American Rifle by Alexander Rose

Author:Alexander Rose
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780440338093
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-10-20T16:00:00+00:00

Migraine-inducing it might have been, but Roosevelt adored the Springfield Model 1903. So pleased was he with it that on November 17, 1903, just five months after the new service rifle was authorized for manufacture, he asked Crozier to obtain him one, stamped with the special serial number 6000 and suitably “sporterized.” Being the commander in chief of the armed forces, the president thought it only right that he should use the army rifle as his chosen hunting weapon. Roosevelt went on to use it for a dozen years on three continents, bagging some three hundred head of all kinds, including lion, hyena, rhinoceros (square-mouthed and hook-nosed), giraffe, zebra, gazelle, warthog, hippopotamus, monkey, jaguar, giant anteater, ostrich, cougar, black bear, crocodile, and python.55

Considering his love for the Springfield 1903 and all its works, it was a good thing that Roosevelt, who died in January 1919, did not live to see the embarrassing finale to the ongoing legal battles over its “American-ness.” As for Crozier, he yet again succeeded in not being left holding the bag, for he retired in the same month as Roosevelt’s death. (His own would come in November 1942.) He thereby escaped censure for the fallout from a reinvigorated lawsuit launched by DWM in 1920. Having given up on obtaining a favorable patent-infringement judgment, DWM’s lawyers focused on whether the alien property custodian’s seizure of the patent had been lawful. Impressed by DWM’s argument that its bullet patent was protected by previous treaty, a tribunal ruled the U.S. government in violation and awarded DWM damages of $300,000. Washington immediately appealed the decision, and the case lurched on interminably, like that of Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (“This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means”), for another seven and a half years, until it was finally settled on the last day of 1928, a generation after its beginning. The judgment stood. With interest added on to the original $300,000, the United States owed $412,520.55.56

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