All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  (Adams also couldn’t resist mentioning that Clara had worn her wedding dress to the dinner. “I did not dare to ask how much alteration it required.”)

  Hay’s letter to Lizzie two days later was no less forlorn: “[I]t is an evil life I am living—hounded by fellow-creatures from dawn till snowy eve, and not one soul of them but wants me to do something difficult or improper.” Some weeks later he was able to give an only slightly sunnier report to Henry White. “I am horribly rushed, and not very well,” he wrote. “By the time you get this, I shall have been in this place of punishment six months—the limit you and I set last August to my probable endurance. I may have deteriorated somewhat . . . but not fatally, and if I could get rid of a beastly cold which makes my life miserable, I should be pretty fit.”

  Some of that fitness he owed to two recent appointments. Whitelaw Reid, despite his valuable service on the peace commission, had not been named the next ambassador to England. Instead, McKinley had given the job to New York attorney Joseph Choate, a law partner of William Evarts and a trusted adviser to Wall Street. Besides being one of America’s foremost legal minds, he was also a most charming public speaker. Everybody, it seems, had his favorite Choate witticism. (Asked who he would like to be if he could not be himself, he replied: “Mrs. Choate’s second husband.”) Like Hay, he was worldly and well-to-do—but without the grandiosity of Reid—and in London, where he arrived in March, Choate too could afford a house on Carlton House Terrace. A loyal Republican, with the admirable battle scar of having run for Senate against Thomas Platt, he would serve Hay steadfastly and adroitly for the next five years.

  The other valuable addition to Hay’s team was William Rockhill. After failing to find a place for Rockhill in the State Department, Hay had tried to secure a sinecure for him as librarian of Congress, only to be blocked by Cabot Lodge, who wanted the job for a defeated Massachusetts politician. Finally in April, he succeeded in having Rockhill appointed director of the Bureau of American Republics, founded in 1890 to promote cooperation between eighteen nations of North, Central, and South America (the forerunner of the Organization of American States). The tacit understanding was that Rockhill would perform his duties for the Americas with an efficiency that would leave plenty of time to advise the State Department on Far Eastern affairs. The salary was meager, but Rockhill leapt at the offer and reported for duty in mid-May.

  The placement of Choate and Rockhill enabled Hay to persevere, for even with the canal and the Alaskan boundary at an impasse, he felt encouraged that Choate would carry the administration’s brief with tact and determination without twisting the lion’s tail unduly. And with Rockhill close by, the State Department was poised to take the next step in American foreign policy. The Philippines, Hawaii, and the canal, whether in Nicaragua or Panama, were all links in the same chain, the jewel of which was China. In John Hay’s career as secretary of state, no two issues would loom larger or contribute more indelibly to his legacy than the interoceanic canal and China. The related diplomacy he accomplished with such determination and delicacy in the coming year would not only shrink the globe but also forestall goodly portions of it from falling apart.

  MEANTIME, HE DID HIS best to keep his friendships intact as well. Hay had known since October that Reid would not win the English ambassadorship, but had been obliged to remain mum until the president was ready to make his decision public. The most awkward moment came at Christmas, when the peace commissioners arrived in New York and were escorted to Washington, at McKinley’s request, by Del Hay to present the signed treaty. At the end of Christmas Day, Reid had come to tea with Hay and Adams, and even then Hay was obliged to keep Reid in the dark. “Poor Hay had to bear the brunt of Whitelaw’s insane voracity for plunder,” Adams confided to Lizzie Cameron after the tea. Writing that same day to Flora Mather, Hay confessed, “I fear he [Reid] will never forgive me for not having been able to get him the English Embassy.”

  Hay apologized to his friend for being less than forthcoming and begged Reid’s understanding: “I shall continue to hope that no cloud shall ever come between us. Your friendship has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life, and in the short space which remains to me I trust I shall retain it.” But the cloud had come just the same, and, without either of them ever saying so, the friendship was thenceforth mentioned mostly in the past tense.

