All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Hay may have wondered to himself just how effective the notes would prove to be; but even he, modesty aside, could not ignore the wave of adulation that followed the announcement that the Open Door was settled. His scrapbooks hold many pages of clippings with headlines such as “Our Great Diplomatic Victory,” “One of the Greatest Triumphs Ever Achieved by This Country,” and “Hay Praised by All.”

  Perhaps the most gratifying salute came not from the New York Tribune, though its attentions were plenty kind, but from the New York Post, which for the previous fifteen years had been edited by Edwin L. Godkin, an ardent anti-imperialist. Godkin’s paper treated Hay’s handling of the Open Door as if it were a magic act: “From the diplomatic point of view the negotiation appears simplicity itself. No treaties; just an exchange of official notes. No alliances; no playing off of one Power against another; simply a quiet inclusion of them all in a common policy. This is simple enough, but so is any common feat of skill when you know how to do it. . . . In the end, Mr. Hay appeared smiling with his whole sheaf of acceptances, and the thing was done. It was an exceeding daring and skillful stroke of diplomacy.”

  AS ONE DOOR OPENED, the hope was that another would soon do the same. In December 1899, as Hay had waited to hear from the powers on China, Congressman William Hepburn reintroduced his canal bill, despite the fact that the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain had not yet been revised and the commission charged with weighing the relative merits of a Nicaragua or Panama route was still a year from completing its report. Congress and the American public were eager to start digging, and this time Senator Morgan was vowing that the Senate would work in concert with the House. “Nothing in the nature of the Clayton-Bulwer prohibition will finally prevent the building of the canal,” Hay alerted Joseph Choate in London. He immediately went to work on a new treaty “so at least the Administration would have its skirts clear of any complicity” if Congress ran roughshod over the old one.

  A number of factors were in his favor. The canal was no longer held captive by Canada, thanks to the provisional boundary settlement earlier in the year. And with the war in South Africa going badly, Britain needed its American friends more than ever. At the start of January 1900, Hay and British ambassador Julian Paunceforte buckled down and worked out a set of terms they figured would make both their governments happy. They agreed that the United States had the exclusive right to build and regulate a canal across the isthmus. Hewing to conventions applied to the Suez Canal, their proposed treaty stipulated that the isthmian canal would be “free and open, in time of war as in time of peace, to the vessels of commerce and of war of all nations,” and that, while the United States would have the right to maintain military police along the canal, it could neither blockade nor fortify the route. Like the Open Door note—like every diplomatic transaction Hay ever conducted—the treaty that he and Paunceforte signed on February 5 and sent to the Senate was infused with the expectation that nations, like men, would treat one another fairly if treated fairly.

  Given the national juggernaut favoring a canal, Hay was hopeful that he would win over the Senate with little debate. “Hay scored on his treaty,” Henry Adams wrote Lizzie Cameron the day after the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty, as it was instantly called, went to the Senate. “He beams with content.”

  Soon enough, though, content collided head-on with senatorial contempt. Hay ought to have known better than to submit a treaty without first circulating a draft. His hubris was received on both sides of the aisle as gross impudence. When the senators realized the treaty did not call for a fortified canal, the impact was “that of a 13-inch shell,” Adams reported to Lizzie. The mood soured further once someone leaked a copy of the treaty to the press. “What shall be said of the value of a diplomatic victory by which we acquire ownership which does not own and a control which does not control?” the New York Sun queried scornfully. “It is a diplomacy of the empty phrase.”

  Hay’s reaction was, in turn, nearly as extreme. “He is about as furious as you can imagine,” Adams went on to Lizzie, “and threatens to resign if they defeat more of his treaties. . . . He regards the Nicaragua matter” (for this was the presumed route) “as personal, and loathes the Senate with a healthy anarchical energy.”

  Hay was so annoyed with Cabot Lodge that the two quit talking while the treaty was before the Foreign Relations Committee. He did, however, exchange words with New York governor Theodore Roosevelt, an unapologetic zealot on the subjects of sea power and the necessity of an American-controlled canal. Rather than writing directly to Hay, Roosevelt had issued a statement to the press, in which he insisted that the canal be fortified.

