Another demonstration helped the Panama cause even more. On May 8, on the Caribbean island of Martinique, Mount Pelée exploded and in less than five minutes wiped out the thirty thousand residents of the town of St. Pierre. Although Martinique was fifteen hundred miles from Nicaragua, Bunau-Varilla’s previous warnings about the danger of volcanoes in Nicaragua resonated anew. “What an unexpected turn of the wheel of fortune!” he exclaimed. “If not the strongest of my arguments against Nicaragua, at least the most easily comprehensible of them was made a hundred times more striking owing to the prodigious emotion aroused by the catastrophe.”
He dashed off letters to Hanna, Morgan, and the White House, underscoring the terrible object lesson of Pelée. Bunau-Varilla, never shy, also made sure his message reached the newspapers. Quoting the “eminent French engineer”—Bunau-Varilla—the New York Sun pointed out that the Nicaragua route was “lined” with volcanoes. The eruption of one of them, Cosequina, in 1835 had been so violent, by Bunau-Varilla’s calculation, that in just six minutes of the caldera’s forty-four hours of activity, the quantity of stone and ash it belched upon the countryside equaled eight years of canal excavation. “Nothing similar can be feared in Panama,” the Frenchman assured.
The bad news on volcanoes got better still. On May 14, a cablegram reached the Sun, reporting that another of Nicaragua’s volcanoes, Momotombo, had erupted, destroying wharves on Lake Managua, one hundred miles from the canal route. This time the Sun made mischievous fun of the event, publishing an editorial in the voice of Momotombo: “My compliments to Senator Morgan,” the mountain taunted. “I am not only alive but am capable of sending down, without notice, through Lake Managua and the Tipitapa River in the adjacent Lake Nicaragua, a tidal wave of sufficient volume and malignity to overwhelm any canal that engineering skill can construct through this country, and to wipe out every dollar of the two or three hundred millions which the United States Government may be foolish enough to invest.”
The Nicaraguan minister to the United States countered with impassioned denials of any recent emissions from Momotombo (when, in fact, Momotombo had erupted on May 13), and the Washington Evening Star published a cartoon of Hanna painting volcanoes on a map of Nicaragua with Bunau-Varilla looking on. Even so, the seed of doubt took hold. And to make sure that it flourished, Bunau-Varilla sent every senator a sheet of paper on which he had affixed a Nicaraguan postage stamp from 1900, showing Momotombo in grand ebullition. Beneath the stamp he captioned: “An official witness of the volcanic activity of Nicaragua.”
Senate debate on the Hepburn bill began on June 4. Morgan, the seventy-seven-year-old former Confederate general, carried the banner for Nicaragua. Reiterating his well-worn brief for an American canal, he questioned the legal right of the Compagnie Nouvelle to sell its concession and stressed the uncertainty of negotiating with a country in the throes of civil war. He warned that if the United States were determined to build a canal in Panama, it would inevitably have to annex the isthmus forcibly, which would “poison the minds of people against us in every Spanish-American republic.” He blamed the entire thrust toward Panama—the revision of the canal commission report, the Spooner amendment, Hanna’s minority report, the volcano scare—on the “direct, constant, and offensive intrusion” of the Compagnie Nouvelle, William Nelson Cromwell in particular.
The following day, Hanna stood up for what was now known among Washington wags as the “Hannama” canal. He came armed with Bunau-Varilla’s charts and the briefs prepared by Cromwell—including testimony from eighty-three shipowners, shipmasters, and pilots, stating their preference for Panama. He displayed an enormous map marked with red dots to indicate the location of volcanoes (eight in Nicaragua, none in Panama). Yet instead of unfurling a list of dry facts, he spoke conversationally to the nearly full chamber, as he would to a group of millworkers in Cleveland or to prospective campaign contributors. He was a man of neither elegance nor eloquence, but he was powerful, and many in the room were in his debt. At sixty-four, he was at the height of his career and also, he knew, nearing its end. (He had three years to live.) He spoke for two hours, occasionally referring to a sheet of paper in his hand, on which he had jotted a dozen or so lines. Finally his arthritic knees gave out, and he was obliged to return the following day to conclude his remarks.
