One month later, Hay was somewhat better; King was not. “His tuberculosis is now pronounced,” Adams wrote again to Lizzie, “and I dread its not confining itself to the lungs. He must go to Arizona at once, and ought to have gone three months ago. He coughs much, with the usual symptoms. . . . Whether we shall ever see him again is a question that one prefers not to ask him.”
Before departing the east, King said goodbye to Ada, suspecting that it was the last time they would be together. He gave her money that he said had been given him by two friends and told her to take the children to Toronto to live. Only when he got to Arizona did he confess to her his true identity.
King was in Prescott when Hay stopped in Phoenix, and so they missed each other again. The presidential train continued on to California, where McKinley and his secretary of state saw the Pacific Ocean for the first and only time in their lives.
Yet they had little opportunity to appreciate their vantage point. As the train neared San Francisco, Mrs. McKinley, always frail, developed blood poisoning from an infected finger. For a week she lay near death. While the president remained by his wife’s side, Hay served as his surrogate, planting a tree at Stanford and addressing the students and faculty at the University of California. The mayor of San Francisco led him on a tour of the city, including a visit to a gambling den in Chinatown. On May 25, Mrs. McKinley was finally judged well enough to travel. The presidential train arrived back in Washington on the thirty-first, two weeks ahead of schedule. McKinley’s speech at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo had to be postponed until September.
In the meantime, Hay was sent to stand in for the president at the exposition’s opening. As little as he professed to enjoy public speaking, he had been doing a lot of it recently, and he was getting better as he grew older. The Pan-American world’s fair was a celebration of the nation’s enlarged presence in the hemisphere, from Alaska to the Caribbean and South America, soon to be cinched at the waist by a canal between the oceans. The exposition was also meant to showcase the wonder of electricity; every night the fairgrounds were bejeweled with two hundred thousand lights powered by the turbines of Niagara Falls. In his brief address on June 13, Hay haled the “ideal of the brotherhood of the nations” and saluted “the armies of labor and intelligence in every country of this New World, all working with one mind and one will, not to attain an unhappy pre-eminence in the art of destruction, but to advance in liberal emulation in the arts which tend to make this long-harassed and tormented earth a brighter”—here a salute to the splendid illumination—“and more blest abode for men of good will.”
On his next trip to Buffalo, three months later, the atmosphere would be infinitely darker. Had Ida McKinley’s finger not become infected, shortening the presidential trip, and had McKinley been able to deliver his world’s fair address in June instead of returning in September to fulfill his promise, he might have avoided assassination. But fate had other plans.
HAY BEGAN THE SUMMER in relatively good spirits. The affairs of state were for once free of major crisis. In the Philippines the guerrilla leader, Aguinaldo, had been captured, and the fight appeared to have gone out of the rebels. Hay had still not heard from Foreign Secretary Lansdowne on the canal treaty, but Choate was cautiously optimistic. In China, Rockhill was helping bring negotiations of the Boxer indemnity to a close. Although Russia continued to press its advantage in Manchuria, the rest of China was free of violence, allowing American troops at last to withdraw from Peking. And the dickering over purchase of the Danish West Indies was showing incremental progress.
The Hay household was a happy place. Both Helen and Alice were in love with two of Del’s classmates from Yale. Helen’s beau was Payne Whitney, heir to a New York street-railway fortune and millions more. Alice had fallen for James Wadsworth, scion of a well-to-do family from western New York; Wadsworth’s father, a congressman, was a friend of Hay’s, as his grandfather, a Civil War general, had been forty years before. Clarence, not yet seventeen and too frequently lost in the family shuffle, was headed to Harvard in the fall.
The best news of all was Del. The British had taken Pretoria in June 1900, obviating his job as consul to the Boer Republic, but he had stayed on anyway and by all accounts had handled himself well. “You have had a very successful year of it,” Hay told his son in a rare expression of approval. “I have not heard a word of criticism of you.”
