Initially, they worried that they might not make it past Chicago. While Hay was in Europe, the economic panic had stirred extreme disaffection among the nation’s working class. Earlier in the spring, Jacob Coxey, an eccentric rabble-rouser from Massillon, Ohio, had led an “army” of several hundred unemployed men on a cross-country march to Washington, where they intended to present a list of demands to Congress. Before he could deliver his ultimatum, Coxey was arrested for walking on the grass of the Capitol. Ten days later, a different, more volatile sort of army took to the field: three thousand workers at the Pullman Palace Car Company in Illinois went on strike over low wages and demeaning labor conditions. By the end of June, fifty thousand members of the American Railroad Union, led by Eugene Debs, had walked off the job. Angry strikers stopped trains and destroyed rolling stock, switches, and railyards, until U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney obtained an injunction authorizing federal troops under General Nelson Miles (who happened to be married to Lizzie Cameron’s sister) to impose order. Debs was taken to jail, and by the time Adams and his companions set out for the West on July 17, most of the strikers had returned to work. Ten days earlier, and the Yellowstone expedition might have had to follow a more roundabout route.
They arrived a week later at Mammoth Hot Springs, the north entrance to the park. Yellowstone had been founded in 1872, but until the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1880, few tourists had ready access to its 2 million acres of geysers, waterfalls, and wilderness. By 1894, though, the route was well traveled. Hotels, tent camps, and coaches allowed visitors to make a grand tour of “Wonderland,” as the railroad brochures advertised, providing plenty of spectacle and just enough hardship to make the trip a true adventure.
For the first week, they took in the sights by coach. To Hay’s cosmopolitan eye, nature imitated art, not the other way around. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone compared favorably with Thomas Moran’s inspirational painting of the same scene, which he had first viewed in the Capitol. He also recognized paintings of the park by his old friend Albert Bierstadt. A waterfall was as high as the Washington Monument; an enormous rock, when seen in the right light, was a Sphinx; and a certain spring was twice as big as Rome’s Trevi Fountain.
For a man who purported to have a weak heart and rheumatism, Hay thrived unexpectedly in Yellowstone. An unheated salon in Paris gave him sniffles, but an accidental dunking in frigid Yellowstone Lake seemed only to refresh him. Much of Yellowstone Park is more than eight thousand feet above sea level; yet Hay tramped up hills for better views and slept under frosty skies without complaint.
After touring the park’s Grand Canyon, falls, and lake, the party truly began to rough it. For the next month, they rode horseback through the rugged, densely timbered backcountry, nearly to the Grand Tetons. Led by five guides and packers and pulling a pack string of a dozen horses, they covered more than two hundred miles of “absolutely trackless woods and plains and mountains,” Hay boasted to Flora Mather. “We lived like fighting cocks.”
No one was more impressed by Hay’s grit than Adams, who up until then had seen his friend stroll barely more than a few city blocks. “Hay has become a blooming mountaineer,” Adams wrote Lizzie. “I am quite proud of having dragged [him] through this extravagant mountain nonsense just to show that he can do that sort of thing as well as anyone. . . . As an invalid with constitutional heart-failure, he [is] an abject fraud. I hope he will never try again that bunco-game on us. If he does, whack him up a mountain!”
In his letters to Clara, Hay fairly exulted in his stamina and spirit: “We had a long ride—the route being unknown to any of us & there being no distinct trails. . . . We got off our horses & began our scramble down the mountainside; slipping in the ashy dust, sinking in the boggy grass, sliding and slipping over great fields of snow, we at last got to the bottom. . . . We are living altogether too well.” He fretted that his appetite was so great that he was losing his “sylph-like proportions.” On one of the few layover days, he lounged about camp, reading a biography of Cicero and drinking in the glorious view of the Tetons, which, he attested, “are nearly as tall as Mont Blanc.”
