Roosevelt responded with a tenderness every bit as fraternal: “[A]ll that you say about not having been able to return the wealth of love and active devotion to your brother would be, in his eyes, were he now alive, a matter for good humored and affectionate laughter. You have returned it; all your public acts have been to him, as in a less degree to all your other kinsmen and to all your old friends, a source of keen pride. Think what interest your career has been to him; of the purple threads it continually shot through the woof of his life.”
The remainder of the year was consumed with the usual post-election intriguing over appointments. One post that was no longer a matter of conjecture was secretary of state. Hay had agreed to continue. “There is, perhaps, no reason why I should not stay,” he wrote his old friend George Smalley, “except weariness of body and spirit, and that seems not to be a sufficient reason. But how long is a question for Providence and the doctors to decide.”
He had yet another reason to remain. He learned through Adams that Lizzie Cameron might be coming back. “You, who are always the same, will find a few chill gray relics of the Washington you knew so well,” he wrote her. “But I am talking nonsense. You will see no change. Your radiance will, here as elsewhere, light up your environment.”
THE NEW YEAR, HOWEVER, brought illness and futility. Winning the election had been a bagatelle compared to the opposition Hay and Roosevelt now faced in the Senate, where treaties were too easily doomed by a minority of one third plus one. “A treaty entering the Senate is like a bull going into the arena,” Hay noted in his diary. “[N]o one can tell just how or when the final blow will fall—but one thing is certain: it will never leave the arena alive.”
One by one, everything he sent to the Capitol was mutilated or murdered. The first to fall was the Hay-Bond Treaty, a reciprocity agreement between the United States and Newfoundland that exempted certain Canadian exports from tariff in exchange for American access to Canadian fisheries. Its executioner was Cabot Lodge, who used the familiar weapon of amendment. “It was a grotesque sight,” Hay wrote bitterly, “seeing Lodge [deal] the treaty its death blow by refusing the Newfoundlanders [duty-]free salt codfish—the only thing they cared about.” Lodge’s conduct, Hay griped to Joseph Choate, was “as stupid a piece of bad manners as any country has ever been guilty of.”
A similar fate awaited arbitration treaties that Hay had signed with nine European countries and Mexico over the previous three months. The treaties were innocuous, singling out no party, people, or industry for favor or offense—no more nor less than straightforward instruments of peace, as Hay had promised in his Boston speech. The signatories agreed simply to take their treaty disputes to the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. As a deterrent to diplomatic frivolousness, or perhaps as a stage of anger management, there was also a provision stipulating that any dispute had to be spelled out in an “agreement” in advance.
The Senate—Republicans and Democrats united—didn’t like the idea of being left out of any phase of the game and changed the word “agreement” to “treaty,” thereby creating the absurdity of a treaty requiring a treaty before it could be arbitrated. Such were the principles of the exalted upper house.
Hay and Roosevelt took the rebuke personally. “The President, and in my lesser degree, myself were the subject of a good many venomous speeches,” Hay noted bitterly after the Senate voted to change the wording. “There was a loud clamor that the rights of the Senate were invaded, [and that] the President’s majority was too big—they wanted to teach him that he wasn’t it.” Roosevelt was indignant and refused to send the treaties abroad for ratification. Hay persuaded him that nothing could be gained by “a battle over the corpse,” especially since they had one more treaty pending in the Senate.
This one involved Santo Domingo and a situation similar to the Venezuelan crisis of 1902. After a succession of revolutions, Santo Domingo (today’s Dominican Republic) was in a shambles and direly in debt to several European powers, Germany being the most wolfish. In early 1904, so soon after the Panama revolution and the establishment of the canal zone, many pundits wondered if Roosevelt might next set his sights on Santo Domingo. He assured Hay and the rest of the cabinet that he desired another island possession “about as much as a gorged anaconda wants to swallow a porcupine wrong end to.”
