The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  The Tribune printed Hay’s verses, signing them J.H., and in a few weeks they were as famous as “The Heathen Chinee.” Even Professor Henry Adams of Harvard was charmed; Hay’s poems were “better than anything Bret Harte ever wrote,” he told a friend. In the saloons of Newton, Kansas, where cowpokes recited the ballads and showed off their chaws of terbacker, an enterprising fille de joie began claiming the bard as her brother.

  “That ridiculous rhyme of mine has had a ridiculous run,” the bard noted with amazement after “Little Breeches” appeared. “As my initials are not known, and they generally get worn off on the second reprint, I have not been disgraced by it.” In a note to W. D. Howells, who had published several of Hay’s essays in the Atlantic, Hay wondered whether Howells knew of “Little Breeches” and its “appalling run. It is published every day in hundreds of newspapers. Two political papers in the west have issued illustrated editions of it. I mention this to show what a ravenous market there is for anything of the sort.”

  Howells not only understood the market, he had done more than any other Eastern editor to create it. A native of Ohio, he loved the twangs and drawls of the West. In Mark Twain and Bret Harte and the Sierra tales of Clarence King, he heard voices that were distinctly American, voices owing as little as possible to the literary traditions of England.

  Howells wanted more rhymes, but Hay could not oblige. Perhaps his Pike County vein had simply run out, or perhaps he was thrown by the accusation, baseless though it was, that he had plagiarized Bret Harte. A few days after Christmas 1870, he announced to Howells that he was out of the ballad business: “I wrote another one, and Reid says it is very bad—in which I agree—so it is not to be published, and I will do no more songs.”

  It was Hay’s early poetic idol, Walt Whitman, who had heard America singing and had encouraged her to celebrate herself. Whitman was still listening in the lighthearted season of “Jim Bludso” and “The Heathen Chinee,” but the music he heard was decidedly more somber. America echoed with “hollowness,” he wrote in Democratic Vistas, his 1871 meditation on the soul of the nation. “Genuine belief” had disappeared, hypocrisy was everywhere. The “depravity of the business classes” was “infinitely greater” than Americans supposed, government agencies were “saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration…. The best class we show is but a mob of fashionably dress’d speculators and vulgarians.” While the nation’s prosperity had lifted the masses from their sloughs, Whitman thought America had failed “in its social aspects, and in really grand religious, moral, literary, and esthetic results.” The great westward march, source of so much patriotic pride, seemed to him a pointless extravagance. “It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body, and then left with little or no soul.” The cure, he thought, lay in scientific breeding. Women must be freed from the “incredible holds and webs of silliness, millinery, and every kind of dyspeptic depletion” in order to fulfill the destiny of their sex. With a “strong and sweet Female Race, a race of perfect Mothers,” the states could be kept supplied with “a copious race of superb American men and women, cheerful, religious, ahead of any yet known.”

  If Whitman’s prescription was easy to ridicule, his diagnosis was not. Ahead of most of his countrymen, he saw that corruption—political, financial, social—was threatening to derail the great locomotive of democracy. In Washington, bribes were no longer simply accepted, they were organized into auctions, with appointments, charters, rights-of-way, and other government favors going to the highest bidder. Those who demanded reform were regarded as fleas on the body politic. The reformers were “noisy but not numerous,” one ravening senator noted; they could be “easily dealt with.” To the airless mind of President Grant, the issue was not corruption versus reform but whether anyone really wanted reform. If Congress declined to pass laws putting civil-service positions beyond the reach of party patronage, he declared, he intended to drop the subject.

  As Republicans and Democrats squared off for the presidential contest of 1872, a small band of idealists wished a plague upon both their houses. Parties bred machines, they reasoned, and the money and offices controlled by machines led inexorably to corruption. They aspired to smash the machines, clearing the way for a return to the pristine days of the Founding Fathers, when government reposed in the hands of the best people. The Republican party, heedless of the corruption swirling around Grant, whose associates were skimming profits from the Union Pacific Railroad and taking bribes in exchange for concessions to operate army trading posts, nominated him to run for a second term. The Democrats, joined by a faction of liberal Republicans, invested their hopes in John Hay’s employer, Horace Greeley.

