All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  He expressed no such satisfaction with the Senate, which on December 20 ratified the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty with three amendments. The first superseded the fifty-year-old Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain; the second stipulated that the United States had the right to defend the canal. And the third deleted the original Hay-Paunceforte language inviting other powers to adhere to the treaty.

  Hay was at once aggrieved and ashamed. The amendments, especially the one calling for American defense of the canal, “deform and disfigure” the original treaty, he complained to Joseph Choate, whose job it now was to sell the changes to England. Hay was pessimistic that Choate would succeed. “If Great Britain should now reject the Treaty the general opinion of mankind should justify her in it,” he wrote his ambassador. “If our Congress should then go forward and violently abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty by legislative action, we shall be putting ourselves hopelessly in the wrong. . . . Why should not Lord Salisbury say to us . . . ‘Take your Treaty, Brother Jonathan, and God send you better manners.’ ”

  Hay put most of the blame for “the disaster” on Lodge. “The most exasperating thing about it,” he confided to Henry White, his trusted embassy secretary in London, “is that a close analysis of the vote convinces me that the treaty could have been ratified without any amendment if our people had any pluck, or if Lodge had acted squarely.”

  Sensing Hay’s ire, Lodge gave an interview extolling the secretary and defending the fairness of the treaty. “Let me say, first, that the amendments were not dictated by hostility for England,” the senator asserted, “and still less were they in any degree a reflection on the Secretary of State, whose patriotism, purity of purpose . . . and high achievement in dealing with our foreign relations, especially in China, are fully and cordially recognized by men of all parties and all shades of opinions in the Senate.”

  Hay was hardly mollified, and he continued to vent his anger at Lodge and the Senate. “Lodge has now come out in a carefully prepared interview, saying that a treaty when sent to the Senate is not properly speaking a treaty—it is merely a project,” he went on to Henry White. “That is to say that if France and the U.S. make a treaty, after careful study and negotiation, it is nothing more, when sent to the Senate, than a petition from the two nations to that body, to make a real treaty for them. The attitude of the Senate towards public affairs makes all serious negotiation impossible. They really seem to think the State Department has no function but to provide their friends with offices.”

  One way or another, however, the canal was going forward. Its congressional champions—Cabot Lodge, Cushman Davis of Minnesota, William Hepburn of Iowa, and John Tyler Morgan of Alabama—had made it clear that even if the British declined to approve the treaty, they were prepared to abrogate Clayton-Bulwer unilaterally and let the British take their lumps. A month before the vote on Hay-Paunceforte in the Senate, the Isthmian Canal Commission, led by Admiral John Walker, had issued a preliminary report, which concluded that the Panama route was shorter and less costly but that the Nicaraguan route was the “most practicable and feasible.” That left only the Hepburn bill, authorizing the United States to build the canal. It had already passed in the House and had preferred status on the Senate calendar.

  Even so, the legislation did not sail through the upper chamber as quickly or as smoothly as expected. Forces representing a newly configured Panama canal company—successor to the original French company—went to work on members of the Senate, urging them to give the Panama route more thoughtful consideration and, at the very least, to hold off on their decision until the canal commission had published its final report.

  Meanwhile, the administration appealed to the Senate to delay the vote until the treaty with Britain was resolved. “If the stirrers-up of strife would keep still a few minutes, we peacemakers might get a chance,” Hay wrote to the newspaper columnist Henry Watterson. “Yet here is our dear old friend Morgan—a heart of gold—saying in the Senate that we are not bound to wait an instant for England to decide a matter which we took a year to discuss, and serving notice on her that . . . we are going to do as we damplease. Of course, that is just what we are going to do—but why say it when we are going through the motions of ordinary civility? A man don’t say ‘Please pass the butter—[and] if you don’t I’ll take it anyway and slit your damn weazand [windpipe] if you wink.’ Yet Mr. Lodge, bred at Harvard, says this is the proper, honest and honorable way to ask for butter, even when the other side is perfectly willing to pass it along.”

