The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  The money from Adams, $2,500, did little more than clear up a swarm of bills. No matter what King tried, he always seemed to be in arrears. Though he still kept an office on Wall Street, it generated little business because so many financiers had lost faith in his grand mining schemes. After hours, when he went up to 43rd Street for dinner at the Century Club, he found that his Wild West yarns and rhapsodies on dark-skinned women no longer commanded an audience. Accounts of long evenings with John La Farge, once his closest companion at the Century, vanished from his letters. The collective timidity of New York provoked him “almost to homicide,” he told Adams. “I go from my work to my little room and drug myself with wine and mine Cervantes.” The long-suffering Cervantes had always been his hero, and King liked to fantasize that he, too, “after much petty misery,” would have the force to write a Don Quixote.

  King had not lost the habit of escaping with his pen, and as his business affairs floundered in 1895, he once more wrote himself into worlds free of insult to mind and spirit. He tried another scientific essay on the age of the earth, and when that failed, he gave himself to a crusade that had interested him since his Cuban excursion with Henry Adams. On lower Broadway, a few blocks from King’s office on Wall Street, a band of exiled revolutionaries were trying to build American support for Cuban independence. Every afternoon over peanuts and beer they briefed newspaper reporters on the latest Spanish atrocities in Havana. Many of their stories were total fabrications, but the suffering in Cuba was genuine. The revolution King had heard about in the hills of Santiago had begun in February 1895. The Spanish retaliated by herding the Cubans into concentration camps, where miserable sanitary conditions and inadequate food would ultimately claim four hundred thousand lives. Those who escaped the fate of the reconcentrados were only marginally better off: a U.S. tariff on sugar imports had put many plantations out of business, spreading unemployment and hunger throughout the island.

  Stirred by the plight of the Cubans, King took it upon himself to plead their case in two long articles for the Forum. In the first, which ran in September 1895, he traced the history of Spain in Cuba. From the outset, he argued, the Spanish had been bent on cruelty and despoliation. Execration was heaped upon execration, promises of reform went unkept, and a crushing burden of taxes and tariffs had left the island “bankrupt under the coarse heel of a despot too blind to see even his own advantage.” As a result, King concluded, nothing remained to the Cubans save “ruin and rage. It is now too late. Spain can never win back the heart of Cuba.”

  A year later, for a blood-and-thunder tale of the rebels in combat, he drew on the campaign notes of their military leaders. Painting the Spanish army as a sneering Goliath, he recounted the reaction in Havana when summer rains forced the fighting to a halt. ‘Officers and soldiers kept the town smiling with camp jests and tales of the droll ‘nigger bandits,’ as they called them, whom they had fought in the field and were to finish off in the autumn,” King wrote. Young officers and “gray generals, stiff with glory and armor-plated with orders and decorations, became centres of cheerful ostentation in every sala.” As the sounds of Spanish marches drifted through the night, nothing seemed to be “more quaint and amusing than the ‘mock-heroic’ personage who stood four hundred miles away in the woods, waving his machete and publishing edicts which were in the style of epic poetry and savored strongly of Cervantes’s invincible knight.”

  The Spanish soon learned that the Cubans “were capable of any sort of desperate onslaught,” King continued. Every time General Antonio Maceo led his rebels in a charge, he squeezed the Spaniards between a pair of impossible choices: “If they stretched out a military net on either hand, wide and strong enough to catch him in case he swerved, the meteoric chieftain was quite capable of raising that horrid cry, ‘Al machete,’ and storming the weakened town. To be hacked to death in their own stronghold was far the worse of two evils, so every commander of them gathered his full force about him, shotted his guns, held his breath and—let the Cubans pass.”

  Compared to the “raggedness, hunger and privation” of the Cubans, King said, “Valley Forge was a garden party.” But he had no doubt that the rebels would prevail if their neighbors in the United States gave them even the tiniest show of support. “They look for no gallant American Lafayette to draw sword for them and share the penury and hardships of their camps,” King insisted. All they needed was America’s official recognition of the Cuban belligerency. Such a move would legitimize the rebellion and, in accordance with international law, allow the United States to treat the rebels as a sovereign nation. Spain, King reminded his readers, had recognized the Confederate States of America only a few weeks after Fort Sumter. “We can return to her, in the interests of liberty, the compliment she then paid us on behalf of slavery,” he wrote. “The justice will be poetic.”