Roosevelt was more specific and less colloquial in his address to Congress in December 1904. “It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare,” he assured his audience. “If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it fears no interference from the United States.” But on the other hand, he warned, “Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may . . . ultimately require intervention.”
Roosevelt once more was warning Germany, indirectly, to keep its distance, but he was also thinking specifically of Santo Domingo. Rather than send in gunboats—again—and in order to prevent any other power from doing the same, he had Hay strike a deal with the Dominican government by which the United States would take control of Dominican customshouses and use 55 percent of all revenues to pay down the debt. In exchange, the United States promised to preserve Dominican integrity.
Later on, the president’s rationale for intervention in the domestic administration of Santo Domingo—or any other country in the Western Hemisphere—would be recognized and respected as the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. But on February 15, 1905, when Hay introduced the Dominican debt plan as a “protocol of an agreement,” the Senate saw only a gross violation of the Constitution, an egregious abuse of executive authority. And in the end it was the Senate’s authority that prevailed. The Santo Domingo treaty was never given the courtesy of a vote.
HAY MIGHT HAVE BEEN more galled if he’d had more strength. By the end of January, there were days when he could barely make it out of bed, much less to the State Department. “One blessed result of the frame of mind of the Senators towards the State Department is that hardly one of them has come to see me for a fortnight,” he joked thinly. “I suppose they mean it as a bitter discipline; if so, I hope it may last for a fortnight longer.”
On January 28, he wrote in his diary: “I had last night much pain, feverishness and a horror of dreams. In one I was going to be hanged.”
Four days later: “The weather still remains gloomy—et moi aussi.”
Yet there were bright spots amid the dreariness. On the diplomatic front, his treaties may have been doomed but three of his friends had at last gained the appointments they longed for. William Rockhill was headed, most deservedly, for China to succeed Edwin Conger. Henry White finally had been promoted from secretary in London to minister in Rome. And for Whitelaw Reid, the wishful thinking and sour grapes were over: Roosevelt had named him the next ambassador to Great Britain. “I cannot help telling you with what long looked for delight I shall countersign your commission,” Hay wrote to Reid, with only the very slightest vestige of stiffness in his tone.
He was able to reward other friends as well. He went to New York in January for the first meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Howells and Twain were absent, regrettably, but Hay and the others present voted membership to Henry Adams and Henry James.
In New York, he just missed seeing Lizzie Cameron, who had recently returned from Paris after three years away. Hay’s letter to her did not indicate her whereabouts; for a moment he believed there was a chance that they might take the same train to Washington. But he had to leave a day early. “So I must live till Tuesday on the hope of seeing you,” he wrote her. “You will shine on us—from all I hear about you—like a beauteous Immortal coming back to earth to find the battered relics of those she used to play with. Every one who sees you sings the sweet and monotonous s
ong, ‘She is lovelier than ever,’ and I feel like getting smoked glasses for Tuesday. Seeing you again seems too good to be true, and too bright to bear.” There is no evidence that she made it to Washington on Tuesday, and no explanation why not. She was never quite as dedicated to Hay as he was to her.
But he did see another dear ex-patriot in Washington. Henry James was back in America, and Hay had lured him to the capital with a promise to introduce him to the president. Roosevelt had always found James’s prose too precious for his liking; Hay, however, was a steadfast admirer. He had just read James’s recent novel, The Ambassadors, which was not actually about ambassadors but a circle of Americans idling abroad. “In its scorn of traditions of all sorts—traditions of style, construction and moral[s],” Hay thought it “wonderful.”
James stayed next door, with Adams, and the dinner hosted by Hay and Clara was a great success. Saint-Gaudens, John La Farge, and most of the other members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters were also invited, although, in noting the occasion in his diary, Hay oddly neglected to mention their presence, or even that of James and Adams. The evening evidently belonged to one man. “The President came to dinner,” Hay recorded. “It was a very pretty party of 28. The women were good to look at and the men good to talk [to]. The President was in great form.” How Theodore Roosevelt got on with Henry James in the Hay salon will never be known. Yet it is safe to say that the Botticelli Madonna, beneath which these American immortals conversed, gleamed warmly in their presence.
