CHAPTER FOUR
As was traditional, the newspapers carried no bylines. But in the Herald the otherwise anonymous “WGM” wrote of the proceedings, “Theodore Roosevelt who was sat in a witness chair in the Supreme Court Chamber is no more like the Theodore Roosevelt of presidential days than a bronco broken to the bit and saddled is similar to the steed raised on the prairie as a wild horse. That is the impression of a study of him at close range in a position the like of which he has never before occupied, a defendant in a damage suit...
“I wonder if he realizes that with all he has done he never did exactly what he was proving himself fully capable of doing, holding his own against skilled lawyers in a position where he must listen to their aggravations at times that must have seemed to him without an end. To me, there was something so pathetic about the spectacle of that man, who for years dominated government through his own will being compelled to look pleasant under the grilling of attorneys who were trying to pry $50,000 out of his pockets.”
Columns across the nation were filled with subjective descriptions of Roosevelt, which ranged from “seemingly depressed” to “visibly enthusiastic.” But for many people all that mattered was that T.R. was back on the nation’s front pages.
Since Lincoln, no man had dominated the American landscape as thoroughly as Theodore Roosevelt. His story was well-known; he had overcome debilitating childhood asthma to become widely admired for his rough and ready lifestyle. Educated at home before attending Harvard University, he had become an ardent conservationist, seeking to protect, and make accessible to the public, vast tracts of land. In 1882, he had entered politics as a Progressive Republican, bringing his commitment to reform to the New York State Assembly. After the untimely deaths of his wife and his mother within twenty-four hours of one another in 1884, he retreated to the solitude of a Dakota cattle ranch, living the hard life of a cowboy. He returned to New York City to become president of the Board of Police Commissioners in 1895, leaving that position two years later to serve President McKinley as the assistant secretary of the navy. He resigned in 1898 to volunteer for action in the field, leading American soldiers into battles in the Spanish-American War.
Returning a red-blooded hero, he was rewarded with election as governor of New York. By then he had become a national figure, a man of robust charm and boundless energy who had distinguished himself as an outspoken defender of the average man—and woman. After finally being convinced to accept the vice presidency, at forty-two he became the youngest president in American history when McKinley was assassinated in 1901. During his almost eight years in the White House, he had made conservation and reining in corporate interests top priorities domestically, and extending American prestige, power and ideals top priorities internationally.
After deciding not to run for a third term, he had led a Smithsonian expedition to Eastern Africa to gather specimens for the new Museum of Natural History, which had been established and partially funded by his father. On that journey, he had captured or killed more than eleven thousand animals and birds for the museum. Throughout this period he was a prolific writer, publishing several bestselling books. His continuous reinvention of himself, always boldly pushing forward, proved a perfect example of the new American spirit.
After splitting with the Republican party and failing to win the presidency in 1912, he once again began exploring, this time traveling to Brazil where he led a team down an uncharted tributary of the great Amazon, the mysterious River of Doubt. Warned of the potential dangers, he responded, perfectly in character, “If it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.”
The trip into the dark jungles proved more arduous than anyone had imagined, and Roosevelt just barely survived; he lost about a quarter of his body weight. The fact that his son Kermit was traveling with him and helped save his life just added to his legend.
Now once again he was on the national stage, and most observers agreed that whatever he was feeling about the trial, he presented an air of confidence as he arrived at the courthouse to resume his testimony on the sweltering morning of April 21.
Arriving at the courtroom accompanied by his private secretary and team of lawyers (Stewart Hancock is to his left) on April 21, Roosevelt proved the New York Sun correct when it chimed, “To Syracuse led avenues, from far and wide. The big Bull Moose again is loose, and in his stride.”
Onondaga Historical Association
Judge Andrews had a pleasant surprise for the spectators. As usual, as he entered the courtroom, everyone rose in respect and he bowed a greeting to the jury and counsel. But then he turned and welcomed his father, the retired chief judge, Charles Andrews, who also was clad in a dark robe. The elder Judge Andrews then joined his son, taking a seat on the bench, which was brightly lit by the morning sun shafting through the cathedral windows. Both men had a great smile on his face.
