Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [240]
For as long as the winter lasted, Roosevelt picked or sought quarrels with friends whose war views did not agree with his. He clashed so furiously with the pro-German editor George Sylvester Viereck over “divided allegiance” to the American flag that they returned each other’s letters. He told St. Loe Strachey that Britain’s desire for an Allied monopoly of American trade was indistinguishable from German Weltmacht; he accused Count Apponyi of being a latter-day Austrian patriot, and when, in late March, Lord Bryce asked him to endorse a World League for Peace, he wrote back declining to be associated with sentimentalists “who seemingly are willing to see the triumph of wrong if only all physical danger to their own worthless bodies can thereby be averted.”
Everyone, except perhaps Apponyi, understood that “T. Vesuvius Roosevelt” had to release lava periodically. But such eruptions were usually short. This one lasted through 13 April, when he checked Edith in to hospital for a hysterectomy. He then had to hurry to Yale to serve as honorary pallbearer at the funeral of the literary scholar Thomas R. Lounsbury.
Upon arrival in the anteroom of Battell Chapel, he found that one of his fellow bearers was William Howard Taft. They had not met face-to-face in almost four years.
Taft made the first move. “How are you, Theodore?”
Roosevelt shook hands, but remained silent and unsmiling.
* Italy entered the war on the Allied side on 23 May 1915.
CHAPTER 21
Barnes v. Roosevelt
My tomb is this unending sea
And I lie far below.
My fate, O stranger, was to drown;
And where it was the ship went down
Is what the sea-birds know.
BY 16 APRIL 1915, two of New York’s most patrician law firms had completed their briefs for what promised to be the most entertaining libel suit since Roosevelt v. Newett: case 164 A.D. 540 on the Onondaga County court calendar, William Barnes, plaintiff-appellant, against Theodore Roosevelt, defendant-respondent. Both sides agreed there was plenty of evidence to show that Barnes had been defamed by Roosevelt nine months before. The only question was whether the latter had been telling the truth or not. If so, there was no libel.
Barnes’s counsel, William M. Ivins of Ivins, Wolff & Hoguet, told Elihu Root that he was going to Syracuse “to nail Colonel Roosevelt’s hide” to the courthouse wall.
“I know Colonel Roosevelt,” Root said. “Be very careful whose hide you nail to that courthouse.”
John M. Bowers of Bowers & Sands had already secured a coup for the defendant by getting the trial moved away from Albany, Barnes’s power base, to Syracuse, a former Progressive stronghold. To make sure his client got the right jurors, he retained an attorney, Oliver D. Burden, on terms billable to the Colonel. All told, there were four lawyers acting for either party in the case, and a roster of nearly a hundred witnesses. The proceedings seemed likely to last a month.
Barnes and Roosevelt were not only looking at heavy potential costs, but at dire political consequences for whichever of them lost. Defeat for Roosevelt would tarnish his reputation as a square dealer. Defeat for Barnes would probably destroy his dream of running in 1916 for the U.S. Senate. Since they were both Harvard men of distinguished families (Barnes was the grandson of Thurlow Weed, a co-founder of the GOP), they were equally encouraged to hear that Justice William S. Andrews, assigned by the New York Supreme Court to hear their case, boasted the same background. He was in fact Roosevelt’s classmate.
Much, therefore, hinged on his reaction to Bowers’s motion, when proceedings began on Monday, 19 April: “Your Honor, I move to dismiss the complaint on the ground that the article [Exhibit No. 1, Roosevelt’s widely published anti-Barnes press