The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  Though a new delegation of Panamanians soon challenged Bunau-Varilla’s credentials, the treaty was swiftly ratified by both countries. Panama feared that delays might lead the United States to reopen talks with Colombia, and the U.S. Senate, despite grave reservations about America’s role in securing Panama’s independence, could not hope for better terms than Hay had won. The price remained at $10 million, the same as in the Hay-Herrán compact, but the Canal Zone had widened from six miles to ten, and the United States would hold it in perpetuity. Panama retained sovereignty in name only.

  The other pressing piece of business on the secretary of state’s agenda, a legacy of the gold rush that had lured Clarence King to the Klondike, pitted Hay’s genteel style against the brashness of Theodore Roosevelt and provoked one last battle with his rival in love, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Until the discovery of gold in 1896, no one had challenged the Alaskan-Canadian boundary. But when Canadian miners in the Alaska panhandle found themselves without access to the Pacific, the government of Canada claimed that the existing line was incorrect. The boundary set in 1867 when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia had relied on earlier treaties and records, none of which settled the matter with precision.

  Guided by his dreams of a new age of Anglo-American harmony, Hay in 1899 had worked out a modus vivendi that allowed Canada to lease a strip of land with a port and to build a railroad through U.S. territory. The Senate accused Hay of giving away too much, the Canadians felt he had conceded too little. The standoff continued until Theodore Roosevelt arrived in the White House. While President McKinley had embraced Hay’s notion that a small concession would further the larger good of amity with England, Roosevelt saw no reason for compromise. In his view, Canada was behaving in a “spirit of bumptious truculence.” Even the cabinet-room globe, which had been made by British Admiralty cartographers, showed the boundary claimed by the United States. The Canadian contention was “an outrage pure and simple,” Roosevelt fumed to his secretary of state.

  Secretary of State John Hay and President Theodore Roosevelt. The caption of this editorial cartoon read, “A would-be champion, who is somewhat erratic, labors under the disadvantage of wielding a very large stick, and insists on playing with a big ball, but they say that his caddie is fine, and will pull him through.”JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

  Brandishing his Big Stick, Roosevelt ordered eight hundred cavalrymen to Alaska on the pretext of assuring order in mining camps. Hay disapproved of this show of force and continued to press for a diplomatic solution. Earlier negotiations had led him to think that Canada might submit the dispute to a tribunal of distinguished jurists, and after months of lobbying, he persuaded Roosevelt to let him pursue the idea. But the president made it plain that he would not cede so much as a snowbank: “I should definitely instruct our three commissioners that they were not to yield any territory whatsoever.” They were to insist upon the entire claim and confine themselves to the task of figuring out “the particular line of limitation which this claim would imply.”

  On January 23, 1903, in Hay’s library, the secretary of state and the British ambassador signed a treaty creating a panel of “six impartial jurists of repute,” three for each side. The treaty was quickly approved, and the Canadians named their eminent jurists: the lord chief justice of England, a former member of the Quebec Supreme Court, and a respected Ontario attorney. Roosevelt, after extending a halfhearted invitation to the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, named three men who had no standing as jurists and no reputation for impartiality: Secretary of War Elihu Root, Senator George Turner of Washington, and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts.

  Canada raged, the press hooted, and John Hay winced. Lodge’s genius for giving offense and his personal quarrel with Canada on another issue made him a particularly abysmal choice. Shortly after the appointment was announced, Hay moaned that Lodge had already made matters worse: “as if the devil were inspiring him,” Cabot had gone to Boston and delivered a speech attacking both Canada and the State Department. “He is a clever man and a man of a great deal of force in the Senate, but the infirmity of his mind and character is that he never sees but one subject at a time, and just at present it is the acceptability of his son-in-law to the voters of Gloucester.” The son-in-law, Augustus Peabody Gardner, was running for Congress in Massachusetts, where fishermen had decided opinions on a longstanding dispute with Canada over fishing rights in the North Atlantic.

