The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  To verify his hypothesis, King needed extensive data on such phenomena as viscosity, elasticity, and the effects of temperature and pressure on rocks. Using laboratory equipment purchased by King, scientists had been conducting the requisite experiments for years, and at the end of 1891, King believed that he finally had enough information for a scientific paper on the subject. Availing himself of Adams’s invitation to use his empty house, King went to Lafayette Square in December intending to spend ten days hard at work on his essay.

  Hay was delighted. For years King had been discussing his ideas with other scientists, and Hay worried that if King did not publish soon, someone else would—robbing him of one more triumph. But King abandoned his essay a day after he started, claiming that he needed to know more about the effects of physical stress on the chemical structure of molecules. Science was perverse, he explained to Hay in a long letter from the Century Club. “When I got hold of the pillars of the temple of geology I pulled down the whole structure. Every previous theory since included goes down in the crash.” Whatever its failings, he still believed that his theory was “the nearest to an adequate idea yet evolved, but to fail in one job is to fail in all.” His fellow geologists were “like men who aim at a deer and shoot with just enough powder to roll the bullet out of the gun. I make the dust fly right under the deer’s feet but I am just as harmless as they…. To start as I did to build a structure and come out as a general destroyer is one of the curiosities of investigation.”

  “‘Viscosity’ has gone to the bowwows for the present,” Hay reported to Adams on January 6, 1892, King’s fiftieth birthday. Noting that King’s finances continued to deteriorate, Hay wished he would give up mining and devote himself to science. “He owes nobody but those who will never bother him. But he patauges [wallows] in the mire as if his life depended on his getting out—and gets deeper in all the time. I have just written him a letter and talked to him like a Dutch uncle…. I am in despair about him. I cannot make him do what he ought, even though I offer to stand the racket.”

  Hay hesitated to say so, even to Adams, but he was standing the racket already. King often asked Hay for money, usually $2,000 to tide him through some unforeseen exigency, and just as often explained his failures to repay (on occasion signing himself “Unremittingly yours”). His prospects seemed perpetually rosy, and he never doubted that he would one day make good on his IOUs. But the evidence, had he been able to see it, pointed toward catastrophe.

  Among the smaller signs was the shabby state of his once-elegant wardrobe. During a visit to Newport in the summer of 1892, he had had to decline an invitation to the opulent villa of Whitelaw Reid because he no longer owned the proper clothes. “I haven’t a coat to my back,” he confided to Hay. The languid, simple Newport of his youth had been overtaken by hordes of vulgarians, many of whom had amassed great fortunes with no talent King could discern. Even more offensive than the doltish millionaires were their ostentatious wives. What a pity, he scoffed, that couturiers invented fashions faster than society provided occasions for wearing them. The women, “with boxes and boxes of undisplayed frippery,” had been forced to divide tennis days at the Newport Casino into three periods so that a new gown could be worn to each. If Columbus had known it would come to this, King moaned to Adams, he “never would have discovered us.”

  October 12, 1892, marked the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the new world, but the United States was not quite ready to celebrate. There was a president to be elected, and the summer and fall of 1892 were given over to one of the gloomiest campaigns on record. Benjamin Harrison had been nominated to run for a second term, and the Democrats turned once more to Grover Cleveland. “The two candidates were ‘singular persons,’” Henry Adams recalled years later, “of whom it was the common saying that one of them had no friends; the other only enemies.” As a heat wave and a cholera epidemic swept along the Eastern seaboard in August, Clarence King, himself a victim of sunstroke, contemplated the presidential choices and wondered to Adams, “What if cholera should decide the election: as between Harrison and Grover which would you attack if you were a conscientious cholera germ?”