In contrast, Roosevelt and Barnes looked quite serious as they resumed ignoring each other from only a few feet away.
The judge began the session by announcing his decision on the sticky question of what range of evidence he would allow to be submitted. “I am going to hold that while under the general denial of malice in the answer the defendant may give evidence as to his own state of mind, may state, for instance, that when the article was published by him he did it without malice, with no ill feeling or anything of that kind against the plaintiff, yet when it comes to proving independent facts which gave rise to the state of mind or which bear upon it, then those facts must be pleaded.”
This was a small but important victory for the Barnes side; Judge Andrews would allow Roosevelt to testify about how he felt and maybe even why he made certain statements—but not allow the defense to try to prove Roosevelt was actually right about his conclusions or thoughts. Bowers objected, knowing this made his task more difficult, and while he lacked the courtroom showiness of Ivins, he was just as resourceful. He had a clever client who would inadvertently, or perhaps even intentionally, try to skirt this confining ruling.
Teddy Roosevelt did not seem the slightest bit deflated by the decision. Rather, he seemed infused with renewed vigor as he took the stand. No one was surprised when Ivins immediately resumed objecting to almost every question, so much so that Bowers drew laughter when he began, “Now I’m going to ask you, and you need not answer the question until Mr. Ivins can object if he wishes to, I’m going to ask you to state any conversation you had with Mr. Barnes in the summer of 1908...”
“I object to that on the same ground,” Ivins said.
“The same ruling as before,” Andrews said wearily, overruling the objection.
Ivins did as much as possible to control Roosevelt with the only weapon he had. When Roosevelt finally got around to answering the question, responding, “The conversation that I held with Mr. Barnes in 1908 on the question of the power of the boss and on his dominance in the party...” Ivins stopped him. “I object to that.”
“Just give the conversation,” the judge said.
Roosevelt continued, “Were continuations...”
“I want the conversations and not a definition or retrospective picture of these conversations,” Ivins said.
“The witness may give the conversation,” Judge Andrews said.
Ivins would have none of it. “I move to strike out...”
The Colonel held out his palms, complaining, “I haven’t answered the question.”
Even that did not deter Ivins, who said, “I move to strike out the testimony which has just been given.”
Eventually though, Roosevelt answered, and when he did he began filling the morning with stories of corruption and cooperation between the two parties in their quest to maintain absolute control of the government. In his conversation with Barnes, he said, “I raised the question of the dominance of the boss over the governorship...where I stated that the position that Mr. Barnes and Mr. Platt were taking inevitably led to corruption in government...
“I told him that (between the time I was elected governor and the time I assumed office) Mr. Platt had asked me to come see him at the Fifth Avenue Hotel... I told Mr. Barnes that Mr. Platt asked me if there were any friends I wished to receive special consideration on the committees in the legislature. I said no and expressed surprise at the fact that committees were appointed inasmuch they are supposed to be nominated by the speaker and the speaker had not been chosen... The answer of Mr. Platt was that no man would be appointed speaker who did not agree to carry out the wishes of the organization and Mr. Platt...”
The Colonel was animated as he told his stories, punctuating most remarks by rapping on the judge’s bench with spread-out fingers, pounding the palm of his left hand with his right fist or thrusting out his chin at the jury box.
The jurors were riveted, their eyes locked tightly on him as he continued, “I then instanced the next conversation I had had with Mr. Platt...he had told me he was glad to say he had got the acceptance of the man whom he considered best qualified for the most important position under me, that of Superintendent of Public Works...and he handed me the telegram of acceptance by the gentleman in question...”
When Ivins objected, demanding to know the name of the man referenced by the witness, Bowers complained that he was doing so “to break up the continuity of the evidence which is being given.”
Ivins responded, “I cannot break up the continuity.”
To which Roosevelt agreed emphatically, pounding his hand on the bench and grinning broadly, “You surely can’t!” Then he burst into his high falsetto laughter and the courtroom rocked with him.
