All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  In summation, Roosevelt asserted to Lodge, Hay “was not a great Secretary of State.”

  Yet Roosevelt never said any such thing while Hay was alive. Two years into his first term as president, he wrote Hay, “When I came in I thought you a great Secretary of State, but now I have had a chance to know far more fully what a really great Secretary of State you are.” And when Hay mentioned that he wanted to leave office, Roosevelt talked him into staying, confessing, “I could not spare you.”

  Intellectually, the two men were equals—well read, well traveled, multilingual. Roosevelt’s knowledge of natural history was as commanding as Hay’s appreciation of fine arts and belles lettres. Politically, they were likeminded, too—both convinced that American republicanism was the hope and high-water mark of “civilization” and that the world’s powers ought to cooperate, however guardedly, to control and uplift “uncivilized” peoples.

  Their most obvious difference was physical. Roosevelt was correct in saying that Hay shrank from the rough side of life—his outing to Yellowstone notwithstanding. Hay’s habit of an early morning massage and an afternoon walk was tame compared to Roosevelt’s rough-riding through Rock Creek Park and a regular White House gymkhana of fighting sticks and fisticuffs. Where Hay was gentle and genteel, soft of hand and voice, Roosevelt was ebullient and relentlessly youthful in his enthusiasms. “You must always remember that the President is about six,” observed Cecil Spring-Rice, the British diplomat who was best man at Roosevelt’s wedding. Henry James’s brother William observed of Roosevelt in 1900 that he was “still mentally in the Sturm und Drang period of early adolescence.”

  One of Roosevelt’s sharpest critics was Henry Adams, who recognized in the president a rival for Hay’s attentions. (Roosevelt, if he cared to admit it, probably felt the same about Adams.) Adams could not understand what his dear neighbor saw in Roosevelt. He and Hay continued with their afternoon strolls, followed by tea. But beginning in January 1902, Hay and Roosevelt established their own routine: on Sunday mornings, after services at St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square, Roosevelt would stop in at Hay’s house for an hour or so of talk. Adams, in his letters to Lizzie Cameron, gave no hint of jealousy, but the more he saw of Roosevelt and the more time Hay spent with Roosevelt, the more displeased Adams became. The president, he told Lizzie, was “a stupid, blundering, bolting bull-calf.”

  Not that Roosevelt did not make at least a token effort to draw Adams into his sphere of influence. “Teddy said the other day,” Hay wrote Adams, “ ‘I am not going to be the slave of the tradition that forbids Presidents from seeing their friends. I am going to dine with you & Henry Adams & Cabot whenever I like.’ ”

  In early January 1902, the invitation came and Adams relented, accompanying the Hays to the “slaughter-house,” his first visit to the Executive Mansion since he and Clover had dined with Rutherford and Lucy Hayes in 1878. He thoroughly regretted the decision. “[A]s usual Theodore absorbed the conversation,” Adams reported to Lizzie, “and if he tired me ten years ago, he crushes me now. To say that I enjoyed it would be, to you, a gratuitous piece of deceit. . . . [W]hat annoys me is his childlike and infantile superficiality with his boyish dogmatism of assertion. He lectures me on history as though he were a high-school pedagogue.”

  Years later, writing in his Education, Adams couched his chronic disdain for Roosevelt in a somewhat more scientific vocabulary, but the message was the same: Roosevelt annoyed him. “Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts,” Adams analyzed, “and all Roosevelt’s friends know that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter,—the quality that mediaeval theology assigned to God,—he was pure act.”

  Hay indulged Adams’s disparagements and likely joined in with a few blasphemies of his own during their end-of-day constitutionals. Yet he did not let his friend’s sour outlook interfere with his own relationship with the president, and gradually he and Roosevelt worked out a modus vivendi that was quite intimate. Hay, who had so recently lost a son, found himself drawn to a vibrant man twenty years his junior. In Hay, Roosevelt realized a palpable link to the generation of his own father, who had died before Roosevelt graduated from Harvard.