  When Harrison lost, many Republicans fixed the blame on one of their own: Civil Service Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. In his crusade against corruption, Roosevelt had noisily exposed the fact that the postmaster and the U.S. marshal in Baltimore, both of whom owed their appointments to Harrison, were extorting campaign contributions from employees. Harrison’s postmaster general tarried when the matter was brought to his attention, and a congressional probe bitingly concluded that such inaction revealed either an arrogant disdain for the law or negligence “to the last degree.” Roosevelt, glowing with rectitude and cocky enough to think that he could undo the political damage, dashed off a magazine article in praise of Harrison’s foreign policy. It seems not to have entered his sublimely focused mind that the affairs of the State Department lay beyond the purview of a mere Civil Service commissioner.

  For Harrison, the scandal and the campaign passed in a blur. His wife, long ill with tuberculosis, died two weeks before the election. Cleveland won, Harrison went home to Indiana to grieve, and Commissioner Roosevelt began to seek other employment.

  And so it fell upon Grover Cleveland to press the gold telegraph key signaling that the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition had officially begun. The pudgy presidential digit executed its duty at a few minutes past noon on the first of May 1893. Steamboats blew their whistles, fountains shot white jets high into the air, the crowd cheered, a battleship fired salute, and the “Hallelujah Chorus” confirmed, for any remaining skeptics, that this was America in full glory.

  With their glittering white palaces and ambitious waterways, the exposition grounds were the product of “the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century!” said Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the participants. His Diana, goddess of the hunt, aimed an arrow into infinity from her perch atop the agricultural hall designed by McKim, Mead & White. There were temples by the dozen, paying homage to electricity, machinery, manufactures, fisheries, mining, horticulture, transportation, the arts, and women. Daniel Chester French’s sixty-five-foot-high female figure of the Republic presided over a lagoon stretching on for half a mile. America had even reinvented the wheel for the occasion: night and day, throngs waited to ride in the glass cars of George Washington Gale Ferris’s magnificent contraption, which transported them, 1,440 at a time, to the dizzying height of twenty-five stories, where they gasped at the gleaming city spread out below.

  Henry Adams had his first look at the fair two weeks after it opened, making a hurried trip with Lizzie and Don Cameron. Years before, after he and Clover returned from the centennial exhibition in Philadelphia, Henry “registered an oath never to visit another of these vile displays.” The prospect of spending several days in the company of Mrs. Cameron gave him ample reason to break the vow, but he did not expect Chicago to be an improvement on Philadelphia. Alighting from the senator’s private railroad car, he was enchanted to find himself wrong. The exposition was more beautiful than Paris, he averred. He had never dreamed that his vulgar age would “rise to the creation of new art, or the appreciation of the old.” He deeply regretted the need to scurry back to Washington to prepare for a summer abroad.

  Adams sailed on June 3, and the Camerons soon followed. In mid-July, they all met in Zermatt and headed for Lucerne, unaware, in the serenity of the Alps, of the economic avalanche taking place at home.

  The trouble had been brewing for more than a year. Gold had flowed steadily out of the U.S. Treasury, the result of a rise in imports and an unintended consequence of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act passed three years before. To halt the slide in silver prices that had ruined Clarence King and uncountable other mining entrepreneurs, the law had authorized the government to purchase and mint fifty million ounces of silver a year. It also provided that greenbacks could be redeemed for silver or gold. Wall Street preferred gold
, and in the summer of 1892, as labor unrest and farm protests spread across the country, nervous financiers began cashing in their dollar bills for gold, accelerating the drain from the Treasury. Early in 1893 came the news that several of the nation’s largest corporations had grossly overstated their earnings and declared dividends they could not possibly pay. Stock prices sank sharply and crashed entirely when European bankers, who had financed much of America’s industrial growth, dumped their American securities. Six hundred banks were forced to close their doors, taking thousands of small businesses and farms along with them.

  Arriving in Lucerne on July 23, Henry Adams found a frantic letter from his brother Charles. The Adams family trust, managed by their brother John, had been hard hit, and John had cracked under the strain. Charles urged Henry to come home at once. Henry hurried to England and sailed July 29.

