Horace Greeley and Whitelaw Reid had no deep reserve of affection for the president, nor had Hay been very intimate with him during the war years, though he had learned to respect him. When a group of disgruntled fire-eaters that included Senator Carl Schurz of Missouri and Henry Adams’s brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., proposed forming a new, Liberal Republican party, they found open ears at the Tribune.
Within a year, the newspaper would be a Liberal Republican clarion and Greeley its candidate. Hay had long-standing differences with Greeley, and he would have even more in the campaign to come, but his dedication to the cause of Republican reform was steadfast and would eventually fill hundreds of column inches. He held Grant to the highest of standards: the general had won the war for Lincoln, but regrettably, he was proving that he could not fill Lincoln’s shoes.
ALTHOUGH HAY WAS DILIGENT and earnest when he had to be, “[H]e never made the mistake of taking the journalistic work too seriously,” recalled Joseph Bucklin Bishop, who joined the paper fresh out of Hay’s alma mater, Brown. “A more conscientious man never lived, but his saving sense of humor forbade his conscientiousness should ever become a disease.” Bishop remembered an evening when Hay, after putting the finishing touches on yet another editorial prodding one of Europe’s monarchs, waved his manuscript and laughed with mock self-importance: “I’ve been going for them kings again, and if they only knew it, they’d be shaking in their boots at this moment.”
If he could be hard on kings and cabinets, he was invariably kind to his colleagues. Years later, Isaac Bromley wrote to Hay: “I was always fond of you since that lovely morning when you came to my desk pulling off your gloves and looking more like an angel than any human being ever looked to me before, saying, ‘Mr. Bromley, that was one of the best articles I ever saw in print.’ I grew into a sort of bathos of fondness and, I think, cried.”
Not long after Hay’s arrival, Reid raised his salary to $65 a week. “Your work thus far has been exceedingly valuable,” the editor complimented, “and I have seen now enough of your capacity in sudden emergencies and in a wide scope to be ready to repeat the assurance which I gave you at the beginning, that journalism is sure to prove your true field. . . . I hope that, so long as I remain on the Tribune at least, you will add to my comfort as well as my strength by feeling it to be your home also.”
Hay did feel at home, as evidenced by the force and clarity of his work. He did not, however, compose his editorials quickly. “I waste two-thirds of my time trying to think of something to write about,” he told John Bigelow. “[Literary critic John] Hassard writes his column while I sit staring . . . in blank imbecility. Reid writes very little, but when it is necessary he beats me two to one.”
HAY HAD ONE OTHER shortcoming: for all his erudition on a worldly range of subjects, he had no real experience as a reporter. How surprising it was, then, that when Chicago burst into flames on October 8, 1871, Reid sent Hay to cover the story. He arrived on the twelfth, after thirty-eight hours on trains, joining another Tribune man, Henry Keenan. The first problem they faced was overloaded telegraph lines; operators claimed to be several thousand messages behind and, to Hay’s greater frustration, they were giving preferential treatment to the Tribune’s rival, the New York Herald. He was finally able to file his first dispatch on the thirteenth.
He approached the assignment as if he were writing in his diary about Paris, Vienna, or Florida. In Chicago, at least, he knew his way around, and he did have connections. Upon arrival he tracked down Robert Lincoln and straightaway asked about the presidential papers, which Hay and Nicolay had helped remove from the White House after the assassination six years earlier. Thankfully most of them were in Bloomington, Illinois, in the care of David Davis, President Lincoln’s trusted friend, now a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. The papers that were in Robert’s possession in Chicago were safe as well, but only barely. “[Robert Lincoln] entered his law office,” Hay wrote, “about daylight on Monday morning, after the flames had attacked the building, opened the vault and had piled upon a table-cloth the most valuable papers, then swung the pack over his shoulder, and escaped amid a shower of falling fire-brands.” On his way to safety, Lincoln stopped to eat breakfast at the house of a friend, the financier and philanthropist J. Young Scammon. Hay reported that afterwards “Lincoln went home with his papers, and before noon the house of Scammon was in ruins.”