  “Et tu!” Hay fired back at the Rough Rider. “Cannot you leave a few things to the President and the Senate?”

  Roosevelt, never one to hold his tongue or bide his time, was not inclined to keep out of the administration’s affairs. Vice President Garret Hobart had died in November, and Roosevelt, with Lodge’s encouragement, was already angling to join McKinley on the next ticket.

  Adams, from his front-row seat on Lafayette Square, could only shake his head at the conduct of Hay’s fellow Republicans. “Washington is just at the full tide of nervous ill-temper,” he gossiped to Lizzie at length. “As usual, the Senate makes the trouble; you know that to me the Senate means practically Cabot; and you know Cabot; [but] you don’t know that Cabot is ten times more cabotin [showman] than ever. The word was made to describe him, and it fits as though a Sargent portrait. The new Nicaragua treaty makes the pretence. Teddy Roosevelt, I imagine, is the cause. Teddy appears disposed to paddle his canoe and upset the [party] machine. Cabot is in deadly terror, and finds his only resource in going back on everybody. At that trick, he is, as you know, quite incomparable. So he has thrown Hay over; declared against his Treaty; alienated the Major [McKinley], and destroyed all the credit with the administration which he has labored so hard to create; and probably, within a twelve-month, he will go back on Teddy, and help cut his throat as he is helping to cut Hay’s.

  “Everybody sees now that Hay must go out very soon,” Adams continued. “Cabot himself told me, on Saturday, that the Treaty would not be approved by the Senate, and that the German vote [in the upcoming presidential election] was the reason;—he disavowed the Irish, but it counts too. So every day I receive Hay’s comments on Cabot, and once a week I receive Cabot’s comments on Hay; and, what is more, I know that the brunt of it falls on Sister Anne [Nannie Lodge], and that she is, as usual, at her wits’ end to make her husband out not to be what he is. You have seen this show so often and you know it so thoroughly by heart, that you will understand all my embarrassments as well as hers. That Hay should resign and go out, is to me indifferent. If I were he, I would stay in . . . but, if he does not choose to stand kicking, it is his affair, not mine; and it is not my administration Cabot is kicking, or my treaty or my canal. . . . [B]ut it is quite useless for me to play pretend about Cabot. He knows by instinct my contempt. . . . Is it not a pretty mess?”

  Hay’s own disdain for Lodge ran even deeper than Adams’s, for reasons he chose not to express fully in his letters. His distaste for the Senate, on the other hand, was well formed, deep-seated, and hardly a secret. He regarded the system of senatorial ratification of treaties as no less than a flaw in the Constitution. “You may work for months over a treaty,” he griped to Henry White, “and at last get everything satisfactorily arranged and send it into the Senate, [where] it is met by every man who wants to get a political advantage or to satisfy a personal grudge, everyone who has asked for an office & not got it, everyone whose wife may think mine has not been attentive enough—and if they can muster one third of the Senate + one, your treaty is lost without any reference to its merits.”

  There was obvious spite in the Senate’s reaction to the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty and, in Lodge’s case, perhaps even a measure of personal grudge. Hay had dropped the treaty in the lap of the Foreign Relations Committee, recognizing that if he had allowed Lodge and his c
ommittee to tinker with it in advance, they would have added the objectionable fortification clause. Either way, he was damned. On March 9, the committee reported the treaty favorably but added an amendment that would allow the United States to defend its canal. Hay condemned the amendment as “a weak resort of ignorance and cowardice.” Lodge, he told Henry White bitterly, “was the first to flop.”

  Yet the conversation was not over, merely postponed. Since it was an election year, and Lodge and his fellow Republicans were disinclined to expose the administration to the sniping of Democratic critics, the Foreign Relations Committee put off general debate until the following winter. In the meantime, the House went ahead and passed the Hepburn bill, authorizing construction and fortification of an isthmian canal. Once again, though, the Republican-dominated Senate decided to delay consideration until after the election.

