The next day, Victoria’s daughter Beatrice took tea with Margaret White, wife of embassy secretary Henry White (whose portrait by John Singer Sargent Hay had so admired), with the express purpose, according to Clara, of conveying what a pleasing impression the American ambassador had made on the queen.
HAY’S RAPPORT COUNTED FOR a lot, but for the time being, there was little of substance he could do for his country. And so, anticipating a smoggy winter in London, he booked a trip to Egypt, with McKinley’s assent. For the past half-century, Europeans and Americans had been taking to the Nile like latter-day pharaohs, journeying from Alexandria to Memphis, Cairo, Luxor, and the cataracts at Aswan aboard native dahabiehs, adaptations of traditional river vessels, refitted with all the luxuries that affluent travelers had come to expect on the Orient Express and the Grand Tour.
Adams, who had spent his honeymoon in Egypt in 1872, agreed to go again. Henry James thought about joining them, then sent his regrets. Hay also invited Lizzie Cameron to play the part of Cleopatra—their “ ‘Star Eyed Egyptian and glorious Sorceress of the Nile’ ”—but she had recovered from her collapse and returned to the United States. In the end the party comprised Hay, Clara, Helen and Alice, Adams, and Spencer Eddy, a promising young Harvard graduate whom Hay had brought to London as his personal secretary.
To travel in Egypt, no matter when, is to drop out of time. In Hay’s case, he missed most of a chapter in American history. While McKinley continued to believe that Spain could be persuaded to let go of Cuba without the military intervention of the United States, a growing number of Democrats and jingoistic members of his own party were agitating otherwise. The New York Journal, jingoistic and Democratic, derided McKinley’s caution as “lacking in virility.” McKinley, who had anonymously donated $5,000 of his own money to a Cuban relief fund, vowed to hold his ground until all options for peaceful resolution were exhausted. “I shall never get into a war until I am sure that God and man approve,” the veteran of Antietam declared. “I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.” Events would soon make this position untenable.
At the start of February 1898, the Hay family and friends steamed leisurely up the Nile, encountering along the way former Secretary of State Hamilton Fish; James Angell, Hay’s former language professor from Brown who was now the American minister to Turkey; and Elizabeth Custer, the widow of the reckless general slain at Little Bighorn. Meanwhile, the U.S. battleship Maine lay at anchor in Havana Harbor, not as a show of hostility, but to be on hand in the event that Americans in Cuba needed protection.
A week later, as the Hays continued from Luxor toward Aswan, the New York Journal got hold of a private letter written by Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, Spain’s minister to Washington, in which he characterized President McKinley as a politicastro, translated to mean an ineffectual, would-be politician, but in Spanish literally a castrated politician. To the Journal, which itself had publicly doubted the president’s manhood, the Spanish minister’s gaffe was “The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.”
Arriving at Aswan on the eighteenth, ten days’ journey above Cairo, seven hundred miles from the Mediterranean, and surrounded by temples of a civilization three thousand years removed from London, Washington, and Cuba, Hay was handed the news that the USS Maine had exploded three days earlier, killing 260 American sailors and wounding ninety. The assumption was that the tragedy had not been accidental. When Adams learned of the hour of the explosion, nine o’clock, he blurted mysteriously, “Then the Spanish did it.”
“We have been much shocked and grieved,” Hay wrote to Henry White in London. “We feel very much out of the world.” To McKinley, he offered perspective and encouragement. “I shall never regret the years I have passed in Europe,” he reflected, “[as] they have rooted in my very soul a confidence and trust in our future, which is beyond and above any temporary or personal disappointments. The greatest destiny the world ever knew is ours.”
Despite the alarming news from home, Hay did not display any particular urgency. Descending the Nile, he and his fellow travelers stopped for several days in Cairo before continuing north to Athens, while Adams went eastward to Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus, Constantinople, and eventually overland to Paris. In Athens, Hay had a pleasant visit with the American minister, William Rockhill, whom he had first gotten to know in Washington several years earlier.
Tall, red-haired, and suavely handsome, Rockhill was a character straight out of an H. Rider Haggard novel. Born in Philadelphia but raised in France, he had graduated from the French military academy Saint-Cyr, after which he served two years in the Algerian desert as an officer in the French Foreign Legion. Even while at Saint-Cyr, he had devoted his spare hours to studying Tibetan Buddhism, and after leaving the Foreign Legion, he mastered Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Chinese in order to translate Buddhist scriptures and to publish his own Life of Buddha. His extraordinary talents were soon recognized in more than academic circles, and he landed an appointment as a secretary to the American legation in Peking. Insatiably curious and thoroughly intrepid, he undertook two harrowing treks into Tibet, becoming the first Westerner in half a century to penetrate the Himalayan kingdom from China. If State Department appointments had been based purely on merit, Rockhill’s ascent would have been meteoric; instead, he took whatever he could, serving briefly as an assistant secretary of state under Richard Olney. The best he could squeeze out of McKinley was Greece, which is where Hay found him, “bored into extinction,” in March 1898. Undoubtedly the two men had a great deal to talk about: Cuba of course, the senility of Secretary of State John Sherman, their mutual friends Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, and surely China, the topic always foremost in Rockhill’s mind. War against Spain had not yet been declared, and Hawaii and the Philippines were still not annexed, but Rockhill could see more clearly than most the place China ought to fill in America’s emergent extracontinental scheme.