Del finally left South Africa in February 1901, stopping in London for two weeks en route to America. “He is a very dear fellow,” Henry White reported to Hay. “I am curious to see whether and how much Mrs. Hay and you find him changed. He talks more than he did—and very well too—and reveals more frequently the possession of that sense of humor which he inherits from you.” Clara went to New York to meet the boat and bring him home. He had been gone a year and a half, during which time he had indeed grown up. He was not as polished as his father, but he was nonetheless poised, confident, and, as Clarence King had once remarked, blessed with “disarming bonhomie.”
Del was contemplating a career in the diplomatic service, but even his father could not promise him another posting right away. Then something better came up. In June, President McKinley appointed him assistant private secretary, the same position Hay had held in the Lincoln White House. Father insisted he had not helped son “even with a word,” though certainly McKinley was astute enough to value the apple of such a trustworthy tree.
Before beginning his new assignment, Del went to New Hampshire with his mother and sisters. Hay remained in Washington until Alvey Adee returned from vacation. He hoped to snatch a day or two at the Fells when he went to Cambridge to receive an honorary degree from Harvard on June 25. He would just miss Del, who was headed to New Haven that same week for the triennial reunion of his Yale class.
At dawn on the morning of the twenty-third, Hay was awakened by McKinley’s secretary, George Cortelyou, delivering awful news. Cortelyou had received a telephone call from the proprietor of the New Haven House, informing him that Del had been found dead on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, having fallen from the window of his third-floor room. In a state of shock, Hay packed a bag and hurried to the train station. Arriving in New Haven in mid-afternoon, he went directly to the undertaker’s and identified his son, still clad in his pajamas.
Del had been to the theater with friends earlier in the evening and returned to his hotel room at midnight, requesting that he be awakened in the morning at nine. The evidence suggested that he had sat at the window before retiring. His clothes were neatly folded, his bed was turned down, and a half-smoked cigarette was found on the windowsill. Apparently he had dozed off, become dizzy, or lost his balance. At 2:30 am, a city worker saw him plummet sixty feet to the pavement. He died instantly. Neither the doctors, the coroner, the hotel staff, Del’s friends, nor certainly his family said anything about drinking—or suicide, a subject that had to have entered the consciousness of his parents at least fleetingly. After all, Clara’s father had killed himself, and thirty-five years earlier Hay had published a short story about a young man Del’s age who throws himself from the Arc de Triomphe. Adelbert Stone Hay’s death, however, was ruled accidental.
Del’s final day was the worst of his father’s life. Though Hay had been at Lincoln’s bedside, had seen the ghastly bullet wound in the president’s skull, and had witnessed his last breath, that tragedy, even as it unfolded, was draped in the gauze of history. Hay had been only one of many whose hearts were broken in the boardinghouse across from Ford’s Theatre. But in the undertaker’s parlor in New Haven, the grief was singular and for that reason incalculably more unbearable.
Helen and Clarence arrived in New Haven later in the day, Clara and Alice soon thereafter. The family gathered at the funeral home for one final glimpse of Del, who was laid out in the blue serge suit he had intended to wear to the Yale-Harvard baseball game later in the week. “He never looked so handsome as in his coffin. His face was not injured. Death had given him a
new dignity,” Hay wrote to McKinley, who had lost two children of his own—and whose own coffin would be filled soon enough.
The family left by train for Cleveland early in the evening. A modest funeral, attended by thirty friends and family members, was held the following day in a small chapel on the grounds of Lake View Cemetery. Del was buried in a plot next to Clara’s father and brother.
The letters of condolence would eventually fill three bound volumes—from Henry James and William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and S. Weir Mitchell, Rudyard Kipling and Bram Stoker, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, seemingly every friend Hay and Clara had ever made, and every public figure, from king to congressman, who cared at all. Scores of newspaper stories celebrated Del’s deft service in South Africa and mourned the bright future taken from him. “He had ease and variety; his family idolized him; everybody liked him and sought his company,” Hay wrote Clarence King. “He was . . . well known in three continents.”
