All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  “The so-called anti-imperialists,” he continued testily, “confound in their daily speeches two absolutely unrelated ideas—the liberty, the civil rights, the self-government which we have given the Filipinos, and the independence which the best of them do not want and know they are unable to maintain. To abandon them now, to cast them adrift at the mercy of accident, would be an act of cowardice and treachery which would gain us the scorn and reproach of civilization.”

  He did a much better job vouching for Roosevelt, but even then he took the risky tack of acknowledging Roosevelt’s principal flaw in order to refute it. “Ask [the Democrats], Has the President been a good citizen, a good soldier, a good man in all personal relations?” Hay urged, commencing a litany of Roosevelt’s virtues. “Is he a man of intelligence, of education? Does he know this country well? Does he know the world outside? Has he studied law, history, and politics? . . . Is he sound and strong in mind, body, and soul? Is he accessible and friendly to all sorts and conditions of men? Has he the courage and the candor, the God-given ability to speak to the people and tell them what he thinks? To all these questions they will answer, Yes.”

  Then Hay asked, and now came the barb at the end of the hook, “What is your objection to him? They”—Roosevelt’s opponents—“will either stand speechless or they will answer with the parrot cry we have heard so often: He is unsafe!”

  For all Hay’s incredulousness that anyone could make such a preposterous charge against Roosevelt, it was in fact something he and Henry Adams had said and thought for years. Roosevelt was a rash cowboy—“pure act,” as Adams said. But rather than harbor this heresy, Hay let it run free. “In a certain sense we shall have to admit this to be true,” he said of Roosevelt’s impulse to brandish a big stick. “To every grade of lawbreaker, high or low; to a man who would rob a till or a ballot box; to the sneak or the bully; to the hypocrite and the humbug, Theodore Roosevelt is more than unsafe; he is positively dangerous!” With that the crowd cheered like Rough Riders, which doubtless some of them were.

  It was a great day to be a Republican, and it had been a bully half-century. Having fired up his listeners, Hay banked the coals with a benediction: “We who are passing off the stage”—meaning not just from the immediate grandstand but from his own platform of public service as well—“bid you, as the children of Israel encamping by the sea were bidden, to Go Forward; we whose hands can no longer hold the flaming torch pass it on to you that its clear light may show the truth to the ages that are to come.”

  When he arrived back in Washington, Hay was deluged with congratulations. Strangers declared him the greatest secretary of state in the country’s history. Another letter writer announced that he had named a newborn son after him. Yet no praise meant more than that of the president. “It is one of the few speeches which can rightly be called noble,” Roosevelt complimented. “I do not feel that it will be merely a good campaign document, though I feel that very strongly too; I feel that it will be one of the speeches dealing with a sufficiently large subject in a sufficiently lofty tone to rank among the few which achieve permanence.”

  Indeed, Hay had reached a higher plane of distinction. Upon his return from Michigan, he learned that the French government wished to confer upon him the Grand Cross of the National Order of the Legion of Honor—in “appreciation not only of your merits as Statesman and Scholar, but still more of the services rendered by you during your term of office in consecrating your efforts to the maintenance of the peace of the world.” He was also named one of the first seven inductees in the newly organized American Academy of Arts and Letters, a class that included Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Augustus Saint-Gaudens. And feeding on his fame, Houghton, Mifflin published a new edition of Castilian Days.

  BY MID-JULY, HE WANTED nothing more than to get away to the Fells. “I have about reached the end of my tether here,” he confessed to Roosevelt on July 14, the day he received notice of the French honor. “I had an attack of vertigo and faintness this morning, which keeled me over for about half an hour.” He left for New Hampshire the next day.

  As usual, the summer was not without its interruptions, but at least one of them was pleasant. At the end of July, Hay made a short trip to Cornish, New Hampshire, where Saint-Gaudens lived and worked. The sculptor had begun Hay’s bust in Washington during the spring but was still not quite done. Hay was enchanted by the artist’s retreat: an old farmhouse and barn converted into a studio with a Pompeian facade and a frieze like the Parthenon’s. He sat for two hours while Saint-Gaudens put the finishing touches on the clay model. Hay was satisfied with the outcome—“a great peril escaped,” he joked to his daughter Helen. From the model, Saint-Gaudens then carved a bust in marble and cast another in bronze—for which Hay paid $10,000.

