And no matter what, Lincoln was the example that Hay always came back to. Lincoln’s standards were the standards against which he measured everyone in the world, starting with himself.
HAY’S RISE WAS RAPID and enviable. After Paris, he served in two more legations, Vienna and Madrid, returning to the United States a polished diplomat, conversant in four languages, precociously cosmopolitan in his manners and appetites. In New York he joined the staff of Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and quickly won respect as its most able editorialist. He never gave up poetry, and his verses brought him unexpected and extraordinary fame. He wrote a provocative and widely read novel, and with Nicolay he completed the ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History, which, at a million and a half words, was the heftiest historical exposition since Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and a benchmark for all Lincoln books to follow.
His marriage to Clara Stone, daughter of a Cleveland railroad, steel, and banking baron, ensured he would never again have to worry about money, and his appreciation for fine living bloomed accordingly. His manses on Cleveland’s Millionaires’ Row and on Washington’s Lafayette Square were filigreed to Gilded Age paragon. He built a summer retreat in New Hampshire, and he traveled lavishly in Europe, amassing a magnificent art collection and cultivating distinguished friends, especially in England, which he came to love nearly as much as his own country.
All the while, he never let go of politics. In the years after Appomattox, he looked on with increasing chagrin and frustration as Lincoln’s legacy was blasphemed by the chicanery of his party and the venalities of the Johnson and Grant White Houses. “I’m keeper of the President’s conscience,” Hay had joked in 1861, shortly after first arriving in Washington. Going forward, he never shirked this responsibility. As the age of spoils and graft escalated, he came to be counted on not merely as a steadfast Lincoln man but as a trustworthy guide who helped lead the Grand Old Party back onto the path of righteousness. That he gave generously and regularly to the candidates he considered of the truest mettle further established him as one of the party’s most influential lamplighters.
He served briefly in the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes but turned down the invitation of Hayes’s successor, James Garfield, to stay on. Instead, he returned to New York to guest-edit the Tribune and wound up covering Garfield’s assassination and long slide toward death with a sense of alarm that was as much personal as partisan.
Nudged by Republican high priest Mark Hanna, whom, like Garfield, he had come to know in Cleveland, Hay pitched in to help rescue candidate (and fellow Ohioan) William McKinley from personal insolvency, thereby securing the one job he ever truly coveted, the ambassadorship to the Court of St. James’s. President McKinley quickly recognized that Hay’s extraordinary diplomatic aplomb could be put to higher use, and so, at the close of the Spanish-American War, McKinley brought him home to be secretary of state. In September 1901, for the second time, John Hay hurried to the bedside of a president mortally wounded by an assassin’s bullet. When McKinley expired a week later, the new president was Theodore Roosevelt, whom Hay had known since Teddy was a child. At first Hay was not convinced that Roosevelt was not still a child—so impetuous, so rambunctious, “more fun than a goat,” Hay quipped.
Much could be made of the differences between Roosevelt and Hay. Hay was genteel, soft-spoken, tailored by London’s best, his Van Dyke beard groomed fastidiously. Hay’s word for fun was “gay”; for Roosevelt, “bully” was better. Roosevelt was looking for the next war; Hay had his fill with the last one. (While it was Hay who famously described the 1898 conflict between the United States and Spain as a “splendid little war,” lost in translation is his relief that it was splendid because it had been so mercifully little.) Roosevelt was an unabashed campaigner, a gate-crasher by temperament; Hay was the one whom everyone begged to be on their ticket and in their cabinet, and he gave in only under a heavy barrage of supplication and flattery. Roosevelt dominated his relations with other men as much by physical force as by the acuity of his ideas. Hay was a sublime conversationalist; great men—and women, too—leaned forward to listen to him and the next day repeated his bon mots.
On the other hand, Hay and Roosevelt did have a great deal in common. Roosevelt had two sides—he was both dog and cat, as the newspaperman William Allen White observed—and Hay, while never entirely able to leash the canine in his president, found the feline aspect winsome.