  IN MID-JUNE 1899, CLARA and the children left Lafayette Square to spend the summer at the Fells, leaving Hay to hold down the State Department. In the muggy heat of summer, the government fell into a state of semi-torpor; socially the city was dead. Hay and Adee worked out an arrangement by which Adee would take his vacations in June and early July—most years cycling in France—and, upon his return, Hay would depart for the Fells, remaining through September. “[T]he State Department, always impossible, has been a little Hell,” Hay told Adams, who was gone as well, staying in Lizzie Cameron’s apartment in Paris. “It was bad enough before you went away; but it has grown constantly worse, and there being nobody to talk to, and call it names, makes the whole thing intolerable.”

  As usual when Hay was alone, he wrote to Lizzie. With Adams in Paris, she was back in the States, biding her time in New York and avoiding going to the Cameron farm in Pennsylvania. Hay beseeched her to come to Washington. Her house was vacant, Vice President Hobart having taken his failing heart to the New Jersey shore for the summer. “Did you ever spend the hot season in Washington?” he asked her. “I have, several times—but one forgets. Certainly I have no recollection of such steady, dense, unpitying heat. One loses one’s mind, heart, and conscience.” If she preferred not to trespass in her own house, there was always Adams’s. “But come and do not delay,” he pleaded five weeks later. “I would fain refresh my worn and weary eyes—bleared with too much diplomacy, by contemplating something more attractive.” He was frightfully busy, he told her somewhat mischievously. “I could not dedicate to you more than 24 hours per day.”

  When she did not accept his invitation, he asked if he might not see her in New York on his way to New Hampshire. When she hesitated even then, he did not relent. “I am afraid you will not take time to think of that scheme I proposed this morning . . . because it does not amuse you,” he wrote just before leaving Washington. “But that is the wrong way to look at it: you should think how it will amuse me. And I am the elder & should be considered. And where shall I see you and where shall we have lunch? Is the Metropolitan Museum—near the Rembrandts—too far away? And the Metropolitan Club Annex—how is that? But anywhere you say will suit me.”

  He closed his letter with a stiff “Regards to J.D.C.” (James Donald Cameron), but those regards were perfunctory at best. The only one he ever longed for was Lizzie. “It seems so unreal and impossible that I am to see you again—if I am,” he mused with ardent anticipation. “Are you as beautiful as ever, and as heartless? I hope so. It would be such a pity if you grew kind. Men are so numerous and unworthy. But be kind enough to say Yes this time and send your letter to my house and not to my shop.” Until then, he assured her, “I shall not sleep.”

  Finally she did consent to have lunch with him, and it was enough to sustain him until the next time.

  CHAPTER 15

  Spheres of Influence

  As much as Hay had complained about the clammy climate and diplomatic frustration of Washington, he fretted obsessively about the business yet unfinished. “I am plagued by the foul fiend fibbertijibbish,” he wrote Alvey Adee, who was minding the store in his absence. “I cannot give myself up to rest and be thankful.” After only three weeks at Lake Sunapee, he went to Lake Champlain, where President McKinley was vacationing, “to bore him for a few hours about Alaska, and Samoa and China, and Nicaragua and the other outlying nurseries of woe and worry.” From there he proceeded to Washington to face “the purgatory I have left,” he told Adams.

  Prospects of a resolution of the Alaskan boundary dispute had brightened considerably since Joseph Choate’s appointment. As Hay h
ad hoped, he and his new ambassador made an effective team: Hay working through British minister Julian Paunceforte in Washington and Choate with Lord Salisbury in London. In early August 1899, Great Britain and the United States at last succeeded in coaxing Canada to accept a provisional boundary, pending final settlement. If nothing else, this modus vivendi now cleared the way for unencumbered discussion of the Clayton-Bulwer canal treaty.

  Next he sold Britain on another map. For the past decade the Pacific islands of Samoa had been controlled jointly and rather unsatisfactorily by the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. After a brief civil war earlier in 1899, in which the Americans and the British backed one side and the Germans the other, the three powers concluded that it was in their mutual interest that the islands be divided. The timing made sense, for Britain was already arming for war with the Boers in South Africa and very much needed the sympathy of the United States and, just as crucially, the neutrality of the kaiser, who had made a show of congratulating the Boers for their early resistance.

