All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Throughout the winter of 1895–96, Hay supported the McKinley campaign by serving as a listening post in Washington, passing along to Hanna and Reid the gist of his conversations with leading Republicans like Don Cameron and Cabot Lodge, who was now a senator. Cameron was particularly useful as a link to Pennsylvania’s other senator, Matthew Quay, who, like Thomas Platt in New York, controlled his state’s Republican machine. “I think you are as good at the game as either of the Penn[sylvani]a Senators,” Hanna wrote to Hay, thanking him for his briefings, “and I am perfectly willing to leave them in your hands.”

  Hanna knew how to delegate; he also appreciated better than anyone before him the importance of strong central command in a political campaign. In 1895, Hanna turned over responsibility for his business affairs in Cleveland to his brother, which freed him to devote his full attention to the task of getting McKinley nominated and elected. So single-minded was Hanna that the perception grew that he had some devious, Svengaliesque control over his candidate—that because he had saved McKinley from financial ruin, he now owned him. The New York Journal, purchased by William Randolph Hearst that same year, hastened to establish its pot-stirring, “yellow” reputation by predicting that Hanna would “play McKinley like a pack of cards.” The paper’s cartoons depicted Hanna as the bloated Beast of Greed, his suit checked with dollar signs; as a puppet master pulling the strings of McKinley; or as an organ grinder calling the tune for his trained monkey.

  The reality was something quite different. Hanna was a millionaire, to be sure, his fortune made in coal, steel, shipping, and banking, and he was indeed full-figured in his profile. But despite his affluence, he lived a relatively conservative, abstemious life. While he was by nature acquisitive and aggrandizing, he had nothing but admiration and respect for McKinley, whom he had first met in 1876, when McKinley had defended a group of coal miners arrested during a strike. Hanna was one of the mine’s owners, and he never forgot the poise and humanity McKinley displayed in the courtroom. Here was a horse to bet on.

  Though six years older than McKinley, Hanna would always be somewhat obsequious toward him. “His attitude was always that of a big, bashful boy toward a girl he loves,” explained H. H. Kohlsaat, publisher of the Chicago Evening Post and another early McKinleyite. “It was not the power that it brought Mr. Hanna that made him fight for McKinley’s nomination and election; it was the love of a strong man for a friend who was worthy of that affection.”

  And even if Hanna had wanted to control McKinley, he would not have succeeded; McKinley was not so pliable, and for all the effort Hanna put into McKinley’s campaign, it was Hanna who depended upon McKinley more than the other way around. Hanna possessed the blunt ambition of a businessman, but McKinley had the tact and equilibrium of a lifelong statesman. “Hanna was impulsive and intuitive where McKinley was calm and reasonable,” the Kansas newspaperman William Allen White remarked. “Hanna would rip out a good red double-distilled God damn where McKinley would stifle a scowl with a smile.” Hanna was the more brusque of the two, White added, and yet, “Hanna gave McKinley his heart.”

  In the first months of the campaign, Hanna insisted on paying all of McKinley’s expenses himself, “until I knew more about who his friends were to be,” he explained. He thanked Hay for his first check but deposited it in the general account of the Ohio Republican Party. As the national convention drew near, McKinley’s chances for nomination looked very strong, and he and Hanna agreed that they would avoid any unnecessary obligations that might come due after the election and inauguration. Rather than give in to the demands of men like Platt and Quay, they played up their resistance by coining a decidedly un-Republican campaign slogan: “The People Against the Bosses.”

  The Republican bosses, all but Platt, eventually fell in line, and McKinley won the nomination handily on the first ballot. After Morton and Thomas Reed declined to join the ticket, McKinley chose as his running mate Garret Hobart, a wealthy, well-connected, but rather bland businessman from New Jersey.