  As an editor of the Tribune, Hay was expected to manufacture enthusiasm for Greeley’s candidacy, but he could not bring himself to feel it. For John Hay, Democrats were inextricably bound up with the ghastly night in April 1865 when John Wilkes Booth, a Democrat, assassinated Abraham Lincoln. On election day, Hay went as far as he could for Greeley. Unable to cast a ballot for him, he stayed away from the polls.

  * Hay functioned as assistant secretary though he never held the title. By law, the president was entitled to only one secretary. Nicolay arranged for Hay to be appointed to a clerkship in the Department of the Interior and assigned to the White House. In 1864, the War Department commissioned Hay as a major, giving him the title of assistant adjutant general of volunteers, detailed to the Executive Mansion. In 1865 he was promoted to lieutenant colonel, then colonel.

  5

  A Daughter of the Middle West

  Ulysses S. Grant swept twenty-nine of thirty-five states. Horace Greeley, whose wife died a few weeks before election day, lost his mind and was taken to an asylum in the country. “He acquiesced in it himself and indeed told me that he supposed he must be mad,” Whitelaw Reid wrote to John Hay. “It troubled him that he could not convince me … the whole world was ruined, and he had caused it, and that if it was not so, as I insisted, he must be mad.” By December Greeley was dead.

  And by December John Hay was deeply in love. Through a New York socialite who considered bachelorhood too cruel a fate for the author of the tender “Little Breeches,” Hay had been introduced to Clara Louise Stone, a reserved and pious young woman whose robust figure, dark complexion, deep-brown eyes, and abundant dark hair gave her the air of a Roman empress.

  In the spring of 1873, when Clara’s parents consented to her marriage, Hay vowed to “consecrate” his life to her. “My mind and spirit are yours as well as my heart and life,” he pledged. “I love you, your soul and body, your goodness and your beauty. You are my inspiration and reward. I worship you.” Sometimes, he confessed, he gazed at her until her eyes and mouth seemed “radiant and glorified with some divine beauty and promise—until it seemed to me that I could not live without falling at your feet and pouring out my full heart in worship.” But honor compelled him to warn her: “You are crazy to give yourself to me—everything for nothing. You are wastefully generous. Ah, think what you give. Beauty and goodness and youth, a rich and noble nature, candor and honor and affection, and in return you get only the worship of a soul which has no existence but in you.” The most he could offer was assurance that his love flowed from an honorable source—respect for her “firm and inflexible Christian character” and her purity. “If, like me, you had passed many years in the troubled current of the world, and met everywhere deceit and folly and sin, treachery and malice, then you would know how infinitely comforting it would be to meet one heart which is true and noble and kind, one which you could trust for time and for eternity.”

  The woman who inspired this passion was born December 29, 1849, eleven years after John Hay. Like him, she was a product of the strapping, energetic Middle West. As a young man, Clara’s father, Amasa Stone, Jr., had moved from Massachusetts to Ohio in order to build railroad bridges. Cleveland was a boom town, inventive and industrious, and Stone’s business prosper
ed. He compounded his fortune by investing his profits in such promising new enterprises as Western Union and Standard Oil. A generous philanthropist, Stone underwrote a home for elderly women and an industrial school. After his only son, Adelbert, drowned at Yale, Stone gave $600,000 for the founding of Adelbert College, which evolved into Case-Western Reserve University.

  Affluence enabled Amasa Stone and his wife, Julia, to put up a gingerbread palace on Euclid Avenue, the broad, leafy street where Cleveland’s finest installed themselves in American translations of Italian villas, Loire Valley châteaux, and Elizabethan manor houses. They sent their sons to Harvard and Yale and finished their daughters at Cleveland Academy.