After the laughter had subsided, Roosevelt identified the man as Francis Hendricks of Syracuse, for whom he had high regard, but “I didn’t intend anybody to choose my appointee and accordingly I would not appoint Mr. Hendricks... Mr. Barnes answered that the Organization had to be dominant, and that he, and those who felt like him, were going to control the Organization...”
The questioning moved to 1907, when Roosevelt was in the White House and his ally, Charles Hughes, was governor of New York. That year, the Colonel remembered, “Mr. Barnes spoke with me generally on the subject of legislation...stating that Mr. Hughes was urging legislation outside of the Organization; that the Organization controlled the Legislature, and that the Democratic Organization was in sympathy with the Republican Organization and would join with them in defeating any legislation to which they were opposed that Governor Hughes backed... The plaintiff said that he and his friends had control of the party. I don’t recall that he said he, himself, controlled it...”
There was little Barnes could do but sit and absorb these blows. At one point as Roosevelt pulled back the curtain concealing manipulations in Albany, Barnes changed his seat and turned away, so his back was to Roosevelt. At times he grasped his chair with both hands and held on, as if squeezing the anger out of himself.
Ivins expressed it for him, angrily raising his voice and challenging the witness in a far more militant tone.
Bowers skipped between subjects, stopping in any one place only long enough to show through his client’s testimony how completely the decisions of government were controlled by the bosses. Concerning the controversial subject of direct elections, Barnes wrote to T.R. in a letter Bowers read to the jury, “When nominations are made they should be final. If the people do not like them they can beat them at the polls, but the members of a party should have the chance prior to the primaries and convention to exercise their judgment and express their will.”
The Colonel recalled that the battle over the Hart-Agnew racetrack bill, legislation that would have restricted gambling at state-operated racetracks, had been especially contentious. “They told me that the passage of the bill depended on one vote; that Senator Grattan had favored the bill and been for it very strongly, that he had then announced that he had to change because Mr. Barnes said he must change, and that he hated to do so but that he had to change because Mr. Barnes said he must change, and the change of that one vote for the time being beat the bill.
“It was Senator Davenport and Senator Newcomb that gave me in full the details of that transaction.” Those many conversations, he testified pointedly, took place before the publication of his article; contending this knowledge was among the reasons he had written it.
Roosevelt said he first became aware of this proposed legislation in 1911 by reading an article in McClure’s Magazine, which led to the discussions with the two senators and others. Bowers tried to enter the article as evidence. Ivins had spent more than forty years in courtrooms and knew how to vent his anger; in one great burst he thundered, “I object to the reception of this as being quotations from an article and not the article itself. I object to it as not being mitigatory; I object to it as immaterial, irrelevant and incompetent. I object to it because no foundation had been laid for its introduction, because no inquiry has been made of the defendant as to whether or not he believed it to be true and I further object that if he did not believe it to be true it is not mitigatory.”
Despite the multitude of objections, Judge Andrews admitted the significant paragraphs in the article, several of which detailed the collusion between Republicans and Tammany Hall Democrats to defeat the bill, highlighting the comment, “Self-preservation is the first law of the gang.”
Bowers then took up the shenanigans surrounding the attempt to pass the direct primary bill. By this time the Colonel was thoroughly enjoying himself; “Riding the witness chair,” wrote the reporter for Tennessee’s Memphis Commercial Appeal, “as if it were a fiery untamed steed.” Each question from his attorney was the starting line for another story to be told, each providing more evidence that New York State was little more than a fiefdom ruled by the bosses. During the debate in the state senate about direct primary elections, for example, a temporary adjournment was called and, as T.R. told the jurors, “Republican State Senators went into that room which Mr. Barnes had gone and the Democratic State Senators with Senator Grady went into the adjacent room...”
Senator Davenport told Roosevelt he opened the door and saw his fellows meeting “with Mr. Barnes who was not a State Senator or a member of the Legislature...in conference with Republicans.” Roosevelt did not remember the precise vote totals, “but I am clear as to the meeting of Republican Senators in one room in consultation with Mr. Barnes and the meeting of the Democratic Senators under the leading of Mr. Grady and coming out and voting successfully to beat the proposition.”