  When Britain asked to delay the boundary talks in order to help Canada devise a dignified retreat from an embarrassing position, Hay saw no harm, but Roosevelt angrily threatened to draw the boundary himself. Hay burned with resentment, partly because he felt the president had buckled under pressure from Lodge and partly because it seemed foolhardy not to give an adversary a chance to save face. In the summer of 1903, as the press stoked rumors of a rift between the president and his secretary of state, the two had no choice but to close ranks. Hay insisted to the newspapers that there was not “a shade of difference” between him and Roosevelt, and Roosevelt instructed Hay to ignore the “swine” who invented tales about them: “When I came in I thought you a great Secretary of State, but now I have had a chance to know far more fully what a really great Secretary of State you are. As for those who first of all portray a wholly imaginary difference between us and then attack me because of that difference—for heaven’s sake let them go on!”

  Soothed, at least for the moment, Hay thanked him “a thousand times” for his letter. What a “comfort” it was to work for a president who “besides being a lot of other things, happened to be born a gentleman.” One of Hay’s biographers has suggested that he called Roosevelt a gentleman in the hope of inspiring him to act like one. If so, the hope was soon dashed. In a “mutinous and disloyal” letter to his wife, which he asked her to destroy, Hay complained bitterly about Theodore’s boorishness. Whenever President McKinley had summoned him to the White House, he had given the secretary of state his full attention for as long as Hay wanted it, he told Clara, “but I always find T.R. engaged with a dozen other people, and it is an hour’s wait and a minute’s talk—and a certainty that there was no necessity of my coming at all.” Only days after swearing publicly that there was no friction between him and the president, Hay wrote out his resignation. Roosevelt kept him waiting for a week then asked him to stay on. “As Secretary of State you stand alone,” Roosevelt said. “I could not spare you.”

  In the end, the settlement of the Alaskan boundary seemed to disprove the fears of both men. After six weeks of negotiations in London, the lord chief justice of England cast his vote with the Americans. The boundary remained as it was on the British Admiralty maps, and Canada came away with nothing but two small islands in the territory in question.

  Clashes and all, Secretary of State John Hay had become a personage. He possessed a sheaf of honorary degrees, the Pan American Congress had named him honorary president, and the government of France would soon tender the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor. Though he joshed to Adams that the bouquets only reminded him of the daisies soon to grow over his head, they also emboldened him to have himself recorded for posterity.

  Like Roosevelt, he sat for John Singer Sargent, and the painter’s encounters with the two aptly summarized the differences between the Rough Rider and the gentleman. Hay, a man of refined tastes and a friend of many artists, gave Sargent as much time as he asked, marveled at his intensity, and did all he could to facilitate genius. Theodore paid the artist no more attention than he gave his secretary of state. During his sessions with Sargent he fidgeted, read, bullied his staff, and whined about time taken from his daily fencing matches. Sargent’s hours in the White House made him feel “like a rabbit in the presence of a boa constrictor.”

  The president got the superior portrait—“good Sargent and not very bad Roosevelt,” thought Henry Adams. “It is not Theodore, but a young intellectual idealist with a taste for athletics, which I t
ake to be Theodore’s idea of himself. It is for once less brutal than its subject.” Posed on a staircase, his right hand on the newel post and left planted squarely on his hip, Roosevelt exuded pure will. Hay’s portrait, with its abundance of beard and mustache, sharp eyes, and slash of menacing red lip, suggested something smaller than life. Adams considered it “frankly bad” and told Hay that Sargent had glimpsed more meanness in a few hours than Adams had seen in forty years of friendship.

  Taking the critique as a joke, Hay sent Sargent next door in the hope that Adams would sit for him. Henry had no such intention. “I am too much of a coward,” he admitted. “Sargent gibbets us all, with his everlasting British condescension and patronage. We bore him. He paints it.”

