Hay called Bryan a “half-baked glib little briefless jack-leg lawyer,” who charged about the country “begging for the Presidency, as a tramp might beg for a pie.” Sounding not unlike Arthur Farnham in The Bread-Winners, he fumed: “[Bryan] makes only one speech—but he makes it twice a day. There is no fun in it. He simply reiterates the unquestioned truths that every man who has a clean shirt is a thief and ought to be hanged: that there is no goodness and wisdom except among the illiterate & criminal classes.”
Finally, two weeks before the election, after giving a speech for McKinley in Cleveland, Hay accepted an invitation to Canton. Few men ever got to know the inner McKinley, even those whom he took into his confidence. William Allen White, the journalist, devoted half his career to looking for “the real man back of that plaster cast” and never succeeded. Hay’s meeting with McKinley evidently went well enough, but he too got only so far. “I spent yesterday with the Majah,” Hay reported to Adams. “I had been dreading it for a month, thinking it would be like talking in a boiler factory. But he met me at the station, gave me meat & took me upstairs and talked for two hours as calmly & serenely as if we were summer boarders in Bethlehem, at a loss for means to kill time. I was more struck than ever with his mask. It is a genuine Italian ecclesiastical face of the XVth Century.”
Hay did not offer any details on what he and McKinley discussed—or whether the subject of appointments came up at all—but he left town assured that “the Majah” was very much in command. “And to think,” he told Adams, “there are idiots who think Mark Hanna will run him.” As proof of his fealty and admiration, not to mention his own steady aim, a few days later Hay sent McKinley several ducks from Winous Point.
McKinley won the election emphatically, thanks to Hanna’s generalship and the alarmism and divisiveness of the Bryan campaign. If McKinley were a patent medicine, as Theodore Roosevelt had suggested, Hanna peddled him in millions of carefully measured doses as one part cure for economic anemia, one part stimulant for a robust national future. Despite covering tens of thousands of miles and delivering more than two hundred speeches, Bryan could not keep pace with the Republican onslaught. His effort to convert currency into class warfare—agricultural interests versus industrial, rural versus urban—gained traction west of the Mississippi and in the South but fell flat everywhere else. In the end, Hanna’s propaganda machine, abundantly funded by the baited bulls of capitalism, convinced Americans that they ought to care more about expanded markets (tariffs) than inflated prices (silver). Persuasion in some instances was said to border on coercion: the Bryan camp alleged that many employers went so far as to tell their workers that their jobs depended on a McKinley victory; bankers warned the same about mortgages. Meanwhile, Republican artillery battered the image of the Great Commoner, as Bryan cast himself, stigmatizing him as a radical doomsayer and “Popocrat,” since he was also the nominee of the anti–big business Populist Party.
Of 14 million votes cast, McKinley beat Bryan by 600,000; in the electoral count, the margin was more impressive, 271 to 176, the greatest edge since Grant’s trouncing of Horace Greeley in 1872. Bryan held the rural vote, but not all of it, and little else besides. He was the younger candidate but in some ways the older, for he purveyed a nostalgic, agrarian, nineteenth-century vision of America. McKinley, for all his front-porch fustiness, emerged as the first twentieth-century candidate, appealing to non-rural, commerce-minded voters—the expanding “middle,” whose fates were now tied more closely to those of industry and international markets than to the family farm. A race that initially had hinged on the question of money had come down to precisely that, and in 1896 Mark Hanna made sure that his man had much more of it. Running for president would never be the same.
IN THE CUSTOMARY HANDICAPPING of who would fill which seats in the new administration, John Hay’s name came up often. Speculation focused not on whether he was in or out, but on which place would be his. “We are at sea here as to whether you are going to be Secretary of State or Ambassador to England,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt, who was angling to trade his job as New York police commissioner for something with more national prominence; his best shot was assistant secretary of the navy.
