All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  The celebrated correspondent Richard Harding Davis, who had been with Roosevelt at San Juan Hill and was next assigned to the South African war, provided a colorful glimpse of Del’s pluck. The English soldiers, it seemed, were so awed by the deadliness of Boer marksmanship that they believed the grease smeared on the enemies’ bullets was poisonous. When Del asked for proof, one of the British complainants produced a bullet covered with a suspicious green compound. “Why, these bullets must have fallen into a pudding by mistake,” Del exclaimed. “They’re flavored with wintergreen.” With that, he licked off the coating with exaggerated enjoyment. “Thus ended the story of Boer barbarism,” Davis narrated.

  FEW REPUBLICANS DOUBTED THAT McKinley would win his party’s nomination in June and the general election in November. Hay, however, had made up his mind that he would not be part of the president’s second term. “Nothing—but nothing—would induce me to stay where I am,” he proclaimed to Adams, who had deserted him for France to begin work on his next volume of musings on civilization, eventually titled Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

  Hay’s disinterest in serving in the next McKinley administration was more believable than Theodore Roosevelt’s insistence that he was not a candidate to succeed Vice President Garret Hobart. Lodge had been working on Roosevelt for months; so, too, had Senator Thomas Platt, the New York Republican boss, who wanted the untamable governor out of his hair. A week before the convention was to begin in Philadelphia, Roosevelt came to Washington to try out his non-campaign on the White House. “Teddy has been here: have you heard of it?” Hay wrote Adams. “He came down with a sombre resolution throned on his strenuous brow, to let McKinley and Hanna know, once for all, he would not be Vice President, and found to his stupefaction that nobody in Washington, except Platt, had ever dreamed of such a thing. He did not even have a chance to launch his nolo episcopari at the Major. That statesman said he did not want him on the ticket—that he would be far more valuable in New York—and Root said, with his frank and murderous smile, ‘Of course you’re not—you’re not fit for it.’ And so he went back, quite eased in his mind but considerably bruised in his amour-propre.”

  The convention was a different affair. Despite what McKinley had indicated to Hay, Root, Hanna, and other confidants, he never stated publicly that he did not favor Roosevelt; rather, he had merely said that he would let the delegates choose his running mate.

  Mark Hanna, now a senator but still chairman of the Republican National Committee, had other ideas. He and Roosevelt had detested each other for years. Hanna had been one of the last holdouts against war with Spain, believing, along with many on Wall Street, that it would be bad for the nation’s recently revived economy. Roosevelt, a trustbuster in the making, regarded Hanna as one of those over-grasping plutocrats who believed that because business was good for the country, then business ought to run the government.

  Yet there was something more fundamental, almost visceral in their mutual antagonism. The forty-one-year-old Roosevelt was in the peak of health and the prime of life; Hanna, at sixty-two (the same age as Hay), was by now riven by rheumatism. One embodied the past, the other the future—the nineteenth century versus the twentieth. And Hanna, whether he said as much, sensed that Roosevelt had the potential to overwhelm stolid, reserved, moderate McKinley. “Roosevelt burst into that campaign . . . with all the flare of a skyrocket, with the incessant clatter of a riveter; and with a new, gorgeous vocabulary of erudite vituperation,” observed the Kansas columnist William Allen White, an early acolyte. “Roosevelt challenged an acclaim which eclipsed Hanna’s presidential candidate . . . and elbowed Hanna off the stage as the savior of the nation. . . . Perhaps subconsciously Hanna was jealous of Roosevelt, the pirouetting young dervish of a Teddy who took the spotlight in the drama of the hour.”

  Hanna did his best to find another vice-presidential candidate—anybody but Teddy. His harangues and arm-twisting had no effect; the delegates would have only Roosevelt, who strode into the convention hall wearing a version of the broad-brimmed hat he had worn as a Rough Rider.

