All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  Hay was one of the first with knowledge that the story was cruelly false. Throughout the Boxer ordeal, he had maintained respectful relations with the Chinese minister, Wu T’ing-fang. (The running joke around Washington was that Wu made Hay “woozy” and Hay made Wu “hazy.”) On July 11, he delivered a message to Wu, who in turn sent it to trusted contacts in China. No one knows how many hands it passed through from the time it left the State Department until an old man appeared at the legation barricade in Peking five days later, waving a white flag and bearing three words in a code understood only by the American minister, Edwin Conger. Deciphered, it read simply: “Communicate tidings bearer.”

  Conger wrote back, also in cipher: “For one month we have been besieged in British Legation under continued shot and shell from Chinese troops. Quick relief only can prevent general massacre.” The message reached Hay on July 20. There were those who questioned the authenticity of Conger’s note, but it was soon verified by another exchange of cables, requesting “bearer” to provide the middle name of Conger’s wife. (Answer: Alta.) The memorial service at St. Paul’s was canceled.

  From here on, the pace quickened. While Hay’s and Conger’s ciphers were passing between Washington and Peking, an allied force of six thousand drove the Boxers and Chinese soldiers from Tientsin, suffering seven hundred fifty casualties and wantonly looting the city. Preparations began immediately for a march on Peking. A force of nearly twenty thousand—ten thousand Japanese, three thousand Russian, three thousand British, two thousand American, a few French (but no Germans to speak of)—set out before daybreak on August 4, determined to make it the entire way this time.

  Hay was too exhausted to wait in Washington for the outcome. The next day, he departed for the Fells. In his absence, he trusted Adee to run the State Department and to keep him informed on the relief expedition via the tiny telegraph office in the nearby village of Newbury.

  In New Hampshire, he broke down entirely. “I did not imagine when I left Washington how bad it was,” he wrote John George Nicolay, with whom he had shared more than one summer in the capital. “If I had stayed another day I should have not got away at all.” His symptoms included backache and an irritable bladder, though at least one newspaper suggested that he was “near the danger point.” He was annoyed but also somewhat tickled by the reports of his imminent demise. “I do not care to take the world into my confidence as to the state of my hydraulics. So I must let the story run,” he wrote Adee. “But so far as I can learn from my doctor, I am not moribund.”

  To Nicolay, though, he was more reflective and rather more final. “[T]here is not much more to expect,” he confided. “My dreams when I was a little boy at Warsaw and Pittsfield have absolutely and literally been fulfilled. The most important part of my life came late, but it came in precisely the shape I dreamed.”

  But then he could not close his letter without griping about the Senate and the aggravation of getting treaties ratified. Already he was bracing for the next round of negotiations over the canal and the other pesky chores that stood between him and the end of his term in office.

  CHAPTER 16

  Rope of Sand

  As Hay rested up in New Hampshire, the relief expedition closed in on Peking: Russian Cossacks, English Tommies direct from South Africa, French Indochinese in sun helmets, Japanese in white tunics, and American Marines in khaki stained with the sweat of the Philippines. Maneuvering more as parallel columns than as a unified force, they broke through the gates of the capital on August 14, to the great joy of the legations. Of the nine hundred haggard residents, miraculously only sixty-six had been killed, with another one hundred fifty wounded. During the final days, the Boxers had launched a ferocious attack on the legation defenses but then dissolved into the ravaged countryside once the allies took the city. The empress dowager trimmed her imperial fingernails, donned the coarse clothing of a peasant, and slipped away with her retinue, unrecognized. The rebellion was essentially over, though the ransacking of Peking and the pursuit of remnant bands of hostile Boxers continued for weeks. William Rockhill had left for China as soon as Conger’s telegram reached Washington. His mission now would be to help steer the peace negotiations between China and the powers—and of course to ensure that the Open Door did not come off its hinges.

