The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  In the beginning, Hay delighted in his Cleveland life. He adored his first child, Helen, who had arrived in March, and he and Clara and the baby were elegantly ensconced in a house on Euclid Avenue, courtesy of Amasa Stone. The work Stone assigned to his son-in-law was trifling—“merely the care of investments which are so safe that they require no care,” he told a friend. After years of showing no interest, publishers had begun pressing Hay and Nicolay for a biography of Lincoln, and at last there would be time to write it. As Christmas drew near, Hay totted up his blessings and pronounced himself “hedged about with good things.”

  But sometime during the spring of 1876, Hay began to suffer from a constellation of ailments suggesting that he was not entirely at ease in his luxurious new life. Headaches, exhaustion, insomnia, and depression came and went for no apparent reason. Disgusted with himself after six trying months, Hay stopped talking about the symptoms, even to Clara.

  Toward the end of the year, two events forced Hay’s attentions in other directions. On November 1, Clara gave birth to their first son, Adelbert, a “fine little man-child, ugly and strong, lean and big-boned,” and sufficiently fierce of mien to be “a railroad maker and statesman,” Hay wrote to Whitelaw Reid. The mother was in splendid form: “The babies take none of her health or good looks away from her,” Hay noted with gratitude. On December 29, Clara turned twenty-seven. It was a day of heavy snow and ripping winds. At seven thirty that evening, in northeastern Ohio, a Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad locomotive crept through a large snow-drift and onto a long bridge spanning the Ashtabula River gorge. The engineer heard a crack and felt the bridge give way. By slamming the throttle wide open, he made it past the break, then watched in horror as the rest of the train plunged into the river seventy feet below. Heating stoves exploded. Fire raced through the cars. Before the night ended, some eighty persons were dead, another sixty injured. It was the worst railroad accident on record, and Amasa Stone had built the bridge.

  For several years, Stone had also been president of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern. When investigators of the Ashtabula accident discovered that the railroad had not regularly inspected the bridge, they naturally concluded that inspections might have prevented the disaster. Worse, the chief engineer on the bridge-building project testified that Stone had refused to listen to concerns about using iron rather than wood to fabricate a span of such great length. Nor had Stone wanted to hear about problems with bridge beams purchased from a firm partly owned by his brother.

  Stone denied knowledge of the defective beams and pointed out that he himself owned no part of the ironworks in question. He also speculated that the bridge collapse had not been caused by structural flaws. There had been a second locomotive behind the tender of the first locomotive, and Stone argued that it had derailed, subjecting the bridge to extraordinary stress. But an engineer who survived the wreck testified that the second locomotive held the rails until it slid into the chasm. The court ordered the railroad to pay damages of $600,000.

  Stone fled to Europe, sparing himself a fusillade of criticism by newspapers and magazines. Henry Adams’s brother Charles, an authority on railroads, accused Stone of dishonesty and criminal neglect. W. D. Howells, who had moved from the Atlantic to Harper’s, used his editor’s column to blame the tragedy on naked greed, and he praised the court for hitting railroad titans in the one place it was sure to hurt, the pocketbook.

  After hearing from an angry John Hay, Howells recanted. A “friend” who was “thoroughly informed of all the facts” had set him straight, he explained in the July 1877 issue of Harper’s. The friend had made him aware that the railroad began compensating victims and their families the day after the catastrophe—well before the court levied its penalties. In addition, the court’s verdict rested largely on the testimony of disgruntled former employees of Amasa Stone. After presenting Hay’s brief, Howells expressed his pleasure at learning of the “really careful management” of the railroad and the “high character” of its officials.

  Restored to favor, Howells soon found himself invited to Cleveland for the premier of his play, Counterfeit Presentment. “My wife never lets me read anything of yours to myself,” Hay said in his invitation. “It is her proud prerogative to read aloud to me every word you write.”

  The rest of Ohio shared Clara Hay’s enthusiasm for this native son. Howells had conquered the summit of cultural summits, literary Boston, and Ohioans chose to read his triumph as a sign that they too had arrived. Because of Howells, Midwesterners were no longer obliged to squirm in silence when an Eastern visitor professed surprise, as Howells’s bride-to-be once had, at seeing a copy of Harper’s or the Atlantic west of the Alleghenies. They could drop the name of the lad from Columbus, who had edited both.