And to John Clark in Scotland, Hay described Del as a young chieftain cut down on the moor: “Twenty-four-years old—6 feet 2 and 15 stone—strong and wise and steady—able to hold his own in fight and council—and of all that brilliant promise nothing but dust and ashes.”
Henry Adams, who was traveling in Europe with Cabot and Nannie Lodge, was distressed that he could not be on hand to console his dearest friend. He knew Hay far too well to waste words on treacly platitudes; instead, he offered plainspoken counsel, drawing upon his own painful history. “Fate strikes us at times too hard,” he wrote the day of Del’s funeral. “There is no use struggling. I daren’t write to your wife. What could I say? Whatever I should try to say would be wrong, or touch some strong chord. She has got to carry her load. She can’t do as I did, sixteen years ago—throw life up, and sit still to wait for its end. I could drop out, and stay out; but she must go on, and carry you all, as before. . . . When one is struck by one of these impossible blows, one either has or has not the strength to go on. If one has it, one picks oneself up, after a time, and limps along, without help, never really oneself again, but able to walk. If one hasn’t it, one goes under, and no help serves. Women are better than men, as a rule, in these trials, and react against them with more instinct. . . . Nine times out of ten, it is the man who collapses.”
Hay read Adams’s note after he returned to Washington. “That was a letter which did its work,” he wrote back. “It took my sore mind from my boy and made me think of my wife and the rest. I do not yet know whether I shall get through or not. I am not making any progress. I am waiting to see if the nerves will stand the strain. I have hideous forebodings. I have been extraordinarily happy all my life. Good luck has pursued me like my shadow. Now it is gone—it seems to me forever. I expect, tomorrow, to hear bad news, something insufferable. The bright spot in the gloom is my wife. She has borne the horror wonderfully. For the first twenty-four hours I thought most of her and what could be done to comfort her, but from the hour she arrived at New Haven she took care of me.”
Lizzie Cameron wanted to take care of him, too, urging him to come to Donegal, the Cameron estate in Pennsylvania. Reluctantly he declined. “I can not see any friends of Del’s at present,” he wrote her, his pain compounded. “I can not talk of him nor think of him without breaking down. I thank you with all my heart for your sympathy and for all your goodness to him which he deeply appreciated.”
On the same day that he wrote Lizzie, he also wrote to Clara, who had stayed on in Cleveland. He was settling Del’s affairs—closing out his bank account, transferring securities. But he could not yet bring himself to open his son’s trunks. “[M]y sorrow grips me from time to time so that I can hardly bear it,” he told his wife. “Everybody seems to think I will be better at work. I do not know whether they are right or wrong. But I want to get away where I can see nobody but my own.”
After a week in Washington, he joined Clara at the Fells, where they kept to themselves until September. “It is a month since our calamity came upon us,” Hay wrote Whitelaw Reid at the end of July, “and yet we have not known an hour when we felt that we could talk with you and Mrs. Reid about it. The time will probably never come; we are too old to heal of such a wound. . . . Our loss grows greater as we move away from it.”
Del’s death had stirred the painful memory of his namesake, Clara’s brother Adelbert, who had drowned at Yale. Yet as Adams had forecast, Clara proved to be the brick of the family. She was not only inherently calmer and more nurturing than her husband; she also possessed a greater faith. “[W]e are not in despair,” she bravely assured Adams later in the summer. “We cannot understand [Del’s death], but we feel it must have been for the best and that he had accomplished in his short life what was intended for him to do. We try to think that he is away on one of his long journeys and that we will meet again someday.” In the meantime, she declared, “We have made up our minds that the only way to keep ourselves and our household from going to pieces is to go on just as we did before.”
