Colonel Roosevelt (63 page)

Had Roosevelt not decided to make his autobiography as impersonal as possible, he could have brought it to an end with an account of this ceremony, casting the congregation as a sort of
dramatis personae
of his life and times. Here was old Joseph Choate, to whom he had turned, after the death of Theodore Senior, for career advice; his classmate Bob Bacon, still the handsomest man in the world, but grizzled now and replaced as American ambassador to France; tiny, guttural Jake Riis, who had opened his eyes to “how the other half lives”; his orthographical mentor, Brander Matthews, one of the few academics he could stand; Bill Loeb, who had handed him John Hay’s telegram in 1901, confirming his accession to the presidency; sleek George Cortelyou, manager of his huge electoral win in 1904; Gifford Pinchot, the architect of his conservation policies; Henry White, who had ridden with him and the Kaiser on Döbertiz Field; Lyman and Lawrence Abbott, his employers at
The Outlook
, wondering how long they could afford to showcase his political opinions; George Perkins, who intended to keep bankrolling the Progressive Party, and Frank Munsey, who did not. And here by virtue of blood was the sole Democrat present, thirty-one-year-old Franklin D. Roosevelt, recently confirmed as assistant secretary of the navy.

Dick and Ethel were married over the loud objections of little Gracie, Ted and Eleanor’s daughter. Future generations were manifesting themselves.

WITH SPRING UNDER WAY
and the Derbys off to Europe on honeymoon, Roosevelt reapplied himself to the literary task he was beginning to find unbearable. “
I am working with heated unintelligence at my ‘biography,’ ” he wrote Ethel. “I fairly loathe it, now.”

His boredom showed as he dictated two long, dry chapters about his commissionerships in Washington and New York in the 1890s. It was difficult to interest any modern reader in the civil service and municipal problems of a quarter-century before. He tried to make them sound less dated, and fell into a presentist mode, as if he were still campaigning against Taft and Wilson. A chapter on his service with the Rough Riders in Cuba, heavily appendicized with documents testifying to his
heroism at San Juan, ended with an argument for military and naval preparedness in 1913. Hindsight made him more pro-labor and better informed about the abuse of women than he had been as president. The Progressive Party platform kept intruding, like King Charles’s head. He seemed to realize that his book was becoming polemical, but could not help himself. Nor could he turn, as he had in happier days, to Elihu Root for corrective sarcasm.

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.

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.

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.’ ”