Del, too, seemed to blossom under the rigors of the trail. He hunted elk with the guides, shot grouse, and learned to fly-fish. “Del was a favorite in the camp . . . very good-natured, bright-tempered, cheery and companionable,” Adams reported to one of his nieces, although, “according to his father, [he] will never be fit for doing anything in life.”
AFTER FINISHING OUT THE summer in New Hampshire, followed by a month in Cleveland and at the duck club, Hay at last returned to Washington in late November. He had not been in Lafayette Square in sixteen months and had not laid eyes on Lizzie Cameron since early in 1893. In the fall of that year, he had written to her after her mother’s death: “It is a savage irony of nature that all that charm of yours which brightens every scene you enter, which is a joy to every heart and every eye you come near, is now in this moment of need, of no use to your self. If you could call in one tithe of the happiness you have radiated on others, you would have a reserve sufficient for any use. . . . Love and sympathy mean nothing in real [times of] trouble, but still I must send my love and sympathy.”
Sadly for Hay, Lizzie did not call upon him in her time of need. Yet whatever were the circumstances that kept them apart—their unsynchronous trips to Europe, her sojourns to South Carolina, his to the Fells and Yellowstone, and, what seems more decisive, her gentle but firm request that he not pursue her so intently—he did not stop pining for her company. Though she discouraged him from writing love letters, he found release in verse. In 1893, he published “Love and Music” in Harper’s Monthly:
I gazed upon my love while music smote
The soft night air into glad harmony. . . .
Her form, white-robed, the jewel at her throat,
Her glimmering hands, her dusky, perfumed hair,
Her low, clear brow, her deep, proud, dreaming eyes,
Bent kindly upon me, her worshiper
There is no record of whether Hay showed this particular poem to Lizzie before he published it, but he sent other poems to her directly, for she later mentioned that “I had a pretty collection of Hay’s verses, but he one day asked me for them to revise, and then destroyed them! The only one preserved was the sonnet to me which he published in his last volume of verses.”
The sonnet in question is most likely “Obedience,” which provides a frank assessment of Hay’s ongoing enchantment with Lizzie and the authority she continued to hold over him:
The lady of my love bids me not to love her.
I can but bow obedient to her will;
And so, henceforth, I love her not; but still
I love the lustrous hair that glitters over
Her proud young head; I love the smiles that hover
About her mouth; the lights and shades that fill
Her star-bright eyes; the low, rich tones that thrill
Like thrush-songs gurgling from a vernal cover.
I love the fluttering dimples in her cheek;
Her cheek I love, its soft and tender bloom;
I love her sweet lips and the words they speak,
Words wise or witty, full of joy or doom.
I love her shoes, her gloves, her dainty dress;
And all they clasp, and cling to, and caress.
That Lizzie was indeed the object of “Obedience” is corroborated by a letter Hay wrote her at about the same time, in which he worships her with comparable anatomic specificity: “Never was a body and spirit united on such equal terms. Your mind and character are extraordinary; but not more so than your hair and eyes, your arms, your waist and your dear little feet. How they trot through my dreams, asleep and awake.”
From then on, however, Hay became, if not exactly a tame cat, then at least one who kept his distance. He and Lizzie were both in Washington for the Christmas holidays, but not long after the first of the year, she was off to South Carolina
for the winter. And so the coals were banked, though hardly extinguished—not so far as Hay was concerned.
CHAPTER 13
The English Mission
In the summer of 1895, Hay was content to retreat to the Fells and leave the affairs of the nation and the world to others. Henry Adams had become an outspoken champion of the insurgency against Spanish oppression of Cuba. Senator Don Cameron had waded clumsily, as was his nature, into the Republican debate on which currency standard the party should advocate in the next election. And in crucial states, party bosses commenced the age-old mating dance of bluff and bluster, warning the next batch of presidential suitors that, no matter what position the party eventually took on currency, tariff, or any other issues of the moment, the favor of allegiance must once again be paid in patronage. Meanwhile, Hay wrote to Whitelaw Reid at the end of July, “I am living in the Place-Where-Nothing-Happens. It would be difficult to imagine a life more stagnant than we lead in this rocky solitude.”