This reliance on conversations with other people brought the Colonel perilously close to presenting hearsay evidence, and Ivins wanted to keep it out. Hearsay is testimony quoting a third party who was not in court and thus could not be questioned about that statement. Generally, it is not permitted into evidence. The decisions Judge Andrews was making in his Syracuse courtroom about the admissibility of previous conversations could be traced back hundreds of years, before America was colonized. As late as the 1400s, jurors were also the investigators of a legal claim; they were usually people who had personal knowledge of the events. But by the end of the Middle Ages that had changed, and jurors had become neutral parties whose task was to judge evidence presented to them; in most cases eyewitness testimony being considered the best evidence. As John H. Wigmore wrote in the Harvard Law Review in 1904, “By the early 1600s the jury’s function as judges of fact, who depended largely on other persons’ testimony presented to them in court, had become a prominent one, perhaps a chief one.” Hearsay was permitted, but it was referred to as “a tale of a tale” or “a story out of another man’s mouth” and given a different weight by jurors.
The admission of hearsay was called into question in the 1603 trial of Sir Walter Raleigh for treason. The most significant evidence against him was the sworn confession of his alleged coconspirator, Lord Cobham. Although Cobham was readily available to testify, the chief justice refused to call him, explaining in this situation “so many circumstances agreeing and confirming the accusation...the accuser is not to be produced.” After Raleigh was convicted and executed, the evident unfairness of basing a verdict on statements of someone who did not appear in court, and could not be cross-examined, led to the exclusion of hearsay in future cases. Although there were numerous exceptions to that rule, the core principle that hearsay evidence may not generally be admitted remained.
Judge Andrews allowed Roosevelt to testify about these conversations he’d had with other political leaders, but only with the understanding that at some point later in the trial his counsel would tie them to other evidence.
When Roosevelt resumed his testimony, he asked the judge, “Am I at liberty to say what Senator Newcomb told me as the reason of his voting for Senator Allds?” This was in reference to Allds being elected president of the state senate.
“No,” Judge Andrews responded, “that is not important.”
But the inimitable T.R. plowed on anyway, gradually taking control of the entire proceeding. “Senator Newcomb informed me...in 1910 that it was necessary to elect a president of the Senate and official leader of the Republican Party.” Roosevelt was trying to show that the bosses in the Republican Party worked with the Democratic bosses to maintain the political power structure rather than pursuing what was best for their respective parties.
“Senator Newcomb told me,” Roosevelt continued, “that the machine Senators chose State Senator Allds for that position. That a section of the independent or anti-machine Republican Senators would not support Allds, leaving the machine men unable to elect Allds by their votes... Senator Newcomb then informed me that Senator Grady and a number of the Tammany (Democratic) Senators voted for Mr. Allds...a sufficient number, using his words, of the machine Democrats joining with the machine Republicans, I think he said the Barnes Republicans but it may have been the machine Republicans to elect Allds President of the Senate...with enough machine Democrats voting to offset the number of Independent Republicans that refused to support Allds...
“...so that Allds was made leader of the Republican Party in the Senate by Tammany votes under the lead of Senator Grattan.”
Underscoring the Colonel’s testimony was the common knowledge that Jotham P. Allds was corrupt. After being elected he had been impeached for accepting a $1000 bribe to vote down a bill and had resigned from the state senate rather than be expelled. When Roosevelt said later that Allds had been thrown out of the Senate, Ivins objected, pointing out he resigned. Judge Andrews told him that the exact cause didn’t matter. “This is merely what he told the witness.”
“Suppose he put in the first chapter of Genesis?” Ivins wondered, his noted sarcasm on display.
“If it was material,” the Judge explained, “as I hold this to be, I would admit it.”
Not surprisingly, T.R. made sure he got the last word, remarking with practiced incredulity, “And that after almost all the other members of the combination had abandoned the effort to defend Mr. Allds Senator Grady still made a speech on his behalf.”
