Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  Lawrence Abbott tried but failed to persuade him to write more “picturesquely.” It was not for lack of literary labor. Roosevelt revised some pages of typescript with such care that all four margins were crammed with interlineations. He eliminated anything that might be read as overtly boastful, assembling a sober and comprehensive account of his service as governor of New York State with the help of George Perkins, and asking Gifford Pinchot to draft a chapter entitled “The Natural Resources of the Nation.” The titles of five other chapters spoke for themselves: “The Presidency: Making an Old Party Progressive,” “The Big Stick and the Square Deal,” “Social and Industrial Justice,” “The Monroe Doctrine and the Panama Canal,” and finally “The Peace of Righteousness.”

  Desperate to compile the most official record, he neglected his own advice to historians and wrote hundreds of colorless paragraphs unlikely to swell The Outlook’s subscription list. Only once, in an inserted chapter about his love of books and the outdoors, did he recapture the charmingly natural style of earlier installments. By the third week of May, he had had enough. He chose not to proceed any further than the end of his presidency, and left African Game Trails and The New Nationalism to account for what he had done since then. Simultaneously, he also finished Life-Histories of African Game Animals, and left on 24 April for Marquette, Michigan, on another documentary quest: to prove for all time that he was not a drunkard.

  CHAPTER 14

  A Vanished Elder World

  Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling,

  Calling to us to come to them, and roam no more.

  Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us,

  There’s an old song calling us to come!

  THE COUNTY COURTHOUSE in Marquette, Michigan, solidly dominated a high bluff on the south shore of Lake Superior. With its stained-glass dome and heavy mahogany paneling, it was intended to proclaim the importance of the little surrounding city as the manufacturing and export hub of one of the world’s richest repositories of iron ore. But its architects could not have conceived that nine years after its construction, a former President of the United States should seek it out for justice, accompanied by a phalanx of distinguished lawyers, doctors, diplomats, editors, and reporters, not to mention a zoologist, a trade unionist, a forester, and two secret service agents, one of whom was detached from Woodrow Wilson’s White House. In case the testimony of all these witnesses was not enough to convince a jury of his sobriety, Roosevelt also came armed with forty depositions, signed by persons as famous as Admiral George E. Dewey and as obscure as James Amos, his own black valet.

  A jury of twelve local citizens was selected on the afternoon of Monday, 26 May, with Judge Richard C. Flannigan presiding. Attorneys for the defense, intimidated by Roosevelt’s thick-spectacled stare, challenged only one venireman wearing a blue Bull Moose badge. The resulting panel was about as varied as a provincial community could muster, consisting of four miners, three teamsters, two farmers, a lumberman, a fireman, and a gum-chewing blacksmith.

  When the trial proper began on Tuesday morning, George A. Newett, owner and publisher of the Ishpeming Iron Ore, was escorted to a seat ten feet away from the plaintiff. With his steel-gray hair and oddly rigid posture, he looked as industrial as any product of Marquette County, except that the rigidity related to illness. Newett was due to be operated on as soon as the jury decided his fate.

  He was a commanding figure nonetheless, registering no embarrassment when the full text of his 12 October 1912 editorial was read to the court. Apart from its accusations of drinking and cursing, it characterized the Colonel as paranoiac, mendacious, cowardly, and a sore loser. But there was a telling hint of political bias: “All that Roosevelt has gained he received from the hands of the Republican Party.”

  Newett was a stalwart of the county and state GOP committees. Roosevelt probably did not remember appointing him postmaster of Ishpeming in 1905. Nor was he aware that Newett would have supported him in 1912 if he and not Taft had been renominated by the Party. The publisher, in other words, despised him for bolting. And if the language of the editorial was abusive, it was accurate in noting that Roosevelt himself was no slouch when it came to personal invective. “All who oppose him are wreckers of the country, liars, knaves and undesirables.” Perhaps for that reason, counsel for the plaintiff, led by James H. Pound, had decided to focus on the drunkenness charge—as Roosevelt did, when he took the stand as first witness.