  In Boston, he found everyone “in a blue fit of terror, and each individual thinks himself more ruined than his neighbor,” he wrote Lizzie in August. “Until they recover their reason, I see no hope of getting on sound bottom.” Henry owed no one, no one owed him, and he had prudently tucked away enough money to meet expenses for a year. He saw little cause for alarm save a temporary—albeit frightful—decline in the value of financial assets. The panic would end soon, he predicted, “as all panics do, in general exhaustion. Then we shall be all right. We have only to stand up and go on.”

  John Hay was equally sanguine. He and his family had gone to Europe in July, intending to stay for a year, and he saw no reason to change plans. Though his mail from Cleveland and New York was “full of dolor and profanity,” he told Adams that he was convinced that “seedtime and harvest will follow each other.” He would pay his debts when his debtors paid him.

  Bored in Quincy, Henry organized a family expedition to the Chicago world’s fair, taking Charles, his wife and daughter, and one of Clover’s nieces. This time he meant to stay for two weeks. They rode the Ferris wheel, watched fireworks, and reveled in “the lowest fakes of the Midway,” Henry reported. He studied the contents of the great exhibition halls and told Hay that he stared “like an owl at the dynamos and steam engines,” which he saw as “an appeal to the human animal, the superstitious and ignorant savage within us, that has instincts and no reason, against the world as money has made it.”

  In Washington an emergency session of Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act and restored a measure of confidence in American credit. But fifteen thousand businesses had failed, dozens of railroads were insolvent, and unemployment was on its way to the unthinkable high of four million. Clearly shaken on his return to H Street in October, Adams wrote Hay, “My dear democracy is all in pieces; not a rag of decency is left.” He foresaw “universal bankruptcy” and felt his toes “getting cold with a very familiar sensation of being shut out-doors in the blizzard.” He had had no word from King but knew that he was in trouble. His bank in Texas had “busted with the rest,” Adams glumly told Hay, “and I fear he has gone under.”

  The El Paso National Bank collapsed as much because of fraud as panic. Two officers of the bank, one a friend of King’s since the Fortieth Parallel survey, had diverted funds to their own purposes. When bank examiners uncovered the irregularities, King requested time to raise new capital, but the panic had rendered the point academic.

  With the bank collapse, the stock market crash, and the birth of another child in July 1893, the pressures on King intensified, but the agony that finally broke him was physical—the flare-up of an old spinal injury. For weeks he could not sleep, and he often found himself wandering through neighborhoods with no idea how he had got there. At the end of October, after a visit to his mother, he came back to New York in excruciating pain. Among his errands was a favor for Frank Emmons, his Fortieth Parallel colleague, who had introduced him to Adams two decades before. Emmons, also a casualty of the panic, was having difficulty joining the Century Club, and King promised to help.

  On Sunday afternoon, October 29, King stood before the caged lions of the Central Park zoo. Shabbily dressed and long overdue for a haircut, he bore no resemblance to the dandy whose immaculate suits and silk hose had graced the evening campfires along the Fortieth Parallel. What happened next is unclear, but it appears that someone bumped him and, perhaps because of the pain in his back, he turned suddenly violent. He himself later claimed to have been “jostled” against a black butler from a house on Madison Avenue. King was arrested, hauled to the nearest police station, and booked on charges of disorderly conduct.

  Terrified that another lapse in judgment might expose his black family in Brooklyn, King avoided his rooms at the Union League Club, where newspaper reporters lay in wait. He handed himself over to his physician and meekly consented to be committed to Bloomingdale Asylum, a mental hospital in the northern reaches of Manhattan.

  IS CLARENCE KING INSANE? the New York Sun asked in a front-page headline on November 3. No, replied his doctor in the next day’s Tribune. King’s spinal inflammation, the national financial crisis, and his “extreme sensitiveness over his professional obligations brought about the condition of his present nervous depression which at times assimilates melancholia…. [I]t seemed best to Mr. King himself, as well as to his friends, in view of the fact that he had no family, that he should go to some place where he could have good nursing and absolute freedom from care. Under such circumstances, there is little doubt that he will recover his aforetime health and vigor.”