  Throughout the siege, Hay’s conduct had received widespread acclaim; once word reached the United States that the legations had been saved, the shower became a deluge. “[Y]ou have won for us the greatest diplomatic triumph of our time,” cheered Henry Adams’s brother Brooks, a champion of American economic supremacy. “I believe you to be one of the two or three Americans living who have measured the present situation, and that your policy will prove to have carried us round one of the great corners of our history.”

  Others besides Adams recognized that the deeds of the past year could not have been done by any other diplomat. “When all the world was feeding upon manufactured horrors and lashing itself into fury over a crime that had not been committed,” World’s Work observed, “it was the American Secretary of State who succeeded in checking the cry for blood, by securing a message from our Minister in Peking, announcing that he and his colleagues were alive.” The Chinese crisis was far from resolved, but Hay’s conduct nonetheless stood as a shining example of a new American diplomacy: “To change the map of the world is commonly considered to be a demonstration of great power,” World’s Work concluded, “but it [is] an exhibition of greater strength to prevent it from being changed.”

  Although Hay was as heartened as anyone by the news from China, his health did not improve commensurably. “I am miserably weak and tottery—in the morning my head swims, in the evening my knees are feeble,” he wrote Alvey Adee at the end of August. “I cannot walk half a mile without fatigue and chilliness.” He regretted leaving Adee with so much work, yet he did not relish the chores that awaited his return. “I see nothing ahead but ceaseless work and worry,” he told Whitelaw Reid in a letter thanking him for the Tribune’s sympathetic coverage.

  The most pressing question was what to do with a defeated and defenseless China. As united as the powers had been in rescuing their legations, they were now uncertain as to the next step, each eyeing the others, all of them giving the Open Door its due, meanwhile angling to gain advantages of trade, if not territory, much as they had always done.

  On August 25, 1900, Russia announced its intention to withdraw its troops from Peking and proposed that the other powers follow suit. McKinley, Secretary of War Elihu Root, and Hay were outwardly gratified that Russia was displaying no desire to conquer any more of China. Privately, however, the administration saw Russia’s withdrawal as a cynical ploy to curry favor with the Chinese and thus to solidify its position in Manchuria—which, as was now quite obvious, Russia regarded as no longer part of China. “Russia has been more outspoken than before in her adhesion to the Open Door,” Hay commented to Joseph Choate, “but her vows are false as dicers’ oaths.”

  Russia’s announcement put the United States in a cunning bind. McKinley wanted American troops out of China at the earliest possible date, but he preferred not to leave unless all the other powers did so too, and he certainly did not wish to leave in tandem with Russia. The latter option would suggest a compact with Russia that flaunted long-standing American doctrine, devalued the Open Door, insulted the other powers, or, worse, allowed them to have their way with Peking. In the end the White House hedged, advising Russia that it would keep its troops in China as long as “there is a general expression by the powers in favor of a continued occupation.” If there were no hue and cry from the powers to stay, then the United States would withdraw its force, although McKinley didn’t specify when or under what circumstances this withdrawal might occur.

  The yellow press, mostly Democratic, interpreted this wishy-washy response to mean that McKinley had made a pact with Russia after all and that the United States might leave before peace and reparations were fully negotiated. Hay, who favo
red keeping troops in China for the time being, was said to be sulking in New Hampshire after not getting his way. “I need not say this is stupid lying,” he responded, making light of accusations that the administration had been somehow co-opted by Russia. Borrowing an analogy from Adee, he explained, “If you break up a quick whist party by saying [to me], ‘Well, I am going to bed, are you?’ and I [also] have to go . . . does it follow that I go home with you and get into your bed?”

  As for the other powers, he had no great confidence in them, either. Germany, whose force in China was so small it had not participated in the march on Peking, was adamant about staying long enough to inflict a full measure of punishment for the murder of its minister. Even Britain had been standoffish toward the United States in recent months. And so it went, with the future of China as murky as ever and Hay determined “to hold on like grim death to the Open Door.”

