PRESIDENCY AND THE PRESS:
MCKINLEY TO WILSON
A new relationship emerged between presidents and journalists at the start of the twentieth century, changing how
presidents governed and how Americans saw their national
leaders in the press. Presidents between 1897 and 1921, especially Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, increasingly turned to daily newspapers and national magazines
to appeal for public support of their policies and to overshadow their opponents. The growing availability of news
from the president attracted larger numbers of reporters,
the nucleus of the modern White House press corps. New
practices of managing the press were established, including news releases, daily staff briefings and the first regular
presidential press conferences, meeting with the correspondents in a group rather than individually. Daily headlines
from the White House helped to create the appearance of
authoritative leadership and increased the president’s ability to lead public opinion in peace and war.
Earlier presidents had at times used the press, but William McKinley, president from 1897 to 1901, was the first
since Abraham Lincoln to seek popular support for a major
military campaign, the Spanish-American war. Although
not a journalist himself, McKinley was familiar with newspapers from his ten years in Congress and as governor of
Ohio. Within days of his inauguration, he attended a meeting of the Gridiron Club and invited Washington, D.C., correspondents to attend an inaugural reception. Later in his
first year, he invited them to a holiday party at the executive
mansion. These small steps were welcomed by the correspondents, whose relationships with McKinley’s immediate
predecessors had been distant. David S. Barry, a correspondent for the Republican New York Sun, wrote hopefully “there are signs the era of friendliness between public
men and newspaper reporters will be restored.” However,
McKinley remained a target for Democratic newspapers,
led by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, which accused
him of being a captive of monopolistic trusts, led by
wealthy Republican businessman Mark Hanna, who managed McKinley’s 1896 campaign against William Jennings
Bryan.
As president, McKinley read New York and Washington, D.C., newspapers to help keep track of what was
presumed to be popular opinion, and perused a daily scrapbook of clippings from regional newspapers under the title
of “Current Comment.” Monitoring the press became more
urgent as McKinley came under increasing pressure to
invade Cuba. Stories of purported atrocities appeared in
sensational newspapers such as Pulitzer’s World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal. Demands for
war peaked in February 1898 after an unexplained explosion sank the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor. The
crisis drew crowds of correspondents to the executive mansion, where they were handed typewritten statements urging restraint to pass along to their editors, who customarily
printed them without identifying the president by name as
a source.
Once war was officially declared, a “war room” with
maps and twenty telegraph lines was established in the
executive mansion, where McKinley tried to centralize the
flow of war information. Reporters thronged the halls, but
McKinley largely delegated personal contact with the press
to his staff and remained personally aloof. In August 1898,
he refused the requests of reporters and photographers to
witness the signing of the peace protocol on grounds that
the press might mar the dignity of the occasion.
Postwar controversies and continued fighting in the
Philippines had the effect of keeping the chief executive
in the headlines. Sensing the presidency was becoming a
news “beat,” George Cortelyou, McKinley’s chief of staff,
set out to make permanent some of the news management
practices developed during the war. These included having press statements available on demand; allowing more
opportunities to speak with the president personally, even
though off the record; treating correspondents from Republican and Democratic newspapers more or less equally;
and establishing a priority schedule for releasing official
statements and speeches, including the annual Message to Congress. By early 1901, McKinley’s relationship with the
press had become so organized he could instruct Cortelyou
to distribute the statement he would not seek a third term
“by the usual channels.” No “usual channels” had existed
between the president and the press when McKinley had
taken office. Although McKinley’s second term was ended
by assassination in September 1901, he had established a
foundation for systematic use of the press by subsequent
presidents, beginning with Theodore Roosevelt.
McKinley had found the press a useful tool to promote
the war effort, but Roosevelt made publicity a central feature of his presidency. Roosevelt’s outspokenness and distinctive appearance made him a magnet for press coverage
throughout his long public career, from flamboyant leader
of the “Rough Riders” in Cuba to governor of New York
and vice president. Hours after McKinley’s funeral, Roosevelt met with leaders of the major press associations to
declare new ground rules: He would be open and accessible
to reporters who kept his confidences, but those who wrote
stories he disliked would be banished.
From 1901 to 1909, Roosevelt met daily, sometimes
hourly, with favored correspondents, the “fair-haired boys”
from Republican newspapers and occasionally from Democratic ones, presenting them with candid off-the-record
comments, news tips and instructions on how to write their
stories. “Roosevelt seldom spoke without seeing a picture
of how the sentence would look in type, and how it would
affect the mind of the readers,” wrote Henry L. Stoddard of
the Philadelphia Press. Although he rarely allowed himself
to be quoted directly, Roosevelt easily dominated the headlines, much to the exasperation of his political opponents
and GOP party leaders in Congress.
Roosevelt also reached beyond the Washington, D.C.,
press corps to cultivate reform-minded writers for national
magazines, who generally supported his policies despite his
critical characterization of them as “muckrakers.” The outpouring of publicity helped make Roosevelt the twentieth
century’s first celebrity president and had the less-desired
effect of placing his family in the press spotlight as well
A small bear Roosevelt spared on a hunting trip in Mississippi became the novelty “Teddy bear.” The president’s
rebellious teen-age daughter became “Princess Alice” and
the focus of a popular song, “Alice Blue Gown.”
