Empire

by Gore Vidal

  As the roll-call was being taken, Dawes chattered: “There’s a story going to break that we provoked those natives to attack us, but it won’t hit the papers till tomorrow, and by then it won’t make any difference.”

  “No difference?” Mr. Day was not shy, Hay decided, mildly curious as to how a Bryan Democrat could be holding office in an administration which took very seriously the notion that to the victors belong the spoils. Naturally, Civil Service reform was dear to every progressive Republican heart; but office for the worthy was dearer. “Do you realize what a difference it will make if people find out that it was us who started trouble over there?”

  “It meant no difference to the vote today, which is what matters. I’m also not saying we started it. I don’t know. It’s just a rumor.” Dawes turned to Day. “You folks have been getting nowhere with silver since they found all that gold in the Klondike, so now you’ve got to hit us with something new, like going into the empire business.”

  “Are you related to my predecessor, Judge Day?” Hay found the young man personable, for an anarchist. From his accent he could have been from Indiana, too; in fact, he was not unlike, Hay thought, his own young self, only taller, stronger.

  “No, sir. But I do know your son, Del.”

  Hay was not surprised. As he himself saw Del so little nowadays, he had no idea whom his son saw. “Then tell me, what has become of him?”

  “I think he’s in New York. I haven’t seen him since last month when he took me over to the White House, to play billiards, down in the cellar.”

  Hay was truly startled. “In the cellar of the White House?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s a terrible place, too. Slimy-like a dungeon. But there’s a billiard room where some of the staff meet…”

  “And the President?”

  “He looked in, while we were playing.”

  Before Hay could unravel the secret life of his son and the President, Vice-President Hobart, now in his chair, entertained a motion from the floor that the peace treaty be, herewith, voted upon. As the senators answered with an aye or a nay when their names were called, Dawes would scribble in his notebook and mutter “Hell” or “Maria,” presumably “bad” and “good.” When the name Elkins was called, Dawes said, “Now we’ll see if your man Bryan’s done his work.” The whole chamber was still. Elkins was a Democrat; and an anti-imperialist. Elkins allowed the silence after his name to last as long as possible; then he shouted, “Aye!” Applause exploded in the gallery. Hobart, resembling an aged gray walrus, struck his gavel hard on his desk. While a familiar la-di-da voice intoned, “Bravo!”

  Day turned to Dawes. “Well, Colonel Bryan’s gone and got you your empire.”

  “You don’t follow your leader?” asked Hay.

  “I think he’s made a mistake. We have enough to do here at home without…”

  But cheering had again filled the chamber: the necessary two-thirds vote had been achieved, with one vote to spare. The Senate had voted fifty-seven to twenty-seven to uphold the Administration’s peace treaty, and annex the Philippine Islands, now in rebellion against their newly legitimate, by act of Congress, masters.

  “Hell and Maria!” shouted the delighted Dawes. “I must go tell the Major.”

  Eddy helped Hay to his feet. Various dignitaries shook his hand, as if this had been his treaty rather than the President’s. At the foot of the gallery stairs, Lodge met Hay with the words: “We have done it.” Hay noted that Lodge looked distinctly unwell. “I have never in my life gone through such an ordeal.”

  Hay gave him the praise that he wanted; and deserved. In the end, only two Republicans had voted against the treaty: Lodge’s colleague Hoar, who had somewhat startlingly offered to be beheaded in the Senate if that would stop the annexation, and Hale, the hereditary senator from Maine, who had kept his hard head, and said no. Otherwise, Hanna’s money and patronage, Bryan’s eloquence and smile, and Lodge’s perseverance had carried, just barely, the day. “The ship of state is in the open sea at last,” said Hay, bowing to left and right, as he and Lodge crossed the rotunda where Washington’s ladies now mingled with the weary proud legislators.

  “Ship is the right image,” said Lodge, somewhat grimly. “And I’ve just spent a month in the engine room…”

  “The cloakrooms of the Senate.”

  “Exactly. I’m caked with grime.”

  At that moment, as if to emphasize the nature of the grime, a tall burly youthful man, surrounded by admirers, all simple Western folk, passed them without a glance, or a pause in his tirade: “I never thought I’d live to see the day when any man dare try to give, openly and in broad daylight, a bribe to a United States senator so as to get him to change his vote.”

