Flashback, April 1906: TR Lashes Out at “Muckrakers”

In what normally makes for a dry, ceremonial occasion, President Theodore Roosevelt blasted the investigative journalism that lent fuel to the Progressive movement he headed--and, in the process, demonstrated anew his talent for phrasemaking--by lashing out at purveyors of negativity that the public, taking his lead, quickly labeled “muckrakers.”

Those fascinated by language--the late William Safire and his ilk--have long known about TR’s neologism. But looking at both the content and context of his speech makes for a fascinating glimpse at how America’s leaders once tried to channel political discourse, why the public responded to TR’s particular appeal, and what impact his words made.

The occasion for the President’s address was the dedication for the House of Representatives office building on April 14, 1906. For more than two decades, since his days in the New York state legislature, Roosevelt had battled the forces of corruption that had found a happy hunting ground in the Gilded Age. In the years since, 10 magazines with a combined circulation of 3,000,000--including Everybody's, McClure's Magazine, and the American Magazine--had alerted ordinary Americans to the depredations of robber barons such as John D. Rockefeller, Charles Yerkes, Andrew Carnegie, and others.

The groundswell generated by the resulting anger had enabled T.R., Robert M. LaFollette, Charles Evans Hughes, and other Progressives to pass legislation related to trusts, food and drug safety and municipal corruption.

But two months before the address, whatever goodwill the President felt toward such revelations began to dissipate. The cause was a magazine series called “The Treason of the Senate,” written by reporter/novelist David Graham Phillips.

The Senate was, indeed, a mega-scandal waiting to happen: Because its members were still at that time voted in by state legislatures, they became almost nakedly beholden to corporate interests. Quite simply, the Senators’ votes--their very offices--were for sale.

The President, known to resort to intemperate rhetoric and even name-calling on occasion (when predecessor William McKinley hesitated about going to war with Spain, TR said the President had “no more backbone than a chocolate éclair”), was unnervingly sensitive to its use by others. He became further aroused in this case upon discovering that one object of Phillips’ charges was Roosevelt’s own mentor, the affable junior senator from New York, Chauncey Depew.

TR was annoyed enough that Phillips had gone after his ally and friend by writing of Depew that the New York Central Railroad, operated by Cornelius and William Vanderbilt, “owned him completely.” The President saw the attack as a product of innuendo and exaggeration.

But Roosevelt also saw another force behind the scenes: William Randolph Hearst, who in the past decade had not only become a media mogul but a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives. (Hard to believe, in light of his late-life reputation as a reactionary, but at this point he was selling himself as the people’s tribune.) It was Hearst’s publication Cosmopolitan that ran the Phillips series.

If anyone had an ulterior motive for his actions, TR believed, it was Hearst rather than Depew: By tearing one politician off his pedestal, the publisher-politician was ensuring that he would mount one himself. Ultimately, even Roosevelt’s administration was being undermined by this, he felt, when an ardent supporter such as Depew was being impugned.

Roosevelt did not hit out immediately at Phillips. Instead, he tried out his criticism privately, writing to friends, to see how they would react to his line of argument. Then he vented his frustrations with “hysterical sensationalism” publicly, in the address at the laying of the corner of the House of Representatives Building.

Several points should be mentioned about the speech:

* The literary allusion, “The Man with the Muck-Rake,” that TR transformed into a new term, “muckraker,” derived from John Bunyan’s 17th-century allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress. Virtually every college graduate of the time--and a much wider swath of Protestant America--would have recognized instantly the source. A century later, in a time not only more secular but less likely to install this book as part of the literary canon, that no longer would be true.

* Though later generations seized on the muckraking image as the most notable part of the speech, the media highlighted another aspect of it at the time: TR’s embrace of the progressive income tax. It was TR’s way of signifying that, though he might have resisted the knee-jerk negativity of the muckrakers, he agreed with them that the divide between rich and poor was a menace to the republic and the robber barons of the time needed to be restrained. (That call for a new tax--and one on the rich--would be verboten in the GOP of John Boehner and Paul Ryan, of course.)

* TR’s criticism of investigative journalism was of a piece with his overwhelming distinctions between “good” and “bad.” Jackson Lears’ New Republic review of Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt is hyperbolic in labeling TR “drunk on his own self-regard,“ but he does have one point: The President lived in a binary universe of moral absolutes. In much the same way that he distinguished between “good” and “bad” trusts, the President drew a distinction between “good” journalism--”absolutely truthful” reports on “every evil man, whether politician or business man, [and] every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life”--and “bad” journalism, which, in its “epidemic of indiscriminate assault upon character,” ran the risk of undermining faith in democratic institutions.

* Muckrakers did not take kindly to TR’s criticisms. The day after the speech, Lincoln Steffens, a pioneer of investigative journalism with his “Shame of the Cities” series, told the President: “Well, you have put an end to all these journalistic investigations that have made you." Though some publications carried on the practice, others began to cool on the idea, as admitted by John O'Hara Cosgrave, editor of Everybody's: "The subject was not exhausted but the public interest therein seemed to be at an end, and inevitably the editors turned to other sources of copy to fill their pages."