All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Clara Hay’s place in the picture is more difficult to discern, simply because none of her letters from this period survives and only occasionally is she mentioned in the letters of the Adamses. “Mrs. Hay is a handsome woman—very—but never speaks,” Clover remarked when they first met, adding that Clara’s husband “chats for two.” The two wives were in many respects opposites. Clara had provided her husband with three healthy and delightful children; but, as one of her friends in Cleveland confided, she was not an abundant source of “mental stimulus.” She remained a devout Presbyterian, steadfastly observant of the Sabbath, while the Adamses and Hay took little interest in church. Since the birth of Clara’s children, the author of “Literature versus Housekeeping” had inclined toward the latter, and, while she still retained “a serene and classic beauty,” motherhood improved neither her figure nor her “versatility and gayety of manner,” acknowledged another friend. When asked what sort of atmosphere Clara created, Clarence King was said to have remarked, “She is not an atmosphere; she is a climate”—albeit a climate calm, sweet, and temperate.

  As for King, he had left Washington before the 1880 election, returning the following February just long enough to resign from the U.S. Geological Survey. Although he, the Hays, and the Adamses would see one another many times thereafter in smaller combinations, the four short weeks that they mingled in Washington was the longest the five of them were ever together in one place.

  THE TALK OF THE town was a new novel, Democracy, a lampoon of Washington courtship and corruption. The book had been published anonymously, and the identity of the author became the object of delicious speculation—and a source of great amusement to Henry Adams, from whose desk the story had sprung.

  The leading character of Democracy, Madeleine Lee, moves to Washington “to learn how the machinery of government worked, and what was the quality of men that controlled it.” She is quickly attracted to the “Prairie Giant,” Illinois senator Silas P. Ratcliffe, leader of his party (unnamed, but plainly Republican). The scales fall from Madeleine’s eyes when she learns that Ratcliffe has received a $100,000 bribe from a steamship company. Beneath his senatorial grandeur, she perceives a “moral lunatic” who “talked about virtue and vice as a man who is colour-blind talks about red and green.”

  Readers of Democracy, of which there were many thousands in both the United States and Europe, easily recognized the resemblance between Ratcliffe and “the Plumed Knight,” Senator James Blaine of Maine, who had been exposed in the Crédit Mobilier scandal and was later accused of receiving $64,000 from the Union Pacific Railroad, a charge he never entirely disproved but somehow talked his way out of on the floor of the Senate.

  Adams’s antipathy for the senator was long-standing. In the presidential campaign of 1876, he and a band of reformers had favored almost anyone as an alternative to Blaine. When the Republican nomination was won by neither Adams nor Blaine, but by “a third-rate nonentity,” Rutherford Hayes, Adams drew some consolation from at least having succeeded in “barring the road to our opponents.” Yet, he groused, “If any storm of popular disgust”—toward Blaine in particular—“is impending, no sign of it yet darkens the air. We shall keep at it, and good will come in time.”

  His scorn carried forward to Democracy, although he revealed his authorship to no one besides Clover and his publisher, Henry Holt. When the book first appeared on April Fool’s Day 1880, Adams was in Europe, which helped remove him from suspicion for the time being. His brother Charles sent him a copy, pronouncing it “coarse” but reckoning Henry might be interested in it, anyway. Clover’s father thought he saw something of his daughter’s mordancy in its pages; she took the compliment but did not divulge the secret. Clarence King and John Hay, eminent wits of Washington society, also came under scrutiny, to the point that Hay told Clover that he had “given up denying it” and King found himself shunned by Blaine. That Hay would be a suspect did not make much sense since he remained a Blaine believer, convinced that the earlier charges of corruption against Blaine had been the absurd and malicious fabrication of Democratic scoundrels eager to derail the senator’s bid for the White House. Nevertheless, when Hay and King at last learned the author’s identity, they took great merriment in perpetuating the mystery.

