All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  While in Madrid, Hay and Adee collaborated on a tale of a mad German scientist who transfers the soul of an American tourist into the body of a local drunkard, using a “life-magnet.” Adee took credit for writing the story, but it had been Hay’s idea, and they sold it to Putnam’s. It would not be their last joint effort. In 1879, when Hay rejoined the State Department as assistant secretary of state, after a nine-year absence, he found Adee ensconced as chief of the Diplomatic Bureau, ably overseeing department correspondence. Two decades later, when Hay returned to diplomatic service once again, Adee had risen to assistant secretary of state. They would work together, hand-in-glove, for the remainder of Hay’s life, having no difficulty understanding each other in any of four languages.

  Hay resigned from the Madrid legation on August 1, 1870, allowing Adee to take the official position of secretary of legation. The reason he gave for quitting was the low salary, but clearly he had gotten what he could out of Madrid. “Hopes of a Spanish Republic,” the first installment of what would become Castilian Days, appeared in the March 1870 Atlantic Monthly, and in July he received a flattering offer from Nicolay, who was back home in America, endeavoring to regain the health that had failed him in Paris. Nicolay had taken a job as editor of the Republican, a Chicago daily in need of its own revival. He wanted Hay to join him. The offer was tempting; for one thing it would bring Hay closer to his family in Illinois; for another, “I could get along with Nicolay more easily than with almost anyone I know,” he wrote to his parents.

  WHILE SPAIN REMAINED HOBBLED by its past, France was colliding head-on with the future. Since 1866, when Hay had last appeared in the French court, Louis Napoleon III had begun to lose his grip. Corpulent and slouching, wracked by gout and gallstones and drugged with opiates, he suffered one insult after another. In 1867, the insurgency of Benito Juárez had forced French troops to withdraw from Mexico; that same year, Napoleon had failed in his attempt to annex Luxembourg and Belgium. Meanwhile, within his own borders, radicalism was on the rise, centered in the emperor’s once orderly cities. Riots in the streets of Paris and angry opposition at the polls signaled that decadent monarchy could not withstand the forces of liberal republicanism for much longer. A coup d’état seemed imminent. To keep the country intact and to preserve imperial authority, the emperor and his ministers endeavored to redirect French passions outward, toward a foreign enemy. In the summer of 1870, that enemy was Prussia.

  After the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, King Wilhelm and Prime Minister Bismarck had bundled a succession of German states, duchies, and cities into the North German Confederation, the ascendant forerunner of the modern German state, its capital the Prussian city of Berlin. The population of the North German Confederation was nearly that of France, and its army was now one third larger than France’s and growing—yet another reason why Napoleon III felt diminished and threatened. Bismarck seemed almost to be taunting the French emperor by refusing to cede lands on the west bank of the Rhine, which, under Napoleon Bonaparte, had buffered the French homeland. War with the upstart Prussians seemed to Napoleon III, and to most of his otherwise discordant countrymen, the solution to a multiple of ills. It would restore French territory and pride and drive an enemy from its doorstep.

  Bismarck saw the logic in war as well. His own circumstances, while not so precarious as Napoleon’s, were nevertheless troubling. In his zeal to stitch together a German confederacy—small states and large, north and south, Protestant and Catholic—the total did not yet equal the sum of the parts. To solidify the “fatherland,” he persuaded Wilhelm to assume the title of emperor of the North German Confederation. Then he set out to nudge France into a fight that would galvanize German spirit once and for all.

  Napoleon took the bait like the glutton he was. He resented the presence of another emperor in the European pantheon. And he was even more annoyed over the emperor who had been chosen, through Prussian meddling, to succeed Isabella II in Spain. At Bismarck’s urging, in early July 1870 the Spanish crown was offered to Prince Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, who, not by coincidence, was of the same noble family as Wilhelm.

