All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Throughout the campaign, Hay enjoyed sparring with Henry Adams, who was more liberal, more Democratic in voice and principle, though it was beneath him to take an active role in politics at any level. “[Y]ou will be so happy and gay over the nomination of your fellow-mugwump Cleveland that there will be no enduring you,” Hay teased his friend before the Democratic Convention. “Well, go to! be as happy as you please. You can never take away from me the blessed memory of four years of Harrison.” The week before the election, Hay retreated to Winous Point and braced for the bad news. The day after Cleveland’s victory, he sent Adams a dozen ducks and a bitter lament: “Woe is me for my unhappy country, which is to struggle under the double affliction of a stuffed prophet and a stuffed ballot box.” But with Hay and Adams, friendship trumped partisanship no matter what. “I love you in spite of your politics and your dishonest victory,” Hay signed off.

  His message of condolence to Whitelaw Reid was not so jocular. “I will not waste words in attempting to expose my deep disgust and grief,” he told him. “At present my chief sorrow is that you and Mrs. Reid are not to be our neighbors in Washington.” And he asked, “Is it not horrible—that fat and fatuous freak, bellowing his inane self-laudations in the White House for four more years, amid the amens of enraptured Mugwumps? The gorge rises at it.”

  THE NEW YEAR GOT off to a poor start. On January 27, 1893, James Blaine died of a heart attack; Hay was among his pallbearers. A week later, Hay learned that his mother, who had just reached her ninetieth birthday, was failing. His brother Leonard advised him not to attempt the trip west. For the time being, she was comfortable and well cared for by their sister, Mary. “But you know how it is with old people,” Leonard wrote. “The light grows dim then flickers then goes out suddenly.” She lasted ten more days. When Hay sent word that he could not possibly arrive in time for the funeral, Leonard hastened to console his brother’s regret and sorrow: “[Y]ou must not blame yourself for anything that even the most distorted fancy could picture as a neglect. You have done your whole duty as a son & brother to all of us three & four times over.”

  Within a week, Hay was called upon to perform another duty—one that would have a direct bearing on his future. While passing through Buffalo en route to New York to give a Washington’s Birthday speech, William McKinley, who was now governor of Ohio, was handed a telegram informing him that an old friend, Robert Walker, had gone broke in the tin-can manufacturing business—which, incidentally, was an industry protected and nurtured by the McKinley Tariff. A pandemic of insolvency was on the verge of enfeebling America, caused by overzealous expansion, easy credit, and blind optimism. Over the next three years, dozens of railroads, hundreds of banks, and thousands of businesses would fail. One of the earliest to do so was Robert Walker’s in Youngstown, Ohio.

  Walker had helped McKinley through law school and his early political campaigns. In gratitude, McKinley had co-signed several bank notes for his friend, and each time that Walker asked him for another signature, McKinley naively assumed that he was signing renewals, when in fact the notes were entirely new. McKinley figured he was accountable for only a few thousand dollars; by the time he received the telegram in Buffalo, the amount exceeded $100,000, more than he could ever hope to reconcile. McKinley, too, would be obliged to declare bankruptcy. Moreover, the embarrassing enormity of his gaffe would surely derail his campaign for reelection as governor in November and snuff any hope he had of running for president in 1896. That is, unless . . .

  Immediately a group of McKinley’s most powerful supporters stepped in to make him whole again, led and cajoled by the governor’s chief political booster, strategist, and fund-raiser, Mark Hanna. One of the people Hanna called upon in Cleveland was John Hay’s brother-in-law, Samuel Mather. Mather promised $5,000 to the fund and then wrote Hay, asking if he would help share the load.

  Hay needed no prompting. By the time he received Mather’s request, he had already sent McKinley $1,000 directly, unsolicited. He now volunteered to pay $2,000 of Mather’s commitment and mentioned that he might be good for more. Other big industrialists wound up giving as much or more than Hay—Henry Clay Frick $2,000; George Pullman $5,000; Philip Armour $5,000—but Hay’s checks were two of the first, and his touch was more personal, a kindness that McKinley never forgot.

