HAY’S RELATIONSHIP WITH JOHN George Nicolay was evolving as well. In the White House, Nicolay had been the primary private secretary, Hay officially the assistant. But with Hay’s success as an author and newspaperman, and now with his sudden affluence, the tables turned. Henceforth Nicolay would be the engineer stoking the Lincoln work, and Hay would remain abovedecks. Nicolay would continue to do the interviews, dig through archives, delivering his yield to Hay. Nicolay’s income from the Supreme Court was adequate to support his family, but when he needed money to sustain the Lincoln work, Hay was always ready with a check—$200 here, $100 there.
In the fall, Nicolay sent his first box of material to Cleveland—notes from his interviews and a selection of recent books on Lincoln and the war. “The work is a heavy one, continually growing on our hands,” Hay confessed. “I have many misgivings about it, [but] we shall put in it all we can.” He promised Nicolay, “I shall go seriously to work upon it. I hope to make considerable progress by next spring.”
But once again his eyesight gave out; he described the symptoms as “partial blindness.” The glare from the snow on Euclid Avenue was so irritating that he wore a special pair of blue goggles whenever he went outdoors. He was well enough to keep tabs on the construction of the house next door but unable to get very far on the Lincoln material. In March 1876, he told Whitelaw Reid that his mind was “enfeebled with illness.” It wasn’t until June that he began to feel better, and even then he advised Nicolay that, to be on the safe side, he would take it easy throughout the summer and then try to buckle down in the fall, by which time the house ought to be done. Clara, he might have added, was pregnant again.
They moved into the new house in October and were thrilled by every opulent detail, from the “gilding and black dado” to the H and S carved into the newel posts of the black-walnut staircase. “If other people don’t like it, something is the matter with their eyes,” proclaimed Hay, whose eyesight was evidently improved.
A SON, ADELBERT STONE Hay, named for Clara’s drowned brother, was born on November 1. “He is a fine little manchild, ugly and strong, lean and bigboned,” Hay wrote proudly to Reid. “[H]e looks already like a railroad maker and statesman.”
Six days later, the nation went to the polls to elect a successor to Ulysses S. Grant. As Hay had feared, Grant had not exonerated himself in his second term. Two major scandals had sullied his administration, although, as usual, the president had been blinded by loyalty and shielded by ignorance while those around him broke the law. First came exposure of the Whiskey Ring, a conspiracy between whiskey distillers and federal revenue collectors to defraud the government of millions of dollars in taxes. Among those arrested was Grant’s private secretary Orville Babcock. Not long afterward, Grant’s secretary of war William Belknap was impeached for taking kickbacks from operators of supply posts on Indian reservations.
In such a climate of shame, the best Hay could hope for was “a man on one ticket or the other for whom I can vote without nausea.” He would have liked Speaker of the House James G. Blaine to win the party’s nomination, even though Blaine had been dirtied by two different scandals himself. Instead, Hay had to settle for thrice-elected Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes. The Democrats chose as their worthy New York governor Samuel Tilden, whose dismantling of the Tweed Ring had burnished his reputation as a reformer.
The election of 1876 was not decided until the following March. Tilden won the popular vote, and at first it appeared that he had won the electoral vote as well. But Republicans disputed returns in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, and only after lengthy and delicate debate by a congressionally appointed commission and backroom promises involving the removal of federal troops from the three states still up for grabs was it officially determined that Hayes, who, until the last minute, expected to lose, had won the election by 185 electoral votes to 184.
As the suspense finally came to a close, Hay wrote to Adee, “I shall never . . . run for any office. . . . The depredation is beyond computing.” Two years later, he would be sorely tempted to change his mind.