Hay had not gone looking for a job since 1869, when he had grown bored with life in Warsaw and wangled a place in Madrid from the Grant administration. He never wanted anything so much that he would bow or scrape for it (except perhaps the affection of Lizzie Cameron), and he was never one to call in a debt, political or otherwise. And yet it was now quite plain that he desired a spot in McKinley’s State Department. His qualifications and his loyalty to McKinley were manifest, and to friends like Roosevelt, his appointment was inevitable. There was really only one person he worried about: Whitelaw Reid.
Earlier in the year, Hay had hoped that McKinley would choose Reid as his running mate, but Reid’s long-standing feud with Thomas Platt ruled this out. Reid now had his sights on secretary of state, but Platt was headed back to the Senate after a sixteen-year hiatus, and McKinley did not relish having to fight Platt over this particular patronage, once they were both in Washington. Nevertheless, Reid believed he had a good chance, and Hay assured his old friend that he would stand clear; he would be content to take the ambassadorship to London.
For two months after the election, Hay and Reid outdid each other in their chivalry, Hay encouraging Reid to take aim at the secretary of state appointment, Reid urging Hay to think twice about his withdrawal from running for the same. “What you say about your own unwillingness to take the Secretaryship of State is in its personal aspect far too generous,” Reid wrote Hay. “I cannot think that you would be right in refusing merely to make place for another. At our time of life these baubles are not likely to be offered often. If, on the other hand, you should distinctly prefer the other place [London], that would doubtless be a sufficient reason.”
To which Hay replied: “I do not see now anybody of the first rank who could come into competition with you, either in personal merits, or in unquestionable service to McKinley. . . . On the whole I am inclined to think McKinley will find his pleasure and his interest coinciding in calling for you.”
Hay was sincere in his wish that Reid gain the secretaryship, but he intentionally overstated his optimism. And it was not an especially great sacrifice to defer to Reid. Hay recognized early on that there was no circumstance under which he himself would get the secretary of state job, with or without Reid in the hunt. Too many other factors worked against him, the most crucial of which was Mark Hanna, the man to whom McKinley owed a favor above all others.
Hanna had his heart set on the Senate, but one of Ohio’s seats had already been promised to the former governor and party potentate Joseph Foraker, in exchange for Foraker’s pledge not to block McKinley’s nomination at the Republican Convention. (Senators were still elected by legislatures and thus more easily controlled by state political machines.) The other seat was occupied by John Sherman, who, at seventy-three, was now a crumbling pillar of Republicanism. Already a plan was taking shape to ease Sherman toward retirement with a brief stopover in the McKinley cabinet—most likely State, since he had already held Treasury in the Hayes administration—thereby opening Sherman’s seat to Mark Hanna. No matter what, there wasn’t room for a second Ohioan—namely Hay—anywhere in the cabinet.
Throughout the fall and winter, Reid discounted the Sherman scenario and believed that his path to the State Department could be blocked only by Thomas Platt, who was purported to have growled, “I told Hanna to tell McKinley, if he wanted Hell with the lid off, at the very start, to appoint Reid.” In fact, as Hay knew but Reid chose to overlook, the far greater impasse remained Mark Hanna’s senatorial aspirations and the bond of loyalty and indebtedness Hanna had forged with McKinley.
Hay saw the wreck coming far in advance and chose another route and destination. The plum he wanted more, the one he now believed was within his reach, was the ambassadorship. If Reid became secretary of state, all th
e better. But if Reid came up short, due to the Sherman-Hanna switch, and then went after the London post, Hay would already have the inside track. The brilliance of Hay’s strategy—in which he stood behind Reid and did not betray him but ultimately outmaneuvered him and established even greater cohesion with McKinley and Hanna—is not revealed overtly in his letters, or at least not in any that survive. Only by reading between the lines and only after the deed was accomplished and Hay was installed as the ambassador to the Court of St. James’s would it be possible to detect just how subtly and completely he had finessed his ally and friend, Whitelaw Reid.