  In mid-September, as he sat gazing upon the turning leaves of the Sunapee hills, he shared his thoughts on the situation with Adee. Even by Hay’s standards of exposition, it was an extraordinary demonstration, filling seven pages of stationery in his confident penmanship, nary a word scratched out or a modifier left dangling: a single, uninterrupted, and plainly exasperated précis on the quandary of international diplomacy in the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion.

  “The dilemma is clear enough,” he began. “We want to get out at the earliest possible moment. We do not want to have the appearance of being forced out or frightened out, and we must not lose our proper influence in the final arrangement. If we leave Germany and England in Peking, and retire with Russia, who has unquestionably made her bargain already with China, we not only will seem to have been beaten, but we run a serious risk of being really frozen out. Germany and England will feel resentful and will take no care of our interests, and Russia will sell us out without winking.

  “You have, it seems,” he continued to Adee, “grave suspicion of the attitude of Japan. There is, therefore, not a single power we can rely on for our policy of abstention from plunder and the Open Door. If we try to deal separately with China, she will say to us, as she said last year, ‘We are not free agents. We are not able, without the permission of the other powers, to fulfill any engagements we might make with you.’ When I tried to get them to agree not to grant any privileges to other powers which should not be equally granted to us, they said precisely that—‘If they use force against us we cannot resist. Will you guarantee us against them?’—a question which I had no authority to answer. The inherent weakness of our position is this: we do not want to rob China ourselves, and our public opinion will not permit us to interfere, with an army, to prevent others from robbing her. . . . The talk of the papers about ‘our preeminent moral position giving us the authority to dictate to the world’ is mere flap-doodle.

  “Anxious, therefore, as I am, to get away from Peking,” he wound up at last, “I cannot help fearing that if we retire with Russia, it will end in these unfortunate consequences: Russia will betray us. China will fall back on her non possumus, if we try to make separate terms with her. England and Germany being left in Peking, Germany by superior brute selfishness will have her way, and we shall be left out in the cold.”

  No wonder his convalescence was slow. “I test my strength every day in a little longer walk,” he told Adee. “I observe the strictest regimen in eating and drinking. I want to come back and get to work at the earliest possible moment, but it would be worse than useless for me to begin too soon & break down again. I now hope—confidentially—to return on the first of October.”

  ULTIMATELY, THE UNITED STATES decided against withdrawing its troops from Peking until the powers had finalized a protocol of peace with the representatives of the exiled imperial court. Negotiations among the powers would continue into the following year, hung up mainly on the size of the indemnity the powers demanded from the all but helpless Chinese government. Throughout the talks, Rockhill pushed for moderation but met with only limited success. When he tried to knock the indemnity down to $200 million, he was roundly outvoted; in the end the Chinese were held accountable for $333 million in damages (many billions in today’s dollars), of which the United States claimed $25 million, the smallest portion of any of the powers except Italy.

  Russia did act on its promise to withdraw from Peking immediately after the siege was relieved, securing from China along the way even greater concessions in Manchuria. Britain and Germany, worried about Russia’s go-it-alone impulse, and doubtless impatient with the United States, announced an alliance in October, which, at first blush, seemed a resounding endorsement of the Open Door. Glancing over the document, Hay was flattered to see a renewed commitment to many of the points he had included in his two circulars: a pledge to honor the integrity of China; a promise not to take advantage of the recent turmoil to grab more territory; and an application of Open Door trade guidelines along the coast and rivers of China. Britain and Germany also vowed to stick together if another power secured from China any advantage that compromised their interests. This last was an inoffensive way of agreeing to keep a sharp eye on Russia. On the other hand, to limit the compact to rivers and the coast was a euphemistic way of giving Russia a free pass in Manchuria.

  To the extent that the Open Door had any strength, it depended on the unanimous endorsement of all the powers. Yet with Britain and Germany now forging their own offshoot alliance, and with Russia cutting separate deals with China and setting its own course in Manchuria, the Open Door, while not exactly off its hinges, appeared rather battered and flimsy. Still, China, after all its recent violence and vandalism, remained in one piece, not counting Manchuria, of course. Hay had played a crucial role in accomplishing at least that much. “What a business this has been in China!” he exclaimed to Henry Adams. “So far we have got on, by being honest and naïf.” How resilient his policy and China’s integrity might be he dared not speculate. “I do not clearly see where we are to come the delayed cropper,” he added. “But it will come.”