  He also commissioned a smaller work: Saint-Gaudens carved and cast a medallion of a winged porcupine, bearing the inscription Porcupinus Angelicus, one of Hay’s terms of endearment for Henry Adams. When Adams received the medallion by diplomatic pouch in Paris, he wrote the sculptor with prickly delight: “As this is the only way in which the Secretary will ever fulfill his promise of making me Cardinal and Pope I can see why he thinks to satisfy me by giving me medallic rank through you.”

  HAY RETURNED TO WASHINGTON in early August. Roosevelt wanted the cabinet back for a midsummer session before the campaign took precedence in the fall. For Hay, there were no pending emergencies—nothing, anyway, on the scale of the Panama tempest of the summer before—but he had more than enough to keep him busy. The Ottoman Empire was not showing American missionaries and schools in Turkey the respect the administration felt they deserved. The disagreement had devolved into pettiness. The sultan refused to give an audience to the American minister in Constantinople; Roosevelt wanted to send the European Squadron to the Turkish coast; Hay suggested withdrawing the minister; the squadron was sent anyway; and in the end the sultan’s manners toward the United States improved markedly. Once again, Hay and Roosevelt had worked well as a team, but these foreign fire drills, while winning kudos for the president’s measured but unflinching aggressiveness, were becoming all too common, and each was more tiresome to Hay than its predecessor.

  Hay fretted, too, over the war in China. Showing a willingness to suffer enormous casualties, the Japanese had driven the Russians from one defensive position to another. Much of the surviving Russian fleet was bottled up at Port Arthur. Increasingly, Hay and Roosevelt worried that Russia would pick a fight with China in order to enlarge the theater of war to a scale more to its advantage. Shortly after Hay arrived in Washington, an incident occurred that nearly gave Russia the excuse it was looking for. A damaged Russian destroyer had sought asylum in the harbor of Chefoo, near Port Arthur, when a Japanese destroyer attacked and forced the enemy ship out of neutral Chinese waters.

  Hay did everything he could to keep Chinese neutrality from being shot to pieces, but he got nowhere with his request for Japan to return the Russian vessel. The Japanese insisted that they could not afford to let wounded ships refit in neutral harbors, only to return to battle another day. More Russian ships sought refuge in Shanghai; Japan did not attack them but made no promise not to. In frustration, Hay suggested to Roosevelt: “Might it not be the best solution for China to . . . lie down and say, ‘I can’t keep the peace between you. Fight it out and be —— with you’? Neither side pays any respect to her rules or her wishes—which she is powerless to enforce. If all her ports were allowed to become ‘spheres of hostility’ the Russians would stop running there for shelter, and the Japs would have no motive to intrude.”

  Roosevelt agreed that there was little more that the United States could do and that the navy must not interfere in the event of any further conflict in what, for the time being, were still neutral Chinese ports.

  At the end of August, Alvey Adee forwarded to Hay a distressing dispatch from Edwin Conger in Peking: “Russian Minister informed me unofficially that Japanese course warrants extension of host
ile zone anywhere in China, and that Russia will no longer consider Chinese Government neutral.” The integrity of China, which Hay had toiled so steadfastly to preserve, appeared on the brink of being sundered.

  But Hay’s worst fears did not materialize. The war was going so badly for Russia and its navy was so diminished that it dared not expose itself as it had done at Chefoo and Shanghai. On September 1, Hay was able to write Joseph Choate, “The bark of both combatants has proved worse than the bite.” Neither side renewed its pledge to honor Chinese neutrality, but thereafter neither made any significant demonstrations against it.

  Still the fighting raged on in Manchuria. “War grows more and more frightful to me as I grow older,” Hay told Choate. “I am more grieved at the slaughter at the Liaoyang”—where nearly ten thousand died and more than thirty thousand were wounded—“than I was at that of Gettysburg, though a lot of my friends fell there.”

