All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  The newspapers conjectured that Hay would be appointed one of the peace commissioners, on the assumption that the conference would take place in London. He was not the least interested, however, and Clara dreaded the thought of having to entertain the delegation, whether her husband was a member or not.

  Still, there was no escaping the changes that were about to transform the State Department. Secretary of State Sherman had muddled through the spring, forgetful and disgruntled. To make up for Sherman’s disabilities, McKinley had appointed Judge William R. Day, a trusted friend from Canton, to serve as Sherman’s first assistant secretary, knowing that Day’s surrogacy would provide only a temporary fix. In April, with war imminent and after one too many lapses of memory, Sherman had been persuaded to resign, and Day had replaced him as secretary of state. Day served ably enough during the war, supported, as he was, by the department’s true mainstay, Second Assistant Alvey Adee, Hay’s colleague and fellow traveler from Madrid. Yet Day, while undoubtedly a quick study, had no experience in statecraft beyond the Stark County courthouse, and now that the American portfolio bulged with new acquisitions, McKinley needed a secretary with deeper experience and more lustrous credentials. Hay should not have been surprised to find his name atop the list, especially after his impeccable showing in London during the past year.

  IT WAS TOO SOON to think about going home. Hay and Clara were thoroughly comfortable with their life in London. The entire family was in England for the summer; Helen and Alice had stayed on after the trip to Egypt, and Del and Clarence arrived from America once the school year was over. Del had finished Yale, and his father found things for him to do at the embassy, where he seemed to enjoy himself immensely.

  There was yet another reason for staying put: the Camerons had rented a country house in Kent near Dover. Lizzie and Don were reconciled, at least to the point of living under the same roof for a few months, and according to their long-standing custom, they invited their “tame cat” to take up residence with them. Adams, after ambling through the Holy Land and Europe, arrived in England in early June.

  The estate was named Surrenden Dering—“Surrender Daring,” to the Americans—a rambling, thirty-bedroom Elizabethan elephant “filled with handsome, ponderous and uncomfortable furniture and enlivened only by dull family portraits,” remembered Adams’s niece Abigail, one of many guests that summer. The setting, though, more than made up for the dowdiness of the house, with gardens and grassy terraces overlooking a deer park and the lush Weald of Kent. Abigail described her uncle leading excursions to parish churches and riding the lanes with Martha Cameron on “two chubby brown ponies.” Don Cameron was his usual vulgar self; he scorned tea and ordered his favorite foods sent over from the States. The cook acquitted herself with corn on the cob, but she stewed watermelon as if it were squash.

  Hay could not get away from his desk until the season was nearly over. From London he wrote Lizzie wistfully, “I am a ghastly wreck and nothing but Surrenden air will bring me round.” He also regretted having missed her when she came through London. “I had most dexterously arranged things so as to shake the diplomatic complications and take you to supper. In advance I indulged my vanity by imagining people saying, ‘Who is that beautiful woman with old Hay?’ ”

  The Hays finally arrived on August 6, and Abigail observed the differences between Clara and their American hostess: “Mrs. Don Cameron was on the whole the most socially competent woman that I ever met. . . . She was not perhaps strictly beautiful, but she was such a mass of style and had such complete self-assurance that she always gave the appearance of beauty and she gave everyone a good time when she set out to please.” Mrs. Hay, meanwhile, “was a most majestic-appearing person with an alarming exterior but a warm heart. She was kind, generous, unpretentious, and completely unselfconscious. . . . Though she made no pretense of being an intellectual, she had a wonderful fund of common sense.”

  As for Hay, Abigail noticed beneath his “lighthearted wit and conviviality” a certain “nervous tension”—a tension that increased dramatically on August 14, when Henry White arrived from London, bearing a telegram. McKinley had named William Day to head the commission that would hash out a final treaty of peace with Spain, and he wanted Hay to return to Washington as the new secretary of state.

  The news that Hay had been offered the highest cabinet post in the administration, a position that ranked beneath only the vice president, was not cause for jubilation at Surrenden Dering. If anything, the opposite was true. Hay was naturally flattered to be asked, and he would have felt bruised if the job had been offered to someone else; yet as much as he had wanted the ambassadorship and had intrigued to get it, he did not relish the prospect of promotion. He was “utterly depressed” by McKinley’s invitation, Henry White noted. Hay confided to White that the strain of being secretary of state would likely kill him in six months. And if he decided not to accept the offer, he realized that he would have to resign as ambassador, for, as Adams commented, “No serious statesman could accept a favor and refuse a service.”

  Hay spent the rest of the day deliberating and finally wrote McKinley a frank but tentative letter of acceptance: “The place is beyond my ambition. I cannot but feel it is beyond my strength and ability.” He told the president that he had not been feeling well lately (his kidneys this time) and could not get away from England until the middle of September. “If you conclude after all to order me home,” he continued tepidly, “it will be with unfeigned anxiety and diffidence that I shall enter upon the duties of an office I have never aspired to, and which I honestly think too great for me.”

  Hay’s consternation so alarmed Henry White that he sent outgoing Secretary Day a rather bold cable: “I think it is my duty to let the President and you know that it is very doubtful whether the Ambassador’s present condition of health is equal to [the] onerous duties of your office. In fact . . . such are his devotion to and desire to be with the President that he will not tell him so.”

  White told Hay what he had done, assuring him that he had acted purely out of duty and heartfelt concern and with no treachery intended. Hay did not take offense; nor was McKinley deterred. The one upshot was that the president consented to let Hay stay in England for another month to regain his health and to close out his affairs.

  He lingered at Surrenden Dering until the end of August, and then, before returning to London, made a short visit to the Isle of Wight for one more audience with Queen Victoria. Again he was invited to sit by the queen’s side at dinner, and the next morning she unexpectedly invited him to her apartment for another talk. “That’s what you get by being a royal favorite,” Hay wrote Clara, who had gone to Paris with the girls to shop. Afterward, Victoria told the British minister to the United States, Julian Paunceforte, that Hay was “the most interesting of all the Ambassadors I have known.”

  For the next two weeks, the British papers were full of congratulations and regrets: congratulations for Hay’s promotion, knowing that Anglo-American relations would improve further with him as secretary of state; regrets over losing such an amiable ambassador. Speculation over Hay’s successor focused on Whitelaw Reid, especially after Reid was appointed to the peace commission that was to convene in Paris (not in London, as had first been thought). On the day that Hay left England, he wrote Reid, extending “the old love, the old confidence, the old trust.” He was less fulsome about his own prospects. “[Y]ou can imagine with what solemn and anxious feelings I am starting for home,” he told his old colleague. “Never, even in war times, did I feel anything like it. But then I was young and now I am old.”

  To another friend he confessed: “I am full of hurry and full of dread, but perhaps I may pull through.”

  HAY WAS SWORN IN as secretary of state on September 30, 1898, whereupon he took his seat at McKinley’s right hand. The mantle of authority was new, but the milieu was familiar, with a few obvious differences. The first floor of the White House had been spruced up nearly twenty years earl
ier to suit the Gilded Age appetites of Chester Arthur, but the second floor, where the president worked and lived with Mrs. McKinley, was hardly more opulent and possibly even more hectic than during the Lincoln years. The first telephone had been installed while Hay was serving in the Hayes administration, and electricity had arrived while Benjamin Harrison was president. Light bulbs now festooned the formerly gas-lit chandeliers, and a labyrinth of wires latticed the ceilings. The bedroom in the northeast corner once occupied by Hay and Nicolay and the adjacent office shared by Hay and the third secretary, William Stoddard, were jammed with the desks of more than a dozen secretaries and clerks. Nicolay’s office had become the telegraph office—no more journeying across the White House lawn to the War Department, as Lincoln had done with ritual solemnity.

  Yet for all the amenities and innovations that had modernized life in the White House over the years—a steam-heating system, bathrooms with running water, and an elevator—privacy and quiet were still in short supply. On the first floor, only the dining room was closed to public gawkers. Upstairs the halls were jammed with the same petitioners, reporters, and pests who had annoyed Hay and Nicolay three decades earlier. McKinley became so distracted by the traffic traipsing in and out of his office—the same south-facing room where Lincoln had worked—that he usually repaired to the cabinet room next door, using the end of the cabinet table as a desk.

  Cabinet meetings were held on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Hay needed neither introduction nor initiation. In the years to follow, spanning part or all of four different presidential terms, the responsibility of advising the president and interacting with the other cabinet secretaries would bring forth the best of John Hay’s talents as conciliator, problem solver, and sounding board. The greater challenge was the actual management of the State Department.

  His forte had never been administration, and suddenly he found himself in charge of nearly ninety employees in Washington and twelve hundred dispersed in embassies, legations, and consulates overseas. For support, Hay tried to bring William Rockhill back from Athens as his first assistant secretary, but McKinley gave the job to David Jayne Hill, president of the University of Rochester, who, while a well-regarded expert on international law, had even less experience in the State Department than did Hay. Fortunately, the capable and nearly indefatigable Alvey Adee continued as second assistant. Hay quickly came to rely on him for almost everything. Adee’s hearing was worse than ever; nevertheless, he and Hay would communicate with little difficulty for the next seven years.

  But even with Adee guarding the door of the office in the State, War and Army Building, Hay could not avoid a certain amount of aggravation. “I receive twenty or thirty worrying visits a day, all from people wanting something,” he wrote Clara. “[T]wo or three chargés d’affaires call; from fifty to a hundred despatches must be read and signed. . . . I get the hour off from one to two & then go back till 4:30.” A week later, a few days after turning sixty, he lamented to her again: “I feel so dull and worthless I almost dread to have you come and plunge into this life of dreary drudgery. It is going to be vile—the whole business. . . . All the fun of my life ended on the platform at Euston [Station]. I do not mean . . . that England was so uproariously gay—but this place is so intolerable.”

  His woebegone mood was decidedly out of step with the rest of the country. The quick and “splendid” victory over Spain had brought the nation together to a degree that had not existed since the onset of the Civil War. America was now the dominant force in its own hemisphere and a formidable presence in the Pacific. “We have never in all our history had the standing in the world we have now,” Hay wrote McKinley shortly after the war ended. The American economy was booming again, exports at an all-time high. The discovery of gold (by Americans) in the Canadian Klondike, so near to Alaska, seemed almost providential. “ ‘We’re a gr-reat people,’ ” one of humorist Finley Peter Dunne’s barroom regulars boasted to his Irish-American sage, Mr. Dooley, who in turn replied, “ ‘We ar-re. . . . We ar-re at that. An’ th’ best iv it is, we know we ar-re.’ ”

  It was hard for Hay to stay glum, now that he was back in his own house on Lafayette Square, amid his beloved books and art collection. Although Adams was still in Europe and Vice President Hobart continued to occupy the Cameron house, life resumed much of its familiar cycle. Hay’s carriage could deliver him to the State Department in ten minutes, to the White House in half that.

  And he liked his boss. Hay had always been effusive in his praise of McKinley, but once he was in a position to observe the man more closely, his respect for his leadership grew even greater. “The President rules [the cabinet] with a hand of iron in a mitten of knitted wool,” he told Lizzie Cameron. “It is delightful to see the air of gentle deference with which he asks us all our opinions, and then decides as seemeth unto him good.” Then he paid McKinley the highest of compliments: “He is awfully like Lincoln in many respects.”

  McKinley had won election as a promoter of domestic prosperity, not as an international visionary. Foreign affairs, beyond the pocketbook ramifications of tariffs and trade reciprocity, had never aroused him. State dinners, or anything the least bit exotic, made him uncomfortable. Yet during the first critical months of his administration, he had been obliged to act as his own secretary of state, suffering the liability of John Sherman and getting by on the lieutenancy of William Day. After a season of war, he was only too glad to turn responsibility for the country’s foreign relations over to the man whom, McKinley acknowledged, ought to have been in charge from the beginning. “He scared me by saying he would not worry any more about the State Department,” Hay told Clara, who was still abroad.

  THE MOST PONDEROUS ISSUE before him remained the Philippines. While in London, Hay had informed McKinley that it would be a considerable disappointment to the British if the United States did not take control of the entire archipelago; beyond that he had not taken a conspicuous position on the matter—which was not the case with most public men he knew.

  The leading advocate for annexation was Henry Cabot Lodge, whose bully pulpit was the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Eschewing the term “imperialism,” Lodge preferred to call his brand of international aggrandizement a “large policy”—in which he couched America’s self-interest abroad in terms of Christian benevolence and divine inevitability. “I do not believe that this nation was an accident,” he told his fellow senators. “I do not believe it is the creation of blind choice. I have faith that it has a great mission in the world. . . . I wish to see it master of the Pacific. I would have it fulfill what I think is its manifest destiny.”

  Theodore Roosevelt was even less varnished in his pronouncements on the subject. America’s manifest destiny, he had once asserted, was “to swallow up the land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us.” He was thinking of the American West when he wrote these words, but to him and other large-policy proponents, the Philippines were the new frontier (and the Filipinos another Indian tribe). In November, on the strength of his Rough Rider exploits and contagious patriotism, Roosevelt would win the New York governorship.

  McKinley, meanwhile, still had mixed feelings about seizing all or any of the Philippines. Having once deplored “the greed of conquest” and having regarded annexation as “criminal aggression,” he now acknowledged the “new duties and responsibilities which we must meet and discharge as becomes a great nation.” He exhorted the peace commissioners to exercise “moderation, restraint, and reason” in their negotiations with Spain, and then he embarked on a tour of the Midwest to take the country’s pulse. He returned to the White House, convinced that “the American people would not accept it if we did not obtain some advantage from our great victories at Manila” and that “the well-considered opinion of the majority would be that duty requires we should take the archipelago.” He did not believe the Philippines were capable of self-rule even as a U.S. protectorate, like Cuba, and he was now quite certain that anything less than ful
l annexation would invite predation by Germany and others. If he did nothing, allowing Spain to retain the Philippines, he feared that America would be the laughingstock of the world.

  Finally the pious president got on his knees and prayed for guidance. “[O]ne night late it came to me,” he told a group of Methodist ministers, “that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them [although many were already Roman Catholic], and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department . . . and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States.”

  On October 26, at McKinley’s request, Hay directed the peace commissioners to insist upon cession of the entire Philippine archipelago. Two days later, to clarify that the administration had not abandoned the path of righteousness, he sent the commissioners another cable. “It is imperative upon us that as victors,” he reaffirmed, “we should be governed only by motives which will exalt our nation. Territorial expansion should be our least concern; that we shall not shirk the moral obligations of our victory is . . . the greatest.”

  Not everyone applauded McKinley’s decision or swallowed Hay’s avowal of national virtue—not the Filipinos, who had cooperated with the American military with the expectation that their sovereignty would soon be recognized; not Democrats, who had a new brickbat to use against Republicans in upcoming elections; and not the bipartisan coalition of critics who regarded the decision to annex the Philippines as an exercise of tyranny that would lead to proportionate tyranny at home—or so proclaimed Carl Schurz, a friend of Hay’s since the Greeley presidential campaign.