  Growing up in this privileged enclave, a daughter was expected to acquire an appreciation of the arts, a sense of duty, and a cheerful acceptance of reality, however it presented itself. Clara Stone’s school compositions show that she learned these lessons well. In “What the Cold Does,” she noted that although it killed plants and people, one “ought not to complain” for without the cold there would be no ice skating. An imaginary conversation between needle and thread begins as a boasting contest and ends with a conciliatory proposition by the needle: “I think now that you are about as useful as I am and if anything more, so let us shake hands and be friends and never quarrel again about such a little thing.” Clara’s dreams of adventure flickered to life in an essay on traveling the world, but given a chance to describe a well-spent day, her thoughts ran to duty rather than excitement. She envisioned a girl who went to school early, recited perfectly, practiced the piano for two hours after school, and then helped her mother sew until dark. After supper the girl did her homework, checked it, and went to bed.

  The wealthy and pious Clara Louise Stone, twenty-four, on the eve of her wedding in 1874. John Hay boasted that she was “large, handsome and good.”JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

  Clara worked as diligently as this paragon, though she remained a rather baffled grammarian. “You must leave off now and again, Clara, and start a new sentence,” one of her teachers implored. Still, Clara loved books, and in June 1868, on the eve of her graduation from Cleveland Academy, she challenged one bit of conventional wisdom in “Literature versus Housekeeping.”

  It is a very old idea that literary women cannot make good housekeepers. It seems natural to believe that a woman cannot attend to belles lettres and write poetry (for proficiency in these takes a great deal of time) and also find opportunity for her household duties. How absurd (it has been often said) for a woman to be taking care of crying children or getting a dinner and at the same time trying to write a book yet it can be done. Men have done it. Look at Oliver Goldsmith who while in the heighth [sic] of his literary glory was keeping house in lodgings and getting his own dinners. Housekeeping appears to be the particular end of woman and anything which interferes with that end should be set aside.

  In accomplishing this “particular end” one must needs have their wits about them as it is something which cannot well be shirked especially management of servants who as all know soon become quite as knowing as the mistress if she has not learned the art of controlling them. But is there any real reason to think that a woman with a well balanced mind and ideas concerning the economy of her hours may not find time for other affairs beside those of housekeeping.

  Literary women have always been and always will be the subject of ridicule. They are generally called blue-stockings, are described as slatternly in their dress and always as having their fingertips dabbled with ink. But ridicule is not argument. There is certainly no need of all this for a woman can keep herself dressed up neatly if she is an authoress as if she had nothing to do with ink.

  Clara added that she would have enjoyed being part of the Blue Stocking Circle, an eighteenth-century group of London women who organized evenings for the sole purpose of intelligent conversation. How refreshing it would be, she thought, to discuss Plato instead of “trials with servants and the annoyances of providing family groceries.” While agreeing that modern women should learn chemistry to understand cooking, arithmetic for keeping family accounts, and Greek and Latin to discipline the mind, Clara believed that none of these mattered as much as the world of letters. “A love of literature is a constant source of pleasure, for a favorite poet or historian often brings refreshment and relief in the midst of the trials and fatigues of household duties,” she declared. On an even loftier plane, literature enlarged a woman’s understanding of “the relation she bears to her fellow beings.”

  The relation of Clara Stone and John Hay incorporated this love of literature. As a long-distance suitor, writing to Euclid Avenue from his office at the Tribune, Hay delighted in passing along books he thought she would enjoy. The couple shared an unqualified admiration for the works of William Dean Howells and Henry James, and when Clara planned a trip out West, Hay forwarded his friend Clarence King’s book, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada.

  In the summer of 1873, the relationship was put to its first test. Clara had postponed their wedding, perhaps more than once, and Hay was growing impatient. As he explained to his friend George Nicolay, “There will be an internecine war before Mrs. Stone consents to give up her daughter—wherein I sympathize with her.” Julia Stone approved of Hay but dreaded the prospect of Clara’s move to New York. In spite of Mrs. Stone’s opposition, Hay jauntily predicted victory “before many centuries” and praised his fiancee as “a very estimable young person—large, handsome and good.”*

  Writing to Clara during that troubled summer, Hay could not resist a bit of sarcasm. If she persisted in procrastinating, he said, “We must love each other less, write more seldom, think of each other much less frequently. How do you like this proposition?” He also pointed out that the happiest relationships he knew were those in which “the husband is all selfishness and the wife all devotion. Shall we try to cultivate these talents, you and I? My own precious love, I cannot be made over again, and so you must take me as I am. If there is any selfishness in your nature it will be aggravated by living with me.”

