All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  The first address was scheduled for May at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. “I can hardly escape it,” he lamented, and, as he finished writing, he rated his work “a poor thing.” The speech was better than that. Hay used the occasion to celebrate the westward flight of the American eagle and to highlight the nation’s great exports of honest dealing and self-restraint. The greatest applause naturally came when he mentioned Roosevelt.

  At St. Louis he was appropriately impressed by the exposition’s extravaganza of palaces and pavilions; he was driven through the grounds in an automobile and attended the third (modern) Olympic Games. But what moved him even more was the Mississippi River in spring flood. In his speech, he invoked “the amphibious life” of his youth. “It was a land of faëry,” he reminisced. “[W]e sang rude songs of the cane-brake and the cornfield; and the happiest days of the year to us who dwelt on the northern bluffs of the river were those that brought us, in the loud puffing and whistling steamers of the olden time, to the Mecca of our rural fancies, the bright and busy metropolis of St. Louis.”

  The olden time was gone, though. He took a half-day excursion on the river and was made melancholy by the change. “There were only a few boats at the wharves,” he noted, “instead of the hundreds that used to be there and the streets near the levee were as desolate as Tadnor in the wilderness.” Jim Bludso and the Prairie Belle were extinct.

  He arrived home on Sunday morning, in time for his customary chat with Roosevelt, who was already looking beyond the election to his new administration. “The President talked a good deal ab[ou]t the next Cabinet,” Hay wrote. “He w[oul]d not listen to me when I told him I must be left out. He wants us all to resign—but he wants to reappoint me.”

  HAY DID NOT PRESS the matter of his retirement, for a new distraction demanded his attention. On May 19, the day he gave his address in St. Louis, the State Department received a telegram from its consul-general in Tangier. “Situation serious,” Samuel Gummeré pleaded. “Request man-of-war to enforce demands.” The reason soon followed: on the evening of the eighth, Ion Perdicaris, a middle-aged bon vivant who for the past twenty years had been living in affluent idleness in Morocco, was kidnapped, along with his stepson, by the Berber chieftain Muali Ahmed er Raisuli, universally described in the English-speaking press as a “brigand.”

  Morocco was the nominal suzerainty of a corrupt and ineffectual sultan. Raisuli was the sultan’s nemesis, and he had paid a dear price for his hostility. His people had been dragooned into military service and cruelly taxed, their villages had been burned, and he had been imprisoned in chains for four years. In retaliation, Raisuli became a sort of Robin Hood of the Rif. His ransom demand for Perdicaris included not just money—although he wanted a great deal of that: $70,000—but also withdrawal of government troops, release of partisan prisoners, removal of the military governor, and control of the districts surrounding Tangier. It was a stiff order, but Raisuli was both devious and cocksure. He had chosen to kidnap Perdicaris not simply because he knew Perdicaris was wealthy, but because he supposed Perdicaris to be a prominent American. By creating an international incident, Raisuli figured to shame the sultan into meeting all of his demands. Indeed, he did not expect the ransom to be paid by Perdicaris’s family or even by the U.S. government. He explicitly demanded that it be extracted from the purse of the local governor. Raisuli was smart enough to know that pressure to comply would be more persuasive if applied by the Americans.

  Purely by chance, as the telegram announcing the kidnapping of Perdicaris reached Washington, three naval squadrons were steaming across the Atlantic en route to the Mediterranean, for training but also as a demonstration of American sea power. Never before had the U.S. Navy concentrated so many ships—thirteen in all—in European waters.

  Hay and Roosevelt did not receive the ransom terms until May 27, and then only by way of a telegram from Joseph Choate in London; Perdicaris’s stepson was a British subject. They agreed that Raisuli’s demands were preposterous. Lacking a better remedy, Hay sent orders to the commander of the navy squadrons, Admiral French Chadwick, to show the flag at Tangier.