  While Roosevelt did not always keep Hay abreast of what too often proved to be less than diplomatic decisions, he did not bulldoze his secretary or intend disrespect of any sort. And though Hay was often privately irked by Roosevelt’s impetuous outbursts, he did not intrigue against him; nor was he inclined to kowtow in order to get his way. Remarkably they seemed to harbor no sense of rivalry and, while not always complimentary of each other, they were, more often than not, effectively complementary.

  Roosevelt was a confronter first, a conciliator second. “I have a horror of bluster which does not result in fight,” he told Hay. “[I]t is both weak and undignified.” By now, Hay knew by heart the axiom Roosevelt had begun using well before he became president: “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” In contrast, Hay avoided conflict wherever possible, realizing that a rope of sand was built more on trust than thrust and that the slightest gust of violence could be its ruin. Accordingly, guilelessly, he did his best to balance Roosevelt’s strenuosity with subtlety, to forestall and, if need be, repair any damage caused by the president’s lunges through the china shop of foreign relations.

  Hay’s job under Roosevelt was in some ways less complicated, in others far more problematic. McKinley had entrusted the portfolio of foreign relations almost entirely to Hay, allowing his secretary of state to serve as his premier, a term frequently used by the newspapers to describe Hay’s Richelieu-like relationship with the White House. That now ended. Roosevelt’s appetite for executive control was more voracious than any president so far. Hay, who was more comfortable with the quieter manner of McKinley, was obliged to make the transition from one to the other—an adaptation evidenced in a speech he gave to the chamber of commerce of New York on November 19, two months after McKinley’s death.

  Hay’s audience at Delmonico’s that night included senators, generals, the governor of New York State, the mayor-elect of New York City, and “the largest aggregation of plutocrats the world knows,” noted the Evening Star of Washington. His observations were a model of modesty and discretion and, before this all-male group, they did not lack for drollery. “There are two important lines of human endeavor in which men are forbidden even to allude to their success,” he explained, “affairs of the heart and diplomatic affairs. In doing so, one not only commits a vulgarity which transcends all question of taste, but makes all future success impossible.” (That Hay possessed considerable expertise in both fields was surely not something his audience suspected. This, however, was not the only time he made such categorical comparisons. “There are three species of creatures, that, when seen going, are coming. When they seem coming they go,” he would pose to male company. The answer to this mildly risqué riddle was: “Diplomats, women, and crabs.”)

  When the laughter subsided, he continued to his New York audience: “But if we are not permitted to boast of what we have done, we can at least say a word about what we have tried to do.” He alluded to the Open Door, avoidance of entangling alliances, and treaties of reciprocity, summarizing, “The briefest expression of our rule of conduct is, perhaps, the Monroe Doctrine and the Golden Rule. With this simple chart we can hardly go far wrong.”

  After making a pious bow to the martyred McKinley, he then turned his attention to the future—to the Roosevelt administration—whereupon his rhetoric became more forceful, ever so slightly Rooseveltian. “I can yet assure you,” he ventured, “that so long as the administration of your affairs remains in hands as strong and skillful as those to which they have been and are now confided, there will be no more surrender of our rights than there will be violation of the rights of others. The President to whom you have
given your valuable trust and confidence . . . feels and knows—for has he not tested it, in the currents of the heady fight, as well as in toilsome work of administration?—that the nation over whose destinies he presides has a giant’s strength in the works of war, as in the works of peace.”

  Winding up, Hay exhorted his listeners, and his countrymen: “Let us be diligent in our business and we shall stand—stand, you see, not crawl, nor swagger—stand as a friend and equal, asking nothing, putting up with nothing but what is right and just, among our peers, in the great democracy of nations.”