  The revolutionaries of lower Broadway, thrilled to see such fervor in the influential pages of the Forum, presented King with a flag captured from the Spaniards in battle.

  Adams was as deep into Cuba as King. Years later Henry would say that King had dragged him into the fray, but the truth was that Adams embraced the cause on his own after another trip to Cuba early in 1895. In the year since he and King had nested in the hills of Dos Bocas, the Cuban economy had buckled, and politics and society were hurtling toward chaos. Henry spent much of 1895 away from Washington, but when he returned in the fall and thought about the presidential contest of the coming year, it seemed to him that Cuba was “the only real issue.”

  With a political zest he had not displayed in twenty years, Henry began working behind the scenes for Cuban independence. The opposition was formidable, he knew. His neighbor in the White House, Grover Cleveland, wanted no part of the rebellion. Nor did bankers and industrialists, who believed that the expense of a war would only prolong the bad times ushered in by the Panic of 1893. Nothing could be accomplished, Henry told his brother Brooks, “till the great Trusts come over to our side. For we are now more than ever under the control of Capital.” Convinced that capitalists would dismiss lofty arguments about the justice of the Cuban cause, Henry decided on another tack: he would persuade them that Cuba was “a great field for their greed.”

  On a Sunday morning in February 1896, Henry crossed H Street and walked east to 21 Lafayette Square, the home of Don and Lizzie Cameron. The three of them were joined by Henry Cabot Lodge, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, and two young Cubans who had opened an unofficial legation in Washington to lobby for their cause. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had recently passed a resolution calling for American recognition of the belligerency, but the Cubans in the Cameron parlor wanted an official U.S. endorsement of their fight for independence.

  In the Cameron house at 21 Lafayette Square (now Madison Place), senators J. Donald Cameron and Henry Cabot Lodge, along with Henry Adams, schemed with Cuban insurgents to build American support for a revolt against the Spanish colonial government at Havana.PATRICIA O’TOOLE

  A few days later, Senator Cameron did the Cubans’ bidding, and Henry Cabot Lodge, the outspoken freshman senator from Massachusetts, shot up to add his support. A free Cuba would be “an opportunity for American capital,” he said, sounding Adams’s theme. After six weeks of debate, Senator Cameron’s resolution sailed through both houses of Congress. A resolution did not carry the weight of law, but it sent an unmistakable signal to the White House.

  Lizzie played a double role in the cabal. The Cubans addressed their letters to her rather than to Senator Cameron or Senator Lodge, who, despite their sentiments, were members of a government that did not recognize the revolution. And on behalf of Henry Adams, Lizzie strove to keep Don’s wandering, alcoholic attentions firmly fixed on the cause. In the summer of 1896, when the Cubans explained their financial desperation to her, she proudly reported to Adams that she had Don “worked up … to try to get some money out of the Standard Oil people in return for concessions granted.”

  Senator J. Donald Cameron of Pennsyl
vania, husband of Elizabeth Sherman Cameron.SENATE HISTORICAL OFFICE

  When Congress reconvened in the fall, the Cubans wanted Senator Cameron to carry his resolution one step further and push for active intervention by the United States. Adams wrote a paper citing the precedents for such a move in which he argued that the Monroe Doctrine gave Congress ample leeway for whatever action it deemed necessary to keep European powers from meddling in the affairs of the Western Hemisphere. In short, if the Cubans wished to be rid of Spain, there was nothing to stop the United States from helping them. Henry’s report went to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Don Cameron’s name and was adopted by a unanimous vote.

  Lodge immediately pressed for a resolution in favor of intervention but was soon forced to abandon the fight. The business interests that had underwritten his run for the Senate refused to accept the argument that war would bring prosperity, and President Cleveland let it be known that he would not, under any circumstances, intervene in Cuba. He had no wish to be remembered as the president who committed his country to war on the eve of leaving office.