  TWO WEEKS IN WASHINGTON exhausted him. “I feel good for nothing and tired to death,” he told his brother-in-law, Samuel Mather. With Clara in New Hampshire and Adams in Europe, Lafayette Square felt empty. In the afternoons, he took carriage rides by himself, and in the evenings, he read his way through the collected works of Molière. And as he was wont to do when he was alone for more than a few days, he wrote to Lizzie Cameron. He had learned that her brother had died and took the opportunity to renew his affection, although he now girded his heart in the politesse of the first person plural. “What can I say, except that we love you and are sorry for you,” he condoled her, extending sympathy by sharing his own suffering. “One of the insoluble mysteries of life is that we should mind about death. As it must come to all why should we fear it and why should the loss of one of our household darken the earth for us forever? Three years ago the death of our boy made my wife and me old, at once and for the rest of our lives. There is no mitigation of grief—it grows worse with the slow exasperation of years.”

  Looking from his library window, he could see Lizzie’s town house, which neither she nor her wearisome husband had occupied since the beginning of the McKinley administration. “When are you coming home?” he asked wistfully. “Your place here has never been filled and can never be but by you. And yet, is there anything to tempt you?”

  ON AUGUST 17, TWO days before returning to the Fells, his mood was elevated immensely by a telegram announcing the birth of John Hay Whitney, Helen and Payne’s second child.

  He spent the rest of that month and all of September in the bosom of his family. Clarence was home from Harvard for the summer. At the first of the month, Alice and Jim Wadsworth paid a visit and then went off to see the world’s fair at St. Louis, leaving Evelyn in the care of her grandparents (and nurse). Hay confessed to his old Scottish friend, John Clark, that he and Clara had been reduced to a state of “idiotic adoration.” Three weeks later, Helen arrived with one-and-a-half-year-old Joan and the new baby, who would soon be nicknamed “Jock.” And for the first time, Hay’s younger brother, Charles, who lived in Springfield, came to the Fells.

  The autumn was as lovely as any that Hay could remember. “I have never seen such splendor in the woods as today,” he wrote in his diary on October 1. “Around the house the maples are blazing in every shade of color from scarlet and orange to pale yellow and delicate pink, while the beeches, birches, ashes, and poplars add their varying shades to the chorus and the evergreens form the grave background of the marvelous picture.”

  The season ended too soon. Charles fell ill, and Hay, who had nursed his brother back to health in South Carolina during the Civil War, rushed him now to a hospital in Boston. A week later, Hay went to Boston as well, to help the campaign by speaking at the International Congress of Peace at Park Street Church, a forum better suited to him than to the president.

  He stressed peace through preparedness, a policy promoted by McKinley and especially by Roosevelt. “It is true that . . . we have had a hundred days of war [Spanish-American]—but they put an end forever to bloodshed which had lasted a generation,” he recited. “We landed a few platoons of marines on the Isthmus last year; but that act closed without a shot a sanguinary succession of trivial wars. We marched a little army at Peking; but it was to save not only the beleaguered legations, but a great imperiled civilization. By mingled gentleness and energy . . . we have given to the Philippines, if not peace, at least a nearer approach to it than they have had within the memory of man.”

  In conclusion, he called for peace through arbitration, an area in which the administration had a somewhat better reputation. In the next Roosevelt term, Hay promised an array of arbitration treaties “with such of the European powers as desire them.”

  The speech was effective, taking the Roosevelt doctrine to a constituency that otherwise might have drawn different conclusions from recent events. “The great hall was crowded to the roof,” Hay noted in his diary. “I was astonished to see how heartily they applauded my report.”

  HIS TRAIN WAS LATE getting to Washington the next morning and he went directly from the station to the White House. Right off, Roosevelt asked Hay to stay on as secretary of state for another four years. “I did not give him any direct answer,” Hay wrote in his diary. He did, however, consent to make one more speech—this one at Carnegie Hall in New York—before election day.

  As November neared, Roosevelt’s victory was all but assured. Alton Parker and his running mate, eighty-year-old former West Virginia senator Henry G. Davis, had made only the slightest dent in the Republican dreadnought. Their operatives endeavored futilely to prove that Roosevelt was in the pocket of the trusts. To get at Hay, someone in New York put out a pamphlet excerpting his more anti-Catholic comments in Castilian Days.

