The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  According to Edwin H. Conger, the American minister to China, the ruling Manchu dynasty was careening toward collapse. At the heart of the problem was a secret society, the Righteous and Harmonious Fists. Better known as the Boxers, they met behind closed doors to practice martial arts and to plot the overthrow of the imperial dynasty and the expulsion of “foreign devils.” As the empress dowager raised taxes and granted ever more commercial concessions to outsiders, the Boxers’ fury mounted, and when a drought in the summer of 1899 created an economic crisis, they went on a rampage. Bands of marauders swept through the northern province of Shantung, killing German missionaries and their Chinese converts and setting fire to churches and schools.

  In the summer of 1900, when the Boxers began murdering foreigners in China, crowds gathered outside the home of Secretary of State John Hay to wait for news of Americans in Peking.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

  When the Boxers ignored orders to stop, Conger shrewdly guessed that at least some parties in the imperial palace sympathized with the uprising. Looking ahead, he saw the overthrow of the dynasty.

  Rockhill disagreed. The Manchu dynasty had survived for centuries, and he could not believe it would perish at the hands of a small band of fanatics. Though he himself had not been to China for several years, he felt he understood it better than Conger, a former Iowa congressman who owed his post solely to his friendship with the president.

  Conger’s alarms continued, and in early June 1900 the Boxers began rioting in Peking. Houses belonging to foreigners were torched. Chinese suspected of being Christians were shot on sight. Telegraph lines were cut, imperial soldiers defected to the Boxers, the Japanese chancellor and the German minister were murdered, and all the foreign legations were under siege. On June 13, a small expeditionary force organized by the European powers tried to march on Peking, and the empress, desperate to placate the Boxers, ordered her troops to turn back the Europeans. Five days later she decreed that all foreigners be put to death.

  “Your open door is already off its hinges,” Henry Adams wrote to Hay from Paris at the end of June. “How the deuce are you to get out? For a fortnight I have been utterly aghast about it. First, the unequalled horror of those wretched people shut up in Pekin to be skinned and burned…. Make an arrangement with You or Me or Him to let our citizens loose, and we’ll promise never to go there again…. I hope you may do it, but all know you can’t. What can you do then? That’s where I begin to turn green. You’ve got literally the world on your shoulders.”

  Hay’s first move was to advise Conger to protect Americans in China as independently as he could: “there must be no alliances,” he cabled. Conger, with no time for fine points, moved a large contingent of Americans into the safety of the well-fortified British legation.

  Washingtonians anxious for news of friends and relatives in Peking gathered daily outside Hay’s house on Lafayette Square. The secretary had little to tell them. For weeks there was no word from Conger, and on July 20, when the minister finally broke through with a cry for help, the secretary worried that it was some sort of Boxer trickery. “Authenticity doubted,” he wired Peking. “Answer this by giving your sister’s name.” Back came the magic word—Alta—and the newspapers marveled at Hay’s ingenuity.

  Three weeks later an international expeditionary force, including two thousand American soldiers from the Philippines, blazed its way into Peking and ended the uprising. The secretary of state received much of the credit and, to his great surprise, none of the abuse he had expected from those who predicted that America’s involvement would lead to alliances with other powers. “What a business this has been in China!” Hay wrote to Adams. “So far we have got on, by being honest and naif—I do not clearly see where we are to come the delayed cropper. But it will come. At least we are spared the infamy of an alliance with Germany. I would rather I think be the dupe of China, than the chum of the Kaiser.”

  On the August day when the expeditionaries stormed Peking, Hay was in bed at Lake Sunapee, where he would stay for two months. The newspapers rumored that he was dying. Obviously hoping to influence the Tribune’s coverage of his health, Hay sent Whitelaw Reid a jaunty account of himself, insisting that he was a temporary casualty of his “June and July in Washington, with a crisis per hour, and a temperature of 98°…. This old tabernacle which I have inhabited for sixty years is getting quite ramshackle in the furnace, the plumbing and the electrical arrangements. But I have had myself pretty thoroughly overhauled, and they tell me there is nothing much the matter except antiquity, and that I have the right to look forward to a useless and querulous old age.”