Teddy Roosevelt long ago had mastered the incredibly difficult skill of speaking to an entire room, and making each person in that space believe he was talking directly to them. So as he answered each question, he grinned at the jury and sometimes lowered his voice a bit so they would have to lean forward to hear him over the increasingly insufferable th-th-thumping of the pile driver outside, and in that way he held them in the thrall of that infectious grin.
Bowers had methodically brought Roosevelt through most of the claims he’d made in his article. More than just trying to show the context behind the statements, Roosevelt, in his own way, was trying to convince jurors that he was right and just in what he had written. He turned his attention to the Bayne Committee report, a document that reported widespread corruption in the state legislature. Roosevelt had been handed a copy of that report by both his nephew, Douglas Robinson, then a member of the legislature, and his cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, then a state senator. While Ivins objected to this questioning, Bowers contended he would justify the article by showing “Mr. Roosevelt not only believed those different matters that came to his attention to be true, not only that he relied upon them, but that he acted as a reasonably patient man would in accepting them.”
T.R. testified that he believed the charges made in the report because both Robinson and his cousin Franklin supported the findings of the committee: “I asked specifically my cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, who was himself a Democrat, not of my political faith, not a supporter of mine, he also spoke highly of the other Senators...”
Bowers then asked, to make it clear to the jury, “And they, in company with other matters...of which you knew, you relied upon in writing the article in the suit.”
“I did.”
While the Bayne Committee Report found instances of corruption in several areas of government, Judge Andrews decided to admit evidence only pertaining to those subjects included in Bowers’s pretrial filings, in particular the lucrative state printing business from which it appeared that Barnes had profited handsomely.
But the Colonel once again found ways around that limitation, telling the jury that his aide, William J. Loeb, “informed me...that the combination of crooked business and crooked politics, as to which I had spoken as being shown to exist by the Bayne report in Albany, extended not only to a business like printing, but to business of the worst type...”
Ivins was on his feet, objecting vehemently.
The witness replied to him, quite innocently, “I am giving what Mr. Loeb told me.”
“You are giving what you said is the worst type...”
“I am not.”
“Wait a moment,” Judge Andrews interrupted, attempting to regain control of his courtroom. To Ivins he said, “When an objection is taken it will be taken with me.” And then to Roosevelt he said, “When an objection is taken the witness will stop answering until I have ruled on it.”
Roosevelt was not deterred. As he began telling the jury about the fight to prevent the Democratic machine candidate William F. Sheehan from being handed the vacant seat in the United States Senate, his voice rose. Roosevelt wanted to make sure the jurors of both parties understood that this wasn’t about Republicans versus Democrats, but rather about bosses of both parties entering into an unscrupulous pact to retain their power. With terrific force he lambasted his accuser, letting loose his anger at Barnes. The newspapers reported that the Colonel sat on the edge of his chair, his body taut with emotion as he pounded out the words, “I am not allowed to say that. Mr. Loeb informed me...that he went to see Mr. Barnes to ask Mr. Barnes if the Republicans in the legislature would not support an anti-Machine Democrat for Senator and that Mr. Barnes answered him, saying that he could not do so because his arrangement with Murphy was that Mr. Murphy had to have a free hand in the election of the United States senator.”
That agreement, he continued in a torrent, was upset by Independent Democrats, among them his cousin Franklin, who told him, “that in his judgement material progress had been made in upsetting conditions that had so long existed in Albany, by which legislators were only figure heads or pawns, who moved exactly as the boss behind them pulled the strings...
“...he felt that the improvement was mainly due by the agitation by the little group of independent Democrats who stood out against Mr. Murphy, he called him ‘Boss Murphy.’ And...in the conversation once or twice he spoke of beating the combined forces of Mr. Murphy and Mr. Barnes.”
Having shown Roosevelt had numerous reasons to believe and write that there was widespread corruption rotting both political parties, Bowers then set out to prove that his comments were not directed personally at Barnes but rather at his role as a boss. The Colonel readily admitted that he’d had many conversations with Barnes, including after he was elected chairman of the State Republican Party. “I said to him...that as a result of the election I and the people whom I represent were out...that I hoped that in that position he would act towards the Republican Party as a whole as his grandfather, Thurlow Weed, as shown in a letter I had just been reading to Abraham Lincoln...
