Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris [247]
DURING THE NEXT TWO days Roosevelt returned to the stand again and again, clarifying and amplifying his testimony for Bowers. When not being questioned, he looked bored. He flinched as Ivins, given the chance to cross-examine, said with mock exhaustion, “I don’t know that I care to have anything more to do with Mr. Roosevelt.”
The old lawyer was trying for a laugh, but what sounded like a collective groan ran through the courtroom. His witness was, after all, a former head of state.
That night, Thursday, 6 May, an ominous letter reached Roosevelt in the house of his local host, Horace S. Wilkinson. It came from Cal O’Laughlin, who was always ahead of the news, and transmitted the written warning of a “high German official” that the administration’s shipping policy was putting American national unity “to a dangerous test.” Citizens of German or Irish ancestry had the right to protest, even sabotage, a neutrality so obviously favoring Great Britain. Their target might be the Cunard flagship Lusitania, currently en route from New York to Liverpool.
She had sailed on the first day of the month, amid a strange flurry of other threats—some wired pseudonymously to passengers as they checked in to their cabins—that she might be struck by a U-boat. An advisory signed and paid for by the German Embassy in Washington had appeared alongside her final sailing notice in several newspapers, reminding travelers “intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage” that a state of war existed between the Reich and Great Britain. Any vessel flying the Union Jack in “waters adjacent to the British Isles,” was therefore “liable to destruction.”
Roosevelt was infuriated by the arrogant tone of the document O’Laughlin enclosed. “It makes my blood boil to see how we are regarded,” he wrote back. “Lord, how I would like to be President in view of what he says about the huge German-Irish element and the possible sinking of the Lusitania.” Personally, he would hang any such scaremonger, “and I would warn him that if any of our people were sunk on the Lusitania, I would confiscate all the German interned ships, beginning with the Prinz Eitel.”
Perhaps it was just as well that Roosevelt was out of office in his current mood. He confessed to O’Laughlin that “if I didn’t keep a grip on myself,” a provocation of this kind “would make me favor instant war with Germany.”
He was back in court the following day, Friday, to hear Bowers begin to wind up the case for the defense. For hours, legal arguments droned back and forth between floor and bench, and Roosevelt looked, if possible, even more bored than he had the day before. Ivins took pity on him and walked over with a little green-covered edition of the plays of Aristophanes. “I came across this yesterday, Colonel, and it struck me that it was a first-class translation, and that if you cared to amuse yourself with anything of this sort while this uninteresting testimony is going on, you might enjoy it.”
Roosevelt was profoundly touched. “Thank you, thank you. I certainly am de-light-ed, Mr. Ivins.”
He remained buried in the book until late in the afternoon, when a messenger brought him a telegram. Reading it, his face changed. At five o’clock the court adjourned, with Andrews warning Bowers that unless more conclusive evidence was offered regarding Barnes’s state printing contracts, he would strike out all testimony heard so far on the subject. This was gloomy news for Roosevelt to ponder over the weekend, but it did not compare with the front-page story in the Syracuse evening newspaper, just then going on sale:
“ ‘LORD, HOW I WOULD LIKE TO BE PRESIDENT.’ ”
The evening newspaper that greeted TR as he emerged from the courthouse, 7 May 1915. (photo credit i21.3)
On an inside page, it was reported that President Wilson had no comment. This was not surprising, since the story was so fresh, terrible, and incomplete. If