  The whole thrust of the campaign was to restore confidence after the three years of uncertainty and upheaval that had followed the Panic of 1893. Millions of Americans were still out of work; commodity prices continued to sag; and strikes and riots had driven a jagged wedge between the “masses” and the “classes.” There was nothing radical or polarizing about McKinley; he was exactly who he said he was: a moderate, modest midwesterner. Scintillating he was not; and yet his steadiness and stoicism were reassuring, even inspiring. He had first come to national attention as an advocate of tariffs, a bundle of incentives and restrictions designed to protect American markets and encourage American industry and agriculture. In tariffs, he and Hanna now reckoned they had the perfect Main Street issue on which to build a presidential campaign. Everyone, regardless of the rung or region they occupied, was eager to see the country heal and grow. While there was no question that tariffs were a boon to big business, they were also touted as good for the little guy. Campaign literature portrayed McKinley as “the Advance Agent for Prosperity,” a trustworthy and benevolent purveyor of a brighter future for class and mass alike.

  Nothing was that simple, however. The issue that wound up dominating the presidential race in 1896 was not tariffs but money—the debate over whether to base the currency on silver, gold, or a fixed ratio (16:1) of the two. Going into the convention in St. Louis, McKinley and most Republican leaders had miscalculated the virulence of the so-called free-silver movement, whose proponents, known as “silverites,” argued that an inflated dollar would make it easier for farmers and laborers to settle debts and pay taxes. In contrast, a currency based on gold tightened the money supply and was assumed to benefit only big business and foreign (mostly English) bondholders. After rancorous debate and the tempestuous exit from the convention by two senators from western silver-producing states, the Republicans finally adopted an equivocal plank that opposed free coinage of silver, unless it was favored by other nations; until then the gold standard must be maintained. Republicans called this position “sound money”; their opponents called them “straddlers.”

  Nearly drowned out in the uproar over currency were several other planks in the platform that would soon loom much larger than the rest: pledges to take control of the Hawaiian Islands; to build a canal across Nicaragua; to enforce the Monroe Doctrine “in its full effect”; and to “actively use [American] influence and good offices to restore peace and give independence” to Cuba.

  If the currency issue was an unwelcome distraction to Republicans, it thoroughly disrupted the Democrats. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago on July 9, William Jennings Bryan, a tall, youthful, messianic, pro-silver populist from Nebraska, accused the “holders of idle capital” of attempting to “crucify mankind on a cross of gold.” The effect of his speech was electrifying and metamorphic. The Democratic Party, which under Grover Cleveland had backed a gold standard, voted overwhelmingly for free coinage of silver and enthusiastically nominated Bryan to take the fight to McKinley.

  Yet Bryan, for all his heat, possessed far less fuel than McKinley. No one ever ran a national campaign as masterfully as Mark Hanna. In previous presidential elections, the task of raising money and winning votes was the job of the party committee in each state. Hanna now insisted that the states take their marching orders from his headquarters in Chicago. Between June and November, he oversaw the distribution of millions of pamphlets, posters, buttons, and newspaper supplements—prompting Theodore Roosevelt to comment that Hanna had “advertised McKinley as if he were a patent medicine.” Hundreds of speakers, campaigners, and brass bands were deployed to districts where they were most needed and to many where they were redundant, just to make sure.

  Hanna, who had served only briefly in an Ohio regiment at the end of the war, tackled his new endeavor like a West Pointer. “The enemy have begun an assault on our lines . . . so that we are obliged to put our men in the field at all points to hold our position,” he wrote Hay as the camp
aign took shape. Hay, who had taken the measure of many an officer, was genuinely impressed by Hanna’s military prowess. “I never knew him intimately until we went into this fight together,” he declared, “but my esteem and admiration for him have grown every hour. He is a born general in politics . . . with a coup d’oeil for the battle-field and a knowledge of the enemy’s weak points which is very remarkable.”

  To pay for the grand offensive, Hanna was no less diligent. Once the Democrats declared war against sound money, he had little trouble dunning big business. “[Bryan] has succeeded in scaring the goldbugs out of their five wits,” Hay reported to Adams, who was a committed silverite (as was Don Cameron at first, under Adams’s persuasion). Under Hanna’s direction, banks were assessed one quarter of 1 percent of their capital. Standard Oil alone gave $250,000. All told, Hanna collected $3.5 million, more than twice the amount raised in any previous campaign. Hay, who gave early and with minimal prompting, was good for at least $5,000 and soon considerably more. “If Gov. McKinley had a few more friends like you I would have a more comfortable time,” Hanna wrote Hay before the convention, thanking him for his latest check, this one for $2,000.