Over the next two weeks, with Cromwell and Bunau-Varilla in support, Hanna outgeneraled Morgan, pulling votes, one by one, to his side, including those of half a dozen Democrats. On June 19, the vote was taken on whether to substitute the minority report (Spooner, Panama) for the majority (Hepburn, Nicaragua). Panama won, 42 to 34. Six days later, the House accepted the conference report on the Panama bill nearly unanimously, and on June 28, Theodore Roosevelt signed the Spooner Act authorizing the United States to acquire from Colombia control of a strip of land six miles wide in which to construct a canal and to acquire the rights, privileges, franchises, concessions, and property of the Compagnie Nouvelle for $40 million. As with the original Hepburn bill, the Spooner Act specified that, if these terms were not fulfilled within a “reasonable time,” then the president would proceed with a canal across Nicaragua.
Roosevelt was elated. “The great bit of work of my administration, and from the material and constructive standpoint one of the greatest bits of work that the twentieth century will see, is the Isthmian Canal,” he wrote Hay after the Spooner Act became law. Contrary to his later claim that he had done Hay’s job for him, Roosevelt then left the task of clinching the deal with Colombia squarely in the hands of his secretary of state. “In the negotiations,” he exhorted, “I must trust you. . . . I hope you will take personal direction.”
Hay, who had stayed clear of the Senate debate, now had his work cut out for him. In the weeks ahead, before heading to New Hampshire for the summer, he ironed out the last details in the treaty, and in early June, Concha sent the document on to Bogotá for the consideration of Marroquín and his government. “I do not imagine we shall get an answer immediately,” Hay wrote to Morgan, “but it makes no practical difference whether we get it now or later in the season, so that we have it signed and ready to send to the Senate by the 1st of December.”
It would take all of that, and much more.
AT THE END OF June 1902, Hay and Roosevelt traveled to Cambridge to receive honorary degrees from Harvard—Hay having missed his chance a year earlier due to Del’s accident. Roosevelt used the occasion to defend the administration’s conduct in Cuba and the Philippines. In passing, he also mentioned what “a liberal education in high-minded statesmanship [it was] to sit at the same council table as John Hay.”
Hay’s address was essentially a fresh invocation of the Monroe Doctrine and the Golden Rule and, as such, provided antidote to Roosevelt’s imperial bullishness. “The principles which have governed me are of limpid simplicity,” he declared solemnly and soothingly. “We have sought in all things the interest and honor of our own country. We have never found this incompatible with a due regard for the interest and honor of other powers. We have treated all our neighbors with frankness and courtesy; we have received courtesy and frankness in return. We have set no traps; we have wasted no energy in evading the imaginary traps of others. We have sometimes been accused of credulity; but our credulity has not always gone unjustified. . . . There might be worse reputations for a country to acquire than that of always speaking the truth, and always expecting it from others. In bargaining,” he concluded reasonably, “we have tried not to get the worst of the deal; remembering, however, that the best bargains are those that satisfy both sides.”
After the ceremony, Harvard president Charles Eliot shared with Hay his great admiration for Roosevelt: “ ‘What a man! Genius, force, and courage, and such evident honesty! . . . He is so young and he will be with us for many a day to come.’ ”
Roosevelt’s longevity indeed seemed to be assured—as was his safety, apparently. Earlier in the day, President Eliot was astonished to see Roosevelt wearing a pistol
under his coat. Just the same, Hay wanted to be prepared for all contingencies. A few days before the trip to Harvard, he had asked Attorney General Philander Knox for further clarification on the details of succession. The vice-presidential chair would remain empty until 1905, and the void made Hay uneasy. “[T]he President’s life is worth twenty of mine in more respects than one,” he wrote Knox, “but I suppose as a matter of duty, I ought to know what I should be called on to do as the first executive act in case of the President’s death.” Soon enough, his inquiry would prove to be anything but academic.
