Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [167]
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