The following day, the fourteenth, Hay headed to DeKoven Street, where the fire had begun. “I have here before me six miles, more or less, of the finest conflagration ever seen,” he recounted. “I have smoking ruins and ruins which have broken themselves of smoking; churches as romantic in their dilapidation as Melrose by moonlight [a reference to a poem by Sir Walter Scott]; mountains of brick and mortar and forests of springing chimneys; but I turned from them all this morning . . . to see the first footprint of the monster who had trampled a great city out of existence in a day.”
At last he reached the address of Mr. and Mrs. O’Leary, where it was said but never proven—and ultimately disproven—that their cow had kicked a lamp into the straw. Hay may not have had much practice as a reporter, but he had a gift for getting to the heart of the matter: “I went around to the rear, and there found the Man of the House, sitting with two of his friends. His wife, Our Lady of the Lamp—freighted with heavier disaster than that which Psyche carried to the bedside of Eros—sat at the window, knitting. I approached the Man of the House and gave him a good-day. He glanced up with sleepy, furtive eyes. I asked him what he knew about the origin of the fire. He glanced at his friends and said, civilly, he knew very little; he was waked up about 9 o’clock by the alarm, and fought from that time to save his house. . . . He seemed fearful that all Chicago was coming down on him for prompt and integral payment of that $200,000,000 his cow had kicked over. His neighbors say this story is an invention dating from the second day of the fire. There was something unutterably grotesque in this ultimate atom feeling a sense of responsibility for a catastrophe so stupendous, and striving by a fiction, which must have heavily taxed his highest powers of imagination, to escape a reckoning he was already free from.”
Hay spent three days in Chicago, gathering images randomly but with the pieces adding to a grim and graphic whole:
“I passed one modest grave, near the scene of a night-camp. A heart was carved upon the wooden tombstone by pious hands, and into this touching emblem a steel fork had been driven by some brutal fist. Above the outraged blazon were the tender words, Ruhe Sanft (‘Rest Softly’). . . .
“Delicate women came as they had escaped from death in thin fluttering night clothes blown about by the surly Autumn wind. . . .
“Many little children were thrown into the crowd too young to speak their parents’ names. . . .
“I heard of one company of German singers from a low concert saloon, who flew out into the night in nothing but their tawdry evening dresses. . . . They talked little, but sometimes they cheated their misery with songs. . . . Nearby the fragments of a Methodist congregation had improvised a prayer-meeting, and the sounds of song and supplication went up mingled with that worldly music to the deep and tolerant heavens.”
He left Chicago, exhausted but satisfied. “I have done all I could,” he wrote to Reid on October 15. “I have a clean conscience. Your condemnation will not gall my withers.”
Reid’s reply has not been preserved, but he surely appreciated how hard Hay had worked under such enormous disadvantage. At least one other paper noticed as well. “John Hay has, within a brief period, become widely recognized as a brilliant essayist, a genuine poet, and an accomplished editor,” the Syracuse Standard commented. “His reputation, however, in one of the most difficult departments of journalistic work—that of reporting—was yet to be made. . . . We hazard little in saying that it is now splendidly attained. . . . The dispatches he has sent to the Tribune concerning the Chicago fire have something of the qualities of the poet and the essayist; but they also bear the unmistakable evide
nces of the true reportorial instinct. . . . Here is [Daniel] De Foe pencil in hand amid ruins greater than those of the London fire of two centuries agone, with all the olden power and all the olden accuracy.”
HE RETURNED TO NEW York and a lifestyle that was neither as one-dimensional nor as ascetic as he purported. There were many days and evenings when his presence was not required at the Tribune. A society column pasted in his scrapbook placed “the handsome and popular John Hay” at a party in the company of the African explorer and gorilla stalker Paul du Chaillu; Cyrus Field, whose company had laid the transatlantic cable; and his friend Albert Bierstadt, whose magnificently romantic landscapes of the American West had established him as one of the country’s most treasured painters. Other letters and newspapers had him, “finical and fine, exquisitely gloved,” dining at Delmonico’s and other fashionable restaurants and quenching his thirst at the Lotos Club, a cheerful sanctuary for writers and artists, including Mark Twain, one of its founders. Soon he was elected to the smart and genteel Knickerbocker Club and Century Association, where he mingled with leading men of business, science, politics, and the arts.