  In the months leading up to McKinley’s nomination, Hay continued to run errands for Hanna and pass along intelligence. “You can be of great service by picking up what is going on . . . in W[ashington],” Hanna wrote in March 1896. “If you want to try your hand at ‘diplomacy,’ make that your mission. Use Cameron and get Quay away from Platt and our work is over.”

  BY MAY, WITH MCKINLEY’S nomination all but assured, Hay put in play a strategy of his own, if indeed that was what it was. With no desire to do any public campaigning on McKinley’s behalf and well aware of Hanna’s keen nose for any solicitation of support bearing the faintest whiff of quid pro quo, he decided that the wisest thing he could do would be to leave the country until the fall.

  He and Henry Adams sailed on May 20, chaperoning Helen and a friend. Clarence King saw them off at the pier in New York. The only other passenger of note aboard the Teutonic was the author and theatrical manager Bram Stoker; Adams remarked in a letter to Lizzie Cameron that he “devotes occasional hours to the girls in the intervals of writing a novel.” Stoker’s Dracula would be published the following year.

  London was the usual luncheons and dinners, fittings at the tailor, visits to galleries. Hay’s dinner guests one evening included Adams, Henry James, Bret Harte, John Singer Sargent, Theodore Roosevelt’s sister Anna (“Bamie”) Cowles, and her husband, William, who was U.S. naval attaché in London. In conversations with Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain and other public men, Hay discovered how unfamiliar the English were with William McKinley, except as concerned his advocacy of protective tariffs. Hay vouched for his candidate, first in a letter to The Times and then in published interviews, stressing McKinley’s decency and level-headedness. “It is difficult to describe Mr. McKinley in a picturesque manner,” he told the Daily Chronicle. “A man like Mr. McKinley is all one side—there is nothing to be said against him. His character is absolutely blameless and spotless. . . . He is distinguished by great moral earnestness.” When the Chronicle asked if there were any truth to the rumor that Hay was interested in higher office in a McKinley administration, he banished the notion with a shake of his head.

  Hay was in Holland with Adams and the girls when he read of McKinley’s nomination, and he quickly cabled his congratulations. For the next two months, as he traveled through France and Italy, he followed the campaign avidly and as best he could. In Paris (where they were joined by Del, on summer vacation from Yale), Hay ran into his old friend Wayne MacVeagh, a notorious Mugwump who had served in both the Hayes and Garfield administrations and was now Grover Cleveland’s ambassador to Italy. (MacVeagh also happened to be married to Don Cameron’s sister.) Hay was pleased to report to Clara that the Democratic Party’s pro-silver leanings had made MacVeagh “almost a Republican again.” MacVeagh further ingratiated himself by advising Hay “in the most solemn manner not to refuse the office of Secretary of State.” Once again Hay acted surprised: “I told him I saw no more chance of being offered it than of being turned to salt, and that I had as little desire as prospect of it.”

  But on August 3, as he crossed the Atlantic, he composed a letter to McKinley to be posted upon arrival. “I inclose a thousand dollar note to help meet the personal demands which will be made on you during the canvass,” he began. “I shall, unless you see some reason to the contrary, send you the same sum each month till November.” Lest McKinley jump to the conclusion that he was shopping for a favor, Hay added emphatically: “I want to make one matter perfectly clear. I do not know whether or not I shall ask you for any public employment. It will depend on various considerations—health, domestic or business affairs, &c. But whether I do or not, I want it understood that anything I may have done, or shall do, between now and next March [Inauguration Day], shall have no bearing on the case whatever. I shall feel as free to make known my own wishes, and you must feel as free to grant or refuse them, as if we had never met.”