  HAY DID NOT RELISH being around for the final defacement of his handiwork. And, truth to tell, he had been looking for an excuse to quit almost as soon as he had accepted his appointment as secretary of state. “I have never had yet the evil courage to tell [the president] I shall not stay,” he had confided to White back in August. But he had told Adams of his intention to “go out” during their walks and teas throughout the winter. “[M]y natural pessimism works now on Hay’s natural pessimism, and his on mine, until we are both half out of our minds,” Adams told Lizzie in January.

  Adams had never seen his friend so agitated, yet he was mildly relieved to observe that the quarrel with the Senate had brought color to Hay’s cheeks. “Curiously enough,” Adams reported to Lizzie as the treaty went before the Senate, “Hay was never in better health or spirits, and takes poundings with positive improvement of health—like massage.”

  However, once the Foreign Relations Committee amended Hay-Paunceforte, Hay hit his limit. On March 13, 1900, he submitted his resignation to the president. “The action of the Senate indicates views so widely divergent from mine in matters affecting, as I think, the national welfare and honor,” he wrote McKinley, “that I fear my power to serve you in business requiring the concurrence of that body is at an end. I cannot help fearing also that the newspaper attacks upon the State Department, which have so strongly influenced the Senate, may be an injury to you, if I remain in the Cabinet.”

  McKinley wrote back immediately, returning Hay’s resignation. “Had I known the contents of the letter which you handed me this morning I would have declined to receive or consider it,” he replied. “Nothing could be more unfortunate than to have you retire from the Cabinet. The personal loss would be great, but the public loss even greater. . . . Your record constitutes one of the most important and interesting pages of our diplomatic history.” The president closed with an exhortation Hay could not dismiss: “We must bear the annoyance of the hour. It will pass away. . . . Conscious of high purpose and honorable effort, we cannot yield our posts however the storm may rage.”

  And so he stayed, but not happily. “We tramp in silence every afternoon an hour,” Adams mentioned several days later. “He has nothing to say. I have nothing to ask.”

  Henceforth Adams began to observe a change in his friend. Hay’s anger and frustration over the canal treaty—and over the Senate’s chronic meddling with all treaties—were part of a larger dissatisfaction. Reminiscing many years later in his Education, Adams described the hardening of Hay’s spirit: “Always unselfish, generous, easy, patient and loyal, Hay had treated the world as something to be taken in block without pulling it to pieces to get rid of its defects; he liked it all; he laughed and accepted; he had never known unhappiness. . . . Yet even the gayest of tempers succumbs at last to constant friction. The old friend was rapidly fading,” Adams lamented. “The habit remained, but the easy intimacy, the careless gaiety, the casual humor, the equality of indifference were sinking into the routine of office. . . . The wit and humor shrank within the blank walls of politics, and the irritations multiplied.”

  YET IF HAY SEEMED withdrawn of late, there was one door he always left unfastened. What Adams did not fully realize was that, as harried and embittered as Hay felt, he too had Lizzie Cameron to elevate his mood. The two men, of course, were aware that each was corresponding with Lizzie, and she with them, but they did not share the entirety of their letters or reveal the frequency. “Hay got your letter yesterday, and told me your news,” Adams informed her in February. “I rarely mention your letters to me, because it makes people”—Hay, for one—“jealous of me. Too many men still love you.”

  Hay continued to reach out to Lizzie whenever his wife was away. “I am all alone for weeks to come,” he had written the previous November, with Clara in Cleveland. “There is not a living soul in Washington. I wonder if this letter will reach you. If so, send me a line.” He signed off: “For your beauty, and your wit, and your brightness, and your sweetness, for all you are and all you have been, active & passive, my deepest gratitude.”

  A week later, he made a demonstration most daring. “Did you ever get a letter written in a Cabinet meeting,” he asked Lizzie, scribbling in pencil on “Executive Mansion” stationery. “I have said all I have to say. Root and Gage [Secretary of War Elihu Root and Secretary of the Treasury Lyman Gage] are good for the next hour and I will talk to you.”

