TR I did.
“That is all,” Ivins said, returning to his table. Roosevelt sat dumbfounded while the silk flags fluttered, releasing the news that the plaintiff had already rested its case.
Bowers, courtly and trim-bearded, came to the Colonel’s rescue with some questions about the highlights of his career. Inevitably these led to the Battle of San Juan. Had Bowers consulted Elihu Root beforehand, as Ivins had, he might have learned that the quickest way to get his client to make a fool of himself was to mention Cuba.
TR My regiment was in the Santiago fight and lost in killed and wounded, over a third—
IVINS I object to the number lost in killed and wounded as immaterial in this case.
COURT We all know what the result of that battle was.
Roosevelt recited his later résumé. Since coming back from Brazil, he said, he had worked as a writer, with some side activity in politics.
Bowers asked him to describe his early relations with Senator Thomas Platt, the “Easy Boss” of New York State and Barnes’s political mentor. It was an adroit defense move, because it forestalled what was sure to be the prosecution’s main line of questioning. Ivins jumped up. “Why all this 1899? Case is in praesenti, if your Honor please.” Andrews overruled him.
Roosevelt said that he had worked with Platt throughout his two years as governor, and thus gotten to know Barnes as their mutual go-between. Bowers asked if he remembered any meetings in which Platt or Barnes had tried to stop him calling for a franchise tax on big businesses. Roosevelt said he did, but to the attorney’s frustration, he could not recall how many, or what either man had specifically asked him to do. “Mr. Barnes spoke of our duty to protect corporations.… I cannot give you the language, the exact language.”
The spectacle of Theodore Roosevelt straining both to hear and think clearly was a shock to many observers. He had always been famous for the perfection of his memory, but here he was unable to drum up facts in his own defense. When he did think of something, it was too late:
TR Mr. Bowers and your Honor, may I be allowed to state the conversation that I had with Mr. Barnes on the propriety and nature of the boss and the domination of the machine?
COURT That is not important.…
TR (incredulous) May I not be permitted to show that there was this boss system, that there was a system of complete control by bosses of politics?
COURT That is entirely immaterial so far as this libel is concerned.
Roosevelt was not used to being silenced. Clearly, Andrews was a different breed of judge from the one who had treated him so well in Marquette. Whether out of anger or annoyance, he sharpened up, and Bowers was able to elicit germane evidence by a different line of questioning. On one occasion, the defendant now recalled, Barnes had cynically said, “The people are not fit to govern themselves. They have got to be governed by the party organization, and you cannot run an organization, you cannot have leaders, unless you have money.” Barnes and Platt had often lobbied him in this fashion, insisting that reform legislation, or failure to reappoint conservatives to office, would result in corporate campaign funds being withdrawn from the GOP. As for his allegations of bipartisan corruption, he remembered Barnes pleading the case of a Democratic legislator named Kelly, who protested against the franchise tax bill in behalf of two wealthy businessmen, Robert Pruyn and Anthony N. Brady.
This sounded more like the old Roosevelt, with precise citation of names and growing animation on the stand. The rest of the afternoon went well for him, although he played into Ivins’s hands by describing Barnes as “a very able man,” and saying that they had cooperated amicably for ten years.
THROUGHOUT THE FOLLOWING DAY, Roosevelt made the most of Bowers’s gentle interrogation. He became comfortable with court procedure, learning not to be upset by Ivins’s objections, and conversationally drawing the judge as well as the jury into his accounts of private lobbying by Barnes in the New York State Capitol, Senator Platt’s “Amen Corner” in Manhattan, and even Sagamore Hill and the White House. Some anecdotes sounded prosy, as if he had gotten them by heart. Ivins was seen staring at him quizzically whenever he became orotund. But there was no denying that the Colonel was back on form, and the silk flags shook often as he scored point after evidentiary point against Barnes.
The most telling was his introduction of a letter from the boss, begging him not to propose a state printing house in his 1900 gubernatorial message. For years, Barnes’s own printing company had been the contractor of choice for the Albany legislature. It is not my desire to intrude my personal matters upon you, Barnes had written, but I wish merely to state that the establishment of a state printing house here would be a serious, if not a fatal, blow to me financially. Andrews permitted Bowers to read the governor’s curt rebuff: There is a perfect consensus of opinion that there should be a state printing office.
In other testimony, Roosevelt exposed Barnes’s animus against the progressive administration of Governor Hughes, admitting that he did not care for Hughes himself. He tellingly dropped the name of “my cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt,” who, as a Democratic state senator, had had to fight Barnes and Murphy in combination to get an electoral reform bill passed. Young Franklin was now in Washington, and, if the tense state of affairs there permitted, would come north to confirm this collusion.
Partnership between bosses was not illegal, but the Colonel made it sound like the pact between Wilhelm II and Franz Ferdinand. He quoted Barnes as saying before the Saratoga convention in 1910 that direct nominations, “if ever adopted by the state, will lead to untold evils in public life and place therein the cheapest citizens.” Such prejudice was liable to impress members of the jury, none of whom looked as if he could afford Barnes’s standard of living.