  Grover Cleveland was the most unpopular man in America in 1896. His decision to restore the gold standard had cost him the support of his Democratic constituency, and the lingering effects of the Panic of 1893 had won him no friends among Republicans. When the Democrats assembled in Chicago to choose their candidate, they picked the most vociferous foe of the gold standard they could find—William Jennings Bryan. A charismatic thirty-six-year-old lawyer from Nebraska, Bryan whipped the conventioneers into a frenzy with his eagerness to slay their dragon. “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns,” he warned the moneychangers, “you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

  Overnight Bryan became the hero and the hope of everyone who felt manipulated by what one impoverished farmer called “the plutocrats, the aristocrats, and all the other rats.” Lashing out against the tiny band of capitalists who controlled America, Bryan exhorted his listeners to reject the premise that “if you will only legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below.” The truth was just the reverse, he said: “if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up through every class which rests upon them.”

  Brooks Adams remarked to his brother Henry that William Jennings Bryan was the “first great slap in the face the new aristocracy has ever had.” But Henry saw no chance for a radical idealist and confidently predicted that the financiers who worked the strings would elect William McKinley.

  They could hardly fail. Mark Hanna, a blunt-spoken shipping and mining magnate who represented himself and Ohio in the U.S. Senate, had been building McKinley’s campaign exchequer for four years with contributions from his fellow millionaires, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and John Hay among them. As a public speaker, mild-mannered Governor McKinley of Ohio was no match for the Boy Orator of the Platte, but as one McKinley enthusiast rejoiced to point out, the Platte was a river “six inches deep and six miles wide at the mouth.” What McKinley lacked in voltage, he made up for in reassurance. Bryan stirred people, but he also frightened them with his talk of abolishing the Supreme Court and nationalizing the railroads. While Bryan barnstormed America, McKinley sat serenely on the front porch of his white clapboard house in Canton, Ohio, and let America come to him. Day after day, carefully chosen delegations of every conceivable interest group, from veterans and temperance societies to Negroes and Presbyterians, stood respectfully on McKinley’s lawn as he dilated upon the necessity of the gold standard and high tariffs. When he finished, a select few were permitted to ask questions that had been prepared in advance by his staff.

  Much as John Hay feared the radicalism of William Jennings Bryan, he was content to confine his politicking to his checkbook, sending Hanna $1,000 a month for the campaign. Hay spent most of the summer sightseeing in Europe with his children, but after a pilgrimage to Canton in October, he was sufficiently impressed with McKinley’s independence from Hanna—and sufficiently unnerved by Bryan’s popularity—to agree to help. For the last three weeks of the campaign Hay shouted himself hoarse carrying his party’s warning to America. If the voters elected Bryan, factories would close. The dollar would cease to command respect. And the nation’s precious liberties would be in the hands of a demagogue. On November 5, America sent McKinley to the White House with the largest majority won by any candidate since Ulysses S. Grant. Still, Bryan’s sweep of the South and much of the West did not go unnoticed by the elitist author of The Bread-Winners. “The strain of universal suffrage on the virtue of the country is tremendous,” he sighed to a friend.

  Adams professed not to care who lived behind the pillars of the large white house on the south side of Lafayette Square, but the politics of the season carried the threat of a double loss. Senator Cameron, deserted by the Republicans of Pennsylvania, had not stood for reelection. To the horror of his wife and Henry Adams, he talked of retiring to his farm near Lancaster. Hay might also defect. There was talk of an embassy, perhaps London, an expression of gratitude for services rendered to the campaign.

  Hay wanted the appointment, but before he could have it, he had to suffer the embarrassment of eliminating his chief rival. In a reprise of the Republican presidential victory of 1888, Whitelaw Reid decided that he deserved London as a reward for the Tribune’s support. McKinley had no more use for Reid than Benjamin Harrison had, and once again Hay was drafted to coax him into a quiet retreat. This time the situation was even more delicate because Reid knew that Hay was being considered for the post. His awkwardness painfully apparent, Hay tried to persuade Reid that the editor of the Tribune was “a bigger man than any Secretary or Ambassador. I implore you not to suffer yourself to be driven into a quarrel with McKinley. It will hurt one of you as much as the other and do absolutely no good to either. He is not to blame, as to you or me. It is circumstance and not altogether volition which decides these things.”