Along the way, he formed a number of lasting friendships. After Reid and Twain, he finally met Bret Harte, who had moved to New York in order to cash in on his meteoric fame. “He is a delightful fellow,” Hay mentioned, “and I would be happy to ‘drop in and take dinner’ as he and Mrs. Harte kindly suggest; but he lives in 49th Street, just an hour by rail from me”—this a gibe at Manhattan’s expansion northward. The two authors were thrown together often, usually in the clubs or homes of mutual friends. Harte lived well in those days, certainly more comfortably than Hay, and neither ever would have imagined that nine years later Hay would be the one on top, with Harte begging him for a job.
Sometime during that first year in New York, Hay also made the acquaintance of Clarence King, whose fortunes would prove even more erratic than Bret Harte’s. Over the next three decades, King would by turns inspire and frustrate Hay like no other friend.
King acquired manners in Newport, geology at Yale; straitened by the early death of his father and then of his stepfather, he was obliged to support his mother and sister by applying his considerable athleticism and intellect to a series of ventures that exposed him to great risk, promised lifelong riches and acclaim, and too often fell short of expectations for reasons that never seemed to be his fault.
For a while, though, everything did go his way. In 1867, at the age of twenty-five, King was named head geologist of the Fortieth Parallel Survey, a daring scientific expedition to map some of the least traveled terrain in the American West. Over the next four years, he trekked across the deserts of California and Nevada and scaled the peaks of the Sierras, dodging bandits, enduring thirst and blizzards, and surveying meticulously all the while. In the summer of 1870, he discovered active glaciers on the summit of Mount Shasta, the only ones believed to exist in the continental United States. Working from his field notes, King wrote an account of his mountaineering exploits for Bret Harte’s Overland Monthly. On Harte’s endorsement, William Dean Howells accepted several of King’s pieces for the Atlantic Monthly, and James R. Osgood agreed to collect them in a book, as he had done for Hay and Harte.
Fit and youthful, his whiskers sun-bleached from months in the wild, King came east in the fall, passing through New York en route to Boston—a “brilliant and beaming creature,” recalled Howells. Here was a man for all seasons: King had crawled into a cave to shoot a grizzly bear; around a campfire in the evening he was known to wear silk stockings and clean linen. When he came east, he brought along his pith helmet.
The first of King’s Atlantic Monthly articles appeared in May 1871, coinciding with the final installment of Hay’s Castilian Days sketches. A coincidence of another sort occurred in the fall: King’s article in the November Atlantic describes an encounter with a filthy, degraded family who had driven their prized hogs from Pike County, Missouri, all the way to the foothills of the Sierras. As a scientist, King noted the devolution of the Pike stock “in all its deformity of outline, all its poverty of detail, all its darkness of future.” And as a raconteur, he recorded the Pike dialect as faithfully and comically as Harte or Hay had done in their stories and poems.
The circle of association was cozy indeed. The same issue of the Atlantic Monthly that carried King’s piece on the Pikes also ran Howells’s review of Hay’s Castilian Days—anonymously, as was the magazine’s custom, but also to make the log-rolling seem less obvious. “Every page sparkles with witty comment,” Howells commended unsparingly. “No other book in English about Spain can compare with it.”
Other notices were equally generous. One reviewer called the prose of Castilian Days “so alive that it affects the reader with that slight running tingle of surprise.” When the book arrived in London, it was welcomed as “one of the brightest, most piquant and withal instructive publications of the year.” Some of the kindest compliments came from reviewers who previously had dismissed Hay as merely the “author of” the Pike County poems. “If any one has indulged in the fear that Mr. Hay was so irretrievably entangled in the quagmire and bog of modern ‘Dialect’-ics,” stated one of his redeemers, “this volume will help very sensibly to remove that impression. For Castilian Days . . . is really a strong and masculine performance.”
ALL TOLD, IT HAD been a heady year. Since joining the Tribune in November 1870, Hay had made a name for himself as an editorialist, poet, lecturer, reporter, and belletrist. He was meeting the most influential people in New York; moreover, he was now regarded as one of them. “Hay is doing admirably and even growing corpulent,” John Bigelow remarked.