  I have never been drunk or in the slightest degree under the influence of liquor.… I do not drink either whiskey or brandy, except as I shall hereafter say, except as I drink it under the direction of a doctor; I do not drink beer.… I never drank liquor or porter or anything of that kind. I have never drunk a highball or cocktail in my life. I have sometimes drunk mint julep in the White House. There was a bed of mint there, and I may have drunk half a dozen mint juleps a year, and certainly no more.…

  At home, at dinner, I may partake of a glass or two glasses of white wine. At a public dinner, or a big dinner, if they have champagne I will take a glass or two glasses of champagne, but I take it publicly just as much as privately.

  Asked about his medicinal use of spirits, he said that he had suffered from occasional attacks of malaria since serving in Cuba in 1898. Once, when delirious on a bear hunt as President, he had been given a shot of whiskey by Dr. Alexander Lambert. In Africa he had had two recurrences of fever and swallowed, at the direction of Dr. Edgar Mearns, “about seven tablespoons” of brandy. There had been a case of champagne among his safari effects, but he had never broken open a bottle, not even to celebrate killing lions and elephants.

  According to African Game Trails, Mearns had treated him with whiskey, not brandy, but Roosevelt’s very vagueness of recall testified to his lack of interest in alcohol. He was, manifestly to the four or five hundred reporters cramming the court, intent only on clearing his name. It was equally plain to the jurors, sitting so close to him that some of his gestures swished the air in front of their faces, why so many rumormongers had inferred over the years that Roosevelt was a toper. They stared at the red, contorting face, and listened in fascination to the unstoppable flow of speech.

  HAD THEY NOT BEEN compelled to retire during the first recess, they would have heard him explain why he was so ruddy. Unable to resist the lure of newspapermen, he went over to the press table and sat on it like a boy, legs dangling. “Because of my high blood pressure, I guess, I’m always a great bleeder. I get hurt and bleed so often that Mrs. Roosevelt pays no attention to it.”

  He proceeded to tell the kind of anecdote that Lawrence Abbott had tried in vain to have him include in his autobiography. “The other day at Oyster Bay the windmill, on a sixty-foot derrick, was squeaking. I got an oil can and climbed up to oil it, neglecting to shut off the mill. Just as I got to the top, the wind veered. The paddle swung around and took off a slice of my scalp. I started to climb down, but I’m big and clumsy and it took quite a little while. By the time I got to the house my face and shoulders were drenched with blood. Inside the door I met Mrs. Roosevelt. ‘Theodore,’ she said, ‘I wish you’d do your bleeding in the bathroom. You’re spoiling every rug in the house.’ ”

  DOCTORS LAMBERT, John B. Murphy, and Arthur D. Bevan, who had examined the Colonel during his prostration in Mercy Hospital the previous fall, proceeded to testify or depose that he was the opposite of an alcoholic patient, with sweet breath, clear urine, no enlargement of the liver, and no tremor. He had an untroubled temperament, a balanced nervous system, and “slept like a child.” Their consensus was that he was a man in splendid health, with no addictive tendencies.

  A qualification to these rosy opinions was expressed by Dr. Presley Rixey, who had been his physician in the White House, and had not seen him for four years. Rixey felt that Roosevelt was in only “fairly good” shape, with a noticeable gain in weight, but confirmed that he had always been abstemious. “He is about as moderate as a man cou
ld well be, and not be a teetotaler.” His appetite for food was another matter. Even with his vigorous exercise schedule in Washington, “I had to resort to extraordinary means to keep him down … to keep down the flesh.”

  Roosevelt made no effort to hide his current paunch. He sat tilted back, caressing the heavy watch chain that draped over it, as witness after witness testified to the main issue of the trial. Robert Bacon, Gifford Pinchot, James R. Garfield, Truman H. Newberry, Jacob Riis, Edmund Heller, Cal O’Laughlin, O. K. Davis, Lawrence Abbott, William Loeb, and many others assured everybody in the courtroom that the Colonel’s thirst for alcohol was only slightly greater than Carry Nation’s.