  At first Hay seemed not overly alarmed by the Perdicaris incident. Other Americans had been kidnapped and rescued during his tenure without a multilateral imbroglio. This was not another Boxer Rebellion. He was far more preoccupied, for instance, with his conversation with Takahira that same day, in which the Japanese minister informed him of the horrendous casualties suffered by both sides in the recent battle of Nanshan. “I hope they may not murder Mr. Perdicaris,” Hay recorded dismissively in his diary, “but a nation cannot degrade itself to prevent ill-treatment of a citizen.”

  Rather than be drawn into awkward and potentially demeaning negotiations between the kidnappers and the Moroccans, Hay’s inclination was to send a terse telegram to Gummeré, making it plain that the United States would punish Raisuli commensurately for any harm he did to Perdicaris. But before he issued his warning, he heard from Choate that the British were making some headway. So the ultimatum was set aside—for the time being.

  Yet negotiations with Raisuli were not going well; with each hesitation by the sultan, Raisuli increased his demands and advanced the day of Perdicaris’s execution. The arrival of Admiral Chadwick’s South Atlantic Squadron and Admiral Theodore Jewell’s European Squadron at Tangier was hardly a deterrent; rather, their presence made Raisuli that much more determined. “Now the Sultan’s authorities will be compelled to accede to my demands,” Raisuli is said to have told Perdicaris, who by this point, despite the death threats, was being treated more as guest than prisoner in the brigand’s mountain hideout.

  Hay’s distaste for the Moroccan standoff increased on June 1, when he received a letter from A. H. Slocomb, a cotton broker in North Carolina who had met Perdicaris in Athens during the Civil War. “[I]s Perdicaris an American citizen?” Slocomb wanted to know. A good question, it turned out. Perdicaris’s father was Greek by birth but naturalized as an American citizen; Ion Perdicaris was born in New Jersey. Slocomb claimed that Perdicaris had come to Greece during the war in order to renounce his American citizenship as a way to keep the Confederates from confiscating property he had inherited from his mother, who was a South Carolinian.

  Hay shared Slocomb’s query with Roosevelt, and on June 4 he sent a cipher telegram to the American consul in Athens, asking for the facts on Perdicaris. The consul wrote back on June 7 that “one Ionnas Perdicaris” had been made a naturalized Greek citizen on March 19, 1862. Hay did not pass this unsettling intelligence to Gummeré; nor to the British, who now had their own battleship at Tangier; nor to the French Foreign Ministry, whose “good offices” he had also entangled with the diplomatic tar baby of the moment.

  Another week went by. Perdicaris remained alive and decently cared for. Raisuli upped the ante once more, requesting that he be given authority over two more Moroccan districts, that more prisoners be released, and that a number of rival sheiks be put in prison. Hay was ready to throw in the towel. “You see there is no end to the insolence of this blackguard,” he wrote Roosevelt. “We have done what we could for Perdicaris—I do not think we ought to go any further.”

  Roosevelt, too, was through negotiating. “Our position must now be to demand the death of those that harm [Perdicaris] if he is harmed,” the president declared to Hay. He also broached the notion of a joint military action with England and France. The following day, Admiral Chadwick began working up a plan to put ashore two brigades of Marines and sailors to seize the Tangier waterfront and customshouse. Such emphatic action, the admiral reckoned, ought to cure the sultan’s impotence in consummating a deal with Raisuli—which, of course, was what Raisuli had been scheming for all along.

  More than ever, Hay wanted the affair behind him. The Republican Convention had begun in Chicago; the campaign would hit full stride after that, and neither Hay nor the president was eager for another war—not over a brigand on horseback and the dubiously credentiale
d Perdicaris. And so Hay wired Gummeré, repeating a message that he and Roosevelt had drafted at least once already, only this time he put it more bluntly: “We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead.”

  The telegram included two more sentences that would soon be lost in the smoke and hurrahs of the national convention: “We desire least possible complications with Morocco or other Powers,” Hay instructed. “You will not arrange for landing marines or seizing customs house without specific direction from the [State] department.” The first line of the telegram—Perdicaris alive, Raisuli dead—had been directed toward the sultan of Morocco, the second part toward the U.S. Navy. Hay had called off the assault on Tangier.