  Returning to Washington in October, Adams was at once gratified and appalled by the trenchancy of his satire, for not only had he taken to task malefactors of the recent past, but he had also foreseen with uncanny accuracy the next sordid chapter of partisan intrigue about to grip the country. In Democracy, Senator Ratcliffe holds a grudge against the president-elect, who has beaten him out of the nomination by three votes. Ratcliffe then brings to bear all of his guile to gain appointment as secretary of the Treasury—this scenario spelled out and published well before Blaine lost the nomination to Garfield and then maneuvered to become secretary of state. Next Ratcliffe becomes locked in a war with the president-elect over patronage that he, as “chief” of “Clan Ratcliffe,” feels is his to control: “At the thought that [the Clan’s] harvest of foreign missions and consulates, department-bureaus, custom-house and revenue offices, postmasterships, Indian agencies and army and navy contracts, might now be wrung from their grasp by the selfish greed of a mere accidental intruder—a man whom nobody wanted and everybody ridiculed”—this too published before Garfield’s dark horse nomination—“their natures rebelled, and they felt that such things must not be.”

  In the end, Ratcliffe gets his comeuppance, but Adams, hardly a romantic, makes clear that American democracy is intrinsically venal. Expose a Ratcliffe, or a Blaine, and a new scoundrel will always step to the fore—someone, as would soon be seen, like New York’s powerful senator, Roscoe Conkling.

  IN NOVEMBER, GARFIELD PREVAILED easily in the Electoral College but won the popular count by the merest margin of 2,000 votes. The big-state bosses, most notably Roscoe Conkling, had come through for him—which, by the rules of the game, meant they expected a say in the next cycle of presidential appointments. The worry now among those who supported Garfield but loathed Conkling’s brand of cronyism was that the president-elect would not be tough enough to resist the persuasions that would soon be brought to bear on him. Before the election, Hay had written to Garfield, exhorting him to stand tall. “Beware of your own generosity! On the 2nd of November, you . . . are to be made our President. I believe it is to be an administration full of glory and benefit to the country—and it will be glorious and fruitful just in the proportion that it is your own.”

  To Reid, Hay was more blunt and unusually feisty: “[A]s you will see Garfield before I do, I hope you will inoculate him with the gall which I fear he lacks. . . . The time has come to be vindictive. We do well to be angry. I am through, for one, with being goodnatured with those coarse grained blackguards. They are a bad lot through and through.”

  When Hay had first accepted his job at the State Department, he anticipated remaining until the end of Hayes’s term, then returning to Cleveland to work on the Lincoln biography. He felt comfortable advising Garfield on his appointments, yet harbored no ambition for himself. Much to his surprise and discomfort, on December 10 Garfield made him a rather unusual offer. He invited Hay to join the administration as his private secretary, but not in the capacity in which Nicolay and he had served under Lincoln. Garfield wanted to redefine the position to make Hay more of a private counsel. He proposed, rather vaguely, to raise his rank “at least to that of the Asst Secs of the Departments.”

  As was his habit, Hay looked for reasons to say no. And this time he did so. “To do a thing well,” he wrote Garfield on Christmas Day, “a man must take some pleasure in it, and while the prospect of spending a year or so in intimate relations with you and Mrs. Garfield affords a temptation which is almost more than I can resist, the other half of the work, the contact with the greed and selfishness of office seekers and bulldozing Congressmen is unspeakably repulsive to me. . . . The constant contact with envy, meanness, ignorance, and the swini
sh selfishness which ignorance breeds, needs a stronger heart and a more obedient nervous system than I can boast. I am not going back on Democracy. It is a good thing—the hope and salvation of the world. I mean simply that I am not fit for public office.”

  He and Clara remained in Washington until after Garfield’s inauguration in March 1881. Though he had bowed out of the running for a spot in the administration, he continued to make suggestions to Garfield on whom he should appoint and, more crucially, on how to play Roscoe Conkling, who was demanding outright control of all New York patronage. Despite the scoldings of Henry Adams, Hay lobbied, successfully, for James Blaine as secretary of state. And he was every bit as delighted when Garfield tapped Robert Lincoln to be secretary of war.