  By mid-morning Wednesday, lawyers for the defense were so desperate that they resorted to holding up the proceedings with technical objections. Judge Flannigan, seeing that they had no evidence to offer beyond rumor, called a recess and allowed them to argue that the Iron Ore, “a little country newspaper, having a circulation of about three thousand,” should be forgiven for going only one step further than many big-city dailies in criticizing “the most talked-about man in the United States in the past year.” If not, their ailing client might have to pay as much as $10,000 in damages.

  James Pound said that Roosevelt was entitled to demand five times that amount. “But my client peremptorily instructed me that I was not to sue for any such sum.” The Colonel had no wish to be punitive, and was not even interested in establishing malice. He merely wanted to stand on “the actual damages” to his reputation, “under the circumstances of the publication.” William Belden, Newett’s chief counsel, seized on this stand to claim that his client was protected by Michigan’s limit on nominal damages, which meant an award of six cents. The judge warned him that an absence of expressed malice did not necessarily imply absence of real injury. “It may be six cents, it may be sixty thousand dollars.”

  Pound returned triumphant to the courtroom and the parade of witnesses for the plaintiff continued through Thursday. James Amos allowed that in ten years as Roosevelt’s manservant, “I never yet have served him with more than one full glass of champagne.” The Colonel never drank at family meals, and when sharing white wine with guests, would spritz his own glass with Apollinaris water. Cal O’Laughlin calibrated his consumption of this insipid fluid at “about an inch and a half to two inches.” Philip Roosevelt stated that when Cousin Theodore was raw-throated from too much public speaking, he would dose himself with “milk punch,” an infusion barely stronger than the dairy original.

  Such repetitive testimony might have emptied the courtroom had it not been enlivened with details about Roosevelt’s personal and family life, few of which had yet appeared (or would appear) in his serialized autobiography. The blacksmith in the jury became so engrossed he frequently stopped chewing.

  By Saturday morning, George Newett had had enough, and asked to be sworn. Reading from a written statement, he described himself as somebody who had once considered Theodore Roosevelt to be “a great Republican leader,” and who had contributed money and editorial support to his campaigns. “I mention these facts as indicating the impossibility of my harboring any feeling of personal malice against the plaintiff.” In recent years, however, he had traveled the country and heard many authoritative-sounding stories that Roosevelt drank to excess. Newspapers on his exchange list seemed to confirm these stories, and he had come to believe them. As a loyal Republican, he had felt obliged in any case to oppose the Colonel’s Bull Moose candidacy. When Roosevelt passed through Marquette the previous fall, he had gone to hear him speak, and had been angered by “what I considered a most unjust attack upon our candidate for Congress, who was one of my lifelong friends.”

  Newett’s mea culpa made clear that he had libeled the plaintiff for political, rather than personal reasons. Roosevelt had indeed attacked Rep. H. Olin Young as “a tool of the steel trust,” and the congressman had subsequently gone down to defeat.

  The trial was won long before Newett admitted that none of the “reputable witnesses” who told him Roosevelt was a drunkard were able to provide evidence of their charges. To continue to believe them would be “an injustice” to the Colonel. Newett did not apologize for his article, but he implicitly retracted it, and he insisted that “in the publication I acted in good faith and without malice.”

  Throughout, Roosevelt had leaned forward listening with intense concentration, occasionally casting a flash of spectacles at the gallery. When Newett finished reading he asked to be heard. “Your honor, in view of the statement of the defendant, I ask the Court to instruct the jury that I desire only nominal damages.”

  AFTER IT WAS ALL OVER, and a nickel and a penny had been received by his lawyers, he pushed his way through a jostling crowd of congratulators. He was in a hurry to catch the 5:30 train and return home for what was left of the Memorial Day weekend. Charles Thompson of The New York Times managed to get close and ask, “Are you and Newett going to meet?”

  Roosevelt looked back with an expression half surprised, half sardonic.

  “Not if the advances are to come from me,” he said.