  Yet in the same letter, he let McKinley know that he had already been rehearsing for a position in the State Department. Over the past year, diplomatic relations between the United States and England had grown absurdly tense, sparked by a boundary dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. In July 1895, Cleveland’s secretary of state Richard Olney—who in his previous post as U.S. attorney general directed federal troops to break up the Pullman strike—had sent Britain a stern warning that any bullying of Venezuela would be regarded as a direct affront to the vital interests of the United States as expressed in the Monroe Doctrine. In his annual address to Congress in December, President Cleveland reaffirmed Olney’s bumptious interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine, declaring that it was the duty of the United States “to resist by every means” any British aggression in Venezuela. Somewhat astonished by such sudden and seemingly uncalled-for belligerence, Great Britain, without acknowledging that it had behaved inappropriately or that the Monroe Doctrine even applied to the Anglo-Venezuelan boundary, agreed to arbitrate the dispute—which is where the matter stood while Hay was in London.

  Hay had discussed the issue at length with Sir William Harcourt, leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Commons. When Harcourt hinted that Lord Salisbury, who at the time was both England’s Conservative prime minister and its foreign secretary, might be inclined to drag out the Venezuelan negotiations in hopes of getting better terms with the next American administration, Hay cautioned against it. “I disclaimed any authority to speak for you or any knowledge of your plans,” he informed McKinley, “but assured him, from my acquaintance with public feeling in America, that the British government would make a great mistake if it fancied [that] the incoming Administration would fall behind the present one in the firm and resolute upholding of the Monroe Doctrine. . . . I have not taken any liberty with your name in this thing, but I felt sure you would be glad of anything your friends might do to facilitate the clearing away of this vexatious dispute before March.”

  March was still a long way off, but, if nothing else, Hay had provided a flattering glimpse of himself in diplomatic harness. He was loyal, informed, confident, and very well connected. Maybe McKinley had other people in mind and maybe Hay wasn’t looking for a job, but, based on his past and recent conduct in London, McKinley would be hard-pressed to find anyone with better qualifications.

  WHILE HAY WAS ABROAD, McKinley remained at home in Canton. All summer long, as Hanna’s well-funded operatives trumpeted “Patriotism, Protection, and Prosperity” across the land and William Jennings Bryan brandished the Cross of Gold at a dozen whistle-stops a day, McKinley scarcely left the front porch of his tidy, two-story house on North Market Street. “I might just as well put up a trapeze on my front lawn and compete with some professional athlete as go out speaking against Bryan,” he remarked. Instead, he welcomed delegations—veterans, farmers, trade associations, unions, and every fra
ternal organization under the sun—to call upon him and express their concerns and wishes. When they were finished, the calm, unruffled McKinley would stand on a chair and deliver a set speech, punctuated with platitudes such as “Good money never made times hard” and “Our currency today is good as gold.”

  He might not have been a trapeze artist, but Canton quickly turned into a circus. The route from the train station was spanned by a gigantic McKinley arch and lined by souvenir vendors; one item that sold by the thousand was a tin dinner pail—tin being an industry fostered by the McKinley tariff, the pail to be filled once the “McKinley Boom” revitalized the economy. (Tin was also the inspiration for one of the characters in L. Frank Baum’s popular novel of the day, The Wizard of Oz.) Between the Republican Convention in June and election day, seven hundred and fifty thousand people from thirty states made the pilgrimage, turning McKinley’s yard to mud and nearly pulling the porch off the house.

  Hay did not join the parade of supplicants to Canton. He passed the remainder of the summer at the Fells and watched from afar. “He has asked me to come,” Hay told Adams, “but I thought I would not struggle with the millions on his trampled lawn.” It tickled him to learn that Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, who had not been McKinley men at first, had been to see the nominee, hats in hand.

  Not until Hay was back in Cleveland in October did he at last wade into the fray with his old vigor. “What a strange and portentous campaign this is,” he had written Reid, who had returned from Arizona and was again stoking the Tribune. “The only real issue between the two parties is the tariff—but by the malice of fate and the limber jaws of demagogues the whole country has been set to talking about coinage—a matter utterly unfit for public discussion.”