  “Who,” asked Hay, “was that?”

  “The honorable senator from Idaho, Mr. Heitfeld, who in a well-run world would be, at this moment, planting wheat back home.”

  “Not, dear Cabot, in Idaho, in February. Was he offered a bribe?”

  Lodge shrugged. “Not by me. But Hanna’s been from one end of the cloakroom to the other, whispering. Bryan, too. So who knows? Anyway, all that matters is that the ship is now full speed ahead. We are on the high seas at last, Mr. Hay. What England was, we are now, as of today. Asia is ours.”

  “Well, not yet.” They were outside the Capitol. The sky was black; a cold wind blew. Fortunately, the Secretary of State took precedence over everyone but Vice-President and Speaker; and in no time at all, the State Department carriage creaked and rattled to a halt, at the head of a long line of carriages, their waiting horses blanketed against the cold. Hay completed the nautical image. “Let’s hope the barometer’s not falling, now that we’re on the high seas.”

  “Oh,” said the driver, thinking that he had been addressed, “there’s a blizzard on its way, sir. Worst of the season, they say.”

  “That,” said Hay to Lodge, “is not a good omen.”

  “So I’ll keep killing Capitoline geese until I find one whose liver predicts good sailing weather.” Lodge and Eddy helped Hay into the carriage. “Seriously,” said Lodge, seriously, “this was the closest, hardest fight I have ever known. I doubt if we’ll see another in our time, when so much was at stake.”

  “I make no predictions when it comes to earthly matters.” An elaborate burst of pain at the bottom of Hay’s spine brought earth into its true material perspective; the inexorable refuge for the lot of them and, for him, more soon than late. “As opposed to heavenly ones. Let us say the ships are afloat, and the legions are fighting on the Asian marches.”

  “Ave Caesar!” Lodge laughed.

  “Hail McKinley.“ Hay smiled in the icy darkness. “Pacific lord of the Pacific Ocean.”

  FOUR

  1

  AT THE END OF the long broad corridor that divided the ground floor of the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Blaise waited in what was known from one end of the political city to the other as the Amen Corner. He had yet to discover why the corner was so named. Presumably it was here that “amen” was put to fervent prayers by the current master of the Corner, Senator Thomas Platt. Seated at the center of a gilded horsehair sofa, the so-called Easy Boss presided over the fortunes and misfortunes of all members of the so-called organization, the machinery that controlled the Republican Party in the state of New York and, presumably, the new Republican governor, Theodore Roosevelt, who had promised to give Blaise an interview after his weekly breakfast meeting with Platt. When Congress was in session, the Senator came up from Washington on Friday evening and returned to the capital on Monday morning. The fact that each Saturday the Governor came down the river from Albany to breakfast with the Easy Boss indicated the nature of their relationship, or so the Chief darkly maintained.

  Blaise was nervous. He had never met the Governor; he was, of course, used to him (“habituated,” he said to himself, reverting to French). By now he had watched the energetic figure on a dozen stages, the incarnation of, if nothing else, energy. Now the Chief wanted the Governor
interviewed; thought the time was right for Blaise to try his hand at the deceitful art; wanted certain things asked, which Blaise had written down on a pad of paper, already smudged from sweaty fingers. He was nervous; and wondered why. Was he not habituated to the great? He was a Sanford; a Delacroix, too. He reminded himself of his father’s deep contempt for all politicians, which had been deeply and permanently satisfied at Newport, Rhode Island, when President Chester A. Arthur had made the mistake of visiting the Casino, where everyone had blithely ignored him. Worse, when it came time for Mr. Arthur to leave, he was obliged to stand, quite alone, while the carriages of Astors, Belmonts, Delacroixs, Vanderbilts swept past him, as he himself shouted, “The President’s carriage!” Colonel Sanford had revelled in the situation. But Blaise lacked his father’s patrician disinterestedness.

  At eight-thirty of a Saturday morning, the Fifth Avenue Hotel was uncommonly tranquil. A few guests were to be seen in the distant lobby, while several potential justices of the peace from upstate tentatively occupied the Amen Corner. They reminded Blaise of the sort of furtive men one saw in the Mulberry Street police station, standing in the criminal line-up.