  Recognizing that he was beaten, Reid asked only for a face-saving letter to show to friends who expected him to hold a position in the new administration. Hay drafted a message from McKinley regretting that Reid’s chronic chest ailment precluded an appointment.

  Somewhere in the middle of this epistolary blizzard, Hay decided to make a pitch for his own candidacy. “There has been so much talk about my being sent to England that I presume you may have given some consideration to the matter,” he wrote to McKinley in an unsigned, undated letter with no salutation. “I do not think it is altogether selfishness and vanity which has brought me to think that perhaps you might do worse than select me.” Hay thought that his appointment would “please a good many people and so far as I know offend nobody” and noted that he had no wish to hold the office long, which would allow McKinley to name a new ambassador “in some critical time when it might serve a useful purpose.”

  On March 3, Hay hosted a stag dinner for McKinley at 800 Sixteenth Street. The next morning, as McKinley dressed for his inauguration, he slipped on a gold ring containing a few strands of hair from the head of George Washington. The ring—engraved with G.W. and W.M.—had been sent by Hay with a wish that President McKinley would attain the glory of the first president. A few days later, the newspapers announced that John Hay would represent the United States in the Court of St. James’s.

  Adams was heartbroken. “Apparently I am going to be left out of the next few years, and lost,” he told a friend. Hay, in a moment of inspired tenderness, asked Henry to join him for the voyage to England, and Henry leaped at the invitation. But he could hardly bear to think of his future in Washington. “The poor old Square is shipwrecked,” he wrote Lizzie, “and though you and Hay may someday recover your foothold, I am pretty effectually drowned.”

  On April 14, after a few days in New York with Cabot and Nannie Lodge and an interminable testimonial dinner that left the new ambassador feeling that he had had “gallons of melted butter” poured ov
er his head, the Hays and Henry Adams sailed on the St. Paul. At sea Hay learned that a spectacle of “welcome and flapdoodle” awaited him on the pier in Southampton and promptly fell into a funk. When the ceremonial moment arrived, he yearned to be with Adams, who had fled to the bowels of the ship. Henry James, down from London to tender his own welcome, silently absorbed the pomp and fawning and then, as if shaping his observations for a novel, asked Hay, “What impression does it make on your mind to have these insects creeping about and saying things to you?”

  Settling into the embassy left Hay little time for Adams, who soon moved on to Paris, telling his brother Brooks, “London does not need me. The more I come here, the more I feel that it has no use for me.” Henry would not permit himself to say that it was Hay who didn’t need him, but when the two friends parted in the spring of 1897, they headed in opposite directions. Hay was looking toward the new century and America’s emergence as a world power. Adams, wanting no part of it, sought refuge in the soaring cathedrals of the Middle Ages. His heart would stay there for the rest of Hay’s life.

  By leaving Washington, Hay and Adams missed the return of their favorite rogue elephant. Since Harrison’s defeat in 1892, Theodore Roosevelt had spent most of his time in New York City, serving as police commissioner. He had also read voraciously, and pondered the meaning of America, and when he came back to the capital as assistant secretary of the navy in the spring of 1897, there was much on his mind. His largest preoccupation was the end of the frontier epoch of American life, noted a few years earlier by historian Frederick Jackson Turner. The so-called Turner thesis, officially titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” had attracted wide attention since its appearance in 1893, and Roosevelt, like others, was restlessly searching for new frontiers. For Roosevelt, the key to the future lay in a book called The Influence of Sea Power on History, by naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan. Mahan held that since great industrial nations produced more than they consumed, they could grow only through foreign trade. World commerce depended upon shipping, and protection of a nation’s merchant fleet called for a well-muscled navy deployed at strategic points around the globe.