Colonel Roosevelt (64 page)

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 could 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.

The Colonel was not alone among the clan of fiftyish, self-styled Anglo-Saxon “gentlemen,” raised on both sides of the Atlantic, who felt a sense of social claustrophobia. For such men (restless Winty Chanler was an example, and Rider Haggard and Frederick Selous and Lord Delamere), there was little left to explore north of the equator except the El Dorados of economic, political, and scientific progress. Those parts of the Southern Hemisphere that were not ice or ocean still offered, here and there, opportunities for geographical exploration to persons no longer young. Roosevelt confided a few details of his Brazilian dream to Arthur Lee, admitting, “
It is rather an ambitious trip for a stout, elderly, retired politician.”

If he could persuade Dr. Lambert that he was fit, and get official backing from the American Museum of Natural History, he would probably not be back home until the late spring of 1914. “
I shall be glad to be out of the country for one reason, and that is the Progressive Party,” he told Lee. “The temptation is for the Progressives always to lie down on me, and in the unlikely event of the party continuing to exist, it has got to learn to walk alone.”

Another reason to leave home for six or seven months would be to spare himself from having to watch the Democrats pervert his political and social legacy. Here was President Wilson determined to remove all Negroes from the federal bureaucracy, and collaborating with Oscar Underwood, the House majority leader, on a tariff bill as pro-corporate as anything approved by Taft.
The pious doctrines of pacificism and prohibition had become fashionable in Washington—nowhere more so than at the State Department, where William Jennings Bryan had declared that nothing stronger than grape juice should be served at diplomatic receptions. The secretary also announced that he would continue to accept fees for delivering his famous chautauqua oration, “The Prince of Peace.” Roosevelt, disgusted, took advantage of a visit of some British pacifists to Sagamore Hill to preach a sermon of his own on the text, “
Thou Shalt Not Slop Over.”