From the moment he entered the White House in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt recognized the power of the press—arguably more so than his predecessors—both for executing his political agenda and shaping his public image.
Known for closely monitoring the presence of cameras at presidential events, on one occasion Roosevelt delayed signing a “banal Thanksgiving proclamation until an Associated Press photographer arrived,” according to historian David Greenberg. He wanted front-page coverage. A picture, he reckoned, might help.
Presidents before Roosevelt largely kept their distance from the press and only occasionally granted interviews. In contrast, Roosevelt set out to create a press-savvy White House that didn’t just tolerate reporters but welcomed them.
Roosevelt played a leading role in “institutionalizing the relationship” between the president and the press by establishing the first permanent White House press quarters, meeting frequently with reporters, and granting those he trusted with unprecedented access, wrote historian George Juergens. A master of public image, he became the first president who truly sought to control the narrative presented in newspapers. Roosevelt’s media operation and the coverage that followed helped shape his legacy—as a conservationist, a trust-buster, and a family man.
“One of the ways to distinguish between [presidents] who succeeded as publicists and those who failed is that the former made the personalization of the office work for them,” wrote Juergens. “Theodore Roosevelt was the first to try, and in doing so, set the standard for his successors.”
Weekly Newsletter
In the process of bringing the press into the White House, he helped lay the groundwork for what evolved into the modern press corps—the reporters who still cover (and sometimes clash with) those in the executive branch.
“[Roosevelt] cultivated the Washington press corps as none of his predecessors had,” Greenberg writes. “The presidential practice of using the mass media to mold public opinion—what today we call spin—was in its embryonic state, and no one did more to midwife it into being than Theodore Roosevelt.”
To understand how Roosevelt transformed the unique president-press relationship, we must first analyze how his predecessors viewed the press. In 1788, when the Constitution was ratified, the new US governmental framework famously included a clause in its First Amendment to prevent any laws that infringed on the freedom of the press. As scholars Jonathan Solis and Leonardo Antenangeli note, the press has served as an “informal check on government” ever since.
The presidential spats with the media we witness today are not new. Though George Washington and the press started off amicably, their relationship grew more adversarial once journalists began criticizing the nation’s first president. During Washington’s presidency, newspapers described him as “treacherous,” “mischievous,” and “inefficient” and attacked his foreign and domestic policies.
Before 1830, newspapers were “filled with personal squibs or stump-speeches and published such stray items of general news as fell easily into [their] possession,” observed peace activist and university president Charles Levermore in 1901. Political parties in early America subsidized newspapers and became the foundation of the press’s business model.
But, amid the rise of the penny press in the 1830s, publishers sought to bring news to the masses. Many outlets began operating independently, earning revenue through advertising.
Average readership of American newspapers nearly doubled in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, says Juergens. Editors—and readers—began advocating for objective, fact-based reporting rather than partisan commentary. Even publications like the New York World, known for its sensationalism (or so-called “yellow journalism”), touted their coverage as fact-driven.
More to Explore
Alice Roosevelt: The Original First Kid
Most newspaper reporters covering government in the nineteenth century trained their eyes on Congress, a habit that started to shift in the 1890s, when Washington Evening Star reporter William Price was assigned to cover the White House full time. A decade later, many national papers were opening Washington bureaus staffed by reporters who specialized in covering the government, including the president.
Media studies scholar Stephen Ponder argues that William McKinley, inaugurated as president in 1897, laid the groundwork for Roosevelt’s later efforts to fully bring the press into the White House. In part, the McKinley administration standardized various press protocols and routines involved in managing the press corps—holding somewhat regular briefings, for example, and carefully timing White House announcements. McKinley also gave journalists a dedicated space inside the White House; it was no more than a corridor table on the second floor, but it was all theirs.
When Roosevelt moved into the White House in 1901, following McKinley’s assassination, he soon called a meeting with reporters from three wire services. This was, Juergens writes, “an unusual request in an era when presidents almost never sat down with working reporters.”
“I shall be accessible to [you],” the president told the reporters, seated around the cabinet table. “I shall keep [you] posted, and trust to [your] discretion as to publication.”
What drove Roosevelt to diverge from his predecessors in his press dealings? For one thing, argues Juergens, Roosevelt knew American journalism had “entered the age of the reporter.” Journalists built their reputations by landing compelling “scoops,” and daily newspapers were becoming commonplace. The president was keenly aware that he could control the “version of truth that went out to the public.”
Roosevelt’s attempt to manipulate coverage of his presidency wasn’t just about his policies; it was also about controlling his image. According to Greenberg, Roosevelt had a “zest for the spotlight,” and philosopher John Dewey once observed, “One cannot think of him except as part of the public scene, performing on the public stage.” The press, says historian Lewis L. Gould, helped Roosevelt solidify his status as the “first modern celebrity president” amid the proliferation of newspapers, magazines, radio, and the advent of photography.
Roosevelt was, writes historian Edward Saveth, “a relatively rich man at a time when men of wealth were under increasing public scrutiny.” He took action to disassociate himself from this widely-held perception and portrayed himself as “patrician proving himself, in encounters with bullies, bears and frontier flotsam—all sorts of derring-do including rifles at ten paces.” And he publicized it all in print.