  Hay had only one moment of anxiety. On Sunday morning, October 23, Roosevelt dropped by Lafayette Square for their customary talk after church. Hay was taken aback to see the president “badly bunged about the head and face”; his horse had stumbled crossing a bridge and thrown him. When Roosevelt made light of his latest brush with death, Hay changed the subject and brought up the secret pledge Lincoln had made in August 1864, in which he promised to support McClellan in the event that he lost the election. Roosevelt welcomed the history lesson, Hay noted, “and went on, as he often does, to compare Lincoln’s great trials with what he calls his little ones.”

  Not until later did Hay reflect on how near he had come to “a four month troubled term” as president. “Strange that twice I have come so hideously near it—once at Lenox [Pittsfield, actually] and now with a hole-in-a-bridge. The President will of course outlive me, but he will not live to be old.”

  SIX THOUSAND REPUBLICANS PACKED Carnegie Hall on the evening of October 23. Twice that many were turned away. Hay arrived hoarse from a cold, but once under way, he gained his voice and his nerve. He raised many of the same issues he had covered in Michigan; but with the election less than two weeks away and with Roosevelt so far in front, the moment to engage the national debate had passed. His goal this time was far more straightforward and his rhetoric less decorous. “If you vote the Republican ticket,” he declared, “you know what you are doing. The Republican record and the Republican professions are at one. They avow what they have done. They make no apologies, no excuses, for it. They say that under similar circumstances they will do the same again.”

  On the other hand, to vote for the Democrats was to reap the whirlwind: “[N]o wizard son of a seventh son can tell what their policy is, what they would do with the Government if they were given it. Their platform is a set of turbid and evasive phrases. The utterances of their public men are shifty and self-contradictory. They talk of a policy of adventure! I have yet to hear of an adventure so reckless and wild as intrusting the fortunes of the Republic to an aggregation like the Democratic party of today.”

  The partisan crowd loved Hay the ward-warrior, expressing their approbation throughout the hour-long speech. One newspaper reported “outbursts” of applause. In his diary Hay preferred, more modestly, to de
scribe the frequent interruptions as “sighs of adhesion.”

  NOVEMBER 8, 1904, WAS anticlimactic. Hay spent the day in his office. “No Sunday is ever so quiet as Election Day at the Department,” he remarked. “It was a blessed chance to work and I pretty well cleared off my table.” Shortly after nine o’clock, he went over to the White House and found the president standing amid a crowd in the Red Room, his hands full of telegrams. One of them was from Judge Parker, congratulating him on his victory. Roosevelt had won thirty-three of forty-five states, more than twice as many electoral votes as his opponent, and more popular votes than any previous president.

  The next morning, an exuberant Roosevelt sent for Hay and showered him with appreciation. “Hayism,” the president asserted, had made a difference in the campaign, and he once again beseeched Hay to stay on, stressing that his presence as confidant and foreign minister meant a great deal to his “personal comfort.” Before Hay could answer, they were interrupted by a secretary, delivering more letters of congratulation. Two days later, Roosevelt let slip to the newspapers, “Hay Will Stay Four More Years.”

  Hay felt trapped. “He did it in a moment of emotion,” he said of Roosevelt’s announcement, “for he has never discussed the matter seriously with me and I have never said I would stay. I have always deprecated the idea, saying there was not four years work in me. Now I will have to go along a while longer, as it would be a scandal to contradict him.”

  MORTALITY DREW CLOSER STILL. The following day his older brother, Leonard, died in Warsaw. A blizzard had struck Washington, and neither Hay nor his other brother, Charles, who was still in Boston recovering from surgery, could make it to the funeral in time.

  Hay shared his grief in a letter to Roosevelt. “I owe him everything. . . . He was always my standard,” he said of Leonard, who had made a career of the army. “He was not so quick at his books as I was, but far more sure. He taught me my Latin and Greek. . . . He fought my battles. . . . Once I dreamed we were Christians thrown to the beasts in the Coliseum. He stepped between me and a lion and whipped the great cat with his fists. . . . He was the chief of my tribe, in birth as well as in mind and character. . . . Now he has left us, and I never had a chance to get even with him for all he did for me when we were boys. My uncertain health, the weather, and other futilities have kept me away from his funeral. I feel remorselessly unworthy of him.”