  McKinley was nominated unanimously. Then came Roosevelt’s turn: he received every vote but one—his own. In his acceptance speech, he struck a posture that surely caught the attention of John Hay, who had remained at his desk at the State Department throughout the convention. “Is America a weakling to shrink from the world work of the great world-powers?” Roosevelt asked in his raptor’s falsetto. “No,” he answered emphatically. “The young giant of the West stands on a continent and clasps the crest of an ocean in either hand. Our nation, glorious in youth and strength, looks in the future with eager eyes and rejoices as a strong man to run a race.”

  A week later, an exhausted but unbowed Mark Hanna wrote to McKinley: “Well, it was a nice little scrap at Phila[delphia], not exactly to my liking with my hands tied behind me. However, we got through in good shape and the ticket is all right. Your duty to the country is to live for four years from next March.”

  WHILE ROOSEVELT WAS STIRRING the pride of the Republican faithful, a crisis was building that would drastically challenge the strength of the giants of the West, and, more particularly, the validity of the Open Door. As it turned out, the Chinese did have something to say about the presence of the powers in their midst.

  Two years earlier, in 1898, the reform-minded Chinese emperor, Kuang Hsu, had been deposed and imprisoned by his aunt, Tzu Hsi, an ambitious and superstitious conservative who believed that the empire would be better off with the outsiders gone. The empress dowager and her imperial government realized that they could not achieve this eviction by themselves; the Chinese military, so recently humiliated by Japan, was no match against the muscle of the industrialized powers. Yet in recent months a much larger, potentially more lethal force had awakened in Shantung Province in northern China, unified by hatred of a common enemy.

  They called themselves the Fists of Righteous Harmony, after the martial-arts rituals they performed en masse, working themselves into a trancelike fervor that emboldened them to confront “the foreign devils” whom they blamed for all the woes that beleaguered their lives, including a drought that in 1899 inflicted famine across northern China. They believed that, once they drove out the Westerners, the rains would come again. Westerners, slow to grasp the potency of these public theatrics, belittled the movement’s adherents as “Boxers.”

  Missionaries were the first to feel the wrath of the Boxers, who accused the Christians of practicing all manner of demonic acts: incest, mutilation of orphans, drinking of blood. Boxers felt a comparable disgust for Chinese converts to Christianity—“rice Christians,” who by 1900, as the famine worsened, numbered nearly a million. To the Boxers, a rice Christian was no longer Chinese at all.

  Most of the missions, Protestant and Catholic, were located in far-flung, unprotected districts; as the Boxers’ intimidation intensified, some Westerners were prudent enough to get out, but most did not. Before the Boxer Rebellion, as it would soon be known, wound down in August 1900, dozens of missionaries, along with thousands of their followers, would be murdered.

  The White House was not alarmed at first. In his annual address to Congress in December 1899, McKinley declared: “The interests of our citizens in that vast Empire have not been neglected during the past year. Adequate protection has been secured for our missionaries.” On June 1, 1900, as the cables from China grew more troubling, William Rockhill, regarded as the administration’s ablest China hand, jotted a note to Hay: “I return the despatches from [American Minister to China Edwin] Conger which you kindly sent me to read. I cannot believe that the ‘Boxer’ movement will be very long-lived or cause any serious complications.”

  Even as Rockhill gave this assurance, Boxers were tearing up the railroad between Peking and Tientsin and burning the stations. Two weeks later, Peking and Tientsin came under full-scale attack.

  On June 15, Conger wrote Hay a chilling report from Peking: “I regret to say that since [June 11] we have
been completely besieged within our compounds with the entire city in the possession of a rioting, murdering mob, with no visible effort being made by the Government in any way to restrain it. We have cleared and barricaded the streets in the vicinity of the Legation, but they are so scattered and our number of guards so limited that the gravest possible danger is imminent. . . . Since my last despatch, every American mission in the city, except the Methodist, with all their well equipped homes, has been burned, also all the Catholic and English, except one, and many hundreds of native Christians barbarously tortured and murdered. . . . We are simply trying to quietly defend ourselves until re-enforcements arrive, but nearly one hundred ‘Boxers’ have already been killed by the various Legation guards.”