  In short order, the money was raised and McKinley was relieved of his debt. Rather than regard McKinley as a scofflaw or beggar or as too inept to manage the affairs of the state, the voters of Ohio expressed resounding sympathy for his plight and in November reelected him by the greatest margin of victory since the Civil War. “I have no words with which to adequately thank you,” McKinley wrote Hay from the governor’s office. “You must interpret my deep sense of obligation and appreciation. How can I ever repay you & other dear friends?” Hay had no immediate answer, but soon enough he would think of something.

  THE BIG EXCITEMENT IN the spring of 1893 was not the McKinley debt, the second coming of Grover Cleveland, or even the darkening economic picture, but the World’s Columbian Exposition: the Chicago World’s Fair. Anyone who could afford it, and many who could not, had to see the neoclassical phantasm of the White City that had sprung up, seemingly overnight, on the shore of Lake Michigan. Farmers and small-town shopkeepers who still lived without electricity and heretofore had traveled scarcely farther than the county fair were beguiled by the vast pavilions of inventions, entire villages inhabited by aborigines from every corner of the globe, and a farrago of attractions and confections illuminated by thousands upon thousands of dazzling electric light bulbs. Even cosmopolitan visitors were impressed. Adams, who arrived in May in a private railcar paid for by the Camerons, was overwhelmed by the fair’s immensity and pleasantly surprised by its beauty—“something that the Greeks might have delighted to see, and Venice would have envied.” The Hays went in June and were similarly smitten. “[I]n architectural beauty . . . it so far transcended anything which the genius and the devotion of man have ever yet achieved,” Hay exclaimed to Richard Watson Gilder.

  On June 27, a week after the Hays returned from Chicago, the New York Stock Exchange crashed, and America suddenly appeared as flimsy as the facades of the White City. By the time the collapse came, Hay had already purchased passage to Europe for his family, with the intention of staying for a year—except for Del, who in the fall would enroll in the Westminster School in Dobbs Ferry to prepare for Yale.

  All of Lafayette Square was abroad that summer, or so it seemed. Adams had sailed a few weeks earlier with the Camerons, the widowed Harriet Blaine, and her children. Another of Adams’s fellow passengers was Thomas Bayard, President Cleveland’s ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—the first time the rank of ambassador was assigned to an American foreign minister. The Hays reached London on July 20 and spent two days with Adams before he headed to Scotland. By then the Camerons had already left for Switzerland.

  As the news from America became more dreary, Adams and Cameron both cut their trips short and returned home. “Everyone is in a blue fit of terror,” Adams wrote Lizzie after he was back in Washington, “and each individual thinks himself more ruined than his neighbor.” The only one of their group who seemed not outwardly affected was Hay. Adams wrote Lizzie that their friend was “calm as the Lake of Lucerne.”

  For the next eleven months, the Hays lived a life of leisure and luxury, visiting their good friends Sir John and Lady Clark in Scotland and soaking up the sun and the baths in the South of France. They passed much of the fall in Paris, followed by a month-long sojourn in Spain. Hay read of the American economic and political news from afar, clucking at the missteps and misfeasance of the Cleveland administration in letters to Adams and Reid. For the most part, though, he was content being idle and aloof. Writing to Adams from Paris on New Year’s Day, 1894, he groused amiably: “I am bored out of my sweet life.” To those back home, some of whom were barely hanging on, this sort of grumbling might have sounded a bit like bragging.

  AD
AMS, BLESSEDLY, WAS NOT hurt by the panic as badly as he initially feared. The same could not be said for Clarence King. Even in the best of times, King had made a botch of business. “Every struggle he makes in his world of finance gets him deeper in the mire [and] costs him something of life as well as of money,” Hay had remarked to Adams several years earlier. And to William Dean Howells he had sighed: “A touch of Avarice would have made [King] a Vanderbilt—a touch of plodding industry would have made him anything he chose.” When King was flush, he dashed about Europe, eating and entertaining like a lord and buying art and curiosities with abandon. Hay would eventually compose an ode to King’s acquisitiveness, entitled “A Dream of Bric-À-Brac.” But he and Adams, while admiring King’s exquisite taste, could only shake their heads at his profligacy. When the author and taste-setter John Ruskin sold King two paintings by J.M.W. Turner, King was said to have laughed, “One good Turner deserves another.” Now the paintings, along with a bundle of unredeemable stock certificates in far-flung mines, were pledged to Hay, who, along with Adams, continued to loan money to King with no intention of ever foreclosing, regardless of how much he admired the Turners or how delinquent King was in making good. “He owes nobody except those who will never bother him,” Hay told Adams. “I am in despair about him. I cannot make him do what he ought, even though I offer to stand the racket.”