  Two members of New York’s police force guarded the door to the private dining room where their one-time commissioner was breakfasting, heartily-the usual adverb-on chicken pan-fried steak, with a pair of fried eggs, like magnified eyes on the steak, and a quantity of fried potatoes. Blaise had questioned the maître d’hôtel earlier. Apparently, the Governor was a big eater, in the Western frontiersman style; he liked his “grub” plain and plentiful and always fried.

  Suddenly, a large, round, dark-waistcoated belly, packed with fried meat, appeared in the dining room’s doorway; the belly’s attachment, Governor-Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, said something to the two policemen which made them frown, and which made their old commissioner hoot with laughter, like a screech-owl, thought Blaise, swooping down upon a nocturnal rodent. The Governor was accompanied by the pale and more than ever weary-looking Platt. To Blaise’s surprise they had breakfasted without aides or-witnesses, he immediately thought. The Chief’s dark conspiratorial view of the world was contagious; and probably correct.

  The policemen then saluted the Governor, who crossed to Blaise, ignoring the would-be supplicants. “Mr. Sanford? From the Journal. Our favorite paper, isn’t it, Mr. Platt?“

  “There are worse, I suppose,” moaned Platt softly, moving toward his familiar settee; he was like the now proverbial man with a hoe come home to rest. “Mr. Sanford,” he murmured, touching Blaise’s hand with his own delicate one. Then Senator Platt sank onto his throne in the Amen Corner, ready to rule as well as reign, while the nominal ruler of the state was left free to charm and delight a young journalist. As supplicants surrounded Platt, the boss waved Governor and Blaise a mournful farewell.

  “Well, now, Mr. Sanford, why don’t you drive uptown with me to my sister’s house. We can talk on the way.” During this Roosevelt had taken Blaise’s left elbow into his right hand, a curious gesture which might seem a demonstration of intimacy or at least good feeling to an observer, but to the victim, so Blaise felt himself, it was more like a gesture of physical control, as the Governor forced him to walk rapidly alongside him, and in perfect step; again he was reminded of the Mulberry Street police station. But although the Governor was like a policeman, he was hardly the robust physical specimen that legend proclaimed. Roosevelt was as short as Blaise, who had spent a half-dozen years praying for half as many inches more; but he had stopped growing at sixteen. Yet where Blaise was muscular, Roosevelt was simply rubbery, with an enormous head and neck, the first emerging from the second like a tree’s section. The belly was definitely fat; the limbs were definitely thick but not muscular. Nevertheless, Roosevelt walked swiftly, purposefully, like an athlete with an appointment on some as yet undetermined playing field. Meanwhile, Blaise was bemused to discover that the Governor’s conversation was exactly as recorded by the press. In the lobby, when strangers asked to shake his hand and wish him well, he would flash those huge rock-like teeth and exclaim, in three distinct syllables, “Dee-light-ed!” When told something that he approved of, he would actually say “Bully!” like a stage Englishman. He even responded, in the street, to cries of “Teddy,” a name that Blaise knew no one ever dared call him in or out of the family.

  A light April rain was dampening Fifth Avenue, if not Governor Roosevelt, who leapt inside his carriage, using Blaise’s elbow, still held in his right hand, as fulcrum. Blaise was happy to note that the brougham was closed. Otherwise, he had an image of the exponent of “the strenuous life,” the title of a lecture recently given in the Midwest, riding up Fifth Avenue in a rainstorm, shouting “Bully!” at the elements.

  “You should go west,” said the Governor, predictably. “A boy like you should develop his body, and morals.”

  Blaise found himself blushing, not at the word “morals,” a subject that he, the French-reared young man, could have lectured the Governor on, but the word “body”; he prided himself on a musculature unequalled by any Yale classmate, the work of nature, admittedly, but still all his own, unlike the thick suet-pudding beside him. Close to, Roosevelt did not look young; but then, for Blaise, forty was not exactly a man’s optimum age. Deep lines radiated from behind the gold-framed pince-nez. The short-cropped hair was grizzled. Like a parenthesis of hair, the Chinese-style moustache framed-and disguised?-red, full, curiously voluptuous lips. The eyes were bright and quick and of no distinctive color, other than bright. The body was unhealthily fat. “I can beat you,” said Blaise, to his own amazement, “at Indian arm-wrestling.”