  That same day, Hay cabled Conger: “Do you need more force?”

  Neither of these messages got through. By then, all communication with the nine hundred foreigners trapped in the Legation Quarter next to the Forbidden Palace was cut off. Making their plight more dire, the empress dowager, despite avowals to the contrary, directed imperial forces to join in the Boxer rampage.

  Hay was in the most precarious position of his career thus far, faced with the dilemma of how to relieve the legation without intriguing with other powers or acting the bully in yet another faraway land—all issues that weighed heavily in an election year. The last thing he wanted was for the United States to take part in any action that would lead to a widening of the war, for he grasped that the other powers, particularly Russia, were itching for an excuse to partition all of China. Even within the administration there were some who suggested that the time had come for the United States to grab a port or at the very least a naval station.

  Hay proceeded as gingerly as he dared. When Conger, in one of the last cables from Peking, asked if he ought to join the other ministers in demanding that the imperial authorities suppress the Boxers, Hay had advised: “Act independently in protection of American interests where practicable, and concurrently with representative of other powers if necessity arise[s].” Two days later—and a week before the Republican Convention in Philadelphia—Hay cabled Conger even more emphatically: “We have no policy in China except to protect with energy American interests and especially American citizens and the Legation. There must be no alliances.”

  One hundred American Marines did join a force of two thousand that set out from Tientsin on June 10, heading for Peking; but even after ordering six thousand more troops from the Philippines, the administration was still not eager to enter into a more formal alliance with the powers. Soon, though, the United States would have to commit. Warships of all the powers were anchored off the Taku forts, at the entrance to the Peiho River, preparing an assault that would open the approach to Tientsin, thirty miles upstream, and to Peking, eighty miles farther. As directed by Washington, the U.S. Navy did not participate in the attack on the seventeenth, the only power not to do so. But after the Monocacy, a Civil War–era side-wheeler, came under fire from the forts, Admiral Louis Kempff cabled that a “state of war practically exists” and that he was “making common cause with foreign forces for general protection.”

  It took less than a day to take the Taku forts, but now Tientsin was surrounded. Six hundred foreigners lived along the river in a settlement one mile long and a quarter-mile wide—“not chosen for defense,” noted one of the trapped residents, Lou Hoover, wife of an energetic young mining engineer, Herbert Hoover. On the day that Taku fell, thousands of Boxers, now joined by more than ten thousand imperial troops, began firing on the foreigners at Tientsin, whose hasty battlements were manned by two thousand soldiers, three hundred of them American. Enough reinforcements were able to fight their way into the settlement to keep it from being overrun, but the enemy still invested the old part of the city, from which it continued to shell the besieged.

  The relief expedition that had left for Peking on the tenth made it barely halfway. It straggled back seventeen days later, reporting three hundred dead and wounded—and still no word from Peking. The sole information that Hay managed to glean on the fate of the legation was a belated dispatch forwarded by the American consul in Shanghai, confirming that the German minister, Baron Clemens von Ketteler, had been murdered by Boxers two weeks earlier. Hay tried not to dwell on what might have happened since then. The only good news came from the viceroys of central and southern China, who assured the State Department that they would do their best to keep the rebellion from spreading to their provinces and would protect the safety of foreigners in their midst.

  On July 3, Hay called a meeting of the cabinet. Since the death of Vice President Hobart, and with the president in Canton for the summer, he was now the ranking officer on the bridge. He presented to his fellow secretaries a letter he intended to send to Berlin, Paris, Rome, St. Petersburg, Tokyo, and four other capitals, reiterating his country’s position on China. With the death of the German minister, the repulsion of the first relief expedition, and the ongoing assault on the foreign compound in Tientsin, he feared that unless he took a stand diplomatically, the other powers would tear China to shreds. But if the fighting could be contained within the areas where the Boxers were at large, and the imperial government could be assured that the powers desired only the suppression of the Boxers and the relief of their citizens, then perhaps the conflict could be resolved before it escalated into full-scale war. Above all else, he wished to keep the channels of communication open, in the event that the foreigners in the Legation Quarter in Peking were still alive. And so, with the cabinet’s blessing, he issued what would thenceforth be known as his Second Open Door note.