  The difficulties passed, and on Wednesday evening, February 4, 1874, in her parents’ parlor, Clara Stone became Mrs. John Hay. The newspapers, which noted only that the occasion was elegant and decorous, were most impressed by Colonel Hay’s New York guests, who noticed the excellence of the French on local restaurant menus.

  One week after the wedding the Hays arrived at their first home, a sunny spacious apartment at 111 East 25th Street in Manhattan. “Lady Clara was in fine spirits and was struck so favorably that I hope the impression may last for some time,” Hay wrote to her sister, Flora. “She spent the afternoon in delightful pottering and has not yet got all the sunshine out of her temper.” There were invitations, including one to dine at the Clarendon Hotel with Mr. and Mrs. Henry Adams of Boston, but Hay was glad that they had married just before Lent, when the social season would come to a halt. Then they would have no obligation to spend their evenings anywhere but at home.

  As feared, Mrs. Stone was distraught, assailed by headaches and unable to sleep, but Clara’s sister suggested that Mrs. Stone’s feelings were not the only ones to be considered. Taking Hay into her confidence, Flora explained that when Clara was a child, she was “shy and diffident, never thought she could be or do anything, and the general public, not having as much faith as we, did not encourage her much. Now, however, I can fairly see her blossom out in the sunshine of her happy life.”

  The sunshine bathed John as well as Clara. Amasa Stone expressed his affection for his son-in-law with a gift of $10,000 in railroad bonds, the Tribune rewarded him with regular pay increases, and he enjoyed wide literary acclaim for his Pike County ballads as well as his book, Castilian Days, a collection of essays written during his days in Madrid. Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and W. D. Howells—the most celebrated litterateurs of the day—admired John Hay. Twain’s admiration verged on idolatry. Hay not only possessed a “winning naturalness” and “
a charm of manner,” Twain thought, he was “a picture to look at, for beauty of feature, perfection of form, and grace of carriage and movement.”

  By the time he married, at thirty-five, John Hay had served in the White House, held diplomatic posts in three countries, and won fame as a poet and journalist.JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

  (Clara Hay, however, gave Twain a permanent fright. Late in life, writing his autobiography, he recalled a Sunday morning decades earlier when “Mrs. Hay, gravely clad, gloved, bonneted, and just from church, and fragrant with the odors of Presbyterian sanctity,” happened onto her husband and Mark Twain as they were “chatting, laughing and carrying on.” The two men sprang to their feet, ready “to say the pretty and polite thing and offer the homage due,” but “the comely young matron forestalled us. She came forward, smileless, with disapproval written all over her face, said most coldly, ‘Good morning, Mr. Clemens,’ and passed on out.” Overcome by sheepishness—one wonders about the nature of the conversation interrupted by Mrs. Hay—Twain could think of nothing to say. Hay, torn between loyalty to his wife and a hostly impulse to ease his guest’s discomfort, explained that Clara was “very strict about Sunday.”)

  The Hays finished their first year of marriage with the happy suspicion, soon confirmed, that they were to become parents. The only cloud in their benignant sky was notable mostly for its silver lining: Amasa Stone wanted Hay to move to Cleveland and join his business, in exchange for which Hay was promised “immediate wealth.” While Hay felt no deep attachment to the Tribune or to journalism, he did not rush to accept Stone’s offer. Perhaps he was reluctant to trade his independence for life in the shadow of his powerful father-in-law. Or perhaps he feared that a quick acceptance would lend credence to the rumor that he had married for money—a million dollars, the gossips said. Whatever Hay’s hesitations, he set them aside in the spring of 1875, when Stone’s deteriorating health made it difficult to refuse his importunings.