For the time being, he made no plans and took on no more writing projects. Nicolay had done most of the work on a two-volume collection of Lincoln’s speeches, letters, and other writings—materials they had gathered from Lincoln’s office after the assassination and in the course of their research for the biography. Hay would continue to write speeches, poems, and an endless flow of letters, but his days as an active author were behind him. This abstinence may not have been premeditated; but neither was it cause for dismay. The only regret he would feel for the idleness that now enveloped him was that he did not cherish it fully enough while it lasted.
As accessible as Lake Sunapee was to Boston and even New York, the Hays seldom succeeded in luring guests to the Fells. Henry Adams and William Dean Howells received annual invitations that they seemed never quite able to accept; the Camerons never came again. The one distinguished visitor to the Fells that summer was Rudyard Kipling, who was living near Brattleboro, Vermont, with his American wife. At thirty, Kipling was already famous throughout the English-speaking world for stories such as “The Man Who Would Be King” and poems such as “Gunga Din.” When he arrived at the Fells, he had just completed the Second Jungle Book and was starting on his only American novel, Captains Courageous. He and Hay had met previously in London, perhaps introduced by Henry James. “How a man can keep up so intense an intellectual life without going to Bedlam, is amazing,” Hay wrote Henry Adams after Kipling had gone back to Vermont. “He rattled off the framework of about forty stories while he was with us. One day I was, as an ignorant layman will, abusing the sun-myths, and happened to say I expected to see ‘Mary had a little lamb’ become one. He instantly jumped upon it, and as fast as his tongue could wag, he elaborated the myth. . . . He was bright and pleasant: entertained himself and the rest of us.” Nobody enjoyed Kipling’s company any better than ten-year-old Clarence.
The other three Hay children came and went throughout the summer, dashing off to visit friends in various seaside towns and receiving them at the Fells in “relays,” Hay marveled with feigned fatherly fatigue. Helen and Alice had a surfeit of beaux, and Del had collected a good set of companions at Yale. The previous fall, Hay had gone to New Haven to watch his son play football but derived no paternal pride from seeing him “rolled and tumbled and pulverized until he became a sorry spectacle of dirt and misery.” The violence of the sport led Hay to compare it to the graver rites of passage of his own generation. “I am sure that you and I were never so young as the boys of today,” he reflected to Whitelaw Reid. “The fellows who came of age in the Lincoln years were forced to look at life in wider aspects.”
Hay had always kept in touch with his former Tribune colleague, but now, with an election on the horizon, their communication picked up. Although Hay saw less of Reid than he did of Adams, he and Reid had much more in common politically and thus shared more political confidences. In fact, Hay and Reid rarely disagreed on any issue or candidate, and this time around they were both wholeheartedly backing McKinley. Reid, who had already served in Paris and been on the ticket with Benjamin Harrison in 1892, was hoping for something more for himself—if not secretary of state, then perhaps London.
UPON LEAVING THE FELLS at the end of September, Hay and Clara visited Reid and his wife, Elisabeth, at Ophir Farm, their estate in the Hudson River Valley—the splendid grounds of which were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, the baronial house restored by Stanford White. The two old friends gossiped and strategized, much as they had done over the past quarter century. In one respect, the game had changed very little since 1881, when they had stood behind James Garfield and defied New York senators Roscoe Conkling and Thomas Platt. Conkling had long since retired, but his lieutenant, Platt, had reestablished himself as the state’s political boss, much to the disgust of Reid. One of the men now in Platt’s pocket was Levi Morton, who, after serving as Garfield’s minister to France and Harrison’s vice president (later displaced by Reid on the ticket for reelection), was now governor of New York.
Once again, then, Reid and Hay had cast their lot with an Ohioan (McKinley) in the next election, while the head of the New York machine issued loud hints of his own preference: this time he wanted either Morton or Speaker of the House Thomas Reed for the White House. But if momentum were to swing toward McKinley, at the very least Platt expected to control a seat or two in a McKinley cabinet, along with other appointments, in exchange for the votes of New York’s delegates at the Republican Convention to be held in St. Louis in June.