  In a letter to Andrew Carnegie, Hay used a more elegant metaphor to express his deep and chronic frustration with the state of statesmanship. Although Carnegie had his differences with Hay on America’s expansionist foreign policy, he never forsook their friendship. At Christmas he was in the habit of sending Hay a case of whiskey from his beloved Scotland. “I thank you kindly for the ‘corpse reviver,’ ” Hay wrote Carnegie in January 1901 after being bedridden for several days. “[I]f a man could only drink enough of it, he would either never die, or wouldn’t care whether he did or not.” He then gave his reasons why the latest shipment was especially welcome: “I have had a dismal week of it;—getting well of the grippe is worse than getting sick of anything else. And besides I am tired to the marrow of my bones, twisting the rope of sand which is American Diplomacy.”

  Hay-Paunceforte, the Open Door, the Alaskan boundary, and every negotiation Hay had conducted with foreign governments—each was a rope of sand, a tangible thread between two points, yet notoriously insubstantial and inherently transitory. Like an hourglass, or like life itself.

  BRITAIN MIGHT POSSIBLY HAVE deliberated on the new canal treaty more expeditiously had Queen Victoria not died on January 21. Choate warned Hay not to expect any decisions from the British Foreign Office for quite some time. Hay took the opportunity to remind the new king, Edward VII, of the deep kinship between the two English-speaking nations: “In wishing you, Sir, a beneficent and prosperous reign, I confidently trust that not among the least of Your achievements shall be the corroboration and perfection of those bonds of confidence and esteem between Great Britain and America for which the recent happy years have done so much. . . . The affection we bore the beloved Queen is already Yours. With hearts full of tender memories of the past and high hopes for the future we pray most sincerely, Sir, for your health and prosperity.” He signed the letter: “Your Majesty’s faithful and obedient Servant, John Hay.”

  NEITHER HAY’S MORALE NOR health improved as the winter wore on and the inauguration neared. “I am sick to the heart of the whole business, and shall gladly get out at the first opportunity,” he told Henry White. “And when I go it will be final. I shall never again accept office, at home or abroad.” He had tried to get White promoted to the ambassadorship to Rome, only to be blocked by the “treachery” of Cabot Lodge. “He is equally false about me,” Hay commiserated with White. “He is not unfriendly to me personally, in the abstract, nor is he to you. But neither you nor I would weight a feather weight with him, as against any selfish advantage. He would cut my throat or yours for a favorable notice in a newspaper.”

  Hay grew still more obsessed with the Senate, if that was possible. “When I send a year’s job to the Senate,” he wrote to Lizzie Cameron in Paris, “they either begin a ghost dance around it with tomahawks drawn, or they pigeonhole it and forget all about it.”

  Lizzie was another obsession that never waned. His letters to her in the previous year were infrequent—which perhaps only means that many of them are lost—but they were no less tender. “I have seen nobody this winter—and I have the joyful prospect of seeing no one till next winter,” he sighed to her with signature self-pity. “Why should I care to see anybody when the only face that is good for tired eyes is that beautiful one that means so much—so rich in beauty, in memory and in suggestion—and is now so far away. I really begin to believe I shall never see you again, you dear sweet woman. If I don’t, remember what a blessing you were with your beau
ty, your wit and your sweetness—one of the great luxuries of my life.”

  It was true: he hadn’t seen much of anybody that winter. Clara’s mother had died, and she and Hay were officially in mourning, precluding them from partaking of the “season”—or at least providing an excuse for not accepting invitations.

  Beyond that, however, public life had made Hay a more private man. His time was in such great demand that he guarded it like a keepsake. He and Clara hosted fewer of their envied dinner parties, at which they mingled statesmen, diplomats, artists, and authors in their sophisticated salon. And rarely did Hay travel anymore, only to and from the Fells or under official auspices—to confer with the president in Canton, for instance, or to give a speech or accept an honor. (In successive years, he received honorary degrees from Princeton, Yale, and Harvard.) He had not been abroad since leaving London in 1898.