“I earnestly hoped he would succeed in his leadership...but that in my judgement the time had passed when the Republican Party would submit to a revival of the boss system as practiced by Mr. Platt... That if that effort were made I believe there would be a revolt in the party; that the men like myself would revolt; whereas we would be delighted to support him if he would act in the spirit shown in that letter.
“Mr. Barnes said that he must act as he deemed best, and the conversation ended.” That was, he admitted, the last time he had spoken with Mr. Barnes.
Bowers then entered three additional magazine articles critical of the way business was being done in state government into the record, and Roosevelt acknowledged he knew, respected and had spoken with two of the men who had written them; and as a result he believed the statements contained in them to be true and claimed he relied upon them when preparing his own piece.
Throughout the day, reporters would regularly wave their small American flags to signal a dispatch was ready to go to the telegraph room. At times, following an interesting byplay, several flags would be waving frantically, suggesting, noted the Times, “a patriotic mass meeting that fascinated the spectators and, as old fashioned descriptive writers say, ‘added a touch of color to the scene.’”
The trial in some ways had been a tour through the recent political history of New York State, and finally Bowers reached the controversial impeachment and removal from office of Governor William “Plain Bill” Sulzer. Governor Sulzer was a populist Democrat who had been elected in 1912 when T.R.’s Progressives had split the Republican Party. Once in office he had supported major reforms, including direct primaries, and refused to accede to the demands of Tammany Hall. As a result, the bosses went after him; among those charges was the use of campaign funds for personal expenses and a salacious claim made by a Philadelphia model that he reneged on his promise to marry her. A frame-up, he called it, and the night he left the Executive Mansion a crowd of ten thousand people turned out to support him. Roosevelt had met him “a great many times,” and after his election remembered two conversations about state affairs. “Mr. Sulzer told me that he had discovered that the government of the state was rotten he said, either throughout or almost throughout... That he was being attacked by Mr. Murphy and the Murphy machine, which was aided by the Barnes machine...”
After Sulzer had been removed from office, Mr. Hennessy met with the Colonel “and told me that the condition of rottenness in the State government defied belief, that he could not have imagined, without having made the official investigation that there could exist such corruption and mismanagement in the State government... That there was frightful corruption in the prisons...” T.R. was on a roll, and he ticked off a list on his fingers and held them up for the jury to see. “...frightful corruption in the canal and the State Architect’s office, instancing case after case when he would give me names of the padding of rolls where the men did not exist although the salaries were drawn by somebody else, of the charging for rock for roads when it was not rock at all but just stone picked up right beside the road, of the collecting of assessments on the salaries...”
Ivins made an attempt to interrupt him; Judge Andrews overruled and the Colonel just kept going.
“Mr. Hennessy stated that as regards masses of employees a regular deduction had been taken out of their pay envelope often before they were paid and turned over to local bosses... He informed me that his object in telling it to me was so that we might get up a non-partisan citizens movement...to throw out both the old party machines because he said we could not get rid of the corruption that was eating into the state government until we got out both the old party machines.”
“Did you believe his statements?”
“I did.”
“Believed them to be true?”
“I believed them to be true.”
“And you acted upon them?”
“I acted upon them.”
“And you acted upon them—”
“In connection with the other statements that I have received.”
“And as bearing upon the article that you have now been sued upon?”
The Colonel said distinctly, emphasizing each word, “Bearing directly upon the article that I published and for which I have now been sued.”
After spending most of his two days on the stand defending his own motives, the Colonel was led by Bowers into a discussion about Barnes’s motives. What created the bad blood between the two men. Several other politicians were identified and attacked equally harshly in the article, yet only Barnes took action. Also, when Roosevelt beat Barnes’s chosen candidate to become the temporary chairman of the New York State Republican Party in 1910, he immediately attacked the “powerful corrupt boss” clearly referring to Barnes. Yet Barnes took no action at that time. Part of the reason for the change may have been that now Barnes was intent on running for elective office.
