All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  DOWN THE STRETCH, WHEN Senator Morgan and his fellow Panama detractors realized that they did not have the votes to defeat the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty outright, they attempted to hobble it with trivial amendments, knowing that a revised treaty would have to go back to Panama for re-ratification, and around and around from there. Hay had been the victim of this ploy one too many times already, and he exhorted Senator Shelby Cullom to do everything he could to block the amendments. “I am only speaking of the matter of opportunity and expediency,” Hay advised respectfully. “We insisted on an immediate ratification of the treaty by the Panama Government, and they acceded to our wishes. If we now, after a very long delay, send the treaty back to them amended, you can at once imagine the state of things that it will find there. The moment of unanimity and enthusiasm, which only comes once in the life of a revolution, will have passed away and given way to the play of politics and factions. They will have a certain advantage which they have not had before in dealing with the matter.”

  Hay then made an admission that heretofore he had been careful to keep out of his public statements and correspondence. “We shall have ratified the treaty with amendments,” he continued to Spooner, “which gives [the Panamanians] another chance to revise their perhaps hasty and enthusiastic action. They will consider themselves as entitled to make amendments as . . . we, and it needs only a glance at the treaty to show what an infinite field of amendments there is from every point of view. The Junta . . . said that, although many of the provisions seemed harsh and hard, yet it was judged for the public good to accept [the treaty] as it was. When they get the amended treaty in their hands again, they will compare it with the treaty we made with Colombia, and see how vastly more advantageous to us this treaty is than that one was” (all italics added).

  Clearly Hay’s sense of fair play nagged at him, but only slightly and not for long. The same day that he wrote Spooner, he offered a stronger rationalization for his actions to the Yale theologian George P. Fisher. He was referring to America’s intervention in the revolution, but the same reasoning applied to the treaty as well. “While I agree that no circumstance can ever justify a Government in doing wrong,” he allowed, “the question as to whether the Government has acted rightly or wrongly can never be justly judged without the circumstances being considered. I am sure that if the President had acted differently when on the 3d of November he was confronted by a critical situation which might have easily have turned to disaster, the attacks which are now made on him would have been tenfold more virulent. . . . It was a time to act and not to theorize, and my judgment at least is clear that he acted rightly.”

  Finally it was time for the Senate to act as well. Chaperoned by Spooner, Cullom, and Lodge, the Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty was put to a vote on February 23, 1904. Conspicuously absent during the final days of debate was Mark Hanna, the Panama route’s greatest champion in Congress. He had been ill for some time and died on February 15, one week before the Senate voted in favor of ratification, 66 to 14.

  On February 25, Hay and Bunau-Varilla signed and exchanged treaties. “Two strokes of a pen were sealing forever the Destiny of the Great Thought which had haunted Humanity for four centuries,” Bunau-Varilla observed with customary histrionics. Hay in turn told Bunau-Varilla, rather more matter-of-factly, “It seems to me as if we had together made something great.”

  IN THE MONTHS THAT followed, all parties were paid: $40 million to the Compagnie Nouvelle, of which Bunau-Varilla was a stockholder; $10 million to Panama. Bunau-Varilla resigned as Panamanian minister and returned to France, enjoying his wealth and his laurels, the latter fertilized by an endless stream of self-congratulation. Construction of the canal began in the summer of 1904 and ended ten years later, just as the First World War began.

  Bunau-Varilla would later boast that he had written nearly every word in the final treaty, and Roosevelt would assert that he had virtually dug the canal himself. Unlike John Hay, they were not men who kept their lights under a bushel. Moreover, they were allowed many more years to revise and embellish their stories. Hay had only a bit more than a year left, and he was never one to gloat.

  But while he was not a braggart, he did not mind compliments. Earlier in the year an editorial had run in the New York Evening Sun, which Hay then pasted among the countless other clippings in his scrapbooks. “If wisdom, statesmanship, and good honest service were the factors securing the honor,” the Sun postulated, “John Hay would be the next Republican candidate for president.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Hayism

  Hay had no ambition to be president. He was not even sure he had the strength to remain in office until the election in November, much less until the end of Roosevelt’s term the following March. After spending December of 1903 invalided with bronchitis and afflicted by gout, he tried to resume his routine at the State Department. Yet he tired easily. He was up to receiving the diplomatic corps at a New Year’s breakfast but too weak to attend a cabinet dinner four days later. On January 15, he canceled a meeting with Roosevelt. “I am very miserable,” he apologized, “and have a date with my Doctor.”

