Here’s another one for Nigel’s Christmas list, and for many others as well. ‘The Bully Pulpit’, the new book by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She’s the one who wrote Team of Rivals, about Lincoln – which I devoured -, and great books about Franklin Roosevelt – which I read – and one about Johnson, which I didn’t read, but which is the one she got in trouble from because of some not too obvious plagiarism from other books.
Well, to start with, the last issue. She will not get into those kinds of troubles again. Kearns Goodwin is a marvelous collector of quotes. They liven up her pages. And she now painstakingly makes sure she gives credit where credit is due. In this new book the notes take up more than 300 pages. The book itself is 1000 pages.
It isn’t really one book though, but three books in fact, masterfully interwoven. First, and probably most, of all it is the story of the rise, and a little bit the fall of Theodore Roosevelt. A marvel of vigorous confidence and energy, happily challenging anyone he will find on his way, including his own (Republican) party.
Then there is the story of William Taft, his successor as president. Hand picked for this role by Roosevelt, who gets disappointed with his performance, challenges him at the next election, in this way making sure that they both will be beaten by the Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson.
And then there is the story of the muckrakers, as Teddy Roosevelt dubbed them. It really is a group of investigative journalists that exposed the anti-democratic and anti-constitutional habits of a group of monopolists (The Morgans, Rockefellers, Harrimans & Vanderbilts – the so called Robber Barons). But also they expose the corrupt practises of scores of politicians and labour union leaders. Reading about their work made my journalistic heart race. Heroes, that’s what they are. True national heroes.
Roosevelt is the most peculiar kind of guy. Years ago I visited the house where he grew up in Manhattan and his summer home in Oyster Bay, Long Island. I’ve never seen so many corpses of deer, bears, even an polar bear, as in those houses. Roosevelt loved nature they said, the evidence shows that he loved to kill it.
Fabulously rich parents (father from New York, mother from Georgia – they stopped communicating after the start of the Civil War). Before his fifteenth he had seen more of Europe than what I have seen now, including a two month trip down the Nile (that’s Africa, I know) in a private vessel with fifteen servants.
Well there is too much to tell, his life is fascinating, mainly because Roosevelt bursted from energy. He was disliked tremendously by the establishment of his party, but very popular within the country, most of all because of his bravery in the Cuban War, a war that he practically started and finished own handed. The establishment thought they had sidestepped the overzealous Roosevelt by making him vice-president. But then, in 1901, a few months after being reelected and my grandmother Pijnenborg was born – and Picasso had his first succesful exhibition in Paris – president McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt, just 42 years old, was president.
He wanted to deliver. His most urgent desire was to break the power of the monopolists that were also the target of the journalists. Complicating factor was that he was undermining the power of the establishment, the same establishment that was funding his own party.
He didn’t mind and used the ‘bully pulpit’, a sort of preachers platform, to convince the American public. He did this successfully, also because he developed very friendly relations with the journalists that had to sell his story to the public.
Fascinating stuff.
The relationship with Taft is also amazing, and something that I didn’t know anything about. Roosevelt and Taft were friends, Taft was a little older and a little wiser, and served as his secretary of War. Much less temperamental, Taft was considered the ideal person to get lots of the initiatives that Roosevelt started, accepted by Congress into law.
That is really what he did. But Roosevelt was a loose cannon, too young, not even fifty, when he ‘retired’ as president. He had made the crazy mistake to rule out an (official second, but in practice basically third) other period after his term (1905-1908) had ended. He said this at the beginning of 1905, thereby making sure that he was hardly taken serious anymore in the last years of his presidency.
Because of his energy and his goodhearted demeanor, Roosevelt was the first to laugh about the cartoons that were made about him – he could also change his mind in a red hot second – Roosevelt is a very likeable character. There is a good reason that the Teddy Bear is named after him.
But one of the surprising things for me was that I like Taft even better. Not aggressive, wise, he would become Chief Justice at the Supreme Court – one of the best ever, he was simply conceived for that role – and not hateful against Roosevelt, even though his blindfolded obsession with thinking that only HE could achieve anything, prevented a second term for Taft. Taft didn’t mind too much, he didn’t really like being president. Thought he wasn’t very good at it.
There is a great last scene in the book were Roosevelt is having dinner in a restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa, six years after he had fought the battle with Taft (and Wilson) about the presidency. Taft is by coincidence also in Des Moines and, when he hears Roosevelt is there, visits him at his table. The two old friends, and most lately enemies, embrace each other, realizing that there is much more that they like in each other than dislike. The other people in the restaurant see what happens, stand up all together and give them a thunderous applause.
Spielberg has bought the rights of the book for the movie, just as he had done with Team of Rivals (Lincoln). My guess is that the movie will start with this scene. Can’t wait to see it.
OK Nigel, you might think that you don’t have to read the book anymore, after so much explanation but it is filled, page after page, with invigorating stories. It is well worth it.
And for my American family. There was a time when the Republican Party was at the right side of the political spectrum, just as at the time of Lincoln. Something has gone awfully wrong since then. Reading this book I am kind of convinced it was because of the singlemindedness of Roosevelt. He never succeeded in starting a third party. I am not convinced that it would not be a good idea to have a Progressive Republican party in the sense of Roosevelt and (even more) Taft. Leave the Conservative Republicans to the Tea Party nuts, and make Wayne president. That way we would be sure that the wisdom of Shelly , it itself being fuelled by Wayne of course – love is a mutually rewarding climbing of the wisdom tree – would reach the White House.
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