  Perhaps he was looking for an excuse not to continue as secretary of state, but by February he truly did not feel up to the job, an opinion seconded by Adams, who was back in Washington for the winter. “I think Hay very far from strong; and doubt his ability to remain in office,” he wrote his brother Brooks. Adams’s concern increased during the following weeks. “After watching Hay’s condition,” he wrote Lizzie, “I am regretfully compelled to admit that he must go out or die. His strength is exhausted and his temper too. Whether he will recover must depend, I suppose, on rest and constitution; but for the present he is done. So much of Hay’s valetudinarianism has always been nervous that I fully admit that he may live to be ninety; but he is no longer fit to be Secretary.”

  Hay’s doctor diagnosed angina pectoris, a harbinger of worse troubles to come. Adams, though, suspected that his friend might merely have come down with a case of “angina senatus,” explaining to Lizzie: “Hay was made to be a first-rate ambassador abroad; he loathes being a third-rate politician at home. He thinks that the proper man for the cabinet is someone . . . with whom the senators can play poker and drink whiskey and hatch jobs in a corner, and so get things done. He feels that he can’t do it, and it takes the life out of him. Then comes Cabot, who is more of a bloodsucker than Platt or Quay or Hanna combined, and whose methods exceed the endurance of a coral reef. . . . Hay frets and rages internally, and suffers the more because he keeps, or tries to keep, an external impassivity.”

  Hay’s impassivity was stretched to the breaking point at the end of the month when British newspapers divulged that the Foreign Office had rejected the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty. Hay was not officially notified for several more weeks, but he did not doubt the story’s veracity; he had been expecting as much all along.

  On March 1, 1901, he submitted his resignation, to take effect on the appointment of his successor. McKinley chose to receive it as an interregnum formality and dismissed it out of hand, not suspecting just how much thought Hay had given to leaving.

  The weather was gray and drizzly for McKinley’s second inauguration on March 4. This time, Hay did not present the president with a ring with a lock of hair or any other gift, and unlike at Lincoln’s second inauguration thirty-five years earlier, sunshine did not break through as the president gave his address. Instead, it poured.

  REMARKABLY, AS MCKINLEY’S SECOND term began and Hay found himself still secretary of state, he gained what, for him, constituted a second wind. His aggravation over the rejection of the Senate-amended canal treaty seemed to have fueled his remaining resolve to try again. Exercising greater shrewdness and a degree more of humility, he determined to consult with the Senate as he went along. It went without saying that the greatest hurdle would still be Cabot Lodge.

  Lodge was incensed by Britain’s rejection of the latest treaty, and he was more impatient than ever to snatch the butter. He assured Hay that if Britain did not replace the old treaty with one “satisfactory to the Senate,” then the Senate would “denounce the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty and pass the [Hepburn] canal bill by a majority so large as to fall but little short of unanimity.” He defended his brinkmanship by citing a variety of experts on international law who posited that “eternal duration is assured to no treaty between great powers.” He even quoted Otto von Bismarck: “International policy is a fluid element which under certain conditions will solidify, but on a change of atmosphere reverts to its original diffuse condition.” In other words, a rope of sand.

  Hay answered Lodge instantly, straining to contain his temper. “I infer from your letter,” he began, “that you think any arrangement we can make with Great Britain will be rejected by the Senate; that Congress will at its next session adopt a resolution abrogating the Clayton-Bulwer treaty, and that this course will have your approval and support.” Then, sounding very Lincolnesque, he coolly skewered Lodge’s logic: “The fact that you can bring forward many instances of the violation of treaties or their one-sided abrogation, seems to prove hardly more than that wherever there are laws, they are occasionally violated; but this does not necessarily repeal the law.”

  And he could not close without delivering a final riposte. “I am hardly ready to accept Prince Bismarck as an authority on international morals,” he submitted, now rather acidly. “Some of his acts require very ingenious explanation and apology.”