Roosevelt’s presidency also was marked by an expansion of publicity activities in government agencies. With the
aid of forester and fellow reformer Gifford Pinchot, who
created one of the first “press bureaus” in the U.S. Forest
Service, Roosevelt participated in a series of newsworthy “events” to promote conservation and development of
natural resources, including a Mississippi River steamboat
cruise and the first national governor’s conference at the
White House. Congressional opponents were so frustrated
at the news coverage they tried unsuccessfully to legislate
restrictions on agency promotional campaigns and other
publicity practices.
William Howard Taft, president from 1909 to 1913,
was as reserved in dealing with the press as Roosevelt
had been exuberant. The consequences of Taft’s policy of
“nonpublicity” showed how much the relationship between
presidents and the press had changed under McKinley and
Roosevelt. Although Taft had once been a reporter in Cincinnati, Ohio, he did not share Roosevelt’s view of the press
as a bully audience and source of useful news coverage.
Taft discontinued Roosevelt’s daily briefings of correspondents, allowed few interviews, and resisted attempts by his
military attacheé, Archie Butt, to publicize the president. In
a letter to journalist William Allen White, Taft wrote: “I am
not constituted as Mr. Roosevelt is in being able to keep the
country advised every few days on as to the continuance of
the state of mind in reference to reform. It is a difference in
temperament. He talked with correspondents a great deal.
His heart was generally on his sleeve and he must communicate his feelings. I find myself unable to do so.” Instead
of publicity, Taft said in a rare magazine interview, “what I
hope for my administration is the accomplishment of definite results, which will be self-explanatory.”
Taft’s reticence was a shock to a White House press
corps that had come to rely on frequent presidential briefings, advisories, or newsworthy stunts to supply the daily
demands of their editors. The correspondents were forced
to seek news tips from sources in Congress and also from
Taft’s critics, including appointees of Roosevelt still in
policymaking positions. These holdovers, especially Pinchot, used the news vacuum to publicize their unhappiness
with what they regarded as Taft’s betrayal of Roosevelt’s
legacy.
Only after the Democrats won control of Congress for
the first time since 1894 and Roosevelt showed increasing
signs of running again did Taft seek to make news in his
own behalf. He became more accessible to the press and
experimented with inviting leading correspondents to group
interviews. But Taft’s popularity and his presidency had
suffered from not meeting the expectations of newsworthy
behavior created in the press by McKinley and Roosevelt.
Roosevelt’s third-party campaign split the Republican
Party in 1912, and Democrat Woodrow Wilson was elected
president.
Wilson’s political experience was limited to two years
as governor of New Jersey but as a political scientist he had
long viewed the press as a means to create public support for
a stronger presidency. As president, he established the first
regularly scheduled presidential press conferences open to
all correspondents, regardless of political affiliation. These
conferences, held twice a week at first, drew one hundred
or more correspondents and hangers-on, prompting Wilson
to demand self-regulation to control the crowding, a move
that led to creation of the White House Correspondents
Association.
Correspondents were allowed to question the president
freely, but Wilson’s responses could be prickly and misleading, as well as off the record. “Of course, I bluffed
you,” he admitted at a 1914 news conference. Hugh Baillie
of United Press International described Wilson’s comments
as “so artful the meaning of what he said didn’t dawn on
people until they were outside.” Wilson rarely allowed himself to be quoted directly and often was dissatisfied with the resulting stories. “Do not believe anything you read in
the newspapers. If you read the papers I see, they are utterly
untrustworthy,” he wrote to a close friend, Mary Hulbert.
Wilson did not enjoy the group encounters with correspondents, and they were discontinued in 1915, ostensibly
because of the outbreak of World War I in Europe. Wilson’s
unhappiness with the press stemmed in part from newspaper coverage of his family life, especially the social lives of
his teen-aged daughters. Two daughters, Jessie and Eleanor,
were married in the White House within a six-month period
in 1913–1914 in the full glare of newspaper and magazine
coverage.
Wilson’s relations with the press changed abruptly in
1917 when the U.S. entered World War I. The president
created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), the
twentieth century’s first war propaganda agency, and delegated to its director, George Creel, the chore of dealing
with the press. Wilson worried that military information
might leak to the enemy from the press, but Congress
refused to grant him authority to censor newspapers
directly. Instead, the CPI warned the nation’s editors
against using news deemed to be dangerous or unpatriotic. In addition, Wilson’s postmaster general denied
mailing privileges to hundreds of publications on security
grounds. After the Armistice in November 1918, Wilson
took 150 correspondents to Europe with him to negotiate
terms of the peace, but the resulting news coverage did not
prove helpful in persuading Americans to support ratification of the Treaty of Versailles. On returning to the United
States, he launched a strenuous but unsuccessful speaking tour to urge its ratification by the Senate and suffered
an incapacitating stroke in September 1919 that ended his
personal contact with the press corps.
Between 1897 and 1921, presidents McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson had experimented with differing
approaches to managing the press to promote or to deflect
news coverage. Their successes and failures contributed to
making press relations a major feature of the twentieth-century presidency and established a foundation for the modern White House press corps.
Further Reading
Elmer C. Cornwell. Presidential Leadership of Public Opinion.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979, originally 1965.
Robert C. Hilderbrand. Power and the People: Executive Management of Public Opinion in Foreign Affairs, 1897–1921.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.
George Juergens. News from the White House: The PresidentialPress Relationship in the Progressive Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.
Stephen Ponder. Managing the Press: Origins of the Media Presidency, 1897–1933. New York: St. Martin’s, 1998.
James D. Startt. Woodrow Wilson and the Press: Prelude to the
Presidency. New York: Palgrave, 2004.
Stephen Vaughn. Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy,
Nationalism and the Committee on Public Information.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.
Stephen Ponder