  When the announcement reached France, Napoleon and his ministers were incensed by the prospect of having their empire hemmed in by not one but now two arms of the Hohenzollern dynasty. This reaction was just what Bismarck had hoped for. The French foreign minister, Duke Antoine Agénor of Gramont, demanded that Leopold’s name be withdrawn. And even after Leopold complied, Gramont would not back down until Prussia expressed its contrition formally and publicly. Gramont sent a telegram to Wilhelm, who was vacationing at the spa of Bad Ems, demanding that Prussia pledge never again to suggest a candidate for the Spanish throne. Bismarck, ever manipulative, twisted the now-infamous Ems Dispatch into a colossal slur on German virtue, at once inflaming his own generals and, by refusing to renounce Prussia’s designs on Spain, goading Napoleon into mobilizing his own vaunted armies.

  France declared war on Prussia on July 19, just as John Hay was preparing to depart for home. “I leave Europe in a grand and imposing time,” he wrote his family in early August. “The greatest historical drama of our time is now being played. I hope the war will not last much longer.”

  His remark was on target in both respects. Although the war did not last long, it changed the world forever. The French army, led by the king, failed miserably—most significantly in its estimation of the size, discipline, and nimbleness of its opponent. In a rapid succession of clashes, the Prussian army, with its fearsome Krupp artillery, rolled over the French lines. On September 2, Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke captured Napoleon and his entire army of one hundred thousand at Sedan, an embarrassment that France has never lived down. When word of this mammoth defeat reached Paris, an angry mob converged on the royal palace and government buildings, vandalizing and chanting “Death to the Bonapartes!” Empress Eugénie, without her diamonds, fled through the Louvre and eventually to England, where she was later joined by her freed husband. With that, the Second Empire was no more, supplanted by a provisional Government of National Defense.

  The war was for all intents and purposes over, although fighting continued for another four months. The Prussian army laid siege to Paris, bombarding and starving it into submission. France—the nascent Third Republic—finally capitulated in January 1871, giving up all of the frontier province of Alsace, part of Lorraine, and an indemnity of 5 billion francs. Bismarck achieved all he wanted and more. Even before Paris had fallen, he gathered together the leaders of the confederate German states and their allies in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles and formed the German Empire, with Wilhelm as its kaiser (a titled derived from “Caesar”) and himself as chancellor. As one empire was swept away forever, a far more expansionist and more militaristic state lifted its proud head in Europe.

  John Hay had traveled through Paris in late August, before the siege and before Napoleon was defeated, deposed, and disgraced. The city was frantically fortifying itself; Baron Haussmann’s boulevards were now patrolled by an undisciplined civilian militia. Foreigners were abandoning the city by every available conveyance. Regrettably, any accounts of his short stay in Paris are lost, if they existed at all. But later he bid farewell to the Bonaparte dynasty in an article for Harper’s. He began by describing Paris as it had appeared in 1869, while he was on his way to Madrid: “The Empire attained its most resplendent bloom the year before its fall. . . . The grand sweep of the avenue to the Place de l’Étoile was one sea of glimmering radiance, and the Arch of Triumph at the crest of the hill was transfigured by the magic of lime light into a vast dome of porcelain and mother-of-pearl, a temple standing in the midst of the opulence and art of new Paris, dedicated to the worship of the material splendor of Napoleonism.”

  But exactly one year later, in the throes of war, he observed a vastly different tableau: “A few servants of the [municipality] were tearing down the pipes and gas-fixtures which had been planned to celebrate the entry of the French army into Berli
n. At every corner panic-stricken groups were reading the bulletins, in which a false coloring was given to terrible defeats. A beaten army was rolling back toward Paris, shouting as beaten armies always shout, ‘Treason,’ and the Emperor, stunned and helpless, abandoning the command to others, was muttering with the iteration of idiocy: ‘I have been deceived!’ ”

  During his three tours of Europe—in Paris, Vienna, and Madrid—Hay had watched while governments came together, fell apart, and re-formed. He had followed firsthand the evolution of states into nations, monarchies into republics. He had been presented in the courts of moribund regimes and in the assemblies of democracies striving to define themselves. After his years in the White House during the Civil War, the rivalry and tumult that he observed abroad perhaps seemed tame in comparison, but by the time he stepped ashore in New York in September 1870, there were few men in America, certainly few his age—a month shy of thirty-two—who could match his understanding of foreign affairs or, for that matter, politics of any provenance.