  Delighted with his Sargent, Hay next commissioned a sculpture. “St. Gaudens is going to bust my head,” he informed Clara in the autumn of 1903, shortly after his sixty-fifth birthday. At $10,000 it was “a ruinous expense and folly,” he knew, “but I have been a long time in office, and only just now recognized that perhaps I may be considered a bust-worthy name in our annals. So if it is ever done, it may as well be done by the greatest artist of our time. It will be ugly but it will be an object of art: And perhaps the family will be no poorer for it.”

  In 1904, when Augustus Saint-Gaudens was sculpting this bust of John Hay, President Theodore Roosevelt complained that the chin was weak. Roosevelt, Saint-Gaudens told Hay, “projected his own powerful jaw on the universe.”U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, SAINT-GAUDENS NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE

  Adams avoided seeing the work in progress for fear of upsetting the artist with a chance remark, but Roosevelt, unfettered by such punctilios, insisted on having a look. After first expressing his approval, he walked around to one side, gazed intently for a moment, then announced that there was “not power enough in the jaw.” When he left, Saint-Gaudens explained with a grin that Theodore Roosevelt “projected his own powerful jaw on the universe.”

  During his stay at Lake Sunapee the following summer, Hay rode over to the sculptor’s studio in Cornish, New Hampshire, for a last round of revisions. Saint-Gaudens tinkered with the cheeks and gave the whiskers an experimental trim but decided that “la beauté de la moustache c’est la longueur.” Hay went home to Sunapee in a furious thunderstorm and a glorious mood. Saint-Gaudens had made a statesman of him. The high forehead and straight nose gave his face an openness that Sargent had missed, and the square shoulders and regal bearing of his head conveyed strength and self-confidence. The jaw showed no hint of weakness.

  Hay and Saint-Gaudens also conspired to capture Henry Adams in bronze in spite of his refusal to have himself immortalized in art. (Asked to explain his reticence, Henry coyly replied that his portrait had been done in the Middle Ages. He could be seen in a sculpted Nativity scene at Chartres, he said; he was the ass in the manger.) In August 1904, as soon as Hay’s bust went off to the bronze founder, Saint-Gaudens fashioned a circular medallion with a caricature of Adams in flight, his bald head trailing a pair of angel’s wings and a body of porcupine quills. Around the border ran the Order of the Garter motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense and the words Porcupinus Angelicus Henricus Adamenso.

  Hay boxed the medallion, adorned it with State Department seals, and sent it by diplomatic courier to Adams in Paris. Henry was charmed. “Your winged and pennated child arrived yesterday by the grace of God and his vicar the Secretary of State,” he wrote Saint-Gaudens. “… As this is the only way in which the Secretary will ever fulfill his promise of making me Cardinal and Pope I can see why he thinks to satisfy me by giving me medallic rank through you.” Speculating that the medal was probably more valuable than a cardinal’s hat, Henry wished only that the sculptor could give wings to the secretary: “he needs them more than I who live in holes.”

  The angelic porcupine and his friend the diplomat clung together after the death of Clarence King, but as they aged they had scarcely more tolerance for each other’s faults than for the foibles of the world at large. Hay told W. D. Howells that he and Adams quarreled “like cat and dog. It is wholesome, I know, to be told what an ass I am, and what ignoble company I keep, and Adams deals faithfully with me.” For his part, Henry lamented that public office had at last “wreaked its fatal will” on Hay, “as it always does and must on all its victims. He is now the statesman pure and complete. He feels it pathetically but has ceased to struggle. All but the official is dead or paralysed.” Hay still came for breakfast on occasion, and the afternoon walks continued, but Adams felt that Hay was irretrievably lost. “He knows it, and is at times miserable about it, but the terror of the end is over his mind, and he curls up in a helpless heap waiting the coup-de-grace,” Henry wrote to Lizzie.