  In November 1877, soon after Howells and his wife stayed with the Hays, John and Clara journeyed to Cambridge to return the visit. Clara arrived with a new autograph book, for which Howells obligingly composed a short poem. Hay came, he told Howells, in the hope of learning “how the deuce you write such delicious things.” Once he knew the secret, he added, “I will come home happy and write some myself.”

  But for most of the next two years, happiness eluded John Hay. Though he turned out more than fifty thousand words of the Lincoln biography, he was plagued by nervous symptoms and bouts of gloom. He traveled to Philadelphia to consult S. Weir Mitchell, an eminent specialist in maladies of the nerves, who found nothing wrong but suggested that Hay spend the summer of 1878 away from his work. Leaving Clara at home with the babies, Hay and his brother Leonard stayed in England for a month, explored Holland and Belgium, took a month-long rest cure at Schlangenbad in Germany, and toured Italy, Switzerland, and Scotland.

  “After I got back I imagined I felt better for a month or so,” Hay reported to Nicolay early in 1879, “but the other day I had the most ridiculous attack I have ever had—thought I was dead for half an hour. The Doctor said it was nothing at all serious—simply the effect of the cold. But I feel rickety yet. I have been trying my best to get to work again with very indifferent success.” His symptoms were undoubtedly aggravated by his relations with Amasa Stone. Long uncertain, Stone’s health worsened after the Ashtabula disaster, which forced him to rely more heavily on his son-in-law. But Stone would not bow out entirely, which left Hay with insufficient authority to carry out his expanding responsibilities. As a prime beneficiary of Stone’s largess, Hay was not in a strong position to complain.

  Hay himself saw no link between his delicate nerves and the tensions of life on Euclid Avenue. In October 1879, when Secretary of State William Evarts asked him to fill in for eighteen months as assistant secretary, Hay declined on grounds of sheer happiness with his family and Cleveland. His only regret centered on the loyalty he felt to the Republican Party and the memory of Lincoln. The vacancy had arisen with the departure of Frederick Seward, who was Hay’s friend as well as the son of Lincoln’s secretary of state, to whom Hay owed his early diplomatic career. Describing the situation to Howells, Hay fretted that his refusal would be considered “frivolous and vain. In that case I shall have to accept—and I stand like a hydrophobical on the edge of a bathtub. It is enough to make a man perish with self contempt, to see such vacillation and lack of self-knowledge.”

  In November, when Secretary Evarts repeated his request, Hay packed his bags for Washington.

  * Various authors have interpreted that description as a sign that Hay was less attracted to Clara than to Amasa Stone’s millions. But Hay’s correspondence contains other complimentary references to amply proportioned women, and when he wrote to a friend after the wedding—describing Clara as “large, handsome and very comfortable”—he enclosed her photograph, a step he would hardly have taken had he been embarrassed by her stoutness. (John Hay to Alvey A. Adee, November 28, 1874.)

  6

  Infinite Mirth

  Hay settled into a suite at Wormley’s, a cozy hotel at Fifteenth and H streets, just east of Lafayette
Square. Owned by a family of mulattoes, Wormley’s was renowned for its table, its encyclopedic wine cellar, and impeccable service. A State Department official had promised that for eight dollars a day, Hay would have every amenity save one: Wormley’s suffered from a shortage of the “high-toned Southern Congressmen” whose nocturnal poker games enlivened the air of most Washington hostelries.

  The capital had scarcely changed since Hay first saw it on the eve of Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861. The population had tripled, to 177,000, and asphalt had at last begun to overtake the mud of the streets, but the city still exuded an air of impermanence. Pondering the contrast between the grandeur of the Capitol and the scruffy rooming houses lining the streets, more than one visitor shared an English tourist’s suspicion that Washington was a Potemkin village, “run up in the night,” dismantled when Congress adjourned, then “packed up till wanted again.”