Hay arrived back in London the last week in March, after an absence of two months. On the twenty-eighth, McKinley sent to Congress the report of the investigation on the Maine, which blamed the explosion on external causes. The president had bought as much time as he could, hoping that Spain would relinquish Cuba peacefully, but the American public would cut the administration no more slack. McKinley finally delivered his war message to Congress on April 11; the blockade of Cuba commenced on April 22; McKinley called for 125,000 volunteers on the twenty-third; Congress declared war two days later; and on May 1, on the far side of the world, Admiral George Dewey sank or captured Spain’s entire Pacific squadron and blockaded Manila.
“We are all very happy over Dewey’s splendid Sunday’s work,” Hay wrote a few days later to Theodore Stanton, son of the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “I detest war, and had hoped I might not see another, but this was as necessary as it was righteous.”
After the navy’s easy triumph in the Philippines, the war’s outcome was all but inevitable, though the end game was still not clear. The concern in Britain, and among the other “Great Powers”—Germany, France, Italy, Russia, and Japan—was not what would become of Cuba, for it was a foregone conclusion that Spain would resist perfunctorily, then capitulate, allowing the United States either to annex the island or to grant independence outright. The bigger question was the Philippines, which ostensibly had nothing to do with why the United States had gone to war in the first place. None of the powers, including the United States, cared very much about the Filipinos as a sovereign people, but they were keenly interested in who would wind up controlling the archipelago, and how much of it, most particularly its harbors. Manila, like Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and the Caroline Islands, was a valuable coaling station on the trade route to China, the prize that stirred the greatest jealousy and ambition among the empire builders.
And any play by one power for overseas territory wound up affecting the relationships of all the others. The term “colony” was gradually being replaced by the l
ess possessory euphemism “sphere of influence,” yet, as national economies expanded and competition for foreign markets increased, the desire to stake claims, both commercial and strategic, continued unabashed. The United States was not especially worried that another power would side with Spain in the Caribbean, but, even as Admiral Dewey was besieging Manila, the German navy hovered nearby, like buzzards over ripe carrion, its strength quickly exceeding that of the American fleet. Later in the summer, Germany’s foreign minister confided to his ambassador in Washington that the kaiser—Wilhelm had been succeeded by his grandson, Wilhelm II—“deems it a principal object of German policy to leave unused no opportunity which may arise from the Spanish-American War to obtain maritime fulcra in East Asia.”
Hay had followed the rise of German nationalism since his time in Vienna and had observed the well-drilled aggression of Bismarck during the Franco-Prussian War. Now that Spain had been put in its place, he recognized it was Germany that bore watching above all other powers. “The jealousy and animosity felt toward us in Germany is something which can hardly be exaggerated,” he wrote Lodge. “They hate us in France, but French hate is a straw fire compared to German. And France has nothing to fear from us while the Vaterland is all on fire with greed, and terror of us. They want the Philippines, the Carolines, and Samoa—they want to get into our markets and keep us out of theirs. . . . There is to the German mind something monstrous in the thought that a war should take place anywhere that they not profit by it.”
Germany’s animus, not just toward America but also toward Anglo-American friendliness, had been building for some time. Well before the Spanish-American War began, Wilhelm II had complained about “the American-British Society for International Theft and Warmongering.” The kaiser’s characterization may have been extreme, but his anxiety was legitimate. The United States remained emphatically opposed to entangling alliances, and Britain’s stance during the Spanish-American conflict was officially neutral, yet each nation was increasingly outspoken in its affinity for the other. Addressing the lord mayor of London at an Easter banquet the day before the U.S. Navy commenced its blockade of Cuba, Hay was especially eloquent in his affirmation of the connection. “The reasons of a good understanding between us lie deeper than any considerations of mere expediency,” he said. “All of us who think cannot but see that there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us to a sort of partnership in the beneficent work of the world. Whether we will it or not, we are associated in that work by the very nature of things, and no man and no group of men can prevent it.”
Three weeks later, after Dewey’s victory at Manila, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain delivered his now-famous address in Birmingham, in which he expressed Britain’s long-term duty to the United States: “It is to establish and to maintain bonds of a permanent amity across the Atlantic. They are a powerful and generous nation. They speak our language, they are bred of our race. . . . I do not know what arrangements may be possible with us, but this I know and feel,—that the closer, the more cordial, the fuller, and the more definite those arrangements are, with the consent of both peoples, the better it will be for both and for the world. And I even go so far as to say that, terrible as war may be, even war itself would be cheaply purchased if in a great and noble cause the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an Anglo-Saxon Alliance.”
