The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism

The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism – by Doris Kearns Goodwin

 

 This book was long.  Good Lord, was this book long.  It’s not that it wasn’t good, it’s just that it was…..long.  Whenever you see a movie in a movie theater, there’s probably a limit of what you can take.  Most people would probably hit that limit around 3 hours.  No matter how good the movie is, after you’ve sat in your seat for that long, you start to squirm and feel very uncomfortable.  You really just want the stupid thing to be over.  This is exactly how I felt reading this book.  Now, I borrowed the large print edition from my local library, which was over 1250 pages (with no index nor source notes).  I know that being a large print book made it look and feel a bit heftier than it was, but it still felt humongous.  It’s not an easy book to carry around either.  I felt like I was toting around an unabridged dictionary.  All of this to say that this book should have been about 300 pages shorter than it was. 

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of my favorite historians.  She never limits herself to writing about a particular person, but yet a person surrounded by curious surroundings that influence the person’s actions as well as the course of history.  When she wrote about Abraham Lincoln in “Team of Rivals”, for instance, she wasn’t writing a straight up biography, but rather how his cabinet was combined of individuals that didn’t really like one and other (including Lincoln) and how his personality and leadership style managed to achieve harmony in the cabinet, and successfully lead the country through one of the most calamitous periods of its history.

Her main topic for this book is the progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century and how president Theodore Roosevelt and his Secretary of War William Taft (who would succeed Roosevelt as President) managed to combat and defeat many of the one-sided strongholds of the country’s economy.  Although many have argued that the progressive movement of late has gone too far, you certainly couldn’t make that argument when looking back at this particular time in history.  You had very very few of the very rich, and then you had multitudes of poor living in extreme poverty.  Back then, there were no government programs to help anybody, nor was there any regulation in how products and consumables were manufactured.  The examples listed are quite scary, and the majority of citizens faced insurmountable odds just trying to survive.

Had Goodwin focused more directly on this crisis, this could have been a much stronger book.  The problem is, she spends an inordinate amount of time being diverted to too many issues, too many personalities, and too much detail.  In fact, you could argue she’s actually writing about three or four books all in one here.  We have a very detailed account of President Roosevelt and of President Taft.  We get histories of both men, including histories of their wives, their parents, their siblings etc.  We learn how they start out great friends, yet end up bitter rivals in the arena of politics. Again, had the author chose these areas to focus on, the book would have been a more satisfying experience.

But, no, since we need to focus on the progressive movement, she feels compelled to introduce a “third” character to this story, the liberal McClures magazine that came into existence around this time.  This is definitely an important part of the overall story, since the magazine went a long way in helping the leadership achieve their goals, but for some reason, again, the author feels compelled to give us extensive biographies on several of the key people that worked for the magazine.  And on and on and on and on.

Once we get to the last few hundred pages of the book, we read in (way too much) detail all of the minutia that eventually led to (now former) President Roosevelt’s and President Taft’s acrimony.  It gets so bad that Roosevelt feels compelled to run for office again as a third party candidate against the incumbent Taft and Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson.  Again, detail after detail after detail is discussed ad-nauseum in reliving the 1912 election.  Perhaps I was just tired at this point.  It’s never a good thing (for me, anyway) when you have to force yourself to finish a book.  I had to give myself goals, such as “today I must read at least 50 pages…..”

I’m complaining an awful lot in this review, so I must reiterate that I still enjoyed the book.  I just felt it could have been much better had it been much shorter.  The author also really likes to use the word “sanguine”.

NOTE: If you want to read more about Theodore Roosevelt, I highly recommend Edmund Morris’ trilogy.  Most of what is written in this book about TR, you can also read about from Morris’ work and it was much more satisfying.