  Insofar as this encampment had a permanent core, it was Lafayette Square, which John Hay crossed every morning on his way to the State Department. Anchored by the White House and Pennsylvania Avenue on the south, the square was a handsome composition of Federal-style houses, mostly brick, which had sheltered public figures as diverse as Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Dolley Madison. On the night of Lincoln’s assassination, a conspirator of John Wilkes Booth had also tried to murder Secretary of State William Seward in his house on Madison Place, the eastern edge of the square. His neck encased in a brace as the result of a carriage accident, Seward was slashed in the face and head but survived. On the opposite side of the square, along Jackson Place, James Blair had organized one of the first scientific expeditions to the southern reaches of South America and the coast of Antarctica, setting out in 1838, the year John Hay and Henry Adams were born. To the north lay H Street and the gold-capped steeple of St. John’s Church, the unofficial house of worship for presidents and their families.

  Hay’s office, near the southwestern corner of Lafayette Square, was deep in the colossal new gingerbread fantasia known as the State, War and Navy Building.* Pillared, porticoed, corniced, and capitaled to a fare-thee-well, the edifice looked less like a bastion of state than a playhouse—the sequel, perhaps, to mad King Ludwig’s fairy-tale castle in Bavaria. What Hay made of this ne plus ultra of Second Empire architecture he did not say, but after only two weeks at his desk he was ready to return to Cleveland. The satisfactions of public service did not begin to fill the holes left by his absent family, he told Clara’s father. “I shall be very glad when I can decently give up this place and go home.” Apart from missing Clara and the babies, he dreaded the daily onslaught of callers who begged favors he could not grant—women, “gentle and ladylike and poor,” who came in search of clerical work, and a parade of would-be consuls and legation secretaries. “Oh dear! if you could sit by my desk one single day and see the clamorous greedy host that comes continually for offices that are not worth having, you would know how sick and disgusted with human nature I feel when evening comes,” he told Clara.

  Among the clamorous was his old friend and fellow balladeer, Bret Harte. After the sensation of “The Heathen Chinee,” the Atlantic had signed Harte for the stratospheric sum of $10,000 a year, but success exacerbated his taste for drink, and by the mid-1870s, the debts of Bret Harte were as famous as his yarns of the Wild West. Mark Twain, one of his angriest creditors, began calling him “the Immortal Bilk.” When Harte promised to sober up, W. D. Howells, Clarence King, and other friends recommended him for a minor diplomatic post in hopes that the combination of a salary and minimal responsibilities would enable him to resume his writing. In 1878 Harte went to Germany as American consul at Crefeld, near Dusseldorf. The locals showed no deference to the author of “The Outcasts of Poker Flat,” the damp air of the Rhine bothered his neuralgia, and Harte was soon plumping for a new post. Hay, after weeks of pulling strings to arrange a transfer, complained that he had received a letter from Harte “showing that his ideas were so lofty that nothing I could do would suit him.” Like the greediest of the greedy who badgered the assistant secretary of state, Harte had his eye on the balmy climes of Spain and southern France. The best Hay could offer was Glasgow. To his surprise, Harte quietly accepted.

  Before going to Washington, Hay had considered running for Congress, a notion heartily endorsed by Mark Twain, who told their mutual friend W. D. Howells that the “presence of such a man in politics is like a vase of attar of roses in a glue-factory—it can’t extinguish the stink, but it modifies it.” But as 1879 came to a close, Hay decided that he wanted no part in the glue factory. The more he saw of congressmen, the more “distasteful” he found them, he told Clara. “I do not want or need any office in the world.” When Clara worried that Ohio Republicans would draft him unless he declared his intention not to run, Hay assured her otherwise: “If I do not work for it, I will not get it.”

  Away from the State Department, Hay spent most of his time in the company of Clarence King, who was also staying at Wormley’s. They had known each other in New York, during Hay’s Tribune days, when they passed many evenings together at the Century Club and won a mild notoriety for a midnight game of leapfrog over the ashcans outside another gentlemen’s club. In 1878, after completing the Fortieth Parallel survey, King had come to the capital to campaign for the creation of the U.S. Geological Survey, which would coordinate the growing number of geological expeditions conducted by the government. He had intended to leave Washington as soon as the agency won congressional approval, but when an incompetent scientist appeared to have mustered enough political support to win the directorship of the new bureau, King had seen no way to block the appointment short of putting himself forward as a candidate. He prevailed and postponed his business plans. Reunited in Washington, King and Hay quickly became inseparable. They breakfasted, walked, ate dinner, and paid social calls together, and with another friend of King’s, they soon rented a house at 1400 Massachusetts Avenue. Life in their new “bachelor castle” proceeded “in a scrambling sort of way,” Hay warned Mr. and Mrs. W. D. Howells in an invitation to dinner, but he promised that an evening with the genial King would be worth their while even if “the feast consisted of a cold potato.”