  Hay’s tendency toward hypochondria was notorious, but the latest symptoms were real and his overall frailty was indicative of something more chronic than grippe. Since his early years as a wistful poet, he had dwelt on his own mortality, but now, first with the Sargent portrait and then with the Saint-Gaudens commission, he seemed increasingly preoccupied with posterity. In January 1904, he began keeping a diary, something he had not done in forty years. He also prepared a will.

  Henry Adams, who had arrived home at the first of the year, was alarmed by his friend’s condition. “Hay has not been out of his house since December 1,” Adams reported to Lizzie, “and is still too weak to walk round the square. At the same time he is regularly besieged and overrun by diplomats and colleagues. At any other time the Panama business would absorb all our thoughts, but today the Jap-Russian affair dwarfs everything.”

  Throughout January, Hay conducted a round robin of conversations with Japanese minister Kogoro Takahira and Russian ambassador Cassini, as their countries spiraled toward war. Officially, he professed neutrality; privately, he was thoroughly disgusted by Russia’s conduct over Kishinev, its chronic cynicism toward the Open Door, and its cavalier aggression in Manchuria. Japan, by comparison, had been honest in its dealings with America, and Hay and Roosevelt sympathized with Japan’s ambition to turn back Russia in Manchuria before it swallowed up Korea, which Japan desired as both outlet and insulation for its island kingdom. The United States was not going to muster a war against Russia over Manchuria; but Japan, with a little encouragement and provocation, could do America’s job by proxy.

  At this stage, Hay and Roosevelt could only hope for a fair fight and try to keep the conflict from spreading to other parts of China. As it was, the cataclysm would be huge enough. “From dispatches received . . . Russia is clearly determined . . . to crush Japan and to eliminate her from her position of influence in the Far East,” Hay recorded in his new diary. Lloyd Griscom, the American minister in Tokyo, was sure that Japan would be no pushover. “The Japanese nation is now worked up to a high pitch of excitement,” he wrote Hay, “and it is no exaggeration to say that if there is no war it will be a severe disappointment to the Japanese individual of every walk of life. . . . Nothing but the most complete backdown of the Russian Government will satisfy the public feeling.” Japan, Griscom observed, was “pluck personified.”

  Toward the end of January, with the fuse burning in the East, Hay convalesced at the plantation of Oliver Payne, the wealthy uncle of his son-in-law Payne Whitney, in Thomasville, Georgia, accompanied by his daughter Helen and granddaughter Joan. “I feel better already—morally,” he wrote Roosevelt upon his arrival, perhaps making a weak joke about the still-pending and perhaps slightly lopsided Panama treaty. The brief vacation seemed to do the trick. “I have the appetite of an old depraved shark,” he told Adams. By the end of the we
ek, he could walk four or five miles in the piney woods.

  He returned to Washington on the evening of February 7 and went immediately to see the president. The day before, Japan had severed diplomatic relations with Russia, and Roosevelt and Hay fretted that a general feeding frenzy by the other great powers might ensue. Hay worked late into the night on a circular and passed it by the president the following morning. He thought it best not to delineate a firm boundary for containment of the fighting, outside of which all the powers would be expected to honor Chinese neutrality. He knew that anything so specific would lead to squabbling that would doom the larger aim of the agreement: his old saw, the Open Door and Chinese integrity. All he wanted, he told Joseph Choate, was to “secure the smallest possible area of hostilities and the largest area of neutrality compatible with the military necessities.” The circular went out to England, France, and Germany immediately, and to China, Russia, Japan, and the other treaty nations soon thereafter.

  Later in the day, Hay received separate visits from Takahira and Cassini. The latter was predictably arrogant. “He spent most of the time in accusing Japan of lightness and vanity; he seemed little affected by the imminence of war, expecting a speedy victory,” Hay noted in his diary. Takahira was composed at first, expressing satisfaction in the neutrality circular, but then as he left Hay’s office, he broke into tears.