  It was hardly an address he would have given if he had not already attained universal respect as a diplomat and if the United States were not now a world power; in short, not an address he would have given three years earlier. The speech was praised broadly, especially for Hay’s coinage of the slogan “the Monroe Doctrine and the Golden Rule.” Yet beyond his specific iteration of foreign policy, his remarks also made plain to his listeners, and to millions who read a transcription in the newspapers, that the ship of state would continue to be steered by mature hands—none other than John Hay’s. McKinley had been an honorable and decent executive, but the public recognized who had been responsible for engineering the Open Door and saving the Peking legation. And while McKinley’s successor was a battle-tested leader, as Hay had proclaimed, there was no question that, at sixty-three, Hay occupied the rightful station of éminence grise of the State Department, of the Republican Party, and indeed of the entire government.

  It followed, too, that the man who had made McKinley look good was capable of doing the same for Roosevelt. “[Hay] has kept to his great task with as splendid a fortitude, with as exquisite a courage and consecration, as well as with as honorable skill as any man ever showed in a high place,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle commented after the New York speech. “The President who appointed him had absolute confidence in him. The President who retained him has an equal confidence in him. The fame of both those Presidents in history will be increased—and that is saying very much—by the vindication which he has given of their confidence in him, and, we may add, by the proofs which he has given of his confidence in them.”

  Moreover, for all Roosevelt’s later attempts to characterize Hay as a mere amanuensis, incapable of carrying out “big things,” the reality was that most of the international challenges Roosevelt now faced as president—the canal, Alaska, China—had already been laid out by John Hay. Roosevelt could assert to Cabot Lodge that Hay had been merely a “figurehead”; but Hay, so long as he was healthy, would continue to lead the State Department and American foreign relations with a sagacity and tact that Roosevelt, try as he may, could not do without.

  THE YEAR 1902 GOT off to a promising start, beginning with passage of the Hepburn bill, authorizing construction of the Nicaragua canal, on January 9. A month later, the Senate unanimously ratified a treaty to purchase the Danish West Indies—the Virgin Islands of St. Thomas, St. John’s, and St. Croix—for $5 million, a deal negotiated painstakingly by Henry White.*

  Hay enjoyed personal satisfactions as well. On February 6, his daughter Helen—who fancied herself a poet and, of Hay’s four children, was the one who most took after her father—married Payne Whitney in Washington. Among the six hundred guests able to fit in the Church of the Covenant were President and Mrs. Roosevelt, most of the cabinet and Supreme Court, and a full deployment of senators and foreign diplomats. The officiating minister was Hiram Haydn, who had married Helen’s parents and still presided over the Old Stone Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, built by the largesse of Amasa Stone.

  Helen Hay was a wealthy young woman before she married; as Helen Whitney, she became immensely more comfortable. The wedding gifts included a solid gold coffee set and, as Henry Adams joked to Lizzie Cameron, “a warming-pan” full of diamonds. Whitney’s uncle, Oliver Payne, who had served as the young man’s surrogate father and whose portfolio included sizable stakes in Standard Oil, steel, railroads, and tobacco, bestowed upon the newlyweds a steam yacht and a mansion on Fifth Avenue designed by Stanford White that would take the next five years to complete. After a breakfast reception at the Hay house, Payne and Helen departed by private train car for the family plantation in South Carolina, followed by a leisurely tour abroad. Adams, who had elected not to partake of the festivities—blaming “indolence” and “too much family”—nevertheless declared the event “the climax of the season.”

  And with Helen at last out of the parlor, Alice Hay was free to announce her own engagement to another of Del Hay’s Yale chums, Jim Wadsworth. Overwhelmed by the grandiosity of Helen’s wedding, she made plans for a smaller, more tranquil ceremony at the Fells at the end of September.

  HAY PRESIDED OVER ONE more send-off during the winter. On February 27, he delivered a memorial to William McKinley to a joint session of Congress, elaborating more formally on his earlier remarks to the New York chamber of commerce. In all his years of service, this was his first time to address Congress, and he rose to the occasion. “The Secretary’s figure is slight and his face is usually pale,” the New York Tribune noted afterward, “but today there was a flush on his cheek. . . . [H]is voice had unusual carrying power, and he was able to make himself heard to the furthest recesses of the hall.”