  As the cable was being transmitted to Gummeré, a correspondent in Washington got wind of it and forwarded it to Chicago, where it was hurried to Joseph Cannon, Speaker of the House of Representatives and holder of the gavel at the convention. Cannon had to bide his time while Henry Cabot Lodge, never the most electrifying of orators, recited the party’s platform to a less than lively hall of party faithful. With Roosevelt a shoo-in, the convention had been short on suspense thus far.

  “Uncle Joe” Cannon recognized red meat when he saw it, and when he regained the podium, he fed his listless congregation with good effect. “We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead!” he read aloud, choosing not to complicate the moment by sharing the more temperate sentences of Hay’s telegram. The Republicans roared like Romans at the Coliseum. “Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum, give me the blood of the Mussulman [Muslim],” the New York World bruited the next morning.

  The party nominated Roosevelt by acclamation. (Their choice for vice president was Indiana senator Charles W. Fairbanks.) Most of the delegates had attributed the dead-or-alive ultimatum to bully Teddy, but at least one newspaper praised Hay for a rare display of pugnacity: “In diplomacy Mr. Hay has heretofore stuck to the suaviter in modo, rather than the fortiter in re. . . . But this Perdicaris outrage seems to have preyed upon his mind until his just wrath could no longer keep within bounds.”

  A bit surprised at his own virulence, Hay wrote in his diary with wry amusement: “My telegram to Gummeré had an uncalled for success. It is curious how a concise impropriety hits the public.”

  Yet his telegram had not been necessary at all. By the time Gummeré received Hay’s instructions, Raisuli had agreed to release Perdicaris and his stepson, in exchange for the asked-for $70,000 and the freedom of his imprisoned tribesmen. Two days later, Raisuli escorted Perdicaris and his stepson down from the mountains to Tangier. Kidnapper and captives parted as friends, and soon the American warships weighed anchor to resume their summer exercises. The nation, Republicans especially, approved of the administration’s tough talk, but Hay exhaled merely a sigh of relief. Several weeks later when it was at last confirmed that Perdicaris had indeed forsaken his American citizenship as a young man, Hay elected to keep the information quiet. He wanted to hear nothing more about “Perigoric,” he told Alvey Adee. “Or is it Pericarditis?”

  ON JULY 6, HAY delivered the speech of a lifetime. Fifty years earlier, to the day, a group of erstwhile Whigs, Free-Soilers, and Democrats, provoked by the recent Kansas-Nebraska Act, which negated the Missouri Compromise and enabled the spread of slavery west of the Mississippi, had gathered beneath a grove of oak trees in Jackson, Michigan, and held the very first convention under the “Republican” banner. Their movement spread from there, at first strictly anti-expansionist and not anti-slavery outright. Two years later, the Republicans nominated their first presidential candidate; in another two years, Abraham Lincoln ran for Senate against Stephen Douglas and lost, setting the stage for 1860, when Lincoln led the Republican Party to the White House and, ultimately, to war. Since then, Grover Cleveland had been the only Democrat to win the presidency.

  Hay was fifteen when the Republican Party was born, and his partisan awakening did not come in full until his arrival in Springfield after college in 1859. Now, in 1904, it was widely accepted that no man alive embodied the half century of Republican tradition, values, and vision more thoroughly and more honorably than the current secretary of state. Hay possessed not only the institutional memory of the party but its conscience as well. There were many who believed John Hay was reason enough to vote for Roosevelt.

  Yet he hardly looked like a campaign weapon. “Astute and punctilious” was how one newspaper described him on the morning of his arrival in Michigan. “He has a pleasant manner, like all great men,” observed another, “and keeps himself well groomed, which cannot be said of all great men. Natty is the term to apply.”

  The day was delightfully fair and cool, Hay recorded in his diary. As he mounted the grandstand, he was daunted by the size of the crowd, ten thousand or more, and feared that not even “hardened old spellbinders” could hold the audience. But he did so, for an hour and a half.

