Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [241]
Andrews rejected the motion, and ordered testimony to begin the following morning.
SYRACUSE MAY HAVE VOTED for Roosevelt in 1912, but if the jurors taking their seats at ten o’clock on Tuesday represented its current political mood, the local GOP had reclaimed many lost sheep. Nine were Republicans, two Progressives, and one Democrat. They worked, in exactly equal proportion, as small businessmen, farmers, and artisans. Roosevelt had once been able to call such people his own—except perhaps the Democrat, a coal dealer who might not have approved his interceding in the anthracite strike of 1902. But now he could not be sure what any might think of him.
The rain-spattered crowd that awaited his arrival at the courthouse was sparse, more curious than welcoming. Only one woman tried to raise a “Hurrah for Teddy!” It was not taken up by other spectators. From their point of view, and from that of newsmen clustering around, the Colonel was a disappointing sight—stout, unsmiling, yielding at every turn to the direction of his lawyers. He wore a shapeless suit of brown and a black hat pulled low, as if to discourage stares. As soon as he sat down in the courtroom, facing the jury across the Bowers table, he put on a pair of bowed spectacles. Their lenses were so thick that they obscured the power of his gaze. A roll of fat unflatteringly rested on his collar.
Barnes came in a few minutes later and sat ten feet away and slightly behind him. Big and well-tailored in dark blue, with silver wings of hair framing his center part, he looked what he was, and had never denied being: a political businessman, at home in boardrooms and the cigar-fragrant hideaways of state legislators. He swung in his chair and shot a glance at Roosevelt, who declined to return it. From then on they ignored each other, often swiveling back to back.
If anybody looked likely to dominate the trial, it was William M. Ivins. Sixty-four years old and meticulously overdressed, with gray spats, ribbon pince-nez, and an emerald pin securing his ascot, he arrived escorting a pretty secretary, the only woman admitted to the floor. His appearance might have prompted titters (especially when he donned a popish skullcap), were he not known to be one of the sharpest cross-examiners in the New York bar. Ivins was a lawyer of international repute, fluent in six languages, widely read in philosophy, finance, and diplomatic history, a collector in his spare time of Shakespearean folios and Napoleonic medals.
“A LAWYER OF INTERNATIONAL REPUTE, FLUENT IN SIX LANGUAGES.”
William M. Ivins. (photo credit i21.1)
He was also mortally ill. Few, if any in the courtroom realized it, so quiet and genial was his manner.
At five after the hour everybody rose for Justice Andrews, who entered carrying two bowls of carnations. Plonked down on either side of him, they merely emphasized his austere severity. He directed counsel for the plaintiff to lay out the “merits of the controversy” before any witness was called. Ivins began by describing Theodore Roosevelt as a political giant who happened to be a gifted writer as well—“probably the greatest arbiter of opinion in this country who has been known in its history.” The jury, he said, should bear in mind that the libel complained of had not been an impromptu remark, but the deliberate work of the Colonel’s “very eloquent pen.” Every word of it would therefore have to be documented and proved.
Ivins turned to William Barnes, Jr., as a person substantial in his own right, being the owner-operator of an important newspaper, the Albany Evening Journal, and for many years the most