As the afternoon wore down, Bowers began wrapping up the Colonel’s direct testimony by producing a letter he had received from Barnes while serving as governor in 1899. “Dear Governor,” it began. “It is rumored that you contemplate in your message the establishing of a State Printing House. I write you this letter because I presume your message will be a matter discussed between you and our friends tomorrow. It is not my desire to intrude my personal matters upon you but I wish merely to state that the establishing of a state printing house here will be a serious if not a fatal blow to me financially.” Signed William Barnes, Jr.
Roosevelt’s response also was put into the record, the key sentence in his rejection of Barnes’s plea being, “There is a perfect consensus of opinion here that there should be a State printing office.”
And in his message to the legislature, the Colonel said as proudly as he had recollected his charge up the hill, “I advocated the establishment of a State printing office.” There it was, the first spark of animosity between the two men. Barnes had pleaded his case, and Roosevelt had responded that he did not intend to do politics the old way. It had become personal.
Bowers, finally, began drawing together all of the disparate subjects he had broached. Still standing by the jury box, as if he were one of them, he set up the pins to be knocked down. “Now in writing this article were you doing it to gratify any personal feeling or were you doing it for what reason?”
The answer was obvious, of course. How could anyone doubt it? “I was doing it in pursuance of what I regarded as the highest duty of citizenship, without any personal feeling whatever, without any malice whatever or any idea of getting any benefit myself from it.”
“Did you intend in that article to make any charge of corruption against Mr. Barnes?”
“No,” the Colonel insisted in a tone that made it clear no reasonable man would ever believe such a thing. “I intended to state that there was corruption and rottenness in the State Government and that it was due to the dominance of the methods in political life typified and represented by Mr. Barnes and Mr. Murphy and by the way in which the two machines...had worked together at certain points where their interests were in common and adverse to the interests of the public as a whole.”
It was 4:00 p.m. With that, Bowers looked at the judge and said, “We will drop the direct examination here...”
There was a stirring in the courtroom as Roosevelt returned to his seat at the defense table, as if a strong tide was going out. Bowers had done a professional job presenting the Colonel’s testimony, giving to the men on the jury predisposed toward his client sufficient evidence to reach and defend the conclusion they wished. For his part, Roosevelt had given his audience all the shades of his renowned character they had read about for so many years and had come to see in person; at various times he had been forceful or vulnerable, he had been defiant or funny, and while his memory evinced an occasional lapse, he had never wavered in telling his story. That story included specific explanations for his words that implicated Barnes in some contemptible political bullying and deal making.
There was considerably more work to be done, but so far Teddy Roosevelt had come onto the stage and delivered a bravura performance.
There was a common vaudeville expression known as “Playing to the haircuts.” That referred to the last act of the evening, generally considered a “chaser,” who performed as the theater emptied so they saw mostly the back of patrons’ heads, the haircuts. William Lyon, the treasurer of the J. B. Lyon printing company, was called to the stand to fill that role in the day. Bowers knew no one could follow Roosevelt, so he filled the rest of the afternoon with tedious testimony about the printing business.
Ivins undoubtedly would wage a fierce attack on the Colonel’s testimony in his cross-examination, questioning his honesty and his integrity. But before that happened, Bowers intended to further muddy Barnes’s reputation. It was not enough to simply defend his client; he also had to destroy Barnes’s credibility. Barnes was most vulnerable, he had decided, in his other business activities.
Bowers established that Barnes owned 750 shares of stock in the Lyon printing company, but finally admitted, “I am only wasting the time of the court by keeping this man here.” It would be far more productive, he explained, to examine the concern’s ledgers.
It was a bit of a cliffhanger; it wasn’t quite up to the level of the Saturday morning serials, but it was curious. The courtroom was left with the impression that Bowers had knowledge of some misdeeds that would be revealed later.
It was after 5:00 p.m. when Judge Andrews thanked everyone and sent them home for the evening.