May 26, 1913—In Marquette, Mich., in a courthouse that later served as the location for the James Stewart legal drama Anatomy of a Murder, an equally extraordinary real-life proceeding began: a libel suit by Theodore Roosevelt against an editor who had accused him of habitual drunkenness.
The suit by the ex-President against George Newitt, editor of local weekly paper Iron Ore, was unparalleled, according to Patricia O’Toole’s When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House, because it was “the first to expose a former president’s personal habits to public view, and Roosevelt was the first former president to hold a newspaper to account for the sort of calumny that might affect his place in history.”
The suit by the ex-President against George Newitt, editor of local weekly paper Iron Ore, was unparalleled, according to Patricia O’Toole’s When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House, because it was “the first to expose a former president’s personal habits to public view, and Roosevelt was the first former president to hold a newspaper to account for the sort of calumny that might affect his place in history.”
A Tumultuous Campaign Swing—In More Ways Than One
The indefatigable T.R. thought nothing of becoming the first U.S. President to journey outside the confines of the country while in office (in this case, Panama, to inspect the construction of the canal), of shooting big game in Africa, or, soon, of exploring the unnavigated “River of Doubt” in Brazil (a trip that nearly cost him his life). Going to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then, was cake by comparison, and Roosevelt enjoyed it so much during his life that he toured 14 of the area’s 15 counties.
The second of these trips, on October 9, 1912, in the midst of his bid for a precedent-setting third Presidential term as nominee of the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party, was the one that led to his later court date in Marquette.
The 250-mile swing through the Upper Peninsula was greeted tumultuously, with many veterans of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders turning out along the way. Places that hardly anyone knew existed (Soo Junction and Munising Junction, anyone?) brought out at least 500 people, and often more.
One person unimpressed with the hoopla was George S. Newett, who used his bully pulpit at Iron Ore to try to keep Colonel Roosevelt from reaching his favorite one: the Oval Office. The editor’s animus was aroused for two reasons: he was a former appointee of the President’s (serving as postmaster of Ishpeming) deeply disillusioned when T.R. split with chosen successor William Howard Taft over the latter’s conservatism, and as a teetotaler he was disturbed by unpublished scuttlebutt that the ex-President was an alcoholic.
The indefatigable T.R. thought nothing of becoming the first U.S. President to journey outside the confines of the country while in office (in this case, Panama, to inspect the construction of the canal), of shooting big game in Africa, or, soon, of exploring the unnavigated “River of Doubt” in Brazil (a trip that nearly cost him his life). Going to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, then, was cake by comparison, and Roosevelt enjoyed it so much during his life that he toured 14 of the area’s 15 counties.
The second of these trips, on October 9, 1912, in the midst of his bid for a precedent-setting third Presidential term as nominee of the Progressive or “Bull Moose” Party, was the one that led to his later court date in Marquette.
The 250-mile swing through the Upper Peninsula was greeted tumultuously, with many veterans of Roosevelt’s Rough Riders turning out along the way. Places that hardly anyone knew existed (Soo Junction and Munising Junction, anyone?) brought out at least 500 people, and often more.
One person unimpressed with the hoopla was George S. Newett, who used his bully pulpit at Iron Ore to try to keep Colonel Roosevelt from reaching his favorite one: the Oval Office. The editor’s animus was aroused for two reasons: he was a former appointee of the President’s (serving as postmaster of Ishpeming) deeply disillusioned when T.R. split with chosen successor William Howard Taft over the latter’s conservatism, and as a teetotaler he was disturbed by unpublished scuttlebutt that the ex-President was an alcoholic.
Hearing the same rumor on the campaign trail, the candidate was determine to scotch the rumor the secret it made its way into print. Three days after the Upper Peninsula trip, Newett obliged, with an editorial that put the rumor out unmistakably: “Roosevelt lies and curses in a most disgusting way. He gets drunk, too, and that not infrequently, and all his intimate friends know it.”
Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes in 1912, late in an election you still believe you can win. Do you ignore some publication that nobody’s ever heard of outside its backwater of the Midwest—or do you take the rumor on now, even if it’s in the middle of a campaign, when your attention will be diverted and you risk giving credence to a rumor?
Roosevelt didn’t hesitate for a second. Shown Newett’s editorial while he was dining in a Chicago hotel, he was as good as his initial vow: “Let’s go at him,” he told associates. Two weeks after the editorial, before voters had gone to the polls, Roosevelt’s legal team filed suit against Newett.