Chamberlain’s speech was circulated throughout Europe and America, much to the satisfaction of Hay, who claimed that the secretary’s remarks were “partly due to a conversation I had with him.” Indeed, he had done his work well. Writing to Henry Cabot Lodge, Hay declared, “For the first time in my life I find the ‘drawing room’ sentiment altogether with us.” Some weeks later he elaborated further: “The Royal Family, by habit and tradition, are most careful not to break the rules of strict neutrality, but even among them I find nothing but hearty kindness and, as far as is consistent with propriety—sympathy.”
Hay solidified this sympathy throughout the summer. At a Fourth of July banquet for the American Society of London, he reciprocated Chamberlain’s espousal of amity. “We are glad to think that this is no passing emotion, born of a troubled hour,” he stated. “[I]t has been growing through many quiet years” and “[n]ow that the day of clear and cordial understanding has come . . . may we not hope it to last for ever?” Then, broadcasting his remarks over the heads of his immediate audience, in the direction of Spain, Germany, and as far as Russia, he added: “It threatens no one; it injures no one; its ends are altogether peaceful. . . . We shall still compete with each other and the rest of the world, but the competition will be in the arts and the works of civilization, and all the people of goodwill on the face of the earth shall profit by it.”
THE WAR IN CUBA ended in mid-July, shortly after the U.S. Navy destroyed the Spanish fleet as it attempted to escape Santiago and less than four weeks after the first American soldiers waded ashore at Daiquirí. A month later, the United States controlled Puerto Rico, Guam, and Manila. Hay followed the campaigns through the newspapers. He did not question the strategic and moral reasons for the war; nor did he exult in them overly much. He was pleased with the outcome, but if he was less than ebullient, perhaps the reason had to do with being so far removed, in both miles and years. Then, too, Spain had hardly been a formidable adversary.
Hay’s modulated enthusiasm is apparent in a letter he wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, acknowledging his contribution to the Cuban campaign. Roosevelt, as the entire world knew, had resigned his position as assistant secretary of the navy and led a regiment of voluntary cavalry known as Rough Riders in an assault on the hilly defenses surrounding Santiago. “I am afraid I am the last of your friends to congratulate you on the brilliant campaign which now seems drawing to a close,” Hay began with fitting bonhomie. “When the war began I was like the rest; I deplored [that you left] your place in the Navy where you were so useful and so acceptable. But I knew it was idle to preach to a young man. You obeyed your own daemon, and I imagine we older fellows will all have to confess that you were in the right.”
Hay’s next paragraph, or the first sentence of it, would be repeated for generations to come, too often ironically, in light of the not so proud events that would ensue in the Philippines. While his words were without a doubt sincere, they were more a reflection of his relief than of his sanguinity or even, as some historians would eventually aver, of his cavalier imperialism.
“It has been a splendid little war,” Hay told Roosevelt, “begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave. It is now to be concluded, I hope”—and here is the phrase that more fairly captures Hay’s temperance—“with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.”
These were sentiments Abraham Lincoln might well have conveyed: engage in the fight for proper reasons, honor the soldier; then, once victory is achieved, hold the moral high ground. Also embedded in Hay’s phrasing was the inference that the United States was not like other countries—brutal Spain or greedy Germany—and that America ought to set a better example, wielding its authority more decently and more wisely.
Little did Hay consider when he wrote to Roosevelt that in two months he would be expected to put his inchoate philosophy into applicable policy as secretary of state; or that in three years Roosevelt would be a president who believed, based on his giddy run to the top of San Juan Hill and his own inflated exceptionalism, that most any war could be splendid.
ON AUGUST 12, 1898, McKinley signed a protocol, already approved by the Spanish Cortes, stipulating that Spain evacuate Cuba immediately and that it cede sovereignty over all its possessions in the West Indies, including Puerto Rico. The fate of the Philippines was purposefully left vague. At the time of Dewey’s surprise attack on Manila, the majority of Americans, including many in the administration, perhaps even the president, could not find the Philippines on the ma
p. But once Manila had fallen, the archipelago was recognized as not only a vital interest but a point of national pride as well. “While we are conducting war and until its conclusion we must keep all we get,” McKinley observed sensibly, and “when the war is over we must keep what we want.”
But what did the United States want? Should it annex all the Philippine Islands, as it had done the Hawaiian Islands a month earlier, or hold on to only one or two as “hitching posts” on the road to China? If McKinley merely took Manila, or perhaps the entire island of Luzon, then Germany would surely gobble up the rest. There was also the matter of the Filipinos themselves, who, like the Cubans, expected the United States to enable their independence. All of these issues required a clearer definition of national interests abroad. Were Americans conquerors or liberators, imperialists or merely “expansionists”? Was it America’s duty to enlighten the benighted Filipinos or to let them find their own way? McKinley, a cautious commander in chief who had never seen the Pacific, was in a quandary. “If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us,” he remarked. But Dewey had not sailed away, and so the president chose to defer his decision until the time when a final treaty could be negotiated with Spain later in the year.
All the Great Prizes Page 39