BY THE END OF July, Hay was at the Fells. “I left Washington at 100° and found my family very comfortable about the tea-table with a rousing wood fire in the chimney,” he reported contentedly. The president too had departed Washington to pass the summer at Sagamore Hill, his retreat at Oyster Bay, Long Island. During his absence, the White House would undergo a thorough restoration and renovation. The upstairs, where Hay had once lived with Nicolay, was simply not roomy enough to accommodate the Roosevelt family, with six frisky children, and the offices of a no less frisky twentieth-century president. Roosevelt had rejected the suggestion that he forsake the tradition of presidents living and working under the same roof. Charles McKim struck a compromise by designing a new office wing, connected by a portico to the west side of the White House. After the remodeling, the first family would have the run of the entire second floor of the White House, once the sanctum of the Lincoln war cabinet and where McKinley had so recently wrestled with the devil of imperialism. Roosevelt had never liked the term “Executive Mansion,” and by executive order he changed the official name to “the White House” because, after all, it was first, foremost, and now forever, a residence.
At Sagamore Hill, the president paid Hay the compliment of devouring all ten volumes of the Lincoln biography and took inspiration from the writing and, above all, from the character of the sixteenth president. “In reading the great work of you and Nicolay this summer,” Roosevelt told Hay, “I have not only taken the keenest enjoyment but I really believe I have profited. At any rate, it has made me of set purpose to try to be good-natured and forbearing and to try to free myself from vindictiveness.”
In late August, Roosevelt paid Hay the further honor of visiting him in New Hampshire during a speaking tour through New England. “The whole country side is plumb crazy over the President’s visit,” Hay reported to Alvey Adee the day before Roosevelt’s arrival. “I thought it a peaceful and unpeopled wilderness and lo! it is a howling mob.”
Roosevelt stopped at the Fells only one night and pronounced his stay delightful, though his sleep was disturbed by the family dogs barking at the Secret Servicemen standing vigil on the veranda. The president’s sojourn to the north country was made even more enjoyable by a trip to nearby Corbin Park, a twenty thousand–acre private game preserve created by the founder of the Long Island Railroad. In an afternoon, Roosevelt stalked and killed a 150-pound wild boar. (It was a memorable hunting season; on a similar outing in Mississippi two months later, the president would spare the life of a small bear, triggering the Teddy Bear phenomenon.)
From New Hampshire, Roosevelt continued on to Vermont and then to western Massachusetts, where in Pittsfield on September 3, his open carriage was struck by a motorized trolley. The president and his fellow passengers, Massachusetts governor Winthrop Crane, White House secretary George Cortelyou, and Secret Service agent Bill Craig, were flung from the overturned carriage. Craig was crushed to death beneath the trolley’s wheels. Roosevelt, painfully bruised, slightly bloodied, but otherwise unhurt, gathered himself up and furiously charged the trolley operator. It took every bit of the president’s meager fund of self-restraint to keep from striking the motorman.
Hay learned of the accident almost immediately by way of a telegram from Adee. While the messenger waited, he scribbled a hasty reply to be forwarded to Roosevelt: “We are greatly concerned to hear of your accident and thank heaven for your escape from serious injury.” The next day, Adee reassured Hay that the president was back in Oyster Bay and feeling fine. “What a marvelous escape it was!” Adee exhaled with obvious relief. “The President escaped death by just about two inches.”
Hay’s relief was greater than almost anyone’s. “I had a hideous appreciation for a moment yesterday of how I should feel if the President should be taken away,” he wrote Adee. He had served two presidents at the time of their murder, but in neither instance had he been the designated heir to the office. “I could not help asking myself if it is right for me to stay in a place with such possibilities,” he reflected morbidly.
When Henry Adams learned of the close call in Pittsfield, he wrote to Clara with caustic cheer, “John seems to have come within just three feet of being President, which caused me to grin at the ways of men and motors and Teddies.”