  While his fellow cabinet members and the president carried on, deliberating the affairs of the nation, Hay, seated within arm’s length of McKinley, turned his thoughts to a topic that had absorbed him for the past decade and more. “There is something unreal, something tant soit peu divine about all my knowledge of you,” he wrote Lizzie. “That you should be the most beautiful and fascinating woman of your generation, the most attractive in wit and grace and charm and yet be so good to me is a thing I never realize and I find it hard to believe when I am away from you. I live over again in memory all the happy hours you have given me, but can hardly believe them real.”

  The risk of making such a proclamation in such a setting was, to his mind, yet another way of demonstrating the courage of his amorous convictions.

  TOO QUICKLY HE WAS tugged back to more earthly concerns. The Danish government had approached him with a proposal to relinquish the West Indian islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix. Hay dispatched Henry White to Copenhagen to begin negotiations. He was also obliged to explain and defend American neutrality in the Boer War. American goods—not military matériel per se, but tons of flour and canned food, and horses and mules by the thousand—continued to flow to South Africa; American banks were indirectly helping finance the British campaign.

  Hay’s own behavior was likewise open to aspersions of favoritism. Before leaving London, he had met cordially with Cecil Rhodes, the diamond magnate and the most prominent champion of British imperialism in southern Africa. After the Boers had expelled British officials from the Transvaal, Hay had offered the services of the American consul to act on behalf of the British government. And when Boer peace envoys came to Washington, he had talked to them for an hour but declined to treat with them in an official capacity, under the technicality that they were not properly credentialed by their government. (“Sicrety Hay meets with them in a coal cellar, wearin’ a mask,” Mr. Dooley reported.) Gestures like these only fanned rumors of a not so secret Anglo-American alliance, which Hay was obliged to deflect again and again. “As long as I stay here,” he assured Henry White, “no action shall be taken contrary to my conviction that the one indispensable feature of our policy should be a friendly understanding with England.” But, he reiterated, “an alliance must remain, in the present state of things, an unattainable dream.”

  As a gesture of equanimity to the Boers, he made a surprising and somewhat controversial decision. In December 1899, he named his son Del as American consul to Pretoria, the capital of Boer-controlled Transvaal. Adelbert Hay was twenty-three, two years out of Yale, and still at loose ends. He had helped out in the American Embassy in London while his father was there and on a lark had gone to the Philippines, as a civilian, to
observe the war. This, however, was the extent of his qualifications for the consulship—along with being the son of the secretary of state. “[H]e is naturally lazy and needed something to wake him up,” Clara explained to Adams. “He has plenty of courage and capacity but lacks energy.” Perhaps Pretoria would prove to be just the tonic. After Del’s appointment, Clara remarked with maternal optimism, “He has been on the jump . . . and seems quite a different person.”

  En route to South Africa, Del passed through London, where he took tea with Lord Salisbury, stirring suspicions that he had been inculcated with a pro-British, anti-Boer bias. “[H]ow could I have paid a greater compliment to the South African Republic [Transvaal] than sending my own son there?” Hay rebutted to a Boer intermediary. Meanwhile, he cautioned Del in the stern voice of the secretary of state: “You will naturally not avow any sympathies at all for either side in the contest, and you will do well not to have any.”

  Two weeks later, once Del had arrived at Pretoria, Hay wrote again, this time in the voice of a concerned father: “I sometimes feel a twinge of remorse at allowing you at so early an age to go away such a distance and to be loaded with such heavy responsibilities, but I could not resist your earnest desire to go, and I am sure that such a test of character and of endurance, if you come happily out of it, will be of advantage to you all your life.” Hay was likely reflecting on his own coming of age thirty-seven years earlier, when he was working in the White House and venturing to the front on orders from President Lincoln.

  To his parents’ delight and the administration’s relief, Del acquitted himself even-handedly and bravely. His greater service was to British prisoners of war in the Transvaal, but he also won the trust of the Boers. “Everyone thought of me as an enemy at first, but I am glad to say that everyone is nice to me now. I had a hard row to hoe,” he wrote home from Pretoria.