As ardent Republicans, they had mutual aggravations: anyone who was less than one hundred percent convinced that republicanism was the boon and salvation of “civilization,” a list of antagonists that included “jack rabbit” Latin American officials, smug sultans, Filipino insurgents, brigands of any hue, “anti-imps,” labor agitators, not to mention Democrats and their waffling poll mates, the Mugwumps. And to the surprise of each, Hay and Roosevelt formed a superb partnership, navigating tricky waters at home and abroad, where the effective strategy was to tread softly (Hay’s job) and brandish a big stick (Roosevelt, naturally). Together they jockeyed with the so-called Great Powers—England, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Japan—a stubborn and testy lot of empires, some too long in the tooth, others too sharp. This family of nations was on the road to dysfunction even before they began competing aggressively in the global grab for “spheres of influence,” a guileful euphemism if ever there was one. The United States and Britain were hardly chaste, not after ugly campaigns in the Philippines and South Africa, but at least the Americans and English had forged a lasting rapprochement, thanks in no small part to the bridge-building that Hay had done while ambassador. The other powers were unapologetically on the make, inferring and avoiding alliances in a jittery choreography of chauvinism and distrust. For the most part, they left the Western Hemisphere alone—once Hay and Roosevelt dissuaded Britain from remapping Canada’s boundary with Alaska, bluffed the Germans from the Caribbean, and, last but not least, pried Panama loose from Colombia in order to build, control, and fortify a long-anticipated “American canal” between the Caribbean and the Pacific.
At the close of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, the biggest canvas of all was China, and here is where John Hay painted his masterpiece, the Open Door. It wasn’t a treaty by any stretch but simply a double dare to play fair in China, consented to by various world powers, one by one, with Hay’s coaxing. If Lincoln had saved the Union, John Hay deserves a nod of credit for saving China from “spoliation” at the hands of the other powers. How he accomplished this is a wonder, an act of feather-light finesse that shaped not just the future of Asia but also the long-term relations of every nation involved.
HAY HAD ONLY FRIENDS, it seems. The closest was Henry Adams, and arguably theirs was one of the most remarkable friendships of any era. They lived side-by-side in Washington (future site of the Hay-Adams Hotel), and for a quarter century they were inseparable, which is not to say they were always together. Yet when they were apart, they wrote to each other faithfully—long, gossipy, joshing, but always affectionate epistles. They wrote to each other knowing that they would see each other before the letter arrived, and they wrote to each other not knowing whether the letter would ever arrive.
From his parlor, Hay could see across to the window of the bedroom where he lived during the Lincoln years. He and Adams took to walking together every afternoon at four o’clock, followed by five o’clock tea with Hay’s wife, Clara, and Adams’s wife, Clover, until the latter’s death; and on rare and cherished occasions, they were graced by the company of Clarence King, the enchanting and far-roving geologist explorer whose follies of love and speculation gave them all fits. On a whim, they named their nucleus “the Five of Hearts.”
Hay and Adams did not see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. For starters, Adams was more of an iconoclast and twice the snob that Hay was. As a grandson and great-grandson of presidents, he looked down his nose on the parade of White House occupants, post-Lincoln, as misfits all. Besides being a keen histo
rian, he also postured himself as a futurist, and the future he foresaw was not pretty. The world order was on the verge of a colossal economic, political, and social comeuppance. Adams poured a steady dose of dourness into Hay’s teacup, but, if anything, it worked as a tonic. Hay, meanwhile, discovered a trustworthy sounding board in Adams. He could go on in detail about the affairs of state, knowing that Adams wouldn’t think of betraying their confidences. When each published novels anonymously—first came Adams’s Democracy, a wry send-up of Washington vanity and corruption, followed by Hay’s The Bread-Winners, a cautionary tale of labor unrest in a city similar to Cleveland—they were tickled when the public suspected that the same author wrote both.