  The most painful pinch caused by King’s indebtedness was his increasing reluctance to be in their company. “[W]henever I think of you and the splendid work you are carrying through with such solemnity of purpose and conscientiousness of effort,” King told Adams, “I feel that you must regard me with despair and be amazed at the barrenness of my poor life. . . . With all the sense of disappointment and the anger at fate there has grown up a sense of shyness about being much with the only friends I care for—you and Hay. . . . But you must be patient with me, and remember the millstone I wear ’round my neck.”

  King of course had another reason for his shyness, and other undisclosed millstones. In July 1893, three weeks after the stock market crash, his wife, Ada, had given birth to their fourth child. At about that time, King also received word that the National Bank of El Paso, which he had founded and in which he was a principal stockholder, had failed. He lost everything, and yet he was too proud to tell Hay or Adams—and he certainly couldn’t tell Ada, who still believed he was a railroad porter. Over the next three months, King fell apart. He let his hair and beard grow shaggy, and his clothes became seedy. On Sunday, October 29, visitors to the Lion House in Central Park noticed a man acting agitated, enraged. When police intervened, he gave his name, Clarence King, and his address, first the Union League Club and then Newport, where his mother lived. No mention of the street where he lived with Ada and their children.

  Arrested for disorderly conduct, King was committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum for the Insane in Harlem Heights. The diagnosis was nervous depression, brought on by his recent financial setback and aggravated by an inflammation of the spine. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was summoned from Philadelphia, but, rather than prescribe his customary Rest Cure of fresh air and a rural setting, he recommended that King stay on at Bloomingdale, where he remained for the next two months, without telling a soul about his bipolar life, and presumably without telling his wife of his whereabouts.

  Adams kept Hay informed of King’s recovery, and Hay was consoled to learn that the two were planning a trip to the West Indies after King’s release, anticipated for early January 1894. Yet Hay was frustrated that he had heard nothing from King directly. “It would seem incredible to anyone but you,” Hay complained to Adams from Paris, that “King has not written me a letter for a year and has never given me the least hint of his affairs except that they were desperate. I have sent him money and securities sufficient, I hoped, to clear him, but have never been informed that he received them, much less what he made of them. I am as much worried over him as if he were my child, but I do not know what to do to help him, in face of his obstinate silence.” In a subsequent letter, he urged Adams to “jolly” King up in the West Indies and then bring him to Washington. “Now that his affairs have gone to everlasting smash we can set him up in a bijou of a house.” Hay had no idea how implausible this proposition would sound to King, aka James Todd.

  KING WAS NOT THE only friend to fall by the wayside that winter. After New Year’s, Hay, Clara, and Helen made their way to Italy, leaving Alice and Clarence in the care of a tutor outside Paris. They were in Rome at the end of the month when Hay read in a newspaper of the death of Constance Woolson in Venice.

  For all her popularity as a short story writer and then as a novelist, Woolson had led a solitary life. One of the few people with whom she gained a modicum of closeness was Henry James. She was an ardent admirer of James’s work and had come to Europe to meet him and, to the best of her ability, emulate his Continental lifestyle. She had tracked him down in Florence while James was beginning The Portrait of a Lady, and he kindly introduced her to the Renaissance city and its stirring architecture, galleries, and statuary. Thenceforth they were loyal friends and correspondents. James described her to an aunt as “old-maidish” and “intense,” but she was grateful for his artistic kinship and clearly would have welcomed something more. While he gently criticized her prose for its preoccupation with “tender sentiment,” she encouraged him to create a female character “who can feel a real love.” Her wish was never fulfilled. In the fall of 1893, she was living in Venice when her “deadly enemy,” depression, took hold. In January 1894, she came down with influenza and perhaps typhoid, and in the early morning of the twenty-fourth she leapt (or fell, as her family chose to believe) to her death from her window to the cobblestones below. She was fifty-three years old.