  ROOSEVELT V. NEWETT WAS a front-page news story across the United States, and received wide coverage even in Britain. Comment on the Colonel’s Pyrrhic victory was generally supportive. The New York Times remarked that all Americans should be pleased to have seen libel rebuffed with honest truth. Satirists and cartoonists sharpened their pens. Hotels in Philadelphia reported a run on “Roosevelt punch.” The Fort Wayne News joked that the Colonel’s major achievement had been to disillusion those millions of Americans who thought he did not drink at all.

  “I am very glad I put the suit through,” Roosevelt wrote Kermit, “but of course it was an unpleasant expense.” Six cents would not significantly reduce his legal fees, let alone pay the travel costs of his dozens of witnesses. “The last eight months I have had three heavy expenses, the attempted assassination, Ethel’s wedding, and this libel suit.” His big book advance from the Macmillan Company was not due until the fall. “I shall have to make one or two speeches and write one or two articles before I start for Arizona with Archie and Quentin.”

  It occurred to him that Kermit was in far worse straits than himself. The young man had at last resigned from his underpaid railroad job, and was about to start work for a firm of bridge builders in the southern part of Brazil. But his new employers sounded shifty with money. Roosevelt fretted about Kermit not eating properly, in order to save enough milreis to marry Belle Willard. “Did you get the check for $200 which I sent you a couple of months ago? I’ll send you another next month, and you will of course let me know if you are short of funds.”

  Kermit indeed had received the check, and proudly torn it up. He attached much more value to a hint that his father let drop in another letter: “Sometime I must get down to see you.”

  Roosevelt had in fact decided to accept an invitation from the government of Argentina to lecture in Buenos Aires sometime in November. That meant a sea journey down the South American coastline, with an opportunity to stop off and see Kermit en route. He was sure of being officially welcomed in Brazil: Hermes da Fonseca, the president of that country, wanted to take him on a hunting trip.

  Secretly, Roosevelt was planning something much more ambitious. The idea of a collecting expedition linking Brazil’s two great waterways, the Rio Paraguay and the Amazon, had begun to grow on him. He had long been curious about the interior of the subcontinent, working its paleontology into his theory of biological analogies in history. Now, with his political career ended (once again!), his autobiography written, and his reputation wiped free of stain, he thought he might embark on one more great adventure before he got too old. Undoubtedly it would be dangerous for a man of his age, but as he wrote in a tribute to the British explorer Robert Scott in The Outlook, “Great risks and hazards are warranted by the end sought to be achieved.” People afraid to venture outside the pale of safety possessed “limited imaginative power.”

  For
a variety of reasons, not all of them conscious, he wanted to feel again as free as he had in Africa, and in those ecstatic days of youth when he could ride across the prairie and never see another human being. The spread of civilization across the earth’s waste spaces, which he had celebrated in The Winning of the West, was accelerating at such a rate that little remained of mystery in nature. Since he left the presidency, both the north and south poles had been trodden on. Automobiles and flying machines were changing the definition of distance; time and space had lost their separate identities (or so a German physicist claimed). Palpably and not altogether agreeably, modernism was asserting itself. An increasing number of “alienists” were preaching the new science of psychotherapy in the Sunday newspapers, while the eroticists of “modern art” treated sexuality and madness as subjects fit for public exhibition. In Paris, on the day Roosevelt’s sips of milk punch were being itemized in Marquette, the choreography of Vaslav Nijinsky and the music of Igor Stravinsky had precipitated a riot among theatergoers.

  Roosevelt no longer believed that civilization improved by expanding. On the contrary, it coarsened as it spread, and encroached on refined enclaves. He found his own sanctuary on Cove Neck in Oyster Bay invaded by a new species, the “moving-picture man of vast wealth.” Somehow this mogul, J. Stuart Blackton, had managed to buy the estate next door, and gotten permission to extend a huge dock out into Cold Spring Harbor. Judging from the size of the stable he was building on a field that had once belonged to Sagamore Hill, he would soon follow up with a mansion that would rob the woods beyond of many trees.