  Roscoe Conkling was accustomed to getting his way. Women tended to melt before his seductions, and men knew better than to cross the six-foot-three senator who worked out daily at a punching bag. Even so, when it came to appeasing Conkling, the professorial but war-tested Garfield would go only so far. In February, the New York boss told Garfield in no uncertain terms that he wanted the New York congressman and banker Levi Morton as secretary of the Treasury. Instead, Garfield offered Morton secretary of the navy and finally, after Morton’s demurral, minister to France. Conkling was livid.

  Garfield was indeed showing more gall than expected. By far the biggest patronage job in New York was that of customs collector for the port, a position that controlled fifteen hundred jobs and handled—usually crookedly—millions of dollars in tariffs and duties. In 1878, President Hayes had removed Chester Arthur as collector for his lax oversight; but with Arthur now redeemed as vice president, Conkling regarded the customshouse as his diadem to dispense as he wished. Garfield felt otherwise, giving it, without consulting Conkling, to William Robertson, a New York state senator who had worked to derail Conkling’s juggernaut to nominate Grant at the Republican Convention. When Conkling learned of Garfield’s choice, he vowed then and there to block the appointment. He would show the “trifling” Ohioan who was boss.

  But not if Whitelaw Reid and the Tribune had anything to say about it. Reid’s disdain for Ulysses S. Grant now became his campaign to thwart Roscoe Conkling, a crusade in which he had capable allies. One was Secretary of State Blaine. Another was Hay, who instead of going back to Cleveland, unexpectedly agreed to return to the bare-knuckled precincts of partisan journalism.

  Reid, at the ripe age of forty-three, had decided to put bachelorhood behind him. In April, he married Elisabeth Mills, the twenty-two-year-old daughter of Darius Odgen Mills, a wealthy California banker and financier who now lived on Fifth Avenue in New York. Reid, whose salary and shrewd acquisition of Tribune stock already ensured him a comfortable standard of living, was suddenly, like Hay, a millionaire. Reid and his bride intended to embark on a long honeymoon through Europe in May. In his absence, he wanted his most trusted friend to steer the newspaper.

  This time Hay could not beg off, though of course he tried. “I find myself low in nerves, irritable, excitable, reduced. . . . I must go home and take things easily,” he pleaded. Reid assured him that the workload would be minimal and that Hay would hardly need to come into the office. And besides, “light employment . . . will keep you from brooding, keep you alert without burdening or tiring you. . . . To come here is the best thing for your health.” Reid made the job sound like the Rest Cure.

  By the first week of May, with Clara and the children reestablished in Cleveland, Hay had moved into Reid’s house on Lexington Avenue and into his office in the Tribune building. The war against Conkling escalated immediately. “I write only to say I am with you to the end in this matter,” Hay assured Garfield on his first day at the Tribune.

  For Garfield, the end would come all too soon.

  CHAPTER 9

  Scorpions

  The pending appointment of William Robertson as collector of customs for the port of New York was seen as nothing less than a toe-to-toe duel between Senator Conkling and President Garfield, with well-armed seconds lobbing taunts and huzzahs at the two combatants. At stake was control of the Republican Party. “I wish to say to the President that in my judgment this is the turning point of his whole Administration,” Whitelaw Reid wrote to Hay before the latter left Washington. “If he surrenders now, Conkling is President for the rest of his term and Garfield becomes a laughing stock. . . . [T]here is no safe or honorable way out now but to go straight on. . . . The least wavering would be fatal.”

  Conkling was playing for keeps as well. Since the election, he had not let Chester Arthur out of his sight, rooming with him in Washington, paying for his meals, and plotting with him over patronage. Arthur’s loyalty was hardly a secret; he might be Garfield’s vice president, but he was Roscoe Conkling’s lackey. Also under Conkling’s sway was New York’s newly elected junior senator, Thomas Platt, who would soon wear the spiteful nickname “Me-Too.” Together they figured to exert plenty of influence in the Senate to block Robertson and humiliate the president.