The bachelor life seemed to suit him—and Reid, too. They had become bosom chums, professionally and socially, and they were often on the town together. “We ought to see the Black Rook before it stops,” Hay prodded Reid on one occasion. “Send the boy for two tickets (good ones) and we will dine together chez le Frenchy and go.” The publisher Henry Holt told of leaving the Century one Saturday at two in the morning in the company of Hay, Reid, and several others. Encountering a line of ash cans on the sidewalk, the cohort of top-hatted revelers decided the moment was ripe for leapfrog.
The subject of marriage came up from time to time. Hay’s and Reid’s imminent captures were rumored every time they were observed in anything more than casual conversation with one of New York’s eligible ladies. Hay was now thirty-three; Reid a year older. It was not so much a question of whether they would succumb as of which one would succumb first. “I cannot get Reid to marry,” Hay joked to Bigelow. “I shall take my own medicine as soon as I own two or three shares of Tribune stock”—an impossibility, at least for the foreseeable future, since only one hundred shares existed, each valued at $10,000. In the meantime the two bachelors continued to partake of the pleasures of the Gilded Age.
Marital medicine was forthcoming, however, and of a far richer dosage than he expected. In the winter of 1872, Hay was introduced to twenty-three-year-old Clara Stone, who was visiting New York from Cleveland. In the months that followed, he fell for her, head over heels. “I have been brought down,” he told a friend, announcing the closure of his career as a blade about town. “Mourn for me. La femme has ceased to exist for me. There is only one—and one is enough. . . . I part from the old life without regret save for the dear old reprobates whom I shall hereafter love in secret and remorselessly cut in public. . . . Believe me, I am not the thing I was.”
CHAPTER 7
Millionaires’ Row
Of their many differences, most did not seem to matter, or perhaps they were what drew them together. Clara Louise Stone was ten years younger than John Hay, and whereas he had been precocious as a young man, she, according to the custom of her class and era, had enjoyed a protected upbringing. She was reserved; he was gregarious. He was classically educated, had seen the world, and spoke several of its languages. She had graduated from the Cleveland Academy and had been abroad once wit
h her parents. But her life thus far had been a chaperoned affair.
In the spring of 1872, Clara and her sister, Flora, were visiting their aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Andros Stone, whom Hay had first met when the Stones had passed through Paris in 1866. Stone had made his fortune in iron in Chicago and Cleveland, and like many industrialists from the West, he had moved to New York to enroll in the burgeoning society of first-generation affluents. How Hay had become reacquainted with the Stones is not clear, but his manners, his résumé, and his acclaim as a writer put him high on the list of bachelors suitable for introduction to a visiting niece.
Hay met Clara for the first time in the Stones’ parlor on 37th Street. The encounter went well enough—nothing close to love at first sight, as Hay later confessed—but afterward he realized he wanted to see more of this demure, bright-faced visitor.
She was not girlish, at least not in her appearance. For one thing, she was stout, not in the way of women who never lose their baby fat, but like a nurse—like a mother. Her eyes were dark and warm beneath full brows and an even fuller head of hair, which she wore braided in a generous bun. She would never bowl anyone over, not with her looks or her dynamism; she was not a woman who threw off sparks. Her appeal was an innate serenity and constancy of mind and metabolism—the essential qualities that suited the “finical” Hay, even if he did not realize it at first.
Yet she was far from complacent. In a school essay, “Literature versus Housekeeping,” she expressed higher expectations for her sex. “Housekeeping appears to be the particular end of woman,” she acknowledged. “But is there any real reason to think that a woman with a well-balanced mind and ideas concerning the economy of her hours may not find time for other affairs beside those of housekeeping?”
She then made a case for a “literary woman,” who is “able to make better plans for her house, knows how to control her servants, has better developed talents, and most of all has her understanding enlarged as to the relations she bears to her fellow beings and has wider ideas of the manner in which to make her home pleasant and enjoyable.” Her intention was not to rock the boat; she was merely suggesting that she could steer it one-handed, if she chose—with plenty of maids, cooks, and nurses helping out, of course.
All the Great Prizes Page 18