Anatomy of a Rumor
Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes in 1912, late in an election you still believe you can win. Do you ignore some publication that nobody’s ever heard of outside its backwater of the Midwest—or do you take the rumor on now, even if it’s in the middle of a campaign, when your attention will be diverted and you risk giving credence to a rumor?
Roosevelt didn’t hesitate for a second. Shown Newett’s editorial while he was dining in a Chicago hotel, he was as good as his initial vow: “Let’s go at him,” he told associates. Two weeks after the editorial, before voters had gone to the polls, Roosevelt’s legal team filed suit against Newett.
Anatomy of a Rumor
In preposterousness, Newett’s claim might be surpassed in modern times only by the paternity suit filed against that raging heterosexual Boy George, or by Matt Drudge’s 2004 pseudo-e-scoop that John Kerry fooled around with a young intern. (Drudge might have thought better of the mental processes that produced his quickly retracted story—i.e., A Democrat + A Female Intern=Sex Scandal—by considering a powerful countervailing bit of evidence: Kerry’s wife Teresa, who surely would have pulled a Lorena Bobbitt if she had discovered her husband philandering.)
Over the course of TR’s life, I’ve been able to turn up only two instances when he became intoxicated, both of which occurred while he was a student at Harvard: at his initiation into the Porcellian Club (according to Gore Vidal, who, characteristically, calls Roosevelt a “sissy” but is unable to document any other drunken adventure other than this); and after the death of the father he worshipped, when, he wrote in his diary, he “got tight” after receiving the news. (The ashamed young man scratched out the diary entry, but David McCullough was able to decipher the passage while researching Mornings on Horseback.)
The youngest man ever to become President and the first President to complete a full term in the 20th century, T.R. seems, in the public eye, far more than his immediate successor, Taft and Woodrow Wilson, a quintessentially modern chief executive who was, in the marvelously apt phrase of historian Henry Adams, “pure act.”
That perception disguises how much Roosevelt was a product of the mid-Victorian era, in his attitude as much as in his age. He did not smoke (indeed, he was the first President to ban smoking, by executive order, in federal buildings, because he feared the loss of historical records by fire). While praising Leo Tolstoy as “an interesting and stimulating writer,” he also judged him “an exceedingly unsafe moral adviser.” While matching fifth cousin Franklin Roosevelt in narcissism, T.R.’s never made him susceptible to attractive women.
In other words, this was a man who did not even come close to Newett’s description—and he had an entire railroad car of friends and associates who were willing to journey out to the middle of nowhere to testify on his behalf to this effect.
Given all of this, how on earth did a private investigator working for Newett’s defense team turn up 40 witnesses willing to swear they had seen Roosevelt intoxicated? “I was really unprepared for perjury on a gigantic scale, perjury scores of alleged witnesses,” Roosevelt wrote a friend.
Intoxication or Caffeination?
If political enmity played a role in these memories, as Colonel Roosevelt hinted, it might have been an instance not of inspiring a lie so much as in coloring perceptions of images that would have looked different to someone else. In an affidavit submitted at the trial, for instance, Admiral George Dewey, hero of the Battle of Manila Bay, wrote of his former civilian head at the Naval Department, that "all people at dinners, whether drink anything or not, are more or less excited. I have seen teetotalers very excited, and I have seen Mr. Roosevelt at dinners where he would be full of spirits, full of life and animation. All who knew him knew his peculiarities in this respect.”
What else might have contributed to this perception of TR as out of control? Henry Adams noted in his posthumous memoir that the President “had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond any other man of great importance in the world, except Kaiser Wilhelm and Joseph Chamberlain" (the latter British politician was the father of future appeaser Neville Chamberlain).
How could someone be so indiscreet and so impetuous? Mere acquaintances might have identified T.R.’s fault as alcohol, but I believe they missed a cause a thousand times more likely: caffeine.
Years ago, someone I knew in the business world was fond of proclaiming that he got all his ideas after he’d had coffee. What he never seemed to notice was the high percentage of these brainstorms that were insane.
Though TR’s hyperkinetic energy was usually ascribed to youth and physical fitness, I believe coffee had a lot to do with it. He loved the stuff. One of his most famous statements came when, after consuming a cup of a then-relatively-unknown brand called Maxwell’s at Andrew Jackson’s Nashville mansion, The Hermitage, he pronounced it “good to the last drop.” Anyone who drinks a gallon of coffee a day, as the President did, bids fair to becoming the most overstimulated person you’ll ever meet.
Crucial Rulings, Devastating Testimony—Then a Favorable Verdict
Perry Mason notwithstanding, lovers of courtroom drama are best advised to keep a sharp eye out for jury selection and rulings from the bench, rather than for shrewd cross-examination by legal eagles, as the best barometer to how a case will turn out.