ALICE HAY’S WEDDING WAS small and simple, certainly by the regal standards set by Helen and Payne Whitney seven months earlier. Two private Pullman cars, stocked with Apollinaris and champagne, left Boston’s North Station at nine in the morning and arrived at Newbury three hours later; from there the guests were carried by steamer to the dock at the Fells. The New Hampshire hills wore their brightest fall finery. The day had begun cloudy and damp, but “fortunately the sun came out just long enough for our guests from Boston to see us as we ought to be seen,” Clara reported to Adams, who once again had sent his regrets.
Hay apologized to the guests for having to come such a long way for just the day, and to Whitelaw Reid he admitted, “It certainly is a tax on one’s friends to marry two girls in a year.” Yet the Reids did make the trip, as did Cabot and Nannie Lodge, Henry White on leave from London, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and his wife, and several dozen more. The younger friends of the bride and groom stayed over, while the rest of the guests departed after a late lunch.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT COULD NOT have attended the wedding even if his schedule had permitted. A bruise on his left shin from the trolley accident had become dangerously swollen and infected, and doctors feared blood poisoning. On September 23, the president underwent emergency surgery. Before the operation, Roosevelt confided to George Cortelyou and Elihu Root, “If John Hay should be President, he would have nervous prostration within six weeks.” Roosevelt, who took no anesthetic, survived the procedure and spent the next few weeks in a wheelchair or on crutches, more stationary than he had ever been in his life. “I am thankful that at last he seems to be getting well,” Clara wrote Adams. “Everybody who knows the scrofulous nature of the Roosevelt blood has been very anxious as to the outcome of this trouble.”
While work on the White House continued, the president, Mrs. Roosevelt, and the children moved into a town house on Lafayette Square once occupied by James Knox Polk’s secretary of war, William Marcy, a stone’s throw from the Hays’ front door. The Roosevelt parlor became the temporary cabinet room and presidential office. For much of October, the president was desperate to resolve the five-month-old coal strike before winter arrived and therefore had little time for Hay, who, as usual, was back in Washington by the first of the month. Finally, on the fifteenth, miners and owners agreed to arbitration, and an ecstatic Roosevelt was able to hobble across the square to a dinner at the Hays’ in honor of the new British ambassador, Michael Herbert. “Theodore was in fine form,” Hay wrote to Adams in Paris. “He began talking at the oysters, and the chasse-café found him still at it. When he was one of us, we could sit on him—but who, except you, can sit on a Kaiser?”
HAY HAD HIS OWN preoccupation that fall. The Panama treaty had languished in Bogotá while the Colombian civil war wound down. The Liberals had all but surrendered; their last redoubt was Panama, where the fighting had intensified to such a degree that the U.S. Navy had intervened, invoking an 1846 treaty that authorized the United States to protect the transit across the isthmus. Two warships, the Cincinnati and Wisconsin, anchored conspicuously at Colón and Panama City, and armed Marines and sailors were placed on every train
of the American-owned Panama Railroad. The American troops did their best to treat the two sides evenhandedly; yet their presence inevitably benefited the Conservative government more than the Liberal rebels, who, even if they could not prevail in the rest of Colombia, still had hopes of holding on to the isthmus for themselves—and the Panamanians.
Marroquín was not thrilled by the American intervention, but he turned it to his fullest advantage. On September 11, he invited the United States to mediate settlement of the civil war. Roosevelt and Hay willingly accepted, aware that the end of the rebellion would bring welcome stability to the isthmus. Furthermore, Hay recognized that American cooperation would curry favor with Marroquín, who still had shown no inclination to act on the canal treaty forwarded to him by José Concha back in July.
In Washington, Concha chose to view America’s expanded intervention in a different light. Unsettled by the events of the previous spring, in which he had been embarrassed and, in hindsight, somewhat bamboozled in the negotiations over the canal treaty, he denounced America’s latest meddling in Panama as a threat to Colombian sovereignty. To appease him, Hay directed the navy to allow Colombian troops to make use of the Panama Railroad. By the end of October, six thousand government reinforcements were positioned throughout Panama, and by November 19 the war was over. A peace agreement was negotiated aboard the Wisconsin. The American mediators were heartened to hear signatories on both sides avow their sincere desire for an American canal across the isthmus.
All the Great Prizes Page 52