  Hay met with a German envoy on August 31 to draw up a plan of partition and then had Choate present it to the British. The final details took several more months, but in the end the United States gained what it wanted: the superb harbor of Pago Pago, the island of Tutuila, and several smaller islands. Germany got the rest. For its gentlemanly deference, Britain was given rights to islands in the Tonga and Solomon groups, plus sundry concessions in Africa. Hay’s style of unruffled, round-robin diplomacy worked just as he had wished, and it would soon reap even greater rewards as he directed his foreign policy even farther afield, to China.

  FOREIGN INCURSION IN CHINA had begun in the 1840s with the establishment of the first sanctioned trading port at Canton. After the First Opium War (1839–42), China gave up five more coastal cities, most notably Hong Kong and Shanghai; in 1858, a dozen more “treaty ports” opened, and for the first time foreigners gained access to the Yangtze River. Looking down the barrels of European guns, China had little choice but to allow low tariffs on foreign goods. China’s impotence to defend itself was laid bare on a grand and gory scale in a confrontation with Japan in 1894–95. In six months, the Japanese army and navy thoroughly thrashed the Chinese, established a “sphere of influence” in Korea, and seized Taiwan outright.

  With that the scramble for larger spheres of influence—territory extending well beyond the original treaty ports—became a virtual stampede. Over a two-year period, from mid-1896 to mid-1898, Germany secured the port of Tsingtao and mining and railroad rights throughout the northern province of Shantung. Russia, whose presence in Manchuria was already well established and who plainly had designs on extending its empire from the Baltic to the ice-free Yellow Sea, tightened its grip on the Liao-tung Peninsula, leasing Talienwan and a naval base at Port Arthur and also securing the right to build a railway connecting these warm-water harbors to the Trans-Siberia Railway. To counterbalance the Russian presence at Port Arthur, Britain carved out a base at Weihaiwei, on the northern tip of Shantung; and to increase its dominance of the central Chinese trade, it leased Kowloon, across from Hong Kong, and gained further commercial guarantees in the Yangtze Valley. France, not to be left out, crept northward from Indochina, leasing Kwangchowan on the Luichow Peninsula.

  The United States was a relative latecomer to China. While hundreds of American missionaries had been proselytizing within its borders since midcentury, American businesses had made only slight inroads. At the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, less than 1 percent of American exports went to China (although U.S. ships carried a third of all the Western goods exported to the country). But once the war was over, the Far East beckoned with heightened seductiveness. Indeed, China was one of the main reasons the United States had decided to hang on to the Philippines. Moreover, as Rockhill stressed to Hay, if the United States did not exert its influence, the powers would surely slice the pie into pieces, sundering China perhaps forever—with the imperial Qing government helpless to do anything about it.

  American businesses with interests or ambitions in China—textiles, steel, and oil predominantly—were not about to sit by while the feeding frenzy escalated. The American Asiatic Association, formed in New York in June 1898, commenced a well-funded campaign to persuade the administration to secure America’s “fair share” of the China trade. The National Association of Manufacturers, numerous chambers of commerce, and jingoes of all stripe joined the chorus exhorting McKinley to become more deeply involved in China.

  Even then, McKinley hesitated to take a stand. In his annual address to Congress in December 1898, he acknowledged that the United States was not indifferent to “the extraordinary events transpiring in the Chinese Empire, whereby portions of its maritime provinces are passing under the control of various European powers.” But as long as American commercial interests were not “prejudiced through any exclusive treatment” by the new occupants, McKinley saw no need for America to become “an actor in the scene.”

  One reason for McKinley’s circumspection, other than his congenitally restrained nature, was his uncertainty over the proper role the United States should play in China. The commercial lobby wanted the United States to establish its own sphere of influence. But to join in the gluttony for territory seemed demeaning and in some respects more baldly colonialistic than annexation of the Philippines. On the other hand, to speak out against the conduct of the powers, after America’s own recent burst of acquisitiveness, would appear hypocritical. And what if the powers ignored American demands to curb their appetites? For all its newfound international prestige, the United States possessed neither the might nor the will to fight another war in the Pacific—not against the powers, not over China.