In the meantime, he had reservations about Rutherford Hayes. A brainy lawyer, brave soldier (wounded four times), and long-laboring party man, Hayes nonetheless lacked the magnetism of Hay’s first choice, Blaine. Yet Whitelaw Reid had thrown the weight of the Tribune behind Hayes, and William Dean Howells had written Hayes’s campaign biography. And so Hay finally paid his respects to his fellow Ohioan. He sent Hayes a gold ring into which he had cast a strand of hair from the head of George Washington, a relic he had obtained from the son of Alexander Hamilton. Hayes was extremely touched by this talismanic link to the nation’s first president. “It will be difficult to wear it at all times,” the president-elect told Hay, “but I shall prize it, and will wear it on special occasions if not constantly.”
For the past twelve years—four of Andrew Johnson and eight of Grant—Hay had wanted nothing to do with the White House and its residents. Now, by giving Rutherford Hayes his blessing, he was hinting none too subtly that he would not mind being invited back.
CHRISTMAS THAT YEAR WAS especially cheery. The new baby was thriving, with lungs “like Stentor” and an appetite “like Gargantua,” and Clara had come through her confinement as well as ever. They loved being in their own house, with their own cook and nurses for the children. Hay had begun collecting art, a passion that would continue the rest of his life. One of the first pieces he acquired was a sketch from Albert Bierstadt, and on December 19 he sent a telegram to Whitelaw Reid, asking his friend to bid as much as $500 on an oil by Winslow Homer that was up for auction in New York. They were as secure and satisfied as any family could hope to be.
Then, on December 29, fortune turned upside down. At seven thirty that night, the Pacific Express from New York crawled westward along the Lake Shore Railway into the teeth of one of northeast Ohio’s infamously ferocious snowstorms. The train—two engines pulling eleven cars—was two hours behind schedule as it approached the bridge over Ashtabula Creek. The first engine was nearly across when the bridge gave way at the center, spilling the second engine and all of the cars seventy feet into the creek bed. Of the nearly two hundred passengers and crew, ninety-two died—most from the direct impact, others from the fires ignited by the stoves in each car. All told, it was the worst rail disaster in U.S. history.
The following day, even before all the bodies had been recovered, a coroner’s jury began investigating the cause of the tragedy. A few facts were known already. The iron I-beams that buckled had been cast by the Stones’ Cleveland Rolling Mill Company. The bridge was constructed using the Howe truss system, developed from a patent purchased more than twenty years earlier by carpenter Amasa Stone, now the principal owner of the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway. Soon enough the jury and the public learned that the stoves that had overturned, burning many passengers alive, were not the self-extinguishing model required by state law.
CHAPTER 8
Roses in a Glue-Factory
When John Hay left New York for Cleveland, he anticipated a life as husband, father, and gentleman of letters, comfortably removed from the hurly-burly of politics and deadlines. While it was never his intention to detach entirely from the affairs of the world, he surely did not expect the world to disturb his peace so soon.
In mid-January 1877, Amasa Stone and the Lake Shore Railway’s chief engineer, Charles Collins, were called before the Ohio legislature to testify on the Ashtabula bridge’s construction and the cause of the collapse. Stone defended the bridge as “very perfect” and insisted that the disaster was caused by the derailment of the second engine and not by any flaws in the design or the manufacture of the iron. He also scoffed at the notion that stoves on Lake Shore trains were any less safe than the so-called self-extinguishing models stipulated by law.
Charles Collins was not so self-assured in his defense. The night after answering the questions of the legislative committee, he went to bed and put a bullet through
his brain.
Two months later, a jury impaneled by the Ashtabula coroner concluded its inquiry. “Mr. Stone had great confidence in his own abilities,” the jury prefaced, “and believed he could build and had built a structure which would prove the crowning glory of an active life and an enduring monument to his name.” However, Stone’s method, employing cast iron in place of stone and wood, as called for in the original Howe truss design, was condemned in the report as “an experiment that ought never to have been tried or trusted to span so broad and so deep a chasm.” For this recklessness the jury blamed the railway—“which, by its executive officer, planned and erected this bridge.”