But there were also betrayals within Hay’s circle and deeper secrets kept from one another. It has been conjectured that Hay had a romance with Nannie Lodge, the wife of Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Clara Hay evidently never learned of her husband’s dalliance, nor did Cabot Lodge, though one wonders if the chronic friction between the senator and the secretary of state, ostensibly over treaties and the direction of foreign policy, was not exacerbated by the subtext of cuckoldry.
Clarence King possessed an even bigger secret—now common knowledge but at the time unspeakable. The reason the Hays and Adamses never succeeded in finding a bride for the fifth Heart was because he already had one. Without telling any of his friends, he was leading a life of a completely different sort in New York.
The dance card gets more intricate still, with Elizabeth “Lizzie” Cameron the center of attention. She was from Cleveland also, the daughter of a judge and the niece of two of Ohio’s most illustrious figures, General William Tecumseh Sherman and Senator John Sherman. She arrived in Washington at the age of twenty and within the year was married to Pennsylvania senator Donald Cameron, twenty-four years her senior. Tall, wasp-waisted, and fetching, she quickly became the Madame X of Washington society. After Clover Adams died unexpectedly, Henry Adams was overwhelmed first by grief and then by the charms of young Lizzie Cameron.
The pas de deux between Henry Adams and Lizzie Cameron might otherwise be a sidebar to the life of John Hay if it were not for a trove of titillating revelations: several dozen letters, ignored or misinterpreted for the past hundred years, that now cast the character of John Hay in an immensely more intriguing light. Unbeknownst to Clara Hay, Henry Adams, and Nannie Lodge, Hay too was in love with Lizzie Cameron.
Their romance flamed in London and Paris in 1891, while their spouses were at home in the United States and Henry Adams was half a world away in the South Seas. “You do things so easily,” Hay gushed in one of his tributes to her. “You write as you walk. There seems no muscular effort in your démarche. You go over the ground like a goddess. . . . Don’t you see, you darling, why I love to grovel before you? It is such a pleasure to worship one so absolutely adorable. There is no one in sight of you in beauty, or grace, or cleverness, or substance of character. . . . You are all precious and divine: one to worship en gros et en detail.”
Caution cooled passion when he was in the company of family and friends, and by all outward measures he appeared devoted to Clara, mother of their four children, font of his substantial wealth. But while Lizzie was lithesome and clever, Clara was quiet, matronly, and, as one society column politely described her full proportions, “embonpoint.” During the final fifteen years of his life, Hay repeatedly circled back to Lizzie, never retiring from the field.
“I AM INCLINED TO think that my life is an oughtnottobiography,” Hay wrote in 1902. Unlike Henry Adams, he had no desire to write a memoir. Throughout his life he urged his friends to destroy his letters after reading them (most did not), but despite Hay’s repeated plaints of privacy and self-abnegation, he clearly did not wish to be swallowed by obscurity or diminished to a footnote in the lives of others. He himself kept many thousands of pages of his own writing—diaries, correspondence, poems, speeches—along with letters received over half a century, and he conscientiously kept scrapbooks of newspaper clippings about himself and the events of his day. And to glance at even one of the volumes of his Lincoln oeuvre is to appreciate his high esteem for biography as literature and as one of humanity’s vital measurements. Hay was a low-key man in many respects, but he was not without a sense of his own worth. He was aware of the imprint of his career, the momentous passages of history of which he had been witness and, in many cases, author. He knew he had put his signature on the world.
Even so, few twenty-first-century Americans recognize John Hay as more than a Zelig in the corner of someone else’s portrait. And the hard reckonings of two world wars and the absolutism of the nuclear age have led historians to look upon Hay’s brand of statesmanship as lacking in firmness and forcefulness. Gentleman’s agreements like the Open Door have been dismissed as ineffectual and passé.