  Henry Adams refused to sit for painters and sculptors, so in 1904 John Hay commissioned Saint-Gaudens to do this small bronze caricature. The angel wings and porcupine body caught the contradictions in Adams’s personality.U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, ADAMS NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, QUINCY, MASSACHUSETTS

  From Roosevelt’s first days in the White House, Adams had predicted that Hay would be forced out of the cabinet to make room for a more aggressive type—a Rough Rider in spirit if not in fact. Though Hay suspected that Henry was right, he would not resign even to spare himself the humiliation of being dismissed. As a gentleman, he would go quietly if the president asked; he would not desert. Nor, in spite of large differences with Roosevelt, would he join in Henry’s derision. Having cast his lot, Hay strove to be both friend and counselor. He wrote Theodore an effusive sonnet, praised his understanding of history (which would have appalled Adams), and entertained him for an hour every Sunday after the Roosevelts attended services at St. John’s.

  Unlike Adams, who felt he had stayed too long on earth, Hay derived a certain wry pleasure from his status as an ancient. In 1904, when a delegation of Republicans asked him to speak in Michigan at ceremonies marking the fiftieth anniversary of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Hay merrily reported to Roosevelt that they had “tried to make it as easy for me as they could, said they did not care what sort of speech I made. I was apparently wanted as a sort of relic, and, to clinch the matter and make my acceptance certain, they said I could read my speech. ‘Yes,’ said another, with large magnanimity, ‘you can sit in a chair and read it if you like.’” Clara protested the journey on medical grounds, but John accepted. It was an election year. His chief deserved all the support he could give.

  Brought to the White House by accident Roosevelt had difficulty believing that the public wanted him there, and he was obsessed by the fear of being turned out. He “thinks of nothing, talks of nothing, and lives for nothing but his political interests,” Adams complained. “If you remark to him that God is Great, he asks naively at once how that will affect his election.” When the New York City newspapers backed the Democratic challenger, a local judge named Alton B. Parker, and when Wall Street vented its displeasure with Roosevelt’s trust-busting, he turned panicky and defensive. Defeat would “not in the least alter my conviction that what I have done was both right and wise,” he insisted to Hay.

  Adams saw that Wall Street was merely trying to scare Roosevelt and prophesied that the financiers would prefer any Republican, even Theodore, to a Democrat. By September, Hay believed that victory was certain. “I am not a rainbow-chaser, but—my dear Theodore—you are elected,” he wrote the president. Applauding Roosevelt’s adroit courtship of the Irish vote, Hay offered to don a green waist-coat and preface his name with O’ if Roosevelt thought it would help. Though the author of The Bread-Winners had little use for Irish immigrants, he understood their value on election day. Then an Irishman was better than a mugwump, Hay told the president, because “he goes to the polls while the mug. is apt to take a day off and commune with Nature.”

  On November 8, three of every five voters cast ballots for Roosevelt, giving him the biggest majority the country had ever seen. Theodore was astounded
. “I had no conception that there was such a tide in our favor, and I frankly confess that I do not understand it,” he told Nannie Lodge.

  Hay soon read in the newspapers that Roosevelt expected him to stay in the cabinet until 1909, when he himself left office. The secretary wondered whether his “tenement of clay” would hold together for that long, and he told Adams on an afternoon walk that by 1909 he probably would have lost all faculty for enjoyment. “Make your mind easy on that score, sonny!” Adams retorted. “You’ve lost it already.”

  A hundred copies of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres awaited Henry on his return from Paris at the end of 1904. He packed them off to friends and soon had the pleasure of knowing that they found the book as beguiling as he had found the Virgin. Lizzie Cameron foresaw that it would “creep into the ken of litterateurs” and pronounced it “the best thing done in modern times.” William James marveled at the “frolic power” of Adams’s prose; his brother Henry read the book with “wonder, sympathy, and applause.” From New Hampshire, Augustus Saint-Gaudens sang his delight: “You dear old Porcupinus Poeticus, You old Poeticus under a Bushelibus: I thought I liked you fairly well, but I like you more for the book you sent me the other day.” Saint-Gaudens did not know whether to like Adams more because he had given him a fresh view of the twelfth century or because the “general guts and enthusiasm of the work puzzles what courtesy calls my brain. You know (damn you) I never read, but last night I got as far in your work as the Virgin, Eve, and the Bees, and I cannot wait to acknowledge it till I am through. Thank you dear old stick in the mud.”