Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [165]
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