  He began with a gentle warning intended as a roundabout message to the imperial government. “If wrong be done to our citizens,” he stated, “we propose to hold the responsible authors to the uttermost accountability.” Then he presented a transparent fiction that would give the Chinese government a chance to save face, and thus save itself from larger reprisal: “So long as [Chinese authorities] are not in overt collusion with rebellion and use their power to protect foreign life and property, we regard them as representing the Chinese people, with whom we seek to remain in peace and friendship.”

  By now he had to know that the Chinese government was fighting in concert with the Boxers; nevertheless, tactical use of the benefit of the doubt would not hurt his chances of getting Americans out of Peking alive, which was the aim of the next part of his circular. “The purpose of the President,” he continued, “is as it has been heretofore, to act concurrently with the other powers, first, in opening communication with Peking and rescuing the American officials, missionaries, and other Americans who are in danger; secondly, in affording all possible protection everywhere in China to American life and property.”

  And finally he raised the flag he hoped would rally the powers—and draw the Chinese—to the issue that mattered most. Whatever the outcome of the rebellion might be, regardless of what befell the legations and missions, Hay wanted to make it plain that the United States would “preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity, protect all rights guaranteed to friendly powers by treaty and international law, and safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.”

  This time he did not ask for a response from the various powers. Nor did the note solicit their adherence. His letter was more a promise than a plea, a statement of the steadfast intention of the United States to honor the integrity of China—the point Rockhill had wanted to stress in the first Open Door note—with the implied suggestion that it was in the best interests of all the powers to follow the example set by America. It was a long shot, fired at a time when Boxers were hacking Christians to death without mercy and foreign soldiers were cutting down fanatical Boxers by the hundreds. There was not much else Hay could do, short of threatening war against any power that stepped out of line. Yet after the reception of the first Open Door note, as unenthusiastic as some of these responses had been, he had to believe that th
e example of the United States counted for something.

  In the end, the Second Open Door did not “save” China outright, as some have mythologized, but it paid off in several incremental ways that were nonetheless crucial. First, it served to deter one or more of the powers from declaring war on China; and second, none used the Boxer hostilities to seize advantages beyond their existing spheres of influence (although it must be said that Russia’s grip on Manchuria and the treaty port of Newchwang grew worrisomely tighter). “The thing to do . . . was to localize the storm if possible, and this we seem to have done,” Hay wrote Adams five days after the note was circulated. “All the powers have fallen in with my modus vivendi in the Centro and South.”

  Hay recognized that his note was little more than a piece of paper, yet he was satisfied to have imposed at least a modicum of good intention and common sense on the chaos of the moment. “I will not tell you the lunatic difficulties under which we labor,” he continued to Adams. “The opposition press call[s] for impeachment because we are violating the Constitution [by invading China without a declaration of war] and the pulpit gives us anathema because we are not doing it enough [sending more troops to save missionaries]. . . . If I looked at things as you do in the light of reason . . . I should go off after lunch and die. . . . But I take refuge in a craven opportunism. I do what seems possible every day—not caring a hoot for consistency or the Absolute.”

  His opportunism—part optimism, part pragmatism—bore more fruit in mid-July, just as all hope seemed to be lost. Over the previous month, attacks on the weary occupants of the Peking legations had been unrelenting. The Boxers had come close to burning them out and breeching their barricades on numerous occasions; food and ammunition were running low. Dozens of foreigners had been wounded or killed, making it even more difficult to defend their half-mile-square perimeter. Three weeks had passed since anyone had heard any news, good or bad. And then on July 16, the Daily Mail of London reported that the legations had been overrun and all the inhabitants butchered. A memorial service for “the Europeans Massacred in Peking” was scheduled for St. Paul’s Cathedral.