Why is Doris Kearns Goodwin raking up old muck?

Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era are well-worn subjects for both professional and amateur historians, so it’s pertinent to ask why Doris Kearns Goodwin devoted so many words —and her considerable reputation — to the writing of The Bully Pulpit. Kearns’s thesis seems clear enough: at the close of the 19th century, mythically egalitarian America was in reality teetering on the brink of genuine class warfare. Something urgently needed to be done to prevent an explosion between a furious, increasingly violent labour movement and a cohort of arrogant monopoly capitalists, whose collusion with corrupt politicians had made them virtually invulnerable. Economic strife had stretched the social fabric to breaking point. The country required heroes and visionaries to save the day.

Into the breach leapt two men of extraordinary intelligence, ambition and neurotic energy: the patrician-turned-politician ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt, and the Irish poor boy Samuel McClure, whose ‘muckraking’ magazine dominated political discussion during Roosevelt’s heyday. As Kearns writes, they bore ‘an uncanny resemblance’, despite their very different origins:

While Roosevelt’s tumultuous energy elicited comparison to that force and marvel of nature Niagara Falls, McClure, ever threatening to erupt in ‘a stream of words’, was likened to a volcano.

On the most obvious level their common cause was political reform — regulating the railways and the industrial trusts, defending the rights of labour unions, popular election of US senators and breaking the power of state and municipal political machines — but the real engine that drove them was a craving for renown.

Brought up until the age of nine in Co. Antrim, McClure was the more classically self-made American. But privileged, Harvard-educated Teddy was no less a self-invention: rejecting a life of ease, he was by turns a cattle rancher, big-game hunter, naturalist, prolific writer and, in his most theatrical incarnation, a self-appointed soldier and imperialist, extending the white man’s burden to Cuba and the Philippines.