Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris

  For us to assume superior virtues in the face of the war-worn nations of the Old World will not make us more acceptable as mediators among them.… The storm that is raging in Europe is terrible and evil; but it is also grand and noble. Untried men who live at ease will do well to remember that there is a certain sublimity even in Milton’s defeated archangel, but none whatever in the spirits who kept neutral, who remained at peace, and dared side neither with hell nor with heaven.

  WISTER WAS ONE of several friends who saw, with varying degrees of alarm, that Roosevelt’s obsession with the war had darkened his personality. David Goodrich, a fellow veteran of the Santiago campaign, went riding with him, and noticed that he kept swinging his half-blind head as he scoped out the icy countryside. He was playing the German game of Kriegsspiel—imagining battlefields and figuring out how to deploy troops across them. Hamlin Garland visited him in his new office at Metropolitan magazine and found him distinctly older in looks and demeanor. His eyes were dull, and his manner subdued. “He will never run for President again,” the novelist lamented. “That he may never lose his sense of humor is my prayer.”

  Finley Peter Dunne, a fellow contributor to Metropolitan, caught the Colonel on a more spirited day, dictating an article to a stenographer. Dunne was put off by the hectoring tone of his sentences, so at odds with the literary grace he was capable of. At a pause in the dictation, Dunne told Roosevelt he felt his recent pieces were unworthy of him.

  TR (laughing) They read all right to me.

  DUNNE But you’re no judge. You are damaging your reputation as a writer. Look at those wonderful things you wrote about your experiences in South America.

  TR Oh well (laughing), you must suit your implement to your subject. A pen is all right for a naturalist, with a poetic strain in him.

  DUNNE A what?

  TR A poetic strain. You didn’t know I had it, but I have and I can use it at times. But when you are dealing with politics you feel that you have your enemy in front of you and you must shake your fist at him and roar the Gospel of Righteousness in his deaf ear.

  Shortly afterward, Dunne left Metropolitan to write for Collier’s. He took with him the memory of Roosevelt marching up and down, “striking his palm with a clenched fist and shouting an article that no one but himself ever read.”

  WOODROW WILSON MAY HAVE been isolated by grief that February, but he was not immobilized by it. He fully understood that he had to do something soon to revise his definition of neutrality, in the view of growing tensions between the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. “We cannot remain isolated in this war,” he said to Joseph Tumulty, “for soon the contagion of it will spread until it reaches our own shores. On the one side Mr. Bryan will censure the administration for being too militaristic, and on the other we will find Mr. Roosevelt criticizing us because we are too pacifist in our tendencies.”

  On 4 February, the German government issued a shipping advisory so menacing that Wilson had to reply in a similar tone. The issue was America’s protectionist policy toward England, under which it exported prodigious quantities of munitions there for war use. Technically, such cargo was contraband and subject to seizure by German warships. But since the Royal Navy controlled the Atlantic, the arms flow might have been on a conveyor belt. Britain had begun to take further advantage of her naval superiority to seize American vessels carrying non-contraband goods to Germany. Sir Edward Grey insisted with a straight face that because the Reich had placed flour, wheat, and corn in official distribution, those items were de facto militarized. Cotton, too, was declared contraband, since it was used to clean German rifles. Britain proposed to apply these restrictions even to shipments to Germany’s neutral neighbors—countries as harmless as Sweden and Holland—on the grounds that landed goods could be relabeled and reshipped to the Reich.

  To that end, it had for the last three months unilaterally blockaded both entrances to the North Sea and sown the water with mines. Desperate for food and humiliated at the impotence of its dreadnoughts, which were jammed in Wilhelmshaven like toys in a drawer, Germany now announced that it had no choice but to use the only marine weapon it could still deploy: the Unterseeboot, or U-boat. “The waters surrounding Great Britain, including the whole English Channel, are hereby declared to be a war zone,” the advisory ran. “On or after the 18th of February, 1915, every enemy merchant ship found in the said war zone will be destroyed.… Even neutral ships are exposed to danger [and] neutral powers are accordingly forewarned not to continue entrusting their crews, passengers, or merchandise to such vehicles.”

  As Sir Cecil Spring Rice advised the State Department, “This is in effect a claim to torpedo at sight … any merchant vessel under any flag.”

  Wilson hesitated only six days before sending Berlin a note that used the kind of specific language he usually avoided.

  If the commanders of German vessels of war … should destroy on the high seas an American vessel or the lives of American citizens, it would be difficult for the Government of the United States to view the act in any other light than as an indefensible violation of neutral rights, which it would be very hard, indeed, to reconcile with the friendly relations now happily subsisting between the two governments.

  If such a deplorable situation should arise, the Imperial German Government can readily appreciate that the Government of the United States would be constrained to hold the Imperial Government of Germany to a strict accountability for such acts of their naval authorities, and to take any steps it might be necessary to take to safeguard American lives and property and to secure to American citizens the full enjoyment of their acknowledged rights on the high seas.

  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.

  * Italy entered the war on the Allied side on 23 May 1915.

  CHAPTER 21

  Barnes v. Roosevelt

  My tomb is this unending sea

  And I lie far below.

  My fate, O stranger, was to drown;

  And where it was the ship went down

  Is what the sea-birds know.

  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 t
he 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:

  In New York State we see at its worst the development of the system of bipartisan boss rule.

  In New York State the two political machines are completely dominated, the one by Mr. Barnes, the other by Mr. Murphy.

  The state government is rotten throughout in almost all its departments, and this is directly due to the dominance in politics of Mr. Murphy and his sub-bosses … aided and abetted where necessary by Mr. Barnes and the sub-bosses of Mr. Barnes.

  Mr. Murphy and Mr. Barnes are of exactly the same political type.

  Roosevelt sat mutely listening, his elbow on the defense table, his head wedged against one fist. He seemed unaware of the stares of fifty reporters ranged near him. Each had a small silk American flag to raise whenever a dispatch was ready to be picked up by court attendants.

  It occurred to Louis Siebold, Washington correspondent of the New York World, that the Colonel was more than just tired, or worried about his ill wife. He was depressed.

  After lunch, Ivins called Roosevelt as his first witness.

  IVINS Have you read the statement complained of in the complaint?

  TR I wrote it.…(laughter)

  IVINS Did you write it of and concerning the plaintiff William Barnes, Jr.?