  Because Woolson was a relative of Samuel Mather, the Hays felt a special responsibility to help with her funeral and burial. When Hay read of the tragedy in the paper, he telegrammed the American legation in Venice and offered to pay all expenses for shipment of Woolson’s body to Rome, where she would be buried in the Protestant Cemetery, according to her wishes.

  In the meantime, he and the rector of St. Paul’s, the American church in Rome, went to the cemetery and found a spot near the graves of Shelley and Keats. “She is worthy company for the best and brightest that sleep around here,” Hay wrote Mather. “Her grave will be a shrine for the intelligence of the world for many years to come.” To Adams, who understood suicide better than most, Hay confided, “We buried poor Constance Woolson . . . a thoroughly good and most unhappy woman with a great talent bedevilled by disordered nerves. She did much good and no harm in her life, and had not as much happiness as a convict.”

  Henry James, who was in England when he learned of Woolson’s death, was stricken with remorse. “Miss Woolson was so valued and close a friend of mine and had been so for so many years,” he wrote Hay in Rome, “that I feel an intense nearness in participation in every circumstance of her tragic end.” Even so, he elected not to make the long journey to the funeral.

  HAY, CLARA, AND HELEN stayed on in Rome until early spring, then began working their way north, first to Florence and next to Venice, where they visited the house that Constance Woolson had rented near the Grand Canal. From there they proceeded to Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, and finally arrived in Paris at the beginning of April to retrieve fourteen-year-old Alice and nine-year-old Clarence, who by now were speaking passable French.

  They started for London on May 2 to be in time for Helen’s “first great day of grandeur”—her presentation to Queen Victoria. Writing to Whitelaw Reid, Hay tried to make light of the occasion. “My womankind have just driven off to the Buckingham Palace in gowns whose vastness and splendor abashed me,” he complained lamely. “H[elen] thought she would like to be presented and Mrs. H[ay] and I, who for 20 years have avoided that function, weakly yielded and are swept into the vortex.”

  Perhaps he had forgotten Clara’s great disappointment at having missed her first drawing room in 1883 due
to her father’s worsening health. Hay, too, rarely passed up a chance to make the acquaintance of great and better Britons. A week after Helen’s presentation, he dressed “like an ape of Borneo”—in knee breeches and stockings—and himself bowed to the queen.

  As much as he tried to downplay the London season, this was his favorite time of year in a country he had come to regard as almost a second home. He and Clara made another pilgrimage to the Clarks in Scotland, then returned to London for a dizzying round of engagements. They attended a ball at Buckingham Palace. Hay was invited to a dinner at the House of Commons with the prime minister’s son, Herbert Gladstone, the historian and Scottish secretary George Trevelyan, and Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies Sydney Buxton. At a dinner party at Trevelyan’s house, he spent an hour talking to the new foreign secretary, Lord Kimberley. And he and Clara had cards for the Royal Enclosure at Ascot—“the goal of every true Briton’s ambition,” he wrote Samuel Mather.

  By the time they sailed for home at the end of June, Hay was well sated. “I never could have believed that a succession of what used to be pleasures, balls, concerts, shows, and dinner parties could become such a weariness to the flesh,” he sighed, but it was clear that he had relished every minute of his latest English immersion. “They are a dear and simple folk, in some ways—these English,” he observed cheerily to Adams.

  HE COULD NOT HAVE been too worn out by the London carousel, for within a week of getting home he agreed to take a much more grueling journey: this one to Yellowstone National Park with Adams, who suggested that they take Del along, too. Del had excelled in his last year in school and had passed the entrance exams for Yale. He was now six feet tall and a beefy two hundred pounds. A summer riding and camping would harden him for football in the fall. Adams also asked King to join the trip—the ideal companion for such an adventure—but he would not commit. Instead, they were accompanied by Hay’s friend William Phillips—“Bilfilips,” Hay called him—who was an early advocate for the preservation of Yellowstone and, along with Theodore Roosevelt, a founder of the Boone & Crockett Club. The final member of the party was Joseph Iddings, a geologist who knew King and, like Phillips, had spent a number of seasons in Yellowstone.