  Garfield had his own guardian in Secretary of State Blaine, who made a point to be at the president’s side on the occasions the vice president was permitted in the White House. A majority of the newspapers in the country were rooting for Garfield, too, though none more vociferously than the Tribune.

  If Conkling thought that the Tribune would modulate its attack during Reid’s absence, he was sorely mistaken. Hay took up the cudgel against the bully senator with righteous ferocity. “Well, which did the Republican voters decide to trust, and pledge themselves to uphold, Roscoe Conkling or James A. Garfield?” he asked on May 4. “Is it not the business of Republican voters to see that their Senators, in their chronic hunger for patronage and power which has become the curse of political life, do not rob a President of his chances of usefulness? It seems that the issue is joined. If the people want government by Senatorial bosses, let them countenance by their silence the attempt of Senators to usurp a power which does not belong to them.”

  The editorial was unsigned, but anyone who knew Hay’s “Balance Sheet” speech recognized the rhetoric: “Have the people lost all that they shouted for, has the Republican party found its fruits of victory turn to Dead sea apples . . . ?”

  From then on, the salvos were unrelenting. In an exchange of letters that Hay later tried to have expunged from official files, he and Garfield shared their thoughts on the most effective way to vanquish Conkling. “Give me a line when you can and it shall be my marching orders,” Hay beseeched the president, to which Garfield responded, “You are handling the work with admirable force & discretion. . . . Shall be glad to hear from you at any time.”

  All the while, Reid followed the Tribune’s coverage from Europe and encouraged Hay to keep the heat on Conkling. Hay dutifully obliged. On May 14, the Tribune was downright brutal: Conkling was no better than “a patriot of the flesh-pots.” His statesmanship was that of “the feed-trough.” And there was not the slightest evidence that “his soul has ever risen above pap and patronage.”

  Around this time, John Russell Young and Henry Watterson, two newspapermen who had known Hay since the Civil War, paid a visit to the Tribune office and were surprised by the transformation that had come over their easygoing friend. “We found little joyousness about him,” Young recalled. “It was a time of political sensitiveness, Republicans at war, the battle fought as the English fight in the Soudan—no prisoners, no quarter. Hay entered into the business with Highland gravity and courage. . . . [He] actually believed in the sincerity of the conflict, and that there were real issues, that it was something more than the mere politicians’ brawl. The Tribune was never so fierce even in Mr. Greeley’s masterful days. The rule of the paper under Reid was that of whips, with Mr. Hay it was that of scorpions.”

  Throughout the spring, Conkling, Arthur, and Platt continued their efforts to stymie the appointment of William Robertson. When their schemes fell short and it became apparent that Robertson would be approved, Conkling resorted to the
most desperate of acts: on May 16 he gave up his seat in the Senate, and Me-Too Platt did the same. Their tactic, extreme as it seemed, was to withdraw just long enough for the New York legislature to reelect them; emboldened by a fresh grip on the New York machine, they figured to return to Washington and settle the score with Garfield. Immediately upon resigning, Conkling and Platt decamped for Albany to set the scheme in motion.

  Conkling’s adversaries were shocked, elated—and cynical. “There is certainly not a statesman in America who excels our Senator in getting into quarrels without cause and out of them without dignity,” clucked the Tribune’s lead editorial of May 17. Bearing the telltale erudition of Hay, the column compared Conkling and Platt to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and their resignation to a French farce in which a man leaves his mistress in a rage but makes sure to leave behind his umbrella “as a pretext for return and a means of reconciliation.”

  Two days after the senators’ exit, their erstwhile colleagues approved Robertson as New York customs collector. The reinstatement of Conkling and Platt was not so readily accomplished. For the rest of the month and throughout June, the New York legislature voted time and again without achieving the requisite majority to affirm Conkling, Platt, or any of the other contenders who dared to crowd the ballot. With each round, in fact, Conkling and Platt’s popularity sank lower.