On the morning of July 5, twenty-four carriages, escorted by an honor guard of cavalry, followed the hearse from Public Square along Euclid Avenue to Lake View Cemetery. After a simple service at the cemetery’s chapel, a quartet sang “For All the Saints Who from Their Labors Rest,” and Hay was interred beside Del—their graves halfway between the Rockefeller family plot and the massive monument to James Garfield. Services were held the same day at the Church of the Covenant in Washington and at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Helen and Payne Whitney arrived in England in time to attend the latter.
The headline in the next day’s Cleveland Plain Dealer read, “Prince of Peace Was Loved by All,” and judging by the outpouring of condolences and memorials, it was true.
Most said the same things, in different ways. They touched on the Lincoln years and the Lincoln biography and continued to the Open Door, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Panama Canal. They reprinted and recited “Jim Bludso” and “Little Breeches.”
Yet it was not the litany of Hay’s deeds that distinguished him as much as the manner in which he had conducted himself while achieving them. “He was not only the foremost statesman of his time; he was the tenderest, dearest, most attractive man of men, and the finest gentleman books make any mention of,” James Hoyt of Cleveland attested. “With no thought of self-seeking, simply by . . . the charm of his own personality, he rose step by step until at last he came to be recognized for what he was, the greatest prime minister that this republic has ever had.”
One eulogist after another stressed Hay’s thoughtfulness—toward subordinates, complete strangers, his peers, and the world. One of the news clippings that Clara added to Hay’s scrapbook avowed, “Among his many admirable traits, none was more notable than his deep human sympathy, which leaped the boundaries of home and state and nation and went out to the suffering of all lands.”
Above all, they praised his forthrightness. “At first men began to talk about ‘shirt sleeve’ diplomacy, as if frankness were something brutal,” the Independent of New York observed. “Mr. Hay believed that simple straightforward directness is good in international as well as personal affairs.”
And he was credited with an impeccable sense of timing: “If, as the old Greeks said, Opportunity has only a forelock, so that he cannot be seized after he has passed by,” the Independent continued, “John Hay was always alert to catch him at the right moment.”
Some of the most profound appreciations came from Jews, who regarded the Kishinev petition as a turning point in the government’s acknowledgment of anti-Semitism. “[W]e have lost our mightiest friend among the nations; a friend who dared to do in behalf of the Jews that which no man in so high a position has ever dared before,” the Tiphereth Zion Society of Pittsburgh proclaimed in an official resolution. Moses Gries of the Central Conference of American Rabbis said in Cleveland on the day of Hay’s funeral: “As rabbi, and for the moment as representative of Jews of the land, I honor and revere the name of John Hay. He was clean and pure and belonged to the pure and upright among men.”
Hay was not a churchgoer himself; he left that to Clara, a solid Presbyterian. Yet he could quote the Bible with fluency and allowed some of his verse to be turned into hymns. “My faith in Christ is implicit. I am a believer,” he had assured Hiram Haydn, pastor of the Old Stone Church in Cleveland, who presided over the wedding of both of Hay’s daughters and the funerals of first Del and now his father. The Reverend Teunis Hamlin, pastor of the Church of the Covenant in Washington, said much the same thing of the late secretary of state that had once been said of President Lincoln: “It would be difficult to find in the New Testament a trait of character described as Christian that was not exemplified in Mr. Hay.”
More mixed were the expressions of grief from Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams. When the president received word at Oyster Bay that Hay had died, he promptly issued a public statement: “His death, a crushing sorrow to his friends, is to the people of this country a national bereavement, and in addition, it is a serious loss to mankind.” That same day he wrote to Clara: “I dearly loved him; there is no one who . . . can quite fill the place he held. He was not only my wise and patient advisor in affairs of state; he was the most devoted and at the same time the most charming of friends.”
But immediately after returning from Hay’s funeral, Roosevelt began putting distance between himself and his former secretary of state, enriching his own esteem by poaching from Hay’s. “Hay was a really great man,” Roosevelt allowed in a letter to Senator Albert Beveridge, “and the more credit is given him the more I am delighted, while the result of the last election showed how futile it was for the Evening Post, the Sun, and the rest of my enemies to try to draw the distinction between what Hay did and what I did. Whether I originated the work, or whether he did and merely received my backing and approval, is of no consequence to the party, and what is said of it is of no earthly consequence to me.”