The Lake Shore eventually paid more than $500,000 in damages, a hefty penalty in those days, but the price incurred by its founder and chief stockholder was in some respects more staggering. Long before the Ashtabula disaster, a cynical American public had come to assume that the railroads that crisscrossed the continent had been built to line the pockets of crooked men; now came proof that these men were not just robbers but killers as well. This, anyway, was the hue and cry of the preachers and pamphleteers who moralized on the horror of December 29. It mattered little that a subsequent study discovered flaws in one of the bridge’s bearing blocks and exonerated Stone’s use of iron trusses. By then his vilification was complete.
To distance him from public attention and to restore his battered spirits, Stone’s wife and daughter Flora took him to Europe. In his absence, Hay gamely pledged to look after Stone’s business affairs, a responsibility that proved to be more nerve-wracking than either man could have anticipated.
During the four years that followed the Panic of 1873, railroads had slashed the wages of employees, even while continuing to pay healthy dividends to stockholders. Finally, on July 16, 1877, a group of workers on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad went on strike to protest a 10 percent pay cut. Their action sparked the first widespread labor uprising in the nation’s history. Over the next two weeks, strikes shut down dozens of railroads across the eastern half of the country. Militias reinforced by federal troops met the rocks and clubs of strikers with bullets and bayonets, killing and wounding hundreds in Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. Millions of dollars in engines, rolling stock, and buildings were destroyed.
Workers in the Lake Shore shop in Cleveland joined the strike on July 23, seeking a 20 percent wage increase. Like most men of his class and income, Hay blamed international conspiracies and demagoguing labor organizers for putting “the very devil . . . into the lower class of working men.” He also was frustrated by the fecklessness of the army and local militias. “There is nowhere any firm nucleus of authority,” he wrote to Amasa Stone, keeping his father-in-law abreast of the trouble in Cleveland. For the time being, the situation was calm, he advised, but “[t]he town is full of thieves and tramps waiting and hoping for a riot, but not daring to begin it themselves. If there was any attempt to enforce the law, I believe the town would be in ashes in six hours. . . . A few shots fired by our militia company would ensure their own destruction and that of the city.” If the situation worsened, he told Stone, “I shall send Clara and the babies away out of danger . . . and keep house myself.”
But in Cleveland no spark ever ignited. In an extraordinary display of moderation, striking Lake Shore workers agreed to respect and protect all railroad property and to abstain from intoxicating liquors during the trouble. By August 3, they returned to work, with no loss of property and no blood shed. (And later that fall they received a wage increase.)
Hay breathed a sigh of relief, although he remained shaken and disappointed by the country’s apparent polarization. “The prospects of labor and capital both seem gloomy,” he wrote to his father-in-law. “I am thankful you did not see and hear what took place during the strikes. You were saved a very painful experience of human folly and weakness.” Soon he would have much more to say on this subject in his novel, The Bread-Winners, set in a fictitious city that was Cleveland in all but name.
In the meantime, he hastened to assure Stone, “All your investments look reasonably safe and snug. I make no new ones except with ample margins.”
AFTER WEATHERING THE ASHTABULA disaster, the strike, and two years in Cleveland, Hay itched to get away. Not that he hadn’t made good and lasting friends in Cleveland—his round table, the Vampires Club, became his version of the Century or the Lotos—but he nonetheless felt the urge to mingle with eastern men, whom he regarded as the true arbiters of American civilization. To be sure, in the late nineteenth century, great wealth and great men were made in Cleveland, but it was also disappointingly true that too few great men from elsewhere came to visit. For stimulating social, political, and intellectual intercourse, Clevelanders of Hay’s refinement, a stratum he regarded as sparse, felt compelled to venture afield, to New York, Washington, or Europe.
In late January 1878, Hay and Clara went to Washington for several weeks. The primary purpose of the trip was to meet with Nicolay and go through the trove of papers that Robert Lincoln had entrusted to their care. For Hay, some of the material was so redolent and revealing that it gave him pause about his own trail of correspondence. “Burn all my letters as soon as read,” he commanded Nicolay, only half-facetiously. “My observations show this is the only safe way. I want my biographer to be restricted to official documents.”