  CHAPTER 6

  Plain Language

  Hay landed in New York in the first week of September 1870, ten years after volunteering to open mail for presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln. He was now thoroughly cosmopolitan, dressed by London tailors, conversant in the finest opera and art, and polished in the etiquette of the haute monde. He was headed for Chicago to see John George Nicolay about the job on the Republican; but first he wanted to have a talk with Whitelaw Reid, the acting managing editor of the New York Tribune. Hay had a proposal to make.

  The Tribune was still very much Horace Greeley’s paper, although he was absent much of the time, giving lectures and bending ears in Albany and Washington. If Hay bore any hard feelings after the Niagara Falls fiasco of 1864, he kept them to himself. Nor did he hold a grudge against Reid, whom he had come to know during the war as well, when Reid was Washington correspondent for the Cincinnati Gazette. Reid had criticized Grant’s poor generalship at Shiloh, and he had been no less harsh on Lincoln, working to block the president’s renomination in 1864 while promoting the campaign of fellow Ohioan Salmon Chase. At one point, Hay had even tried to have Reid fired—to no avail. Arriving at the Tribune after the war, Reid was given the official title of first writing editor, or head editorial writer, though it was now quite apparent that he was Greeley’s right hand and heir.

  Hay and Reid had too much in common not to get along. Reid was only one year older, and like Hay, he had grown up west of the Appalachians, in his case, Xenia, Ohio. He was an exemplary scholar, enlightened by reading Rousseau and Keats at Miami University. And he too had cultivated a buoyant urbanity. Long, lean, with a Van Dyke beard similar to the one Hay would soon grow, he was a hale bachelor well met in the clubs and drawing rooms of postwar New York.

  The Tribune was not the biggest daily in New York. The Herald, Times, and Sun all claimed daily readership greater than the Tribune’s forty-five thousand, but the Tribune also printed weekly and semi-weekly editions that had more subscribers than the other three competitors combined, making it the most widely read newspaper in the country.

  Reform was the journalistic byword of the day. The Union had been preserved, Andrew Johnson had been purged, and time had come for a fresh start. Newspapers, in their hunger for readership, vied to expose corruption and tout their own virtuosity. The enemy was fraud, graft, quid pro quo, and the spoils system. Rings came in various sizes, all of them unscrupulous: the Whiskey Ring, the Gold Ring, the Tweed Ring. Railroads were crooked, machines rapacious. “Boss” was a bad name, and an honest politician was someone who, when bought, stayed bought. It was said that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner dubbed the era—and their 1873 novel—the Gilded Age because to them “gild” sounded an awful lot like “guilt.”

  Horace Greeley’s Great Moral Organ was in its element. Its city reporters exposed corruption in the New York Customs House and cruelty in the city’s mental asylum. The paper also boasted some of the very best writing of its time. Twain’s Innocents Abroad was first serialized in the Tribune. William Winter, writing for the Tribune, set the standard for drama criticism. Henry Villard, John Russell Young, Noah Brooks, and George Smalley—to name four of the worthiest reporters of the Civil War—all filed to the Tribune. Yet what separated the Tribune from its rivals on Newspaper Row—and the reason Hay came to see Whitelaw Reid—was coverage of overseas news.

  Foreign reporting was revolutionized in 1866 with the completion of the transatlantic telegraph cable. That same year, George Smalley was sent to London to supervise a foreign bureau that would take advantage of the new technology. The Austro-Prussian War ended before he could set up shop, but in 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War erupted, Smalley’s reporters were well deployed at the front. The Tribune’s blow-by-blow coverage, funneled first to Smalley in London and then transmitted to New York at the rate of six words a minute, scooped most other papers by days.