Roosevelt’s creation of the new White House press quarters—off the main lobby of the then new West Wing—was a major leap forward in the relationship between the two entities. He equipped it, according to the White House Historical Association, with three telephones, obviating the need for messengers and telegraph operators.
Yet Roosevelt didn’t merely bring journalists into the White House—he sought to keep them there, enticing them with “long, rambling, relaxed conversations,” Juergens writes, including during his midday shave. He had favorites whom he trusted and considered friends, granting them preferential access to intimate, informal conversations with him. By contrast, those whom he felt betrayed him were, Juergens says, “dead in the eyes of the White House.”
As part of his press operation, Roosevelt took another monumental step: he required cabinet members to funnel all press inquiries through his personal secretary, William Loeb Jr. These actions helped lay the groundwork for the later establishment of the role of White House Press Secretary, a position first occupied by journalist George Akerson, whom Herbert Hoover had originally hired as his secretary.
Roosevelt became a savvy master at the well-timed release of important news. He knew Sundays were typically slow news days, and on that account, publications struggled to fill their pages on Mondays. Roosevelt strategically released good news on Sundays, increasing the likelihood of getting himself front-page coverage. He released bad news on Friday afternoons to “bury it in the little-read Saturday paper,” Greenberg says.
Roosevelt also mastered the art of the trial balloon, sharing proposed actions or policies on an “on-background” basis with the press so they couldn’t attribute the information to a named source. A positive response from the public meant the proposal would likely become reality, whereas a negative one could lead him to deny (and abandon) the plans he floated.
Roosevelt used his relationship with the press not just to gain publicity but also to deny it to adversaries. In 1908, Roosevelt supported William Howard Taft for president. That year, according to an article in the New York World, he did what he could to diminish any front-page coverage of New York Governor Charles Evan Hughes, whom some Republicans viewed as a potential alternative to Taft. Roosevelt did this by releasing a controversial message to Congress, mainly about trusts and corporate corruption, around the same time that Hughes gave a speech about his own political future.
Roosevelt was sly. He anonymously leaked news to circulate information that might otherwise seem self-serving or partisan. According to the US Naval Institute, he leaked information to the press in July 1907 about an anticipated worldwide tour of the Great White Fleet of 16 battleships—painted (mostly) white—meant to demonstrate naval strength and diplomacy, particularly amid tensions with Japan following its war with Russia.
Roosevelt let newspaper editorials hash out the pros and cons of the voyage before making an official announcement, and the leak represented the first time congressmen (and the public) heard about the fleet’s plans to circumnavigate the globe.
With pieces of his press operation in place, journalists became paramount to shaping Roosevelt’s legacy of conservation. The president worked with Gifford Pinchot—the US Forest Service’s first leader—on a publicity campaign in this realm, and came to appoint a commission in 1903 that held public hearings and investigations the president knew would grab headlines.
Even if Roosevelt failed to sway Congress, he and his team reckoned, the president could still generate coverage that would draw the public’s attention to conservation. And he largely succeeded, ultimately helping to establish (and protect) 230 million acres of public lands during his two terms in office.
Roosevelt knew his publicity campaign was “an indispensable means to an end,” writes Greenberg, and that his interactions with the press reflected his evolving view of the presidency not as a strictly administrative official but as an “engine and leader of social change.” As Roosevelt once remarked to journalist Ray Stannard Baker, “I do not represent public opinion. I represent the public. There is a wide difference between the two, between the real interests of the public and the public’s opinion of these interests.”
While Roosevelt’s own purposes were naturally served as he built out his publicity operation, the press benefited as well. His naturally colorful personality made him an ideal source of news and distinguished him from predecessors. The press’s close coverage of Roosevelt, who fathered six children, contributed to the “personalization and glorification” of the first family in the press, Juergens says. It was the start of a tradition that continued well into the future.
Roosevelt’s facility in popularizing words and phrases including “muckrakers,” “trustbusters,” and “speak softly and carry a big stick” attracted not just reporters but also political cartoonists, and his appeal to these artists was vital to political cartooning evolving into a serious form of journalistic expression. It didn’t hurt, Juergens writes, that Roosevelt’s features and outfits were compelling to caricature—“the large, flashing teeth, the thick-lensed glasses, the drooping mustache…the cowboy suit, the safari jacket, the Rough Riders uniform.”
Roosevelt’s presidential successors built on his innovations, though the dynamic between the president and the press has ebbed and flowed over time. While Taft limited his interactions with journalists, Woodrow Wilson convened the first-ever White House press conference in March 1913.
The next year, eleven journalists went on to form the White House Correspondents’ Association in response to rumors that the Congressional Standing Committee of Correspondents was planning on selecting which reporters were invited to presidential news conferences.
In the 1950s, President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s press secretary allowed recording equipment at press conferences—for TV, radio, and print—for the first time, formalizing the White House press corps as we know it today. Its members are in the spotlight amid Donald Trump’s second term, as the administration has revealed plans to seize control of the press pool and decide for itself which news organizations (and reporters) cover the president up close.
The emergence of the press corps in its current form happened over many presidencies, but it was Theodore Roosevelt who, in the early twentieth century, brought journalists into the White House and reimagined what the relationship could be between the executive branch and journalists.
“In our country,” Roosevelt once said, “I am inclined to think that almost, if not quite, the most important profession is that of newspaperman.”
Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.