  Clara Hay took a grimmer view. She rarely wrote to Henry Adams, but after a week of nursing her exhausted husband, she begged Henry to spend the winter in Washington rather than Paris. Hay, too weak to sit up and write, dictated a letter to Adams and added a note in his own hand: “I have never known anyone refuse to do as she says without being sorry for it afterwards.”

  As Hay lay in bed during August and September, he had plenty of time to work out the calculus of his life. His political feud with Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had created the bitter breach foreseen by Henry Adams, and Hay had not seen Nannie for months. This was a loss he could not discuss with anyone but Adams and Lizzie Cameron, and in a letter to George Nicolay, whom he had known for four decades, Hay seemed determined to count himself a fortunate man. Though he admitted his exasperation with the Senate, he declared himself generally pleased with the course of his life. His boyhood dreams had “absolutely and literally been fulfilled,” he said. “The most important part of my public life came late, but it came in precisely the shape I dreamed when I was a boy.” With this friend who had shared his youthful ambitions, Hay perhaps felt obliged to acknowledge that life had given him much of what Nicolay knew he wanted. But writing to Sir John Clark, whom he had befriended in his forties, Hay said he found little cause for jubilation. What joy was there in scaling a pinnacle if one could not act? he wondered. “So like many another better man before me,” he told Sir John, “I find power and place when it comes late in life, not much better than dust and ashes.”

  Triumph or pointless exercise, Hay’s career as secretary of state would soon be over. Clara had announced that she would not serve a second term as a cabinet wife. The secretary, who had talked of resigning from his “little Hell upon earth” for more than a year, vowed to leave office after the election of 1900. He had only one worry: “How hideous it would be, if I found private life bored me, after definitely chucking the public,” he told Adams. But after two grueling years of “twisting the rope of sand which is American diplomacy,” he was willing to run the risk.

  To Hay’s weary eyes, America seemed to be “wallowing in a fat and stupid prosperity,” but he guessed that prosperity, even the fat and stupid kind, would suffice to keep William McKinley in the White House. As the summer conventions approached, the only mystery seemed to be McKinley’s running mate. Vice President Hobart had died in November 1899 after a long illness. Cabot Lodge and Thomas Platt, the Republican boss of New York, had immediately set to work to draft Governor Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt wanted none of it and came to Washington to say so. “It was more fun than a goat,” Hay told Adams. “He came down, with a sombre resolution throned on his strenuous brow, to let McKinley and Hanna know, once and for all, that he would not be Vice President, and found to his stupefaction that nobody in Washington, except Platt, had ever dreamed of such a thing. He did not even have a chance to launch his nolo episcopari at [McKinley]. That statesman said he did not want him on the ticket—that he would be far more valuable in New York…. And so he went back, quite eased in his mind but considerably bruised in his amour-propre.”

  Insisting that the governorship of New York suited his active mind better than the empty honor of the vice presidency, Roosevelt nevertheless decided to keep his spot as a delegate to the Republican convention. When Mark Hanna, the convention chairman, asked why, Roosevelt explained that it was a
question of manliness: only a coward would have stayed away.

  Sensing that the brawny, hyperkinetic Roosevelt was ungovernable, Hanna loathed the prospect of having him on the ticket, and he came close to apoplexy as one delegate after another talked of drafting the Rough Rider. “Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one life between that madman and the Presidency?” Hanna exploded. When a delegate reminded Hanna that he was in charge, Hanna shouted, “I am not in control! McKinley won’t let me use the power of the Administration to defeat Roosevelt. He is blind, or afraid, or something!”

  Neither blind nor afraid, McKinley had piously decided that he would have no candidate but the candidate of the convention. Roosevelt, bowing to destiny, allowed himself to be nominated, and in a magnificently ostentatious fit of modesty, cast the only vote against himself.

  “Your duty to the country,” Hanna sputtered to McKinley, “is to live for four years from next March.”

  With the boundless energies of Theodore Roosevelt at his disposal, the president did not even bother to campaign from his front porch. Roosevelt whistlestopped from coast to coast, logging twenty-one thousand miles and preaching hundreds of sermons on the “fearful misery” that would follow if William Jennings Bryan lived in the White House. When Bryan, a fervent anti-imperialist, declared that “We dare not educate the Filipinos lest they learn to read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States,” the Rough Rider jeered. America was “a nation of men, not a nation of weaklings,” and Americans were “as ready to face their responsibilities in the Orient as they were ready to face their responsibilities at home.” It was absurd to hurl stones at expansionism, Roosevelt said, “for we have already expanded.” Contraction was not an option.

