Colonel Roosevelt (91 page)

ROOSEVELT WAS NOT
impressed by the phrase
strict accountability
, because he doubted (against the evidence of Vera Cruz) that Wilson was capable of military action. The President did not seem to hold Britain equally accountable for mining the North Sea. That was the trouble with pacifists: when they tried to assert themselves, they often behaved without logic. It could be argued that a torpedo aimed at a merchantman known to be carrying contraband was less despicable than floating bombs that blew up any ship indiscriminately—an American freighter, say, laden with nothing more lethal than seeds. Wilson’s threat to Germany did not insure against an upsurge of anti-British feeling in the United States, should either kind of accident occur. It was bad enough that the Royal Navy had taken to stopping and searching American ships, with scant respect for their flag or passengers. “
I hope that at all costs
your people will avoid a clash with us,
where we are right,
” Roosevelt wrote Spring Rice. “Your government evidently feels a great contempt for the Wilson-Bryan administration; and I don’t wonder.… But it is just weak and timid but shifty creatures of the Wilson-Bryan type who are most apt to be responsible for a country drifting into war.”

In a censuring tone such as he had never directed at his old friend before, he added the hope “that you will under no circumstances yourselves do something wrong, something evil, as regards which I and the men like me will have to clearly take the stand on the other side.”

Spring Rice took no offense, believing that Theodore had still not recovered, emotionally or physically, from his near-death experience in Brazil. Sir Edward Grey reacted with similar mildness to a long and
almost treasonous letter from the Colonel, saying that Wilson was quite capable of reversing any foreign-policy initiative to win reelection, and reproaching Britain for “assuming” that its naval power gave it the “right” to harass American exporters. He merely replied, “People here will not stand letting goods go past our doors to Germany.”

For as long as the winter lasted, Roosevelt picked or sought quarrels with friends whose war views did not agree with his. He clashed so furiously with the pro-German editor George Sylvester Viereck over “divided allegiance” to the American flag that they returned each other’s letters. He told St. Loe Strachey that Britain’s desire for an Allied monopoly of American trade was indistinguishable from German
Weltmacht;
he accused Count Apponyi of being a latter-day Austrian patriot, and when, in late March, Lord Bryce asked him to endorse a World League for Peace, he wrote back declining to be associated with sentimentalists “who seemingly are willing to see the triumph of wrong if only all physical danger to their own worthless bodies can thereby be averted.”

Everyone, except perhaps Apponyi, understood that “
T. Vesuvius Roosevelt” had to release lava periodically. But such eruptions were usually short. This one lasted through 13 April, when
he checked Edith in to hospital for a hysterectomy. He then had to hurry to Yale to serve as honorary pallbearer at the funeral of the literary scholar Thomas R. Lounsbury.

Upon arrival in the anteroom of Battell Chapel, he found that one of his fellow bearers was William Howard Taft. They had not met face-to-face in almost four years.

Taft made the first move. “How are you, Theodore?”

Roosevelt shook hands, but remained silent and unsmiling.

BY 16 APRIL 1915
, two of New York’s most patrician law firms had completed their briefs for what promised to be
the most entertaining libel suit since
Roosevelt v. Newett:
case 164
A.D
. 540 on the Onondaga County court calendar,
William Barnes, plaintiff-appellant, against Theodore Roosevelt, defendant-respondent
. Both sides agreed there was plenty of evidence to show that Barnes had been defamed by Roosevelt nine months before. The only question was whether the latter had been telling the truth or not. If so, there was no libel.

Barnes’s counsel, William M. Ivins of Ivins, Wolff & Hoguet, told Elihu Root that he was going to Syracuse “to nail Colonel Roosevelt’s hide” to the courthouse wall.

“I know Colonel Roosevelt,” Root said. “Be very careful whose hide you nail to that courthouse.”

John M. Bowers of Bowers & Sands had already secured a coup for the defendant by getting the trial moved away from Albany, Barnes’s power base, to Syracuse, a former Progressive stronghold. To make sure his client got the right jurors, he retained an attorney, Oliver D. Burden, on terms billable to the Colonel. All told, there were four lawyers acting for either party in the case, and a roster of nearly a hundred witnesses. The proceedings seemed likely to last a month.

Barnes and Roosevelt were not only looking at heavy potential costs, but
at dire political consequences for whichever of them lost. Defeat for Roosevelt would tarnish his reputation as a square dealer. Defeat for Barnes would probably destroy his dream of running in 1916 for the U.S. Senate. Since they were both Harvard men of distinguished families (Barnes was the grandson of Thurlow Weed, a co-founder of the GOP), they were equally encouraged to hear that Justice William S. Andrews, assigned by the New York Supreme Court to hear their case, boasted the same background. He was in fact
Roosevelt’s classmate.