Bowers asked when he had last seen the plaintiff. Roosevelt said it had been at the annual Lincoln Day banquet in New York in 1911. Effectively and dramatically, he described how Barnes had boasted that conservatives were now in control of the state GOP, jeering that progressives and their ilk “were out.”
The Colonel looked a happier man when the court adjourned at 5 P.M.
BY NOW THE TRIAL was being treated as a major story in New York newspapers, shouldering aside headlines bearing the words YPRES and DARDENELLES. Court artists rejoiced in the contrasting physical presences of Roosevelt and Barnes (ignoring each other in court) and Ivins, with his skullcap and spats, looking like an illustration from a Dickens novel.
Thursday was the day the old lawyer had been waiting for, and he lit into Roosevelt with relish.
IVINS Has your occupation in life, apart from your public service, been that of an author?
TR An author and a ranchman and an explorer.
IVINS Then you have had three professions?
TR I have followed all three vocations, or avocations.
IVINS And more or less simultaneously?
TR More or less simultaneously. (Laughter)
“I have also been an officeholder,” he tried to add, but Ivins had already managed to imply that, by spreading himself too thin, he could be seen as a dilettante.
Roosevelt smelled danger, and was uncharacteristically terse as Ivins pressed him to talk more about himself. A series of easy autobiographical questions soothed him. He began to answer at greater length. Ivins congratulated him on his memory. “It is pretty good,” Roosevelt admitted.
Ivins switched to a much more detailed interrogation. He focused on one of the low points of Roosevelt’s career: the tax-avoidance controversy that had nearly disqualified him from the gubernatorial nomination in 1898, until Elihu Root rescued him with an argument just short of fraud. Campaign finance was one of Ivins’s specialties—he had published a little book on the subject—and it was emphatically not one of the defendant’s. Roosevelt soon had cause to regret that he had been tricked into praising his own memory. After drawing a few more blanks, he fell back on vehement protestations that he stood for “righteousness” in politics.
&
nbsp; IVINS Now, does that rule apply to other people, in their judgment with regard to righteousness and the opportunities for its expression, as well as it does for you?
TR Of course it does.
IVINS Does that apply to Mr. Barnes just as much as it does to you?
TR It does apply to Mr. Barnes just as much as it does to me.
IVINS …Has not every man an equal right to determine his own rule of righteousness and his time of applying it?
TR He has if he has the root of righteousness in him. If he is a wrongdoer, he has not.
IVINS Who is the judge, you or he?
TR It may be that I am the judge, of him. If I had to be the judge—
Justice Andrews sat expressionless between his two bowls of carnations. Roosevelt began to flounder, punching the air as he had in the courthouse in Marquette, Michigan.
TR I will give you an exact example. Senator Burton—
IVINS You need not gesticulate.
BOWERS (for the defense) Why not?
IVINS I do not object to his answering. I object to his manner.
BOWERS Oh, is that it?
IVINS I do not want to be eaten up right here now. (Laughter)
Pleased to have exposed the defendant as both complacent and excitable, Ivins went on to taunt him about his infallibility (“You did not at that time have an attack of righteousness?”) and reprimand him for making speeches (“You need not treat me as a mass meeting, because I am not.”). Roosevelt managed to control his temper through the rest of the day, arguing that he could not be blamed for using the services of political bosses when they saw their way clear to supporting his policies.
Ivins kept harping on his literary productivity. One exchange between them caused gasps around the courtroom:
IVINS Since [1898] you have probably written more than any other man in the United States, haven’t you?
TR I don’t know, but I have written from 100,000 to 150,000 letters.
When he returned to the witness chair on Friday, Ivins asked why, after more than ten years of working with Barnes, he had excluded the boss from his autobiography.
“I particularly wished not to make any wanton or malicious attack on him.”
Ivins tried to disconcert him by revealing that many of the things he had said about the plaintiff in court were taken, word for word, from his general remarks on corruption in that Barnes-free book. “It is because of your excellent memory, is it not?”
Roosevelt let the sarcasm go. He had noticed that he had an avid audience in the jury. They leaned forward every time he spoke, as if activated by a jolt of electric current. He began to address them directly, and Ivins scolded him.
COURT Mr. Ivins, this witness will be treated as any other ordinary witness. I cannot have any discussion of that kind in this court room.
IVINS I apologize to your Honor.
Returning to Roosevelt’s autobiography, Ivins quoted a line about Senator Platt, Some of his strongest and most efficient lieutenants were disinterested men of high character, and asked if Barnes was included. The Colonel hedged. “Mr. Ivins, that is not a question that I could answer by a yes or no. Do you wish me to answer how I feel about it?”
“If you cannot answer it, I do not care for your feelings. I want to know whether you can answer yes or no.”
Andrews ruled that Roosevelt must respond accordingly. The stenographer repeated Ivins’s question.
TR Now—
IVINS No, one moment—I ask for a categorical answer. Yes or no?
TR Then I must answer you, no.… That I did not so include him.
IVINS Then I will ask you this. If you did not so regard him as a man of high character, why did you invite him to the executive mansion? Why did you consult him in the Capitol? Why did you associate with him? Why did you advise with him?