It was the right time to be in the capital. January and February, the period between New Year’s and Lent, were “the season,” and with Grant gone at last, Hay looked forward to rubbing shoulders with the new Republican establishment. On February 2, he and Clara attended a reception at the White House, a sober affair, like all recent White House events; Mrs. Hayes, nicknamed “Lemonade Lucy,” forbade alcohol on the premises. That same night, the Hays made the rounds of several other receptions, dropping by the houses of James Blaine, now a senator, and Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward, son of Hay’s mentor, William Seward, who had died in 1872. Later he and Clara were invited to dinner at the house of Henry and Clover Adams. Whether he realized as much, a new chapter in his life had just begun.
EXCEPT FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN, no other person—certainly not John George Nicolay or Whitelaw Reid, nor Theodore Roosevelt, perhaps not even Clara—played so important a role in Hay’s life as did Henry Adams. Once they made each other’s acquaintance, it was as if they had been friends forever. Theirs would not be a case of one person finishing the other’s sentences—they disagreed too often for that ever to occur—or of one completing the other in any way whatsoever. They were both very independent; they respected each other’s privacy and withheld many secrets. Yet when one was in the presence of the other, he gave him his full attention, a form of recognition afforded to no one else, to the point that the two men seemed almost to fill the space around each other, an atmosphere infused when they occupied the same room or when they exchanged letters, which they did by the score. For reasons that no one but they fully understood, and not even they articulated, Adams was the person in whose company Hay felt most himself. And Adams, the more irascible and phlegmatic of the two, recognized in Hay an admirable peer who consented to put up with him just as he was.
They were the same age, though Adams, prematurely bald and gray, looked older. He was slightly shorter, too, but, contrary to his persona as a drawing-room prig, he was athletic of build, with “an air of self-contained strength.” They had met earlier in London and perhaps also in Paris. Since then, Adams, like Hay, had made a name for himself as a writer. In 1870, the same year Hay joined the Tribune, Adams accepted a position as professor of history at Harvard and assumed the editorship of the North American Review. Their list of mutual friends was lengthy and impressive: Clarence King, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and a great many statesmen. Moreover, they each possessed extraordinary insight into the American presidency: Hay through his time with Lincoln, Adams as the great-grandson of John Adams and grandson of John Quincy Adams.
They both were giving Washington another cha
nce. Adams had spent years abroad, mostly in London, and as a Brahmin and a congenital snob in nearly all respects, he had declared the capital “outside the social pale”—a city with “no monde, no demi-monde, no drives, no splendor.” As best he could tell, “[n]o literary or scientific man, no artist, no gentleman . . . had ever lived there.” Anyone who was attracted to the place was either “an adventurer,” “an office-seeker,” or “a person of deplorably bad judgment.”
Now, however, Adams had a good reason to be in Washington. He had undertaken to write the biography of Albert Gallatin, secretary of the Treasury under Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, after which he would begin on what he expected to be his grand oeuvre, thorough histories of the Madison and Jefferson administrations. For all of these, he would require access to papers archived in the capital.
To their surprise, Adams and his wife, Marian, better known as Clover, found the capital quite livable. The activity they enjoyed most was looking down their noses at the world, and in Washington the opportunities for dour spectatorship were never-ending. And whatever monde they found lacking, they created for themselves. Clover instituted five-o’clock tea in the handsome house on H Street they rented from the philanthropist and art collector William Corcoran, at which she and Adams suffered as few fools as was possible in a town perpetually rife with them. “We have had a very cheerful winter in Washington,” Adams admitted to an English friend. “We have had all the society we wished. . . . Our little dinners of six and eight were as pleasant as any I ever was at even in London. And Washington has an advantage over other capitals that a single house counts for more than half a dozen elsewhere; there are so few of them.” Continuing with his stuffy praise, he observed, “Washington is not very unlike the north of Italy in its climate, malaria included, so that I expect it to become one day or another a favorite winter watering-place.”
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