By the end of December, McKinley and Hanna had quietly agreed that Sherman would get the State Department. Accordingly, they had taken Hay into their confidence and recruited him to help appease Reid. A telegram from Hay to McKinley, filed in McKinley’s presidential papers for the year 1897 but clearly marked “Dc 26”—which can only mean December 26, 1896—advised: “How would it answer to say that [Reid’s] selection for a place in the cabinet or a foreign embassy . . . had been under consideration, that his friends had thought it would be imprudent for him to risk the confinement of official work until his health was more completely restored, that you then reluctantly gave up the idea of appointing him[?]”
If the date on this telegram is correct, Hay knew a full month before Reid that McKinley did not intend to offer Reid a job. Even if the date is not correct, Hay’s conduct in the weeks that followed, while well intentioned, was an exercise in self-promotion unprecedented and unrepeated in his exemplary life. Never did he lie outright; but neither did he reveal the whole truth.
Two days after sending the telegram to McKinley, Hay reached out to the president-elect in a different, more magnanimous way: “I send you a ring today which I hope you will wear on Inauguration day. It contains a few hairs from the head of George Washington.” Hay saw no reason to mention that he had presented a similar ring to Rutherford Hayes twenty years earlier. McKinley was touched, and he began wearing the ring immediately.
McKinley, however, was far too canny to make any larger promises to Hay; nor did Hay make any demands, assuring McKinley, “I shall not question either your judgment, or your friendship.” Even so, in early January 1897, he drafted a letter to McKinley, laying out the case for his own appointment to London: “I do not think it is altogether selfishness and vanity which has brought me to think that perhaps you might do worse than select me. 1. My appointment would please a good many people & so far as I know would offend nobody. . . . If Reid can’t get it, he would rather have me go than any one else. 2. I should not hold the office very long. It would be at your disposal in some critical time when it might serve a useful purpose. 3. As I have no claim on the place, and as it is really above my merits and deservings, I think I would be more grateful than any one else would be, and would do as much to show my gratitude.” He then urged McKinley to make up his mind as soon as possible because “[a]lready it is difficult to find a suitable house for an Embassy.”
Reid, meanwhile, had not helped his own case by going to Arizona for the winter, distancing himself from the field of play and reinforcing rumors of his questionable health. (Actually, Reid was feeling better than he had in years, riding horseback twenty or more miles a day.) By early January, he was willing to acknowledge that secretary of state was no longer in the cards; yet he still could not bring himself to believe that the job would go to Sherman. Instead, he sketched out a scenario in which Hanna would become secretary of the navy (leaving Sherman in the Senate) and Hay would vie for secretary of state, thus opening England for himself. The only hitch, as usual, was Platt, who wanted New York Central president Chauncey Depew for the English ambassadorship. These and other prognostications Reid sent in cipher to a trusted underling in the Tribune office, who decoded and forwarded them to Hay.
Hay, who by now grasped that Reid was not in serious consideration for any position, either in Washington or abroad, nonetheless encouraged his friend to persevere. One of his morale-boosting letters brought tears to the eyes of Mrs. Reid. “She said it made life worth living to have such friends as you & Mrs. Hay,” Reid wrote, “whether we get the place or not.” Hay gave Reid the impression that his own chances for London were worse than dismal, and even while newspapers continued to mention him as a possibility, he clarified to his friend, “I have so constantly talked for you and refused the use of my own name, that I am considered out of it.”
And yet, just to be safe, on January 22 he told Reid about the letter he was about to send to McKinley, spelling out the reasons why London should go to John Hay and not Whitelaw Reid: “I think I shall let it be known . . . that while I continue to prefer your appointment to my own, in case the President does not think it expedient, for any reason to appoint you, I know you would prefer me being selected than any New York man identified with the Platt interest.”
Even then, Reid would not recognize the inevitable. He diagrammed another chessboard, with himself as secretary of the navy (now that it was clear that Hanna would try for the Senate) and Hay as assistant secretary of state, with the understanding that Hay would replace Sherman as secretary in a year or so. (The second part of this picture was of course quite prescient: Hay would succeed Sherman after eighteen months.)