  The Tribune’s triumph, not to mention its editorial harangues of Napoleon III, got Hay’s attention and gave him an idea, which he spelled out to Reid over dinner at the Union League Club. Rather than going to Chicago to work for Nicolay, he proposed that he return to Paris to cover the siege and its aftermath for the Tribune. Reid informed Hay that he already had a man in Paris writing a weekly letter. Instead, Reid countered, “I would rather . . . have you come to New York, and if you were not a fellow of such diplomatically extravagant habits as to be beyond the reach of our modest salaries, I should try to tempt you.”

  After seeing Nicolay in Chicago a few days later, Hay was more than tempted. “I do not find the elements of stability [at the Republican] I expected,” he wrote Reid. “N[icolay] is fighting a good battle but the figures will beat him.” Indeed, Nicolay cut his losses after three months and took his family to Florida for the winter. Hay spent the next few weeks in Warsaw and promised to come back to New York sometime later in the fall—that is, if Reid’s offer still stood. Any coolness that had lingered from the war years had already melted away.

  Hay found Warsaw as welcoming as ever. The grapes from his “shy little vineyard” had produced 200 gallons of wine, and autumn flattered the landscape. “The great River is wrapped at daybreak in a morning-gown of fog,” he wrote Nicolay, “and the light has a regular spree on the many colored foliage of the hills and the islands. I am doing nothing and find it easy to take.”

  He had too many irons in the fire to linger for long. Castilian Days was to be published by James R. Osgood, who was also a part owner of the Atlantic Monthly. Meanwhile, William Dean Howells was preparing several more of the book’s chapters for the magazine. And the Tribune looked promising, although Reid had yet to make a firm offer. At the end of October, Hay headed east to talk “au grand sérieux” with his editors.

  In New York, Reid persuaded him to accept a job writing “breviers,” the Tribune’s term for editorials, for $50 a week, a handsome salary for those days. For convenience, Hay took a room in the nearby Astor House, where he also ate his meals. “I cannot regard it as a successful experiment as yet,” he wrote Nicolay after a few weeks on the job, “though Reid & the rest seem satisfied.” “The rest” included Horace Greeley, who initially was displeased to learn that Reid had hired his old Niagara Falls companion. But once Greeley began reading Hay’s editorials, he changed his tune and declared Hay the most brilliant editorial writer ever to darken the door of the New York Tribune.

  Others were singing his praises as well. Hay went up to Boston to meet Howells and James T. Fields, the venerable editor of the Atlantic, whose circle of friends included Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, Bronson Alcott, James Russell Lowell, and the James brothers, William and Henry. For Hay, who had once worshipped at the feet of Edgar Allan Poe’s mistress, entrée to Fields’s universe was intoxicating, though he was not so stage-struck that he was unable to comport himself impressively, as he always managed to do in the presence of royalty. “Come as often as you please to Boston,” Fields wrote after Hay�
�s visit. “Chaps the likes of you don’t often stray this way.” Fields urged Hay to return for a meeting of the legendary Saturday Club, consisting of Hawthorne, Emerson, et al. “[Y]ou shall be my guest whenever you choose to give me that pleasure.”

  Hay hit it off well with Howells, too. It was the first time they had met in person, though they had known about each other for years. Howells had grown up in southern Ohio (not far from Reid), making ends meet as a newspaper reporter and yearning to succeed as a poet and author. In 1860, he was chosen—over John George Nicolay—to write a campaign biography of Abraham Lincoln. For his service, Howells was awarded the consulship to Venice, where he wrote a series of sketches eventually bound together as Venetian Life. Hay’s articles from Spain may well have been inspired by Howells’s from Italy. Howells’s novels, A Hazard of New Fortunes and The Rise of Silas Lapham, would one day be American classics.

  Howells and Hay were a year apart in age, and their small-town roots, their dedication to Lincoln, their tours of Europe, their devotion to literature, and their attraction to the cultural offerings of the East made them kindred spirits even before they shook hands in the Atlantic Monthly offices. A year earlier, when James Fields had sailed for Europe, leaving his assistant in charge, one of the articles Howells had picked out was “The Mormon Prophet’s Tragedy,” recognizing not just the author’s name but also a fresh voice from a region not unlike the one where he was raised.