  In Washington, Henry Adams read the papers and immediately deduced that “something remains untold.” He supposed he could learn the details by going to New York, but as he told Hay, “I don’t care to ask.” In Henry’s remove there was a suggestion of defensiveness—armor, perhaps, against the haunting memories of Clover’s breakdown. He would not go to see King unless someone asked him to.

  From La Farge came word that it was best to stay away. For the moment King was seeing no one but his doctors and James Gardiner, his friend since childhood. “[W]hat he wants is to be alone and irresponsible for a little while,” La Farge explained. King’s collapse had come as a blow to La Farge, but the artist’s concern was not without reservation. “[A]s you know,” he told Henry, who knew precisely the opposite, “I have never been really intimate with him.” La Farge seemed to fear that his association with King, whose erratic behavior had occasioned much gossip, would reflect badly on himself.

  The worst of King’s crisis passed in a week. As his spinal torment subsided, his spirits quickly revived. The Bloomingdale doctors assured him that he had not lost his sanity, an opinion confirmed by S. Weir Mitchell, the eminent Philadelphia neurologist who had ministered to John Hay. After examining King at Bloomingdale, Mitchell concluded that his derangement was not organic and that with care and rest, he would recover in a few months. The only medical dissent came from King’s mother, a fervent homeopath, who had insisted on coming to New York against the advice of everyone involved. King’s friends kept her away as much as possible, but they could not shake her conviction that the illness could be traced to one of the medicines prescribed by his physicians.

  When Constance Fenimore Woolson sent news of King’s breakdown to Henry James in London, the novelist was sympathetic but unsurprised. “It’s miserable to think one may never see him as he delightfully was,” said James. “In truth I never thought there was no madness at all in his sanity—and feel indeed as if there may be some sanity in his madness.”

  Adams, ready to be of help to King, stayed in Washington and busied himself with the final details of his memoir of the last queen of Tahiti. He had had ten copies printed in December and a few days before Christmas sent them off to Tahiti for corrections and additions. He told Hay that he knew little about King’s situation “except that he is getting on well, and that his friend Gardiner is always with him. If anything can drive him to sanity, I think Gardiner can do it; he would drive me to a much further region.”

  Adams’s low esteem for Gardiner undoubtedly came
from King, who loathed Gardiner’s second wife, the sedate daughter of an Episcopalian bishop. Resenting her influence on his old friend, King had taken particular delight in offending her. During one dinner at the Gardiner house, King had horrified his hostess by telling stories about Civil War rations covered with mold and fly eggs, and about Cuban cigars being rolled to exquisite smoothness on the bare thighs of beautiful young women. Mrs. Gardiner barred King from her house. But a bishop’s daughter could scarcely object to Christian kindness, so her husband went daily to Bloomingdale.

  On New Year’s Eve, two months after the episode at the zoo, King finally felt well enough to write to Adams. “I refrained from boring you with the miseries of my months of torture here,” he explained, “and I don’t think I should ever have broken silence were I not at last convinced that the progress of recovery, though of geological slowness, is really going to arrive at a cure.” The doctors would check his spine again but had already told him he was well enough to leave. “[N]ext week is to be my last in this house of madness.” The doctors had laid down only one condition for his release: he must promise to head South for more rest. “What do you say to taking the Island trip with me?” King proposed. He had boned up on the Caribbees, “and if any trust can be put in human testimony they must be splendid for scenery and absorbing for geology. A light opera bouffe effect is evidently given by the extremely characteristic darkeys with their chatter and bandannas, with something serious and orchestral in the way of gumbo and pepperpot. Rum is the agent of erosion from all accounts. Antigua makes a celebrated dish of turtle and grows the finest pineapples in the solar system.” There was no danger of “a recurrence of disability,” King insisted, and in any event, his personal care would be the responsibility of his valet, who was “a monument of medical wisdom.” King had only one reservation: “Common honesty demands that I confess that I am likely to be rather dull company for a little while but in a few days I will be gay enough.”