  He spoke for more than an hour, and with every flourish of phrase and evocation of patriotic precedent, his audience of congressmen, senators, cabinet, and court—along with a gallery full of wives, daughters, and friends—recognized that the impeccably groomed, consummately poised statesman who rendered the full and fair measure of McKinley did so with unsurpassable authority. “There is not one of us but feels prouder of his native land,” Hay offered in closing, “because the august figure of Washington presided over its beginnings; no one but vows it a tenderer love because Lincoln poured out his blood for it; no one but must feel his devotion for his country renewed and kindled when he remembers how McKinley loved, revered, and served it, showed in his life how a citizen should live, and in his last hour taught us how a gentleman could die.”

  Again the speech was roundly applauded and widely distributed. One of the many readers to be moved by Hay’s words was Edith Wharton. “[I]t was oratory in the high sense of the word,” she wrote to George Smalley of The Times, “[and] I don’t know whether to praise it more for its quality of sustained eloquence, or for the way in which idea and expression hold the same high level, & move, all through it, at the same majestic pace. We need so much, in this slip-shod, irreverent, headlong age & country, such object-lessons both in language and thought, that I feel Mr. Hay has done a service to the whole country.”

  IN THE MONTHS THAT followed, however, Hay’s service to his country and his president was fraught with frustration and misdirection, as two familiar bugbears rose up to try his nerves and test his ropemaking skills. One was the Alaska boundary; the other, not surprisingly, was the canal.

  The Alaska dispute had lain dormant for the past two years, defused by the interim agreement by which the Canadians and Americans shared access to the Klondike gold fields. The United States had wanted to avoid any disruptions in its negotiations with Britain over the Central American canal, and Britain wished no more friction with the United States while the Boer War dragged on. Four months into his presidency, Roosevelt had far more pressing matters on his plate: an embarrassing report on American brutality in the Philippines, including a torture technique known as the “water cure”; another strike by the United Mine Workers; and an anti-trust suit he had filed against the behemoth Northern Securities, controlled by some of the richest and most powerful men in America. For the moment, Alaska was the least of his worries, and he expressed no eagerness to proceed with a final boundary settlement, preferring, as he said to Joseph Choate, to “let sleeping dogs lie.”

  But by March 1902, Hay sensed that the time was ripe to resolve the Alaskan business once and for all. The South African war was at last coming to an end, and he had recently heard from both the British am
bassador Julian Paunceforte and the Canadian prime minister Wilfred Laurier that they might finally be willing to give way on the disputed coastal territory through arbitration. When Hay presented the case to Roosevelt, the president scoffed at the thought of compromising on a matter in which he was absolutely certain the United States was in the right. Canada and England, he growled, had no more legitimate claim to the stretch of Alaska coastline in question than the United States had to Cornwall or Kent. Having awakened the sleeping dog, he announced that he would send engineers to survey a boundary “as we assert it,” adding emphatically, “and I shall send troops to guard and hold it.” When George Smalley, who was at the meeting with Roosevelt and Hay, suggested that this action sounded “very drastic,” Roosevelt replied bluntly, “I mean it to be drastic.” A few days later, he ordered Secretary of War Root to reinforce the garrisons in southeastern Alaska. “Whenever Canada raises a bristle,” Henry Adams told Lizzie Cameron, “Theodore roars like a Texas steer, and ramps around the ring, screaming for instant war, and ordering a million men instantly to arms.”

  Hay had never served a president who was so eager to pick a quarrel, and even as he directed Choate to press ahead with negotiations for a tribunal of arbitration, he feared that Roosevelt might fly off the handle at any moment and send in the gunboats. Later in the summer, Roosevelt still had not cooled off. “It seems to me that the Canadians have no right to make a claim based upon the possible effect of their own wrongdoing,” he wrote Hay. “I feel a good deal like telling them that if trouble comes it will be purely because of their own fault; and although it would not be pleasant for us it would be death for them.”