Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [243]
The spectacle of Theodore Roosevelt straining both to hear and think clearly was a shock to many observers. He had always been famous for the perfection of his memory, but here he was unable to drum up facts in his own defense. When he did think of something, it was too late:
TR Mr. Bowers and your Honor, may I be allowed to state the conversation that I had with Mr. Barnes on the propriety and nature of the boss and the domination of the machine?
COURT That is not important.…
TR (incredulous) May I not be permitted to show that there was this boss system, that there was a system of complete control by bosses of politics?
COURT That is entirely immaterial so far as this libel is concerned.
Roosevelt was not used to being silenced. Clearly, Andrews was a different breed of judge from the one who had treated him so well in Marquette. Whether out of anger or annoyance, he sharpened up, and Bowers was able to elicit germane evidence by a different line of questioning. On one occasion, the defendant now recalled, Barnes had cynically said, “The people are not fit to govern themselves. They have got to be governed by the party organization, and you cannot run an organization, you cannot have leaders, unless you have money.” Barnes and Platt had often lobbied him in this fashion, insisting that reform legislation, or failure to reappoint conservatives to office, would result in corporate campaign funds being withdrawn from the GOP. As for his allegations of bipartisan corruption, he remembered Barnes pleading the case of a Democratic legislator named Kelly, who protested against the franchise tax bill in behalf of two wealthy businessmen, Robert Pruyn and Anthony N. Brady.
This sounded more like the old Roosevelt, with precise citation of names and growing animation on the stand. The rest of the afternoon went well for him, although he played into Ivins’s hands by describing Barnes as “a very able man,” and saying that they had cooperated amicably for ten years.
THROUGHOUT THE FOLLOWING DAY, Roosevelt made the most of Bowers’s gentle interrogation. He became comfortable with court procedure, learning not to be upset by Ivins’s objections, and conversationally drawing the judge as well as the jury into his accounts of private lobbying by Barnes in the New York State Capitol, Senator Platt’s “Amen Corner” in Manhattan, and even Sagamore Hill and the White House. Some anecdotes sounded prosy, as if he had gotten them by heart. Ivins was seen staring at him quizzically whenever he became orotund. But there was no denying that the Colonel was back on form, and the silk flags shook often as he scored point after evidentiary point against Barnes.
The most telling was his introduction of a letter from the boss, begging him not to propose a state printing house in his 1900 gubernatorial message. For years, Barnes’s own printing company had been the contractor of choice for the Albany legislature. It is not my desire to intrude my personal matters upon you, Barnes had written, but I wish merely to state that the establishment of a state printing house here would be a serious, if not a fatal, blow to me financially. Andrews permitted Bowers to read the governor’s curt rebuff: There is a perfect consensus of opinion that there should be a state printing office.
In other testimony, Roosevelt exposed Barnes’s animus against the progressive administration of Governor Hughes, admitting that he did not care for Hughes himself. He tellingly dropped the name of “my cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt,” who, as a Democratic state senator, had had to fight Barnes and Murphy in combination to get an electoral reform bill passed. Young Franklin was now in Washington, and, if the tense state of affairs there permitted, would come north to confirm this collusion.
Partnership between bosses was not illegal, but the Colonel made it sound like the pact between Wilhelm II and Franz Ferdinand. He quoted Barnes as