  In the end, he won by persistence, patience, finesse, and perhaps a little bluff of his own. Because Britain was well aware that the canal would be built, with or without an Anglo-American treaty, Hay sensed that the Foreign Office might come around if he simply refined the language in the next draft. The changes he made, after talking with both the Senate and Paunceforte, were subtle, to the extent that he changed much at all. He removed one or two small legalistic thorns and generally softened the tone throughout, but did not alter the two critical elements of the treaty: Britain’s insistence that the canal be neutral and the Senate’s sine qua non asserting that the canal be built, maintained, and defended by the United States. “I have drawn this up with very great care,” he wrote to Choate. “You will see by a careful perusal of it and comparison of it with the extinct treaty, that it contains substantially all that was asked for in the [Senate’s] amended treaty, but in a form, which, I hope, will not be objectionable to the British Government.”

  The new foreign secretary, Lord Lansdowne, was in no hurry to reply, but now at least the process of give-and-take had resumed, and this time Hay was reasonably confident that he and the Senate were on the same page.

  ON APRIL 29, 1901, Hay left Washington for a trip with McKinley through the South and West. Seven weeks was a long time to be gone, but he didn’t mind getting away from the annoyances of the capital. During the spring, he and Adams had resumed their afternoon walks, although Hay’s stamina was noticeably diminished. “He looks pasty and pale,” Adams wrote Lizzie in April. “[H]e can’t walk as far as K Street without a duck-fit, at least on a windy day, or at a brisk gait; he gives out, at a pinch, whenever he calls on himself for endurance.” All the more reason to escape to a warmer, drier climate.

  McKinley intended the trip as a victory lap and a chance to promote his economic agenda for the next term. Initially, he proposed taking along his entire cabinet, but the only members in the party of forty-three passengers aboard the train were Hay and Postmaster General Charles Emory Smith. They made their way through the cotton-producing states of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, where Hay drew his share of cheers for the Open Door. Then across Texas and onward to Phoenix, Arizona, from which Hay sent Adams a jaded account of the junket thus far—“the getting into hacks and being driven through the principal streets in the broiling sun to the Public Square; then an address of welcome from the Mayor or the Governor. . . . And the long banquets of 22 courses and the drizzle of eloquence to follow. And the peril to my immortal soul when they ask me what I think of their city. I hastily run over all the advantage of London and Paris and Tadmor in the wilderness, and say their town combines all their charms and none of their faults—which is swallowed even as a turkey gobbles a June-bug. It has not yet killed me, and possi
bly it will not, for after all the racket, it is a sort of rest from the State Department.”

  In Phoenix, he had hoped to meet up with Clarence King, who was in Arizona for his health. They had seen each other less and less in recent years, as Hay became more absorbed in his public responsibilities and King struggled to make ends meet. Hay and Adams continued to loan King money, collateralized by King’s valuable art collection and near-worthless stock certificates. But as creditors they had long since given up on their friend settling his debts—another reason why King had been shy about coming around.

  Under the name of James Todd, he had moved his wife and four children to a house in the New York borough of Queens several years earlier, while he continued his peregrinations in quest of windfalls. In the summer of 1900 he had gone to the newly discovered gold strikes in Nome, Alaska, but came away no richer. That fall he was in Prescott, Arizona, inspecting a copper mine, when he came down with whooping cough. By the end of the year, doctors had diagnosed tuberculosis.

  Hay had seen King at the end of the previous summer, when he came to the Fells for a day. He was as “delightful as ever,” Hay noted, “though hard worked and not too strong.” By the following March, when King stopped off in Washington, bound for the Bahamas on doctor’s orders, Hay and Adams were shocked by the change. “I have been hit badly by Clarence King,” Adams wrote Lizzie. The formerly indefatigable mountaineer was now “broken by pneumonia and gravely threatened by worse.” At the time, Hay was doing none too well himself, adding to Adams’s anxiety. “So, you see,” he continued to Lizzie, “my two friends, and I might say my only two friends, are agitating me by announcing that they don’t know whether they are fatally ill or not, but will tell me in a month or two.”