  It was Takahira who saw the future more clearly, and it was Cassini who ought to have wept. That evening, February 8, a few minutes before midnight, Japanese destroyers attacked the Russian Pacific Squadron huddled beneath the shore batteries of Port Arthur, Manchuria. In five minutes, Japanese torpedoes disabled three Russian ships, including the Tsarevich, the pride of the fleet. Before the Russians could clamber to battle stations, the Japanese had disappeared into the darkness of the Bay of Korea. The next morning, adding insult to injury, they struck again, leaving teeth marks in the Russian flagship Petropavlosk and three other warships. The assault accomplished two objectives: first, it pinned back the Russian navy sufficiently to allow Japanese troops to land safely in Korea; second, it sent a resounding message that little Japan was not to be taken lightly. (Thirty-seven years later, Japan needed to look no farther than Port Arthur for a strategy that would cut another great power down to size at Pearl Harbor.)

  The next day, Hay remarked in his diary that the news of Russia’s comeuppance had arrived “like claps of thunder . . . but as people became used to it, every one said [they] had always expected it.” Adams, the inveterate doomsayer, prophesied that Russia would soon be bankrupt, the czar would fall, China would go to pieces, leading to the complete “upset” of Europe and the rest of Asia—“the full maelstrom.” Cassini was more stoic: “He takes the buffet of fortune very gallantly: not too gaily,” Hay noted, “but seems sure of ultimate victory and a stern reckoning for Japan.”

  When Takahira came to Hay’s office to deliver his emperor’s official announcement of a declaration of war, “[H]e could hardly prevent his grim visage from showing some signs of satisfaction,” Hay observed, “but he talked with great dignity and reserve. . . . He also said they did not intend to make any selfish use of their victory, if Providence continued to favor them. He said with his strange smile that there need be no fear of ‘the Yellow Peril.’ ”

  Within a week of sending out his neutrality circular, Hay received responses from all the powers. Not surprisingly, Russia was the last, and the least enthusiastic. Hay interpreted the most recent equivocation much as he had done four years earlier with the first Open Door note: he credited Russia as “responsive to the proposal of this Government” and immediately forwarded the positive news to China and Japan.

  Yet Hay knew that if the Russians ever found a pretext to expand the war in order to seize more territory, they would not hesitate to do so. Cassini, who was in Hay’s office almost daily, was sure that China was in league with Japan. At the height of his paranoia, he tried to convince Hay that the Chinese army was being “organized and drilled with great energy and assiduity” by the Japanese. A month later, after Cassini for the umpteenth time conveyed his government’s “terror of some aggression from the Chinese,” Hay wondered “whether their terror is real, or whether they are simply making up a case against China.”

  As the author of the neutrality circular, Hay strived to set a good example. He had Roosevelt issue an executive order directing government officials to observe strict impartiality in their public utterances. He took it as a compliment when Cassini told him that in St. Petersburg the secretary of state was referred to as “the Unknown Quantity.” Yet for all his efforts at fairness and discretion, he could do little to stifle the favoritism of the president, who admired the fighting spirit of the Japanese and their underdog spunk. Roosevelt had added jujitsu to his White House fitness regimen and enjoyed a rapport with Takahira that Cassini both resented and envied. Japan’s other envoy to Washington, Baron Kentaro Kaneko, had been at Harvard with Roosevelt. In a letter to his son Ted, written days after the attack on Port Arthur, the president made his bias plain, if not entirely public: “For several years Russia has behaved very badly in the Far East, her attitude toward all nations, including us, but especially toward Japan, being grossly overbearing. . . . I thought Japan would probably whip her on the sea, but I could not be certain; and between ourselves—for you must not breathe it to anybody—I was thoroughly well pleased with the Japanese victory, for Japan is playing our game.”