But to most of Hay’s contemporaries, his manners, his mind, and his conduct as spokesman for a nation finding its voice on the world stage were nonpareil and pitch-perfect, and their praise for him was profuse. “He so far overshadows all the other ‘statesmen’ in Washington and is so far superior to any and all Republicans who have held high office in Washington in the last decade,” the Evening Sun of New York editorialized in 1903. “That John Hay has been the main wheel of the Roosevelt administration . . . has long been made manifest to everybody who has observed the numerous instances wherein Mr. Roosevelt’s strenuous, headstrong actions have been deftly smoothed over by the quiet, notoriety-hating secretary of state. There have been a score of instances . . . where the president in his happy, devil-may-care, we-can-lick-the-world style has overstepped the bounds of diplomacy and the presidential prerogative only to be rescued from a difficult predicament by John Hay.” “In sum,” the Sun declared, “John Hay has performed greater and more substantial service to his country than any Republican since Abraham Lincoln.” This from an otherwise unfriendly paper.
His partisans were even more appreciative. “If a man [were to] look over the changes in the world during the last decade to decide what is the most hopeful measure of human progress,” the highbrow journal World’s Work eulogized in 1905, “he might well say that it is the lifting of diplomacy from the level of sharp practice to the level of frank and fair dealing; and this change is the measure of the work of John Hay. For he was a great man [and] if we had not such a man . . . [d]iplomacy might have gone on as the art of low cunning applied to great problems—the good weak and the strong tricky. He made frankness and uprightness strong, and he made trickiness weak by forcing it to confess its character or to retire.”
Hay’s successor as secretary of state, Elihu Root, was at once a student, observer, and beneficiary of Hay’s superb tact and politesse—his “extreme refinement,” as Root reminisced at the dedication of the John Hay Library at Brown University in 1910. “He was the most delightful of companions. One found in him breadth of interest, shrewd observation, profound philosophy, wit, humor, the revelations of tender and loyal friendship and an undertone of strong convictions—and now and then,” Root went on, “expression of a thought that in substance and perfection of form left in the mind the sense of having seen a perfectly cut stone.”
And yet, Root continued in his encomium, “His life was his own and he shared it only with those he loved. The proud modesty of his self-respect made it impossible for him to testify in his own behalf or to allege his own merits.”
The pages that follow aim not so much to speak for John Hay as to allow him to speak for himself, in order that the brilliance of his life, the example of his life, and, what is more, the sheer poignancy of his life might at last be considered in full.
CHAPTER 2
Spunky Point
Hays were Scots originally. The first to set foot in America arrived by a roundabout route. John Hay’s great-great-grandfather, also named John, hired out as a soldier in the Rhineland of what was not yet Germany before immigrating to the Atlantic colonies in the mid-eighteenth century. One of his sons, A
dam, settled in Virginia and served bravely in the Revolution. Adam’s son, another John, remembers receiving a pat on the head from George Washington.
This John Hay—our John Hay’s grandfather—was of a restless family who came of age in a restless nation. Like so many young men, he rankled at the “harsh and arbitrary ideas” of his father and, at the age of eighteen, launched himself westward, alighting in the bluegrass of Fayette County, Kentucky, where he became an ardent Whig (along with neighbor Henry Clay), a manufacturer of cotton goods, and the husband of Jemima Coulter, with whom he had fourteen children. The John Hay who is the subject of this biography recorded that his grandfather met with “gratifying success” in Kentucky. “But he always had his doubts of the advantages of the system of negro-slavery,” and so after thirty years sought “a new home in a region which was, at least, free of this objection”—across the Ohio River in Illinois, where slavery had been proscribed by the original state constitution of 1818.
The Hays relocated to Sangamon County in 1830, the same year, coincidentally, that Abraham Lincoln arrived in Illinois and with his father built a cabin on the Sangamon River. Hay’s cotton business did not thrive in its new location, nor did a brick mill, although he had better luck in land speculation. He and his family lived not in a log cabin but in a solid house in Springfield, where Hay became a pillar of the Baptist Church and, reportedly, the first man to sign the promissory note securing the building of the State House, once Springfield was declared the capital in 1839. The boy who had felt the touch of George Washington lived until he was ninety, lasting just long enough to watch the funeral cortège of his friend Abraham Lincoln pass by his parlor window.
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