Over the course of TR’s life, I’ve been able to turn up only two instances when he became intoxicated, both of which occurred while he was a student at Harvard: at his initiation into the Porcellian Club (according to Gore Vidal, who, characteristically, calls Roosevelt a “sissy” but is unable to document any other drunken adventure other than this); and after the death of the father he worshipped, when, he wrote in his diary, he “got tight” after receiving the news. (The ashamed young man scratched out the diary entry, but David McCullough was able to decipher the passage while researching Mornings on Horseback.)
The youngest man ever to become President and the first President to complete a full term in the 20th century, T.R. seems, in the public eye, far more than his immediate successor, Taft and Woodrow Wilson, a quintessentially modern chief executive who was, in the marvelously apt phrase of historian Henry Adams, “pure act.”
That perception disguises how much Roosevelt was a product of the mid-Victorian era, in his attitude as much as in his age. He did not smoke (indeed, he was the first President to ban smoking, by executive order, in federal buildings, because he feared the loss of historical records by fire). While praising Leo Tolstoy as “an interesting and stimulating writer,” he also judged him “an exceedingly unsafe moral adviser.” While matching fifth cousin Franklin Roosevelt in narcissism, T.R.’s never made him susceptible to attractive women.
In other words, this was a man who did not even come close to Newett’s description—and he had an entire railroad car of friends and associates who were willing to journey out to the middle of nowhere to testify on his behalf to this effect.
Given all of this, how on earth did a private investigator working for Newett’s defense team turn up 40 witnesses willing to swear they had seen Roosevelt intoxicated? “I was really unprepared for perjury on a gigantic scale, perjury scores of alleged witnesses,” Roosevelt wrote a friend.
Intoxication or Caffeination?
If political enmity played a role in these memories, as Colonel Roosevelt hinted, it might have been an instance not of inspiring a lie so much as in coloring perceptions of images that would have looked different to someone else. In an affidavit submitted at the trial, for instance, Admiral George Dewey, hero of the Battle of Manila Bay, wrote of his former civilian head at the Naval Department, that "all people at dinners, whether drink anything or not, are more or less excited. I have seen teetotalers very excited, and I have seen Mr. Roosevelt at dinners where he would be full of spirits, full of life and animation. All who knew him knew his peculiarities in this respect.”
What else might have contributed to this perception of TR as out of control? Henry Adams noted in his posthumous memoir that the President “had the reputation of being indiscreet beyond any other man of great importance in the world, except Kaiser Wilhelm and Joseph Chamberlain" (the latter British politician was the father of future appeaser Neville Chamberlain).
How could someone be so indiscreet and so impetuous? Mere acquaintances might have identified T.R.’s fault as alcohol, but I believe they missed a cause a thousand times more likely: caffeine.
Years ago, someone I knew in the business world was fond of proclaiming that he got all his ideas after he’d had coffee. What he never seemed to notice was the high percentage of these brainstorms that were insane.
Though TR’s hyperkinetic energy was usually ascribed to youth and physical fitness, I believe coffee had a lot to do with it. He loved the stuff. One of his most famous statements came when, after consuming a cup of a then-relatively-unknown brand called Maxwell’s at Andrew Jackson’s Nashville mansion, The Hermitage, he pronounced it “good to the last drop.” Anyone who drinks a gallon of coffee a day, as the President did, bids fair to becoming the most overstimulated person you’ll ever meet.
Crucial Rulings, Devastating Testimony—Then a Favorable Verdict
Perry Mason notwithstanding, lovers of courtroom drama are best advised to keep a sharp eye out for jury selection and rulings from the bench, rather than for shrewd cross-examination by legal eagles, as the best barometer to how a case will turn out.
So it proved here, with the Roosevelt legal team getting its wish for a jury comprised of workingmen (four miners, three teamsters, two farmers, one blacksmith, one locomotive foreman, and one lumberjack). Moreover, local trial judge Richard Flannigan ruled that Newett could not introduce statements from other newspapermen that it was generally reported that T.R. was frequently drunk.
That last point in particular is important. The anything-goes ethos of the Internet means that print journalists can now sneak out reports of candidates’ infidelities and other assorted peccadilloes as media stories (e.g., “Isn’t it awful how Reporter So-and-So says that Candidate X is a philanderer?”) rather than actual statements of fact (“Candidate X met with Prostitute Y for the umpteenth time in Washington”).