  Even Andrew Carnegie returned to the fold. Spooked by Bryan’s socialism, he announced his support for McKinley in the pages of the North American Review. Better to err in the Philippines, Carnegie thought, than to “fail to repel this covert attack upon the reign of law at home.” On election day, America decided to sign on for “four more years of the full dinner pail” rather than take a chance on the vague visions of William Jennings Bryan. When the votes were counted, McKinley’s sweep was even more commanding than in 1896. “It was,” John Hay told his son Del, “the most overwhelming victory in this generation.”

  20

  The Road to Paradise

  From Paris, where he was immersed in the art and literature of the Middle Ages, Adams congratulated Hay on his contributions to McKinley’s triumph. The secretary of state had carried out his responsibilities with “infinite patience” and “uncommonly correct judgment,” Adams declared, and had done so with exceptional grace: “you have held your tongue.” But apart from the vicarious pleasure of a friend’s success, Henry felt obliged to confess that to a twelfth-century monk like himself, nothing seemed more fantastical than twentieth-century America.

  For five years Henry had lived in two times and places, spending winters in contemporary Washington and summers in medieval France. The deeper he delved into the twelfth century, the more he preferred abbots and troubadors to the politicians who crowded his breakfast table. In Washington, present hurtled toward future at a speed that left him breathless. “Every day opens a new horizon, and the rate we are going gets faster and faster till my twelfth-century head spins, and I hang on to the straps and shut my poor old eyes,” he told Lizzie Cameron in February 1900, a few days after his sixty-second birthday.

  Returning to France in the spring, he combed the 270 acres of the Paris Exposition for clues to the new century, but as he scrutinized the automobiles, rolling sidewalks, and other wonders of science, he gleaned nothing. “The charm of the show, to me, is that no one pretends to understand even in a remote degree, what these weird things are that they call electricity, Roentgen rays, and what not,” he wrote home to Hay.

  Again and again he found himself mesmerized by the gleaming dynamos in the machine gallery on the Champs de Mars, where he sat by the hour, “watching them run as noiselessly and as smoothly as the planets, and asking them—with infinite courtesy—where in Hell they are going.” He did not understand how they ran, but in their faceless power he read the obituary of his own generation. “The curious mustiness of decay is already over our youth, and all the period from 1840 to 1870,” he told Hay. “The period from 1870 to 1900 is closed…. The period from 1900 to 1930 is in full swing, and, gee-whacky! how it is going! It will break its damned neck long before it gets through.” Awed by the thrumming monsters, unwilling to engage himself with a world in which every advance brought a dozen new perplexities, Adams fled to the comforts of a simpler time.

  His escape to the Middle Ages had begun in the summer of 1895, when he toured the cathedrals of northern France with Cabot and Nannie Lodge and their two sons. For ten days they wandered from Amiens to Chartres, with Mont-Saint-Michel and a half dozen other great churches in between. Though he had seen Amiens twice in the past, he had “never thoroughly felt it before,” he wrote to Lizzie Cameron. Coutances with its clean lines struck him as “the ideal image of outward austerity and inward refinement.” Mont-Saint-Michel, overrun by “gross, shapeless, bare-armed” Frenchwomen, threatened to disappoint, but after a few hours of scrambling over cliffs and moats with the Lodge boys, Henry yielded to the magic of the mount. Even the pugnacious Cabot, he noted, became “natural, simple, interested, cultivated, artistic, liberal—genial.” Following a night at Le Mans, the travelers spent an afternoon at Chartres, where Henry “worshipped at last before the splendor of the great glass Gods.”

  As soon as he arrived in Paris, he sent Lizzie an enthusiastic account of his medieval education. A week later he had second thoughts. “The Gothic church, both in doctrine and in expression, is not my idea of a thoroughly happy illusion,” he told his brother Brooks. “It is always restless, grasping and speculative.” The pointed arch was “cheap,” and the highest compliment he was willing to pay the Gothic style was that it reflected his own “ideals and limitations. It is human.” He felt more at home in the sweeping Norman vaults of Coutances, which he imagined his ancestors had helped construct. His soul, he insisted, was “still built into it. I can almost remember the faith that gave me energy, and the sacred boldness that made my towers seem to me so daring … Within I had no doubts. There the contrite sinner was welcomed with such tenderness as makes me still wish I were one. There is not a stone in the whole interior which I did not treat as though it were my own child.”