  Inevitably the task of cobbling a practicable China policy was Hay’s responsibility. Like McKinley, he had never set eyes upon the Pacific. (The farthest west he had ever traveled was Yellowstone.) But he had followed with great interest Henry Adams’s account of his trips to Japan and the South Seas, and William Rockhill tutored him frequently on Far Eastern affairs. While in England, he had made the acquaintance of two men whose expertise would elevate and solidify his understanding of China. One was Archibald Colquhoun, who had traveled extensively in India and all parts of Asia. Hay was an avid reader of Colquhoun’s China in Transformation, published in 1899, in which the author recommended that Britain—and by extension America—adopt a “room-for-all” doctrine.

  Another book, The Break-Up of China, by Charles Beresford, was even more influential. In the fall of 1898, Beresford, a member of Parliament and an admiral in the Royal Navy, had made a tour of China on behalf of the Associated Chambers of Commerce of Great Britain. From Hankow, on the Yangtze, he wrote Hay, “[I]t is imperative for American interests as well as our own that the policy of the ‘open door’ should be maintained.”

  Returning from China by way of the United States, Beresford pitched his book and the principle of the Open Door to business groups in San Francisco, Chicago, Buffalo, and New York. He stressed that the interests of Britain and America in China were “absolutely identical,” but because Britain was not acting swiftly enough, it now behooved the United States to take the lead in preventing the breakup of China. To keep this disintegration from occurring, Beresford proposed a policy he entitled “The Open Door, or Equal Opportunity for All,” in which Britain, the United States, Germany, and Japan would combine “not for purely selfish motives, but to guarantee the independence of China, and the maintenance of a fair field and no favor for all comers.” The strength of such an agreement, he elaborated, “would lie in the fact that it would be too powerful to attack, and that it could maintain the peace while preserving the open door to all. . . . To China herself, the Powers would prove friends in need. By guaranteeing her integrity, they would give a new lease of life to the Chinese Empire.”

  In Washington, Beresford met with the president and of course Hay, who hosted a banquet in his honor. Hay, however, was still in no hurry to mold the Bere
sford idea into a concrete doctrine, much less a treaty or even a set of guidelines for his Far Eastern ministers. “It is not very easy to formulate with any exactness the view of the Government in regard to the present condition of things in China,” he equivocated three weeks after Beresford’s visit. “In brief, we are, of course, opposed to the dismemberment of that Empire, and we do not think that the public opinion of the United States would justify this Government in taking part in the great game of spoliation now going on. . . . [B]ut for the present we think our best policy is one of vigilant protection of our commercial interests without formal alliances.”

  In the early summer, yet another China hand, Alfred Hippisley, visited the United States, on leave from his post as British inspector of Chinese maritime customs. Hippisley was an old friend of Rockhill, going back to Peking in the early 1880s, and doubtless it was Rockhill who brought Hay and Hippisley together to discuss the situation in China. Hippisley followed up with a letter to Rockhill, offering practical suggestions on how to sustain and stimulate the China trade. Specifically, he recommended that the United States strike an agreement with the other powers, ensuring that Chinese tariffs be applied equally throughout the various spheres of influence—in short, no power would be discriminated against by another in its access to China.

  Rockhill forwarded Hippisley’s advice to Hay in New Hampshire. He also wrote to Hippisley, proposing that the United States go even further in its posture toward China. “I would like to see [us] make a declaration in some form or other, which should be understood by China as a pledge on our part to assist in maintaining the integrity of the Empire,” Rockhill suggested. Still, he doubted that he could win support for any such plan, on either tariffs or the overall integrity of China, for the simple reason that it was likely to cause trouble in the next elections: “[I]t might be interpreted by a large part of the voting population of the United States, especially the Irish and Germans, as an adoption of the policy advocated by England and any leaning toward England on the part of the administration would, at this time and for some time to come, be dangerous, and might lose the President his nomination.”