That last point in particular is important. The anything-goes ethos of the Internet means that print journalists can now sneak out reports of candidates’ infidelities and other assorted peccadilloes as media stories (e.g., “Isn’t it awful how Reporter So-and-So says that Candidate X is a philanderer?”) rather than actual statements of fact (“Candidate X met with Prostitute Y for the umpteenth time in Washington”).
Were he alive today, Newett could simply have claimed the rumors existed and he was simply bringing them out into the open. In addition, one of the conditions imposed on plaintiffs by the Supreme Court in its landmark ruling New York Times v. Sullivan -- that they needed to prove that defendants knew their statements were false or in “reckless disregard of their truth or falsity”—would have made it immeasurably harder for Roosevelt to file his suit.
Things became quickly worse for Newett, starting with Roosevelt’s testimony. Once again, the President revealed his talent for the dramatic when, upon being asked by his attorney if he’d ever been wounded, the ex-Rough Rider rolled up his cuff, displaying an ugly gash on his forearm that he'd received in his famous charge up San Juan Hill (really Kettle Hill)—something that, uncharacteristically, the publicity-hungry politician had never divulged to the public. (“I wasn’t officially wounded,” he explained on the stand. “I never went to an aid station. Somebody wrapped a bandage around my arm and I went on.”)
The final straw was the collective parade of famous witnesses who testified that Roosevelt had never become intoxicated—former Cabinet members, ambassadors, judges, department heads, and newspaper owners. He stayed away from heavy beer and wine, stopping at the occasional glass of wine with meals, they agreed.
Once the ex-President’s legal team finished this devastating testimony, Newett took the stand and conceded that he could not prove the charges, for all of the witnesses he had relied on were unwilling to swear to their statements. He was now willing to admit he had made a mistake, with his only defense being that he had not written the editorial with malice.
The Roosevelt defense team desired $10,000 in damages, but he immediately requested Judge Flannigan to only award him nominal damages, as he had filed suit not to gain money but to disprove the rumors once and for all. Flannigan granted his wish, instructing the jury to award the plaintiff six cents—the price, it was noted, of a good newspaper. After the jury did so, the judge issued an unequivocal statement that the ex-President’s sobriety had been firmly established.
T.R. had fought many bruising battles with Irish Catholics who formed the base of the Tammany Hall political machine. But in Flannigan, an ex-Democrat who left that party because of William Jennings Bryan’s free-silver policies, Roosevelt surely found one to his liking.
Aside from the Midwest jurist’s favorable rulings during the five-day trial, his personal characteristics, as described by longtime associates nearly 15 years after the trial, would have appealed to the energetic, impetuous—but personally abstemious—master politico: “hard working, straightforward, blunt, yet intensely human.”
Things became quickly worse for Newett, starting with Roosevelt’s testimony. Once again, the President revealed his talent for the dramatic when, upon being asked by his attorney if he’d ever been wounded, the ex-Rough Rider rolled up his cuff, displaying an ugly gash on his forearm that he'd received in his famous charge up San Juan Hill (really Kettle Hill)—something that, uncharacteristically, the publicity-hungry politician had never divulged to the public. (“I wasn’t officially wounded,” he explained on the stand. “I never went to an aid station. Somebody wrapped a bandage around my arm and I went on.”)
The final straw was the collective parade of famous witnesses who testified that Roosevelt had never become intoxicated—former Cabinet members, ambassadors, judges, department heads, and newspaper owners. He stayed away from heavy beer and wine, stopping at the occasional glass of wine with meals, they agreed.
Once the ex-President’s legal team finished this devastating testimony, Newett took the stand and conceded that he could not prove the charges, for all of the witnesses he had relied on were unwilling to swear to their statements. He was now willing to admit he had made a mistake, with his only defense being that he had not written the editorial with malice.
The Roosevelt defense team desired $10,000 in damages, but he immediately requested Judge Flannigan to only award him nominal damages, as he had filed suit not to gain money but to disprove the rumors once and for all. Flannigan granted his wish, instructing the jury to award the plaintiff six cents—the price, it was noted, of a good newspaper. After the jury did so, the judge issued an unequivocal statement that the ex-President’s sobriety had been firmly established.
T.R. had fought many bruising battles with Irish Catholics who formed the base of the Tammany Hall political machine. But in Flannigan, an ex-Democrat who left that party because of William Jennings Bryan’s free-silver policies, Roosevelt surely found one to his liking.
Aside from the Midwest jurist’s favorable rulings during the five-day trial, his personal characteristics, as described by longtime associates nearly 15 years after the trial, would have appealed to the energetic, impetuous—but personally abstemious—master politico: “hard working, straightforward, blunt, yet intensely human.”
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