  Nor could Hay muzzle the American press, which, he archly observed, “finds an attractive subject in the Russian misfortunes.” Whenever Cassini read of some slight against the czar or of a public toast to Japan, he stormed into Hay’s office in high dudgeon. Hay’s famous forbearance was not infinite, and finally, after enduring a particularly obnoxious obloquy from the Russian ambassador, he struck back. “I spoke of the daily attacks of the Russian press on the U.S., of the constant ill-will of which we are the object in Russia: and all without cause,” he fumed in his diary. “ ‘You have nothing to complain of at our hands,’ ” he said he told Cassini, who admitted that the administration’s neutrality was above reproach. That being so, Hay asked, “ ‘Why do you quarrel with us who do not control our Press, when we make no complaint of you, who do control yours, when they daily insult us?’ ”

  This question quieted Cassini, Hay noted caustically, and he “went away in quite a calm frame of mind.” In his diary entry next day, Hay remembered one more thing he had told the ambassador before showing him out: “I said to Cassini . . . that the Russian attitude towards us reminded me of a man who should get into a quarrel on the street and then go home and beat his wife.”

  During the months that followed, the world looked on in horror and stupefaction as Russia and Japan fought battles bigger and bloodier than Gettysburg and Antietam combined. Outnumbered but better armed and disciplined, Japan won successive victories on land and sea. By late spring of 1904, a confident Takahira approached Hay about acting as mediator in any peace talks, when and if they should be opportune. Hay applauded Takahira’s desire for peace but told him that he was reluctant to make “overtures which were likely to be rejected”—by Russia, presumably.

  Roosevelt was likewise intrigued by the prospect of playing a part in negotiations to end the war, but he too felt that any sort of involvement by his administration was premature. Yet, he told Hay, “We may be of genuine service, if Japan wins out, in preventing interference to rob her of the fruits of her victory.” Accordingly, Hay suggested to Takahira that Roosevelt might be just the mediator Japan was looking for.

  In the meantime, Hay continued as the guardian of neutrality and as a leaning post for the ministers of the combatants. “Everything seems to have come out exactly right,” he wrote Joseph Choate in London. “The whole world is in line in favor of preserving the neutrality of China, so far as is possible in a state of flagrant war, which must necessarily be fought out, to a great extent, on her own territory. . . . Russia is very cross with us just now,�
�� he added, “but our consciences are clear. We have done nothing but observe a strict neutrality between the two parties. Japan is sensible enough to be content with this, and the exasperation of Russia is the natural result of bad luck which has attended her so far.”

  HAY HAD OTHER ANNOYANCES that spring. His back went out. His gout would not go away. And as Roosevelt prepared to run for election, Hay was called into service in a capacity he did not relish. “In the cabinet meeting today,” he wrote on April 12, “the President set forth at great length the difficulties and dangers of the campaign, as a preliminary to the suggestion that the welfare of the Republican party in this trying hour demanded that I should make some speeches. The motion was seconded by [Treasury Secretary] Shaw and [Navy Secretary] Moody with considerable eloquence. I sat mute—fearing to speak lest I lose my temper.”

  Roosevelt was hardly in danger of defeat. His most likely opponent was Alton B. Parker, chief justice of the New York Court of Appeals, a decent but hardly charismatic or renowned man—not like the previous Democratic nominee, William Jennings Bryan, and even less like the protean Teddy, who, though he had never actually run for president before, conducted himself as if the office was his for as long as he wanted. Roosevelt was confident of victory but nonetheless refused to take the coming contest lightly. “He sees a good many lions in the path,” Hay commented, “but I told him of the far greater beasts . . . in Lincoln’s way, which turned out to be only bob-cats after all.”

  Given Hay’s enormous esteem and his long and venerable history as a Republican, Roosevelt was shrewd to want him in a more visible, and more audible, capacity in the campaign. Yet Hay was hardly in a stumping mood. Speechwriting for him was more taxing than any other writing he did. He labored over each address, approaching it more as poetry than prose. “It was simply tortuous [for him] to contemplate a speech,” his daughter Helen Whitney would recall. The thought of now having to perform as the president’s clarion seemed more like a prank than an honor. “It is intolerable that they should not see how much more advantageous to the administration it is that I should stay at home and do my work than that I should cavort around the country, making lean and jejune orations,” he complained to his diary. But in the end he consented.