  He began, appropriately enough, by reflecting upon the early years of Republicanism, and the Lincoln in him found voice: “[T]he whole party stood like a rock for the principle that the damnable institution must be content with what it had already got, and must not be allowed to pollute another inch of free soil,” he declared. “On this impregnable ground they made their stand; and the mass convention which assembled here in 1854 . . . gave a nucleus and a name to the new party, destined to a great and beneficent career. Before the month ended, the anti-slavery men of five more states adopted the name”—he was seven pages into his address before he invoked the hallowed word—“ ‘Republican.’ ”

  One listener said Hay wielded the English language like a “musical instrument” and that his diction possessed “singular precision and sibilance.” In recapping the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and articulating the difference between the two rivals, Hay observed with lyrical concision, “[Lincoln] was fighting for freedom and could say so; Douglas was fighting for slavery and could not avow it.”

  And of Lincoln’s legacy, Hay claimed rightful ownership for the assembled: “If there is one thing more than another in which we Republicans are entitled to a legitimate pride, it is that Lincoln was our first President; that we believed in him, loyally supported him while he lived, and that we have never lost the right to call ourselves his followers.”

  Since this was the campaign season, and the party of Lincoln was now also the party of Roosevelt, Hay set about entwining the two. “I hope I am violating neither the confidence of a friend nor the proprieties of an occasion like this,” he ventured with staged etiquette, “when I refer to the ardent and able young statesman who is now, and is to be, our President, to let you know that in times of doubt and difficulty the thought oftenest in his heart is, ‘What, in such a case, would Lincoln do?’ ”

  He took considerable care, too, in telling the other story he knew better than anyone else—that of the foreign policy of the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations. In doing so, he also issued a report card on himself, perhaps not applying the most penetrating candor, but nonetheless offering a directness both coherent and persuasive.

  “A country growing so fast must have elbowroom—must have its share of the sunshine,” he soft-pedaled, making American expansion sound like the most wholesome of impulses. “In the last seven years, without aggression, without undue self-assertion, we have taken the place that belongs to us.”

  Here, thus, was manifest destiny cast in some of that same benign sunshine: “Adhering with religious care to the precepts of Washington and the traditions of a century, and avoiding all entangling alliances, professing friendship to all nations and partiality to none, McKinley and Roosevelt have gone steadily forward protecting and extending American interests everywhere and gaining, by deserving it, the good will of all the world.”

  Yet beneath Hay’s advocacy, there lay a subtext of defensiveness. He was addressing the choir, meanwhile attempting to quell omniscient doubters—Democrats, anti-imperialists, Mugwumps. “We do not covet the territory, nor the control of any other people,” he assured. “We have made, it is true, great acquisiti
ons, but never of set purpose nor from greed of land.” He mentioned Hawaii and Samoa with satisfaction. The Panama treaties, the Open Door, and the integrity and neutrality of China were gems in the crowns of McKinley and Roosevelt, “gained by appeals to reason rather than [by] force, without parade or melodrama.”

  He could just as easily have detoured around the most conspicuous smudge on the escutcheon of the McKinley-Roosevelt era, the Philippines. Instead, he stood guard over it. The spoils of the Spanish-American War had not been his direct responsibility as secretary of state; the United States had no foreign policy toward what were now American possessions—until Cuba achieved independence in 1902. Hay had no hand in the suppression of the insurgency in the Philippines, nor in the establishment of a “civil” administration there. (The latter chore was accomplished by William Howard Taft, whose service to America’s far-flung “little brown brothers”—Taft’s term—had won him promotion to Roosevelt’s cabinet as secretary of war, replacing Elihu Root.) Nevertheless, in the oak grove of Jackson, Michigan, Hay stood up for the Philippines and his president without remorse or alibi.

  “Some well-meaning people—and others not so well-meaning—are constantly persuading [the Filipinos] that they are oppressed,” he told his sympathetic listeners, “and that they will be given their liberty, as they choose to call it, as soon as the Republican party is overthrown in this country. These are the true enemies of the Filipinos, and not the men who are striving with whole-hearted energy and with consummate success to ameliorate their condition and to make them fit for self-government and all its attendant advantages.