As the days passed and no announcements were forthcoming from Canton, Reid grew steadily more upset with McKinley for allowing himself to be badgered by Platt. Inevitably, Reid compared 1897 to 1881. “Garfield’s fatal mistake was that he gave Platt and Conkling five or six nominations before he had the courage to name the man [Blaine] to whom he owed his own nomination. Naturally they had already ‘sized him up’ as timid, and acted accordingly, and my own comfort in recalling that sad period is that I had earnestly warned him of this danger beforehand.” (Once again Reid was partly prescient: in four years Garfield and McKinley would have something more fatal in common than Thomas Platt.)
Hay’s correspondence with Hanna and McKinley contains several hints that he knew by the end of January that he was at the top of the list for London, although nothing was locked in yet. Before anything further could transpire, McKinley still had to dispense with Reid. Once Reid was out of the picture, Hay could accept the appointment without bruising the friendship. How carefully this end game was choreographed is not known, but what is evident is that Hay shifted, deftly and discreetly, from brokering the candidacy of Reid to brokering Reid’s withdrawal. With McKinley’s consent, Hay met with Reid’s father-in-law, Ogden Mills, and persuaded him to make the long journey to Arizona to break the news that no job awaited Reid in the new administration. Hay also wrote Reid a letter that he hoped would arrive shortly after Mills. “You will come back well & strong and take your place at the head of the greatest paper on the continent,” he comforted, “and everybody will desire [your] friendship & offer theirs.” In closing, he added wearily, “I am indifferent as to who gets the Eng. Mission”—a statement which, at this stage, was at best disingenuous.
A week later, Hay got from Reid the response he had hoped for in the form of a telegram: “Repeat in strongest and most unreserved way . . . don’t throw your own chance away.” And in a follow-up letter, Reid was even more gracious. “I think you have acted with a generosity and self-sacrificing devotion far beyond my desserts. . . . I want to release you from any obligation you may think you have placed yourself under to neglect your own interests in order to promote mine.”
It now fell to Hay to find a way for Reid to save face—and to curb Platt’s satisfaction at having stymied his nemesis. This he accomplished by drafting a letter to go out over McKinley’s signature, in which McKinley expressed his great disappointment at learning that Reid’s fragile health prevented him from accepting appointments to either the cabinet or England. Out of fairness, Hay also gave McKinley an option. He composed a second letter, in which the president-elect offered Reid the ambassadorship to England.
Hay, of course, was betting that Reid would not accept out of concern for th
e effect of London’s damp and coal-clotted air on his lungs—a debility Hay had himself experienced firsthand. “[I]t would be suicide,” Hay advised McKinley, “but if he should [accept], he would make an excellent Minister.” But then Hay made an uncharacteristically blunt comment that revealed just how much confidence he had in his alignment with McKinley—and just how little genuine sympathy he had for Reid: “If on the other hand, Reid should decline, you would be free to look somewhere else. In all this, I am thinking only of you. I have ceased thinking about Reid; he thinks enough about himself for two.”
As Hay expected, McKinley sent the first letter, not the second. Without suspecting that Hay was the true author, Reid saw right through it. “The President’s letter is . . . extremely complimentary, charming, and everything else delightful, excepting sincere,” he wrote Hay after McKinley’s inauguration. There was nothing the matter with his health, Reid insisted. Just the same, the deed was done.
And with that, the tumblers fell into place, and the door swung open. With Reid out of the way, Platt acquiesced, and McKinley was finally free to award Hay the prize he so greatly desired. Reid would blame many people for his rejection, but he never faulted John Hay. Hay had done all he could for Reid, although, in retrospect, he had done a good deal more for himself.
EVEN BEFORE HAY’S APPOINTMENT was made official, his friends in England wrote to express their great hope that he would be the next ambassador. George Smalley, who had worked with Hay at the Tribune but was now with The Times of London, was the first to publish the news, prematurely it turned out, but correctly. He spoke for a great many in Great Britain when he wrote Hay, “You are the ideal man for the place. . . . We want a man who is a true American yet not anti-English.”
All the Great Prizes Page 37