  While Hay had drifted from diplomacy to journalism to his sinecure in Cleveland, King had leaped from one pinnacle to another, and Hay overflowed with admiration. The Fortieth Parallel survey was not only exemplary science, it had sealed the bond between East and West—a critical achievement in the eyes of political leaders whose memories of the Civil War stirred fears of Western secession. At ease in the literary realm of Howells, able to discuss the most arcane details of Oriental art, a superb outdoorsman, King seemed to have left no territory unconquered. In spite of his desire to leave government, he embraced his administrative duties at the U.S. Geological Survey with as much ardor as if he planned to stay forever. He devised uniform standards for fieldwork, eliminated duplications among surveys in progress, and undertook an ambitious study of the nation’s mineral wealth for the 1880 census.

  As a scientist, King was one of a handful who challenged the assumption of gradual change that underlay Darwin’s theory of evolution. After examining volcanoes, mountains, and other terrestrial upheavals, King concluded that cataclysmic events such as earthquakes had also left their mark on the evolution of plants and animals. Outlining his ideas at the 1877 commencement exercises of his alma mater, the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, King sounded a theme that would preoccupy social thinkers for the rest of the century: “When catastrophic change burst in upon the ages of uniformity and sounded in the ear of every living thing the words ‘Change or die,’ plasticity became the sole principle of salvation.” To John Hay, no one seemed more adaptable, more versatile, more splendidly equipped for change than Clarence King.

  King returned the admiration. For all his discontent and indecision, Hay represented precisely what King wanted for the next stage of his life: stability. Since breaking off his engagement to Miss Dean of Vir
ginia City, King had struggled to resign himself to life without marriage, but he still longed for a wife like the “calm and grand” Clara Hay, who struck him as a rare combination of head and heart and the embodiment of “the best of the 19th century.”

  Full of plans for cattle ranches and mining ventures, sure that his knowledge of the West would enable him to make fortunes of his own, King felt little envy of the wealth Hay had acquired by marriage. King was less compelled by the fact of Hay’s money than by the uses to which he put it. Unharried by any desire to build an empire of his own, Hay contented himself with incremental gains on his father-in-law’s millions and directed his energies to other pursuits, such as the Lincoln biography he was writing with Nicolay. King meant to pursue a similar course. Once rich, he would collect art and subsidize serious scientific work—theoretical research of the sort abjured by practical-minded legislators.

  King and Hay were also united in their antipathy to Washington society. As the capital of a democracy, Washington prided itself on keeping its doors wide open and liked to boast that this accessibility made for the most captivating society in the nation. Those who held such a view were “very much mistaken,” said a New York Times correspondent. “The truth is that more uneducated, rude, and vulgar men and women find their way into the social gatherings of the capital than to those of any other city in the Union.” A Washington party was bound to be a crush of “over-dressed, loud-mouthed, vulgar people”—adventurers, swindlers, and the elderly debauchés who made up the diplomatic corps. Hay tried to like the spectacle of it, if only because he thought Clara would, and his letters to Euclid Avenue brimmed with descriptions of blazing jewels, ambitious ball-gowns, and diplomats in brilliant regalia. Bored and annoyed by the social demands of his office, Hay sometimes forgot engagements, and he made a game of inventing devious methods of skipping dinner courses without attracting the notice of his hostess. King was not nearly so restrained, and the primmer the crowd, the greater his urge to test the limits of propriety. He loved to tell crude tales of the West, especially one about a campfire repast consisting entirely of baked beans. “Pitch in, my boy, pitch in!” he had urged a forlorn-looking diner. “Sow the wind! Reap the whirlwind!” Boasting of his marksmanship, he had brought a hush to a fashionable drawing room by raising a rifle and taking aim at a chandelier. When an anxious guest asked if the gun were loaded, King withered her with a smile and an offer to load it if she wished.