  Adams reassured his friend that he had done the best he could under such snarled circumstances: “[I]n watching you herd your droves of pigs, I am at times astonished to see how, by hitting one on the snout and by coaxing another with a rotten turnip, you manage to get ahead, or at least not much backward. . . . You have been so right when everybody else was wrong, that I half believe you are too good to drive hogs.”

  HAY WAS BACK IN Washington by October 1, not exactly reinvigorated but sufficiently fit “to work on my last shift,” he told Adee—a shift he expected to end soon after the election. In the closing weeks, McKinley appeared to be a shoo-in. As in 1896, he did not campaign actively, leaving the hard work to Mark Hanna, who raised $2.5 million, so much that he eventually reimbursed his big corporate donors. The peripatetic Theodore Roosevelt more than made up for McKinley’s statuary inertia, whistle-stopping twenty thousand miles, delivering six hundred speeches in five hundred towns in twenty-four states.

  Roosevelt had his own Hanna in Cabot Lodge, who counseled his protégé after the Republican Convention: “We must not permit the President, or any of his friends, who are, of course, in control of the campaign, to imagine that we want to absorb the leadership and the glory. I want you to appear everywhere as the champion of the party, and above all as the champion of the President. . . . This is going to be of immense importance to us four years hence.”

  Once again the Democrats nominated William Jennings Bryan, who ran on a pro-silver, anti-trust, anti-imperialist platform. Yet Bryan’s charges of imperialism against McKinley did not stick as firmly as he would have liked. Cuba had recently elected delegates to a well-timed constitutional convention. Though insurrection in the Philippines dragged on, McKinley pledged that the islands would be granted self-government (if not independence) once the fighting ended. The relief of the Boxer siege and the evident success of the Open Door put another feather in McKinley’s cap—and further served to justify America’s presence in the Philippines. Clo
ser to home, opportune settlement of the tense United Mine Workers’ strike took some of the wind out of Bryan’s anti–big business rhetoric just days before voters went to the polls. The economy was robust; dinner pails were full.

  On November 6, 1900, McKinley defeated Bryan by an even wider margin than four years earlier, bettering him by a nearly two-to-one margin in the Electoral College and three quarters of a million popular votes. “We did wallop them proper and I am glad not to live under Bryan and his gang for the next four years—if I am to survive them,” Hay wrote Adams. “He would be worse than Teddy; yes, I tell you, worse.”

  Roosevelt had no idea of the degree to which Hay and Adams mocked him behind his back, just as Cabot Lodge was clueless to the depth of their derision of him. In congratulating the vice president–elect, Hay made sure to address him formally as “Mr. Roosevelt.” To which Roosevelt replied: “I wish you would always call me Theodore as you used to.”

  Roosevelt, meanwhile, addressed Hay as “Mr. Secretary” and flattered him to good effect: “I do not think I am wrong in my historic judgment of contemporary matters,” the younger historian wrote the elder, “when I say that President McKinley’s administration will rank next to Lincoln’s in the whole nineteenth century in point of great work worthily done.”

  Hay assumed that he and Roosevelt would not be serving in the same administration. But at the first cabinet meeting after the election, McKinley announced that the current membership was irreplaceable, which put his secretary of state, for one, on the spot. “[T]he President made a little speech saying the victory was as much ours as his, saying that he could not afford to part company with us, and asked us all to remain with him for the next four years,” Hay wrote to Del, who was still in Pretoria. “It was one of the most touching and dignified things I have ever known him to do.” Under the circumstances, Hay did not have the heart to tell McKinley of his intention to leave. Instead, he mustered a lachrymose reply to the president and his fellow cabinet members, assuring them that “the happiest hours I have ever spent are those I have spent in companionship with my colleagues.”