SHORT OF LEAVING OFFICE entirely, Hay had no choice but to resume his participation in the affairs of the world. At the end of August, Britain announced it was ready to put the canal treaty in order. The English ambassador Julian Paunceforte, who knew Hay’s mind thoroughly and had his own pride of authorship in the treaty, was home on leave for the summer. Cabot Lodge had passed through London in July and, setting aside his sniping ways, displayed a willingness to hash out the treaty firsthand with Foreign Secretary Lansdowne and the leader of the House of Commons, Arthur Balfour. They seemed to have hit it off, a relieved Joseph Choate informed Hay.
Lodge agreed to stop in London again on his way home from the Continent in September, in order to smooth out any remaining differences in the treaty. Hay was so hopeful that a workable document was near at hand that he made a hasty trip to Canton at the end of August to go over the recent developments with McKinley. “I am profoundly gratified at the way the matter now presents itself,” he wrote Choate on September 2, after seeing the president. “If Lord Paunceforte brings [the treaty] back next month in the form we have indicated, I shall be ready to intone my nunc dimittis.”
Two days later, on September 4, the president and Mrs. McKinley set out for Buffalo to deliver the address he had intended to give in June, before their western trip was curtailed. The following morning, McKinley gave his speech to a crowd of fifty thousand on the fair’s esplanade. The subject was peace and stability through reciprocity. As a politician who had built his reputation as a champion of tariffs, he now proclaimed that America’s economy was prosperous enough and its prowess in the world great enough that the time had come to modify its protective posture—high tariffs—and engage in freer trade with overseas markets. “Isolation is no longer possible or desirable,” he declared. “Our capacity to produce has developed so enormously and our products have so multiplied that the problem of more markets requires our urgent and immediate attention. Only a broad and enlightened policy will keep what we have. No other policy will get more. . . . We must not repose in fancied security that we can forever sell everything and buy little or nothing. . . . Reciprocity is the natural outcome of our wonderful industrial development.”
He knew that lowering the nation’s guard in this way would not sit well with cautious conservatives within his party, but he was confident that recent developments, including the Open Door and the prospect of an interoceanic canal, promised a robust future in which the United States could hold its own against its rivals and benefit from more open exchange with its allies. It was arguably the most potent speech of McKinley’s career. It was also his last.
The following afternoon, after a visit to Niagara Falls, McKinley held a public reception in the exposition’s garish Temple of Music. It was to last for only ten minutes, which would give him enough time to greet several hundred people. Years earlier he had mastered “the McKinley grip,” a technique in which he extended his right hand and grasped only the fingers of the person standing before him, while w
ith his left he politely but firmly pulled the fellow past, already grasping the fingers of the next in line. He boasted he could shake fifty hands a minute.
At 4:07 pm, McKinley applied his famous grip yet again. Noticing a bandage or handkerchief over the man’s right hand, McKinley reached for the left. At that, Leon Czolgosz, a twenty-eight-year-old half-baked anarchist, thrust a .32-caliber revolver toward McKinley’s white-vested midriff and fired two shots before being pummeled to the floor.
One of the bullets glanced off McKinley’s breastbone and was of little consequence. The second bullet passed through his stomach and could not be located during exploratory surgery. Initially, the doctors attending the president spoke of a full recovery, basing their optimism on McKinley’s stout constitution and the lack of damage to other internal organs. McKinley was taken to the home of the exposition’s president, John Milburn, where, over the next few days, he was observed to be slowly improving.
Hay was notified of the shooting via the telegraph office in Newbury. With Vice President Roosevelt and most of the cabinet already en route to Buffalo, Hay prepared to head for Washington, to be in a better position to keep foreign governments and his own ministers and consuls informed on the president’s condition. At the suggestion of George Cortelyou, he changed his plans at the last minute and went to Buffalo also, arriving on the tenth.
After visiting McKinley’s bedside, Hay assured a newspaperman, “The reports of the doctors are so encouraging that I see no reason for alarm or for fear that the President will not speedily recover.” He left for Washington the next day, as did most of the rest of the cabinet. Roosevelt was so unfazed by McKinley’s condition that he set off to climb Mount Marcy, the tallest peak in the Adirondacks.
All the Great Prizes Page 48