TR Because I thought he was above the average of the ordinary political leaders.… I believed that he had it in him…to become a most useful servant of the state, and I believed that there was a good chance of him so becoming.
BOWERS (hinting) Have you finished, Mr. Roosevelt?
TR I have.
For the first time, the defendant was beginning to sound like a small boy trying to fib his way out of a situation. By using the phrase some of to qualify his praise of Platt’s aides in 1899–1900—a group effectively consisting only of Barnes—Roosevelt the autobiographer had adopted a technique he affected to despise in other writers: the employment of “weasel words” that sucked the specificity out of statements. Some of enabled him to plead that he had not, in fact, ever thought of Barnes as a “disinterested man of high character.” He now cast about desperately for another literary device to save himself, and thought of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel about a man both good and evil. That was it: Barnes was “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.” He said he had known only the former during his time as governor.
Ivins noted that he had, nevertheless, retained Barnes in a position of high Republican responsibility long after becoming President in 1901. Roosevelt said he had done so as a consequence of his vow to honor President McKinley’s legacy. Ivins asked if that had still been the case on 29 January 1907, when he wrote to Barnes on White House stationery: It was a pleasure to send your reappointment [as surveyor of the port of Albany] to the Senate today. Sincerely, Theodore Roosevelt.
TR Yes, sir.
IVINS Then which Mr. Barnes—Mr. Jekyll Barnes or Mr. Hyde Barnes, did you appoint to office and express your pleasure in appointing?
TR I appointed Mr. Barnes to office and until 1910 I hoped that we were going to get his Dr. Jekyll side uppermost, and I did not abandon hope until 1911.
Ivins let this protestation speak for itself. But he submitted for the jury’s further consideration a long series of cordial notes from Roosevelt to Barnes, indicating that Mr. Hyde had not begun to prowl the streets of Albany in his full monstrosity until the Progressive/Republican split of 1912.
THE DEFENDANT REMAINED in the witness stand for four more court days. He suffered further lapses of memory, principally on questions of campaign financing. Ivins tried to represent them as selective amnesia, but they looked to impartial observers like the forgetfulness of a man with larger things on his mind. The trial so far amounted to an entertaining exposé of unremarkable political facts. Both parties to Barnes’s lawsuit were—always had been—pragmatic politicians, the one looking for votes and reliable appointees, the other able to supply them, but at a price. As a young governor, Roosevelt had understood that reform legislation was impossible unless he could rely on a Party majority that was boss-controlled and lubricated with corporate contributions. As a power broker, Barnes knew that cooperation with the minority machine was sometimes necessary; the will of the people might even demand it.
Ivins’s evidence showed only that early on, Roosevelt had been naïvely eager to believe that Platt’s machine men were altruistic. He was certainly so himself (even the most wheedling letters Ivins obtained from the archives showed him to have been active in the public interest). But he had often kept his long-distance glasses on, rather than focus too closely on what the Easy Boss was doing.
Under hard interrogation by William L. Barnum, one of Ivins’s associates, Roosevelt admitted that he had once appointed a Democrat to office because Platt needed to do Tammany Hall a favor. Barnum said that in exchange, the man’s sponsor, a state senator, had asked them both to cooperate on a $12 million appropriation for one of his real estate interests. Had such a bill been passed? The Colonel could not remember.
“A little matter of twelve million wouldn’t make any impression on you?”
“After sixteen years,” Roosevelt snapped, “during which I have had to do with billions of expenditures, the item does not remain in my mind.”
It irked him that day after day of cross-examination was being devoted to his operations in Albany, long ago, rather than to Barnes’s later behavior as the successor of Boss Platt. Justice Andrews seemed to be in no hurry to
summon witnesses like Cousin Franklin, who could testify to the venality of the plaintiff in recent years. The trial threatened to drag on indefinitely. Barnes quit attending on 26 April, saying that he would return only when called for.
“ ‘WHAT RELATION ARE YOU TO THE DEFENDANT?’ ”
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. (photo credit i21.2)
Roosevelt finally stepped down as a witness at noon on the twenty-ninth, with his reputation for total recall much damaged. Nevertheless, Bowers succeeded in introducing some damning evidence against Barnes, including ledger-book proof that the boss had enriched himself on state printing contracts. Whether that made him corrupt or not, the jury would have to decide.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt’s appearance in court on Tuesday, 4 May, created a stir.
“What relation are you to the defendant?” Bowers wanted to know.
“Fifth cousin by blood and nephew by law,” Franklin replied, grinning. The line was obviously well rehearsed.
He confirmed that Barnes and Boss Murphy had been partners in legislative shenanigans to which he had been privy. But the lift he gave to the Colonel’s case was mainly psychological. As a senior official of the Wilson administration, he was manifestly an important man. His department was on high alert over attacks on transatlantic shipping by German submarines. No fewer than twenty-three merchantmen had been torpedoed since the beginning of May—among them an American oil freighter, the Gulflight, with three lives lost—and persistent rumors were circulating that a major liner was being targeted for destruction soon.
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