ON MARCH 3, THE eve of the inauguration, Hay gave Roosevelt a present similar to the one he had given to William McKinley: a gold ring in which was cast a strand of Lincoln’s hair. “Please wear it tomorrow; you are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln,” Hay wrote. Hay had Lincoln’s and Roosevelt’s monograms engraved on the ring, along with words from Horace: Longes, O utinam, bone dux, ferias/Praestes Hesperiae (“Good Captain, may you grant long periods of peace in Hisperia”).
Roosevelt apparently knew nothing about the McKinley ring (or the ring given to Rutherford Hayes) when he thanked Hay for his thoughtfulness. “Surely no other President, on the eve of his inauguration, has ever received such a gift from such a friend,” he responded. “I am wearing the ring now; I shall think of it and you as I take the oath tomorrow. I wonder if you have any idea what your strength and wisdom and sympathy, what the guidance you have given me and the mere delight of your companionship, have meant to me in these three and a half years.” He signed his letter, “With love and gratitude. Ever yours, Theodore Roosevelt.”
Hay sat bundled in heavy topcoat and scarf against a blustery north wind as Roosevelt took the oath of office and delivered his inaugural address—“short and in excellent temper and manner,” Hay pronounced it. After lunch at the White House, Hay was joined by Clara and Clarence in the grandstand for the three-hour inaugural parade. The inaugural ball, he tallied wearily, “was a success in numbers if nothing else.”
THE CABINET MEETING THE following week was perfunctory. All of the members had submitted their resignations and been promptly reappointed, with the exception of the postmaster general. “I have three Commissions of Secretary of State already and this will be the fourth—all of them countersigned by myself,” Hay observed drolly. He was reminded of Mark Twain’s quip: “I like to introduce myself because then I can get in all the facts.”
Yet he had not been entirely honest with the president. Roosevelt knew that Hay was weak and exhausted, but only Clara and Adams knew just how close he was to complete collapse. Since January, wife and best friend had conspired to pry him from the State Department for an enforced hiatus of rest and treatment in Europe, where the medical expertise and therapeutic baths were esteemed the best in the world. Finally, he felt so awful that he had no choice. Adams booked passage for Hay, Clara, himself, and three servants aboard the Cretic, departing New York on March 18, bound for Genoa, Italy. They expected to return at the end of May.
“I tried to walk this afternoon, but it was tough work,” Hay wrote on the twelfth. “By going very slowly & stopping often I was able to cover about a mile.” His doctor, Surgeon General Presley Rixey, who had been the White House physician since McKinley, suspected “nervous dyspepsia.” When Hay complained of “an increasing pain over the heart,” Rixey expressed puzzlement.
Even then, he was loath to leave. The situation in China seemed to be reaching a critical juncture. In the five-month-long siege of Port Arthur, Russia and Japan had suffered more than one hundred thousand casualties; in taking a single hill, the Japanese had lost more than ten thousand men. At last Port Arthur surrendered on January 2. Hay broke the news to Cassini at a White House reception.
Things were not going well for Russia at home, either. On January 16, Bloody Sunday, Cossack cavalrymen opened fire on two hundred thousand demonstrators in St. Petersburg, killing and wounding hundreds, perhaps thousands, of citizens. A month later, a socialist blew up the mayor of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei, the czar’s uncle. The revered writer and moral oracle, Leo Tolstoy, was exhorting his countrymen to quit the fight in Manchuria.
On January 26, Hay felt too sick to leave his house but pulled himself together sufficiently to receive Minister Takahira, who was eager to spell out possible conditions for peace.