Much, therefore, hinged on his reaction to Bowers’s motion, when proceedings began on Monday, 19 April: “
Your Honor, I move to dismiss the complaint on the ground that the article [Exhibit No. 1, Roosevelt’s widely published anti-Barnes press release of 22 July 1914] is not libelous
per se
, and that the complaint contains no innuendo, and therefore, there is nothing to go to the jury.” Bowers argued that in a pre-election season, the Colonel had just been asking voters to back a non-machine candidate for governor of New York State. Obviously, he had been unsuccessful. But as a free-speaking citizen, he was “privileged” under the Constitution to draw attention to suspicious dealings in Albany.

Andrews rejected the motion, and ordered testimony to begin the following morning.

SYRACUSE MAY HAVE VOTED
for Roosevelt in 1912, but if the jurors taking their seats at ten o’clock on Tuesday represented its current political mood, the local GOP had reclaimed many lost sheep. Nine were Republicans, two Progressives, and one Democrat. They worked, in exactly equal proportion, as small businessmen, farmers, and artisans. Roosevelt had once been able to call such people his own—except perhaps the Democrat, a coal dealer who might not have approved his interceding in the anthracite strike of 1902. But now he could not be sure what any might think of him.

The rain-spattered crowd that awaited his arrival at the courthouse was sparse, more curious than welcoming. Only one woman tried to raise a “Hurrah for Teddy!” It was not taken up by other spectators. From their point of view, and from that of newsmen clustering around, the Colonel was a disappointing sight—stout, unsmiling, yielding at every turn to the direction of his lawyers. He wore a shapeless suit of brown and a black hat pulled low, as if to discourage stares. As soon as he sat down in the courtroom, facing the jury across the Bowers table, he put on a pair of bowed spectacles. Their lenses were so thick that they obscured the power of his gaze.
A roll of fat unflatteringly rested on his collar.

Barnes came in a few minutes later and sat ten feet away and slightly behind
him. Big and well-tailored in dark blue, with silver wings of hair framing his center part, he looked what he was, and had never denied being: a political businessman, at home in boardrooms and the cigar-fragrant hideaways of state legislators. He swung in his chair and shot a glance at Roosevelt, who declined to return it. From then on they ignored each other, often swiveling back to back.

If anybody looked likely to dominate the trial, it was
William M. Ivins. Sixty-four years old and meticulously overdressed, with gray spats, ribbon pince-nez, and an emerald pin securing his ascot, he arrived escorting a pretty secretary, the only woman admitted to the floor. His appearance might have prompted titters (especially when he donned a popish skullcap), were he not known to be one of the sharpest cross-examiners in the New York bar. Ivins was a lawyer of international repute, fluent in six languages, widely read in philosophy, finance, and diplomatic history, a collector in his spare time of Shakespearean folios and Napoleonic medals.

“A
LAWYER OF INTERNATIONAL REPUTE, FLUENT IN SIX LANGUAGES
.”
William M. Ivins
.
(photo credit i21.1)

He was also mortally ill. Few, if any in the courtroom realized it, so quiet and genial was his manner.

At five after the hour everybody rose for Justice Andrews, who entered carrying two bowls of carnations. Plonked down on either side of him, they merely emphasized his austere severity. He directed counsel for the plaintiff to lay out the “merits of the controversy” before any witness was called. Ivins began by describing Theodore Roosevelt as a political giant who happened to be a gifted writer as well—“
probably the greatest arbiter of opinion in this country who has been known in its history.” The jury, he said, should bear in mind that the libel complained of had not been an impromptu remark, but the deliberate work of the Colonel’s “very eloquent pen.” Every word of it would therefore have to be documented and proved.

Ivins turned to William Barnes, Jr., as a person substantial in his own right, being the owner-operator of an important newspaper, the
Albany Evening Journal
, and for many years the most powerful figure in New York politics. The jury would learn that Governor Roosevelt had depended on Barnes’s services as long ago as 1899, and that President Roosevelt had twice reappointed him to state office. The two men had met and corresponded regularly, exchanging mutual compliments, until their political ways had diverged in 1910. Ever since then, for reasons best known to the defendant, Barnes had become
persona non grata
at Sagamore Hill. Counsel for the plaintiff would attempt to show in cross-examination just what it was that Roosevelt had against him.

Before doing so, however, Ivins wanted jurors to hear the Colonel’s exact words of July 1914—words addressed to more than two and a half million newspaper readers, and written “
with the same care and the same skill that he had shown in preparing
The Winning of the West
and
African Game Trails.
”

It was evident that Ivins’s strategy was to appeal to the anti-intellectualism ingrained in the average American juror. He was subtly portraying Roosevelt as a littérateur, an elitist, a poison-pen scribe who visited his political prejudices upon those less “privileged” than himself. Reading with dramatic incisiveness, Ivins gave life to the words complained of by Barnes: