All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Schurz was one of the founders of the Anti-Imperialist League, whose membership grew to include a number of men Hay knew and respected: Henry Adams’s brother Charles Francis Adams; Henry James’s brother William James; Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and even former Secretary of State John Sherman. The Anti-Imperialists did not dwell on the economic implications of imperialism; rather, their main grievance was that their government would do precisely what McKinley and Hay pledged it would not—that is, inflict irreparable damage on American values and turn the United States into a “vulgar, commonplace empire.”

  Despite their vociferous efforts to intercede, the Anti-Imperialists had little effect on the outcome of the peace negotiations in Paris. On November 28, Spain capitulated to nearly all the American demands and agreed to renounce all rights to Cuba, to cede Puerto Rico and Guam, and to sell the Philippines for $20 million. But the Anti-Imperialists did not surrender as quickly as the Spaniards, and they now turned their wrath to blocking congressional approval of the peace treaty.

  Their opposition put Hay in a particularly awkward spot. Earlier in the summer, for example, he had congratulated Andrew Carnegie on an article the steel baron had written in the North American Review, in which he warned that “Triumphant Democracy” was on the brink of “Triumphant Despotism.” Carnegie had taken Hay’s compliment to mean that their views on the Philippines and American expansion were not so far apart. But once Hay backed McKinley and the peace commissioners on annexation of the Philippines, Carnegie wrote Hay a four-page screed, first accusing the president of plunging the country into an abyss and then condemning Hay for associating with a “military dictator.” “You have made a mistake,” he told Hay, scrawling at the bottom of the letter, “Bitterly opposed to you yet always your friend.”

  Hay had not been the author of the Philippine doctrine, nor had he been especially outspoken in advocating extracontinental expansion. But now he had to withstand the crossfire as best he could. Moreover, the new world charted by the Treaty of Paris was his to navigate.

  HENRY ADAMS WAS TOUCHED when Hay suggested that he would make a worthy successor as ambassador to England. But he recognized that he could be of greater service to his dear friend in the unofficial capacity of counselor and comforter. After settling Lizzie Cameron in an apartment in Paris for the winter, Adams arrived at Lafayette Square in mid-November. “Hay needs an alter or double,” he wrote to Nannie Lodge, “somebody like me, as intimate and as imbecile, but with traces of energy still left.”

  Thus commenced a new phase of Adams and Hay’s relationship. The teas and dinners during the Five of Hearts days had been convivial and the talks lively, but this was something different. The two friends fell into the habit of walking together after Hay finished up at the State Department—the dour historian and beleaguered diplomat in top hats and high-buttoned topcoats, clearing their heads and collecting each other’s thoughts. “[W]e tramp to the end of 16th Street discussing the day’s work at home and abroad,” Adams related to Lizzie.

  In his own letter to Lizzie, Hay gave his version of the ritual: “I go to the Department at nine and work till five and then carry home a little portfolio of annoyances. . . . If it were not for that blessed Dor [one of Martha Cameron’s nicknames for Adams] my lot would be most pitiable. He takes me for a walk in the gloaming and predicts catastrophes and ruin till my own cares fade away in the light of the coming cataclysm.”

  Adams would never warm to McKinley, and while not a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, he thought annexation of the Philippines a shameful error. “I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare,” he wrote Lizzie, “[in which] we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.” Yet neither he nor Hay ever argued over politics or found fault with each other. Instead, they “united in trying to help each other to get along the best way they could,” Adams wrote in his Education, “and all they tried to save was the personal relation.” Even then, Adams added, he “would have been beaten, had he not been helped by Mrs. Hay who saw the necessity of distraction, and led her husband to the habit of stopping every day to take his friend off for an hour’s walk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay afterwards, and a chat with anyone who called.”

  One of the callers that fall was Cabot Lodge, who lived a few short blocks away on Massachusetts Avenue. In many ways, Hay and Adams’s relationship with Lodge was even odder than their relationship with Don Cameron. Cameron was dull, and now that he was retired from the Senate, he was even easier to finesse. Besides, with Don also came La Dona. Cabot Lodge, on the other hand, was hard-nosed and arrogant, as self-serious as Hay and Adams were self-deprecatory. The romance between Hay and Nannie Lodge, such as it was, had long since dimmed, with Cabot and Clara none the wiser—their ignorance evidenced by the fact that the Hay and Lodge families continued to see a great deal of each other. All the same, neither Hay nor Adams could look at Lodge without seeing the hint of horns poking from his patrician brow.

  As difficult as Lodge was socially, his political style was what really grated. Hay and Lodge were both Republicans, but Lodge was much less moderate and immensely more intractable. Lodge still regarded McKinley as meek and felt somewhat the same about Hay. As for Lodge’s large policy, the larger the better. When it came to asserting America’s place in the world, no one was as aggressive and cocksure as Cabot Lodge, unless it was Theodore Roosevelt. And if the world was Lodge’s oyster, so too was the State Department. Since gaining a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, he had come to regard the department as his virtual fiefdom, its secretary and staff on call to do his senatorial bidding.

  Hay, though, was not so easily cowed by Lodge’s forceful nature, nor did he readily subscribe to the senator’s ultra-expansionist rhetoric. Hay had been around his share of egotists and knew that the best way to accommodate them was to let them have their say and to hold one’s ground as calmly and politely as possible. Such was his approach when Lodge began dropping by Lafayette Square in December. After one of these sessions, Adams described to Lizzie Cameron the chill he saw growing between the two statesmen: “[T]he Senator, while agreeing in general approval of the Secretary of State’s health, expresses an earnest wish that he would not look so exceedingly tired when approached on business at the department; while the Secretary with sobs in his voice assures me that the Senator gives him more trouble, about less matter, than all the governments of Europe, Asia and the Sulu Islands [in the Philippines], and all the Senators from the wild West and the Congressmen from the rebel confederacy. Tell me, does patriotism pay me to act as a buffer-state?”

  Adams’s snide humor was not lost on Lizzie, for she was one of four people who understood why Hay was willing to put up with Lodge but would never entirely bend to his will. After all, she and Adams had been the other “Two on the Terrace.”

  THE MATTER THAT HAY and Lodge spent so much time discussing over tea was the Treaty of Paris and its chances for ratification. All treaties, even after they had been agreed upon by the nations of interest, still required a two-thirds vote of the Senate. In the case of the treaty with Spain, the Anti-Imperialists and obstructionist Democrats mounted a formidable front against the annexation of the Philippines, their moral objections strengthened by the legalistic contention that the U.S. Constitution forbade acquisition of territory not intended to become a state. (On the other hand, there was little or no public outcry against the cession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Guam.) To block ratification they needed only 28 votes. And they might well have succeeded if a new war had not broken out in the Philippines.

  Filipinos, who had cooperated with the Americans in ousting the Spanish, felt bitterly betrayed when the United States proceeded to enforce military rule over the archipelago and scoffed at a newly written Philippines constitution and fledgling government. Filipinos likewise bristled when American soldiers routinely dismissed them as “niggers,” “jungle bab
ies,” and “gugus,” and the leader of their independence movement, Emilio Aguinaldo, as a “halfbreed adventurer.” When Aguinaldo and his cohorts were excluded from the peace negotiations with Spain and barred from Manila, the city that they had helped to liberate and hoped would become the capital of an independent Philippines republic, the crisis ignited. On February 4, 1899, a standoff between natives and their occupiers turned violent, killing some sixty Americans and perhaps as many as three thousand Filipinos. The insurrection that ensued was to last four years and would require a force of more than seventy thousand American troops to suppress.

  On February 6, one day after news of the outbreak of fighting reached Washington, Vice President Hobart put the Treaty of Paris to a vote of the Senate. The tally was 57 to 27, one more than the required two-thirds majority. Annexation accomplished.

  Ten days later, McKinley gave a speech in Boston, reiterating his reasons for taking the Philippines. “Our concern was not for territory or trade or empire, but for the people whose interests and destiny, without our willing it, had been put in our hands,” he explained, even as the rebellion escalated. “We were doing our duty by them, as God gave us the light to see our duty, with the consent of our own consciences and with the approval of civilization. . . . Nor can we now ask for their consent. . . . It is not a good time for the liberator to submit important questions concerning liberty and government to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down their rescuers.”

  The treaty, he elaborated, committed the Filipinos “to the guiding hand of the liberalizing influences, the generous sympathies, the uplifting education, not of their American masters, but of their American emancipators.” And finally McKinley aimed his rhetoric not just at the Anti-Imperialists but also at the nations of the world who wondered at the true nature of America’s intent: “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind,” the president asserted. “They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose. Our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun.”

  WHILE THE WAR DEPARTMENT endeavored to smother insurgency in the Philippines, the State Department took up the far more complex task of making the world smaller, or at least more accessible. With America’s billowing presence in the Pacific and the enchanting promise of the Far East, the need for a shorter and speedier route to foreign fronts and markets was greater than ever. After the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, a comparable project across Central America had at last seemed feasible. A French company was the first to try, digging in Panama for seven years, from 1882 to 1889, before going broke. Hay had been assistant secretary of state—and in-house translator—when the director of the French project, Ferdinand de Lesseps, attempted to get the United States involved; but President Hayes and Secretary of State William Evarts wanted nothing to do with a French canal. Any endeavor involving the United States, Evarts declared, would be an American canal under American control. Furthermore, he insisted, the United States would not consent to the surrender of this control to any European power or to any combination of European powers.

  This view grew only stronger during the Spanish-American War, when the battleship Oregon required ten anxious weeks to steam from Puget Sound to Key West. An American-controlled canal between the Pacific and the Atlantic would have given the U.S. Navy an enormous strategic advantage; a canal controlled by an enemy or blocked by a neutral power could have been disastrous.

  In 1887, the Maritime Canal Company, an American firm, had begun to dig in Nicaragua, a much longer route, but one considered by most American engineers to be less problematic. This effort collapsed in the Panic of 1893, but thereafter Nicaragua was regarded as “the American route.” In Congress, the greatest champion of Nicaragua was Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, a seventy-five-year-old former Confederate general whose enthusiasm for an interoceanic canal predated the urgency of the Spanish-American War but now benefited from it enormously. In June 1898, as the navy blockaded Manila and Santiago, Morgan introduced a bill calling for the federal government to rehabilitate the Maritime Canal Company’s concession and renew work on the canal across Nicaragua—a canal built and owned by Americans. The war ended before the Senate could take up the legislation, but in his annual address to Congress in December, McKinley stressed the indispensability of “a maritime highway” and urged Congress to act without delay. The president expressed optimism for the Nicaragua route—and made no mention whatsoever of Panama.

  On January 21, 1899, the Senate passed Morgan’s canal bill by an overwhelming majority. “Permit me to congratulate you most heartily,” John Hay wrote the senator. “I hope you will not consider it presumptuous in me to express my admiration of your work, and that you may soon see the complete accomplishment of it.”

  What Hay did not mention to Morgan at the time was that a canal across Central America was in clear violation of a treaty that proscribed precisely what Morgan and the Maritime Company were proposing to do. By the terms of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, Great Britain and the United States pledged that neither country would exclusively control or fortify any prospective isthmian canal and that both would guard the safety and neutrality of any canal they might build.

  The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was not put to the test, at least not immediately, for the Morgan bill hit an impasse in the House, where William P. Hepburn, a Republican from Iowa (Morgan was a Democrat), smelled something funny in the Maritime arrangement. Hepburn had come under the sway of a new group of canal advocates who had reasons, both mercenary and patriotic, to believe that Panama, not Nicaragua, ought to be the American way. To Morgan’s dismay and frustration, his bill was tabled until a newly created Isthmian Canal Commission could investigate the relative merits of both paths. So began “the battle of the routes,” which would drag on for four more years and alter the politics of Latin America for at least the next century. Hay would be in the very thick of it—but first he had to dismantle Clayton-Bulwer.

  HIS TASK WOULD HAVE been much more straightforward if the British Foreign Office had not insisted on entangling the old canal treaty with more recent and far testier negotiations to resolve the boundary between Canada and Alaska.

  The boundary in question was the rugged, jig-sawed coastline of northern British Columbia, delineated rather hazily in an 1825 treaty between Britain and Russia. The ambiguity of the boundary had been of no consequence when the United States purchased Alaska in 1867; the American assumption was that the boundary followed the coastline, including all inlets and harbors. But the Canadians, whose foreign policy was still determined by Great Britain, believed that the boundary cut across the mouths of inlets, making the inlets theirs. Neither side pushed the issue until the gold rush began in 1897—at which point Canada became convinced that there ought to be an all-Canadian route to the gold fields via the Lynn Canal, the longest inlet and the preferred jumping off point to the mountain passes that connected the coast to the Klondike. From distant Washington and London, the controversy appeared rather picayune, but to the Canadians it was regarded as a national affront. Such was their indignation that a joint high commission had been impaneled in 1898, before Hay became secretary of state, to work out an amicable solution.

  Bickering continued through the fall and into the winter, proving irksome to the State Department and embarrassing to the British Foreign Office, whose stubborn North American dominion threatened to bruise the newly ripened friendship between the two countries. With resolution nowhere in sight, Prime Minister/Foreign Secretary Salisbury seized on the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty as the lever that could break the Alaskan logjam: If America would give ground in the north, Britain would give ground in the south, consenting to a revised treaty that would allow for an American canal.

  Hay had no desire to stir up trouble with Britain, but, on the other hand, he was sure that the Canadian claims were “ridiculous and preposterous,” and it galled him that the canal could be held hostage. “The two questions have nothing to do with each other,” he vented to Henr
y White, who was the acting ambassador in London until Hay’s replacement was appointed. “Every intelligent Englishman is ready to admit that the canal ought to be built, that the United States alone will build it, that it cannot be built except as a Government enterprise, that nobody else wants to build it, that when built it will be to the advantage of the entire civilized world, and, this being the case, it is hard to see why the settlement of the matter ought to depend on the fish duty or the lumber duty or the Alaska boundary. . . . We shall have to make the best we can of a bad situation.”

  A week later, the high commission adjourned until the end of the summer, without reaching a settlement and without agreeing on even basic ground rules for arbitration. Hay went into the spring “convinced that the Canadians prefer that nothing shall be settled between the two countries. . . . I cannot at this moment look forward in any hopeful spirit to a renewal of our negotiations.” He had accomplished nothing; worse still, he knew that men like John Morgan and Cabot Lodge would not let a fifty-year-old treaty with Britain keep the United States from building a canal. Unless he succeeded in separating Clayton-Bulwer from the Alaskan boundary, a great deal of the goodwill he had worked so hard to establish between the two countries would be dashed.

  HE DID NOT HANDLE the strain well. Adams noticed that Hay’s temper had turned “quite savage.” After a dinner party to celebrate Hay and Clara’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, attended by Cabot and Nannie Lodge, among others, Adams wrote to Lizzie Cameron: “I am in daily terror lest Hay should bolt the course. I can see, beneath his silence, how he suffers under the imbecility of his colleagues, and the increasing difficulties of his situation. Yesterday, or rather Friday, everything seemed to give way together—The Canada Joint Commission broke down, dragging with it the Clayton-Bulwer negotiation and all Lord Salisbury’s honeymoon. . . . [T]he whole work of the winter was in ruins.”