  But in the end, despite his reservations, it was the Gothic sumptuousness of Chartres, not the simplicity of Coutances, that took hold of his imagination. He understood Chartres no better than the dynamos, but he was content to feel its power. As he mused to Lizzie Cameron after a second visit, “I am not quite sure that there is much religion in glass; but for once I will not require too much.” It was enough to sense the “elevation and passion, the absorption of every act and thought in an ideal of infinite beauty and purity.” The result was “beyond what I should suppose possible to so mean an animal as man. It gives him a dignity which he is in no other instance entitled to claim.”

  A year later, after his winter of plotting with Senators Lodge and Cameron and the Cuban revolutionaries, Henry revisited Chartres and decided that the combination of stained glass and Gothic was “the highest ideal ever yet reached by men.” Amid the glories of Chartres he could not help thinking about the paltriness of his own time. Foreseeing the victory of William McKinley and his fellow plutocrats, Adams complained that a “materialistic society like ours has no life except in materialistic success.” If America had “an earnest impulse, an energy or a thought outside of dollars and cents,” he hoped to see it before his descent into senility.

  On the surface, the grievance seemed little more than a reflex born of Henry’s twin habits of keeping a tight rein on his pleasures and of seeing himself as an alien. Generations of Adamses had perfected the art of nipping their joys in the bud, a vice that Hen
ry cursed but could not break. Politically, he had always insisted on his status as an outsider, relishing his vision of himself as “stable-companion to statesmen.” What distinguished his protests in the summer of 1896 from his past raillery was, quite simply, Chartres. However keenly the cathedral sharpened his feeling of dispossession, it also gave him a refuge. In the peace of its great nave, afloat in the pure colors of the glass and the uncomplicated melodies of Gregorian chant, he would begin to sort through the accumulated tensions of a lifetime: between thinking and feeling, between male and female, and between his love for Lizzie Cameron and his guilt over his dead wife.

  Henry Adams spent most of 1897 and 1898 in Europe, but there was little time for cathedrals. Life revolved around Ambassador Hay and his family in London and around Lizzie Cameron, whose marriage was in tatters. In the spring of 1897, after Don vacated his Senate seat, Lizzie begged her uncle John Sherman, then secretary of state, to give Don an embassy. Sherman did not oblige, perhaps because of Don’s affinity for bourbon. Out of office, the senator had no use for Washington, and he again spoke of retiring to his farm in Pennsylvania. Lizzie promptly collapsed. The breakdown appears to have been as much mental as physical, but when the physician’s stethoscope detected a “distinct valvular weakness” in the heart, the episode was labeled a heart attack. The patient was ordered to rest for six months. Don exacted his revenge by leasing their house to Garret Hobart, the new vice president. On learning that she would have to leave 21 Lafayette Square by the end of April, Lizzie suffered a relapse.

  By mid-May, the redoubtable Mrs. Cameron was on her way to Europe, having persuaded her doctors that the strains of life with Don outweighed the stress of travel. Don went “on a jag,” a friend confided to Hay, but managed to sober up sufficiently to put Lizzie, Martha, and a nurse aboard an ocean liner in New York. The summer was to be a trial separation, Lizzie explained. “I am determined to make a good try at running our broken down machine—if it won’t go, then I can re-adjust and begin,” Lizzie explained to Henry. “But I must try, or I shall not feel quite satisfied.” The effort was not for her but for Martha: “She has seen more than I thought and remembers from further back—But for her very sake it must be made to work.” Unable to express all her tumult, she merely noted how “curious” it was that “one shuts up like a jackknife when anything becomes real, or sensitive. … I have often wanted to tell you, but cannot. The moment it is of you, I cannot talk of you even to yourself. Above all, I cannot say anything of all that I feel to you. Someday I shall go on my knees to you and humbly kiss your hand—even then, you won’t know the smallest portion of it, very dearest.”