Winner of the 2015 Audie Award for History/Biography and Finalist
for Audiobook of the Year
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns
Goodwin's dynamic history of Theodore Roosevelt, William H. Taft and the
first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the
nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air.
Winner of the Carnegie Medal.
Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Bully Pulpit is a dynamic history of the
first decade of the Progressive era, that tumultuous time when the
nation was coming unseamed and reform was in the air.
The story is told through the intense friendship of Theodore Roosevelt
and William Howard Taft--a close relationship that strengthens both men
before it ruptures in 1912, when they engage in a brutal fight for the
presidential nomination that divides their wives, their children, and
their closest friends, while crippling the progressive wing of the
Republican Party, causing Democrat Woodrow Wilson to be elected, and
changing the country's history.
The Bully Pulpit is also the story of the muckraking press, which
arouses the spirit of reform that helps Roosevelt push the government to
shed its laissez-faire attitude toward robber barons, corrupt
politicians, and corporate exploiters of our natural resources. The
muckrakers are portrayed through the greatest group of journalists ever
assembled at one magazine--Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln
Steffens, and William Allen White--teamed under the mercurial genius of
publisher S.S. McClure.
Goodwin's narrative is founded upon a wealth of primary materials. The
correspondence of more than four hundred letters between Roosevelt and
Taft begins in their early thirties and ends only months before
Roosevelt's death. Edith Roosevelt and Nellie Taft kept diaries. The
muckrakers wrote hundreds of letters to one another, kept journals, and
wrote their memoirs. The letters of Captain Archie Butt, who served as a
personal aide to both Roosevelt and Taft, provide an intimate view of
both men.
The Bully Pulpit, like Goodwin's brilliant chronicles of the Civil War
and World War II, exquisitely demonstrates her distinctive ability to
combine scholarly rigor with accessibility. It is a major work of
history--an examination of leadership in a rare moment of activism and
reform that brought the country closer to its founding ideals.