Although the battlefield was familiar, Hay’s position on it had shifted somewhat. He was as well connected in Republican circles as he had been in 1881, when he had filled in for Reid at the Tribune, but he had not been in the thick of a political fight in years and had not held office since the Hayes administration. Now, after the poor showing of Harrison and the heartbreak of Blaine, he considered making one more foray. “The summer wanes, and I have done nothing for McKinley,” he wrote his Yellowstone companion Bill Phillips in September. To make up for his omission, he mailed a $500 check to Mark Hanna. Many more would follow.
Reid, all the while, still had the presses of the Tribune at his command, although his day-to-day presence at the paper had shrunk and his own voice had weakened, quite literally. Since the defeat of Harrison in 1892, he had spent more than half of his time away from New York, seeking to cure his chronic bronchitis and asthma in drier climates. When Hay saw him in October, Reid insisted he was gaining strength, but a month later his doctors ordered him to Arizona. Optimistically he predicted to Hay that he had “a fair prospect of a comfortable Winter,” although Hay confided to Adams, “Arizona has to me a mournful sound.”
THERE WAS PLENTY TO like about McKinley, even if there was not that much to love. Hay and McKinley had both grown up in what was still regarded as the West (McKinley was born in Niles, Ohio, in 1843), and both had flourished during the war under leaders whose blessings would accelerate their ascent of the Republican ladder (Hay under Lincoln, McKinley under General, then Governor, Rutherford Hayes). Their personalities and intellects, however, were vastly different. For McKinley, literature was the Bible; poetry he found in a hymnal. He neither danced nor attended the theater. He rarely tasted strong drink and did not try ice cream until he was in law school. He played whist, never poker. His one vice was cigars: he smoked (or chewed) as many as fifty a week. In personal appearance, his sole vanity was tidiness: every day an immaculate boiled white shirt and piqué waistcoat, a black frock coat with a carnation in his lapel. In an era when most men, Hay included, cultivated some form of whiskers, McKinley was bare-faced (and so disciplined in his grooming that he could shave without a mirror). His marble jaw and gray eyes inevitably invited comparison to statuary. As a letter writer he was perfunctory, as a storyteller unmemorable. His public oratory was clear and effective, but never histrionic—rarely more than a clenched fist punched gently into an open palm to drive home a point.
Yet if he was not the smartest man in the room, he was the most
trusted. If his was not the strongest voice, he was the best listener. Adjectives used by McKinley’s peers to describe his character could fill a Sunday School tract: responsible, industrious, determined, patient, imperturbable, sincere, fair, courteous, and kind. He was devoid of guile, incapable of manipulation. It scarcely mattered that he was often impassive or that he had few close friends. Among Republicans, he had rivals but precious few enemies.
In 1893, when Hay had stepped forward to help bail McKinley out of debt, he hardly knew the man whose honor and career he was rescuing. Surely they had met on more than a few occasions during McKinley’s years in Congress and then as governor of Ohio, but McKinley was not someone Hay would have invited to dinner, like James Garfield, James Blaine, Cabot Lodge, Theodore Roosevelt, or even Don Cameron. (The invitation probably would not have been accepted, anyway; due to Ida McKinley’s frailty, attributed to epilepsy and the wrenching death of two young daughters, she and her husband rarely went out.) But by now Hay was shrewd enough to appreciate that one did not have to be chummy with a candidate to respect him. He had backed Blaine more steadfastly than any politician since Lincoln, yet Blaine proved not to be electable. McKinley was. With the right Republicans behind McKinley early enough, solidly enough, he could be propelled all the way to the White House. It didn’t matter if “the Majah”—as Hay called McKinley, a reference to his brevet rank at the end of the war—was short on sophistication and imagination. His broad shoulders could carry the party standard; moreover, he had earned the right to do so.
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