  The Governor, who had been staring out the window, hoping to be recognized by a passing umbrella, turned an astonished gaze on Blaise. The spectacles were allowed to drop from his nose onto his chest-where they swung on their chain like a pendulum. The eyes, Blaise could see at last, were blue. “You! A city dude?” There was a burst of high laughter; then: “You’re on,” said the Governor.

  The two men then arranged themselves on the back seat so that each could rest an elbow on the middle cushion as they interlocked forearms. Blaise was perfectly confident; he was stronger, he knew, as he began to force down the older man’s arm. But Roosevelt was heavier; finally, faced with defeat, he simply cheated. Aware that he was about to be beaten, he surreptitiously slid his feet under the folding seat opposite and, with this leverage, abruptly forced Blaise’s arm down. “There!” shouted the Governor, delighted.

  “You had your feet under the seat.”

  “I did not…”

  “Look!” Blaise pointed; the feet were quickly withdrawn.

  “An accident. They slipped.” For an instant Roosevelt looked furious, like a small child caught out. Then he roared. “Bully for you, my boy! Come on in. You’re no city dude. Whatever you are. A Sanford. Which Sanford?”

  The family game was swiftly played through. The Colonel, a perfect snob like so many tribunes of the people, was quite at home with a Sanford; but somewhat intimidated by a Delacroix. As they got out of the carriage in front of 422 Madison Avenue, the brownstone house of the Governor’s youngest sister, Mrs. Douglas Robinson (Blaise took meticulous notes), Roosevelt said, “Do you box?”

  “Yes,” said Blaise, who did.

  “We’ll go put on the gloves in the basement, once breakfast’s settled.”

  Mrs. Robinson, addressed as Conie by her brother, was a dark, bright-eyed woman, who led them into a small parlor, dominated by the head of a buffalo shot by the Governor when he was a cowboy in the West. The resemblance, Blaise noted, was eerie between victim-beast and victor-man. “I used to be a taxidermist myself,” said Roosevelt. “Birds, mostly. But I really wanted to be an ornithologist, a naturalist. Why Hearst?”

  “Well, why not, sir?” Blaise sat in a William Morris rocking chair while Roosevelt worked off his breakfast by walking vigorously, if pointlessly, about the room. From the back parlor, a telephone rang from time to time and a low masculine
voice would answer it. Apparently, the state of New York was being strenuously governed even as they spoke.

  “He is against reform, of course. He is a Democrat, not that I am strict in such matters. But I think Boss Croker is, perhaps, unsavory, even by Tammany standards.”

  “That’s true, sir. But he did stand by when you were running for governor, and you won by eighteen thousand votes because he wouldn’t really go all out for Judge Van Wyck.”

  Roosevelt chose not to hear this. “Last week, Mr. Hearst was at the Tammany Hall dinner, in Grand Central Palace, presided over by our friend Croker, home from Ireland, or away from home, in Ireland. I would not want to be so closely allied with such a man.”

  “I think, sir, the Chief was there to listen to Mr. Bryan.”

  “I can’t think why a newspaper publisher, who went to Harvard, should want to involve himself in politics when he has, as far as I can tell, no politics at all.”

  Although Blaise had been more amused than bemused by the Chief’s sudden obsession with politics and the holding of high office, he could not tell Roosevelt that much of the Chief’s interest had been created not, as many thought, by the career of his father, Senator George Hearst, but by that of the thick small restless shrill-voiced man who was marching about the room like a toy soldier that someone had wound up but forgot to point in any particular direction. Blaise had now given up on conducting an interview with the Governor. Those whom Roosevelt regarded as social equals, and Blaise was one, were not treated as a part of the solemn consistory of reforming angels at work with bucket and shovel in the stables of the republic; rather, they were treated as a fellow boy by a boy who despite-or because of-small stature and bad eyesight, was a born bully and, perhaps, leader, too, if anyone could be persuaded to follow him. Certainly, whatever crossed his plainly quick mind, he felt obliged to express.