Meanwhile, Cassini, out of pride and doubtless under orders from St. Petersburg, scoffed at the peace rumors when they appeared in American papers. “I do not know who has set them afloat. They are terms a nation might accept who had only two soldiers left and them in flight,” he told Hay with his usual hauteur. “Do not people know we have an army in Manchuria, intact, of 400,000 men and a fine fleet?” He persisted in calling the Japanese successes “éphémères.” As for the internal disorder in Russia, the ambassador blamed them on “a nombre infine of deranged minds.”
Cassini was obliged to change his tone, if not his accent, two weeks later when the Russian army was driven from the Manchurian capital of Mukden. In possibly the greatest collision of soldiers in the history of warfare, a Russian force of two hundred ninety thousand was no match for the relentless Japanese, two hundred thousand strong.
On March 10, the day after Russian general Alexei Kuropatkin ordered a retreat, the U.S. minister to Tokyo, Lloyd Griscom, cabled Hay that the Japanese military desired peace and that the Japanese government wanted Roosevelt to mediate it. The precise terms were not yet on the table, nor would the war be over until Russia’s Baltic fleet, which was due in Chinese waters any day, was crippled or otherwise brought to heel.
Yet the time was ripe. “If the war stops now,” Griscom wrote on March 15, three days before Hay was to depart for Europe, “[the Japanese] will be very little damaged, but within the next few months they see staring them in the face the possibility of acute financial distress and endless suffering. . . . The evident longing for peace is something indescribable, but they are plucky fighters and, like a thorough-bred terrier, they will hold on until they are dead. . . . In a vague sort of way the Japanese undoubtedly look to us for some sort of assistance when the time for negotiating peace comes, although they do not exactly know what form it could take. Possibly they only want that we give the great moral weight of our approval to the peace conditions they would exact.”
The great moral weight was at last too much for Hay. Months before, he had recommended the president as the most capable mediator of peace. And now the job would be Roosevelt’s alone.
On March 17, Hay, Clara, and Adams took the train to New York, accompanied by Clarence and Jim and Alice Wadsworth. They stayed that night in the apartment Helen kept at the Lorraine Hotel. Roosevelt happened to be in New York also, to attend the wedding of his niece Anna Eleanor Roosevelt to distant cousin Franklin, same last name. Hay was watching from his window as the president’s carriage rolled up next door at Delmonico’s, escorted by a troop of cavalry.
The next morning, Hay awoke with chest pain. At the White Star pier, he collapsed climbing the stai
rs to board the Cretic; he would have fallen if he had not been caught by Jim Wadsworth and Clarence, who were on hand to see him off. He had to be carried to his cabin in a wheelchair.
From Washington, Dr. Rixey issued a statement that Hay was merely suffering from “overwork.” Hay put it differently in a letter to his English friend, the historian George Trevelyan, who was his exact age. “I have great doubts whether this tenement of clay which I inhabit will hold together,” he confessed. “Walking with Henry Adams the other day, I expressed my regret that by the time I got out of office, I should have lost the faculty of enjoyment. As you know Adams, you can understand the dry malice with which he replied: ‘Make your mind easy on that score, sonny! You’ve lost it now!’ ”
CHAPTER 21
All the Great Prizes
Hay spent the first week of the voyage in his cabin. Thankfully, the Atlantic was calm and the Cretic “as steady as a church,” he reported in his diary. As they reached the Azores, he was able to make turns about the deck. He chose not to go ashore at Gibraltar or Algiers, conserving his energy for lunch and a carriage ride when they put in for a day at Naples. Nearly seven years—seven all-consuming years—had passed since last he set foot in Europe. No man had been more of the world than John Hay; ironically, his labors had kept him from living in it. Now, by getting away from the State Department and returning to the cosmopolitan comforts of the Continent, he hoped to find the restorative he needed. But on April 1, as they prepared to dock at Genoa, the pain in his chest returned. “We have got to find out what is the matter,” Adams wrote to Lizzie Cameron.
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