Except that it was. “Of course, what I am about to say I can only say to a close friend, for it seems almost ungenerous,” Roosevelt confided to Cabot Lodge in the now notorious (and previously quoted) letter of July 11, 1905. “But for two years [Hay’s] health had been such that he could do very little work of importance. His name, his reputation, his staunch loyalty, all made him a real asset of the administration. But in actual work I had to do the big things myself, and the other things I always feared would be badly done or not done at all.”
Spoken like a son jealous of his father’s shadow.
Had Adams known of Roosevelt’s letters, he would not have been shocked by their self-serving disrespect. He had been deeply disgusted by the American political system since at least the Grant administration and now blamed it—and the treaty process in particular—for the death of his best friend. “The Senate killed Hay,” he wrote bitterly to Lizzie Cameron from Paris. “Our friend Cabot helped to murder him, [as] consciously as possible, precisely as though he put strychnine in his drink.”
Writing to Clara Hay, he was not quite so graphic but equally incensed. Adams was convinced that the cause of Hay’s physical decline was not his heart. Hay had done well at Nauheim, lost ground in Paris and London, then improved during the voyage home. But the prospect of going to Washington weighed on him, Adams averred. “[I]t was not physical fatigue . . . that caused collapse, but merely the renewed strain of nervous worry. His diplomates tired him out, after his Senators had poisoned him.”
Having spilled the cup of bile, Adams let it flow. “I admit that I draw my conclusions largely from myself. Senators poison me, and therefore I avoid them. Diplomates, especially American Ambassadors”—his father had been one of the few good ones—“bore me beyond endurance, and I never go near them. . . . If I had to deal with them, they would kill me, as, in my opinion, they did him.”
After the death of his wife twenty years earlier, Adams had gradually pulled himself together, but he was not sure he could do so again. “As for me it is time to bid good-bye,” he wrote Clara. “I am tired. My last hold on the world is lost with him. I am too old to make new efforts or care for new interests. I can no longer look a month ahead, or be sure of my hand or mind. I have clung on to his activities till now, because they were his, but except as his they have no concern for me, and I have no more strength for them. He and I began life together. We will stop together.”
THERE ARE MANY THINGS Hay was not. He was not so much a striver as he was an inquirer, an insatiable self-improver. He was not a man of the people, like Lincoln, yet if he was guilty of snobbery, he directed it more often toward other snobs than toward the nation’s breadwinners.
He was kind and quite generous—giving not just to candidates but also to charities ranging from mission societies to vocational schools for Negroes—but he was not one hundred percent empathetic to the world. One of the reasons he had interceded on behalf of Jews after the Kishinev massacre was out of concern that such pogroms would increase the flow of unwelcome immigrants to the United S
tates. Similarly, it went without saying that the Open Door swung one way only; he did not ask the Chinese for their permission to send out his celebrated notes to the powers; nor was he inclined to open America’s door to China’s predominant export: its citizens.
It must also be said that on some level—one that will never be fully ascertained—he was not faithful. Then, too, there was one great prize that, as much as he desired it, he never did attain to his satisfaction.
IF ROOSEVELT’S HARSH POSTMORTEM judgment of Hay is valid, why, then, did the president not release him from service on the many occasions that Hay invited him to do so? The answer most often posited is that Roosevelt employed Hay as the venerable, avuncular pilot of the administration’s warship as it parted the waves of the world. Still, Roosevelt’s diminishment of Hay did not alter their actual relationship; it only reframed how Roosevelt wanted that relationship perceived in the pages of his own self-inflated record.
In the twentieth century, moderation and neutrality—not merely diplomatic neutrality but also moral evenhandedness—fell into disuse and disfavor. Hay’s treaties were said to be soft; they lacked teeth. Perhaps so, but they were not shortsighted. Hay was a romantic but not the sort who clung to rosier yesteryears. He had sought a new and better world since his boyhood in Illinois, since the Kansas-Nebraska Act had brought America to a fork in the road that changed everything. Republicans, to Hay, were futurists, in the United States and in the Spain of Castilian Days. He had a notion of what the New World ought to be, but he was never grandiose in his designs; there was no Hay Doctrine per se. Only in hindsight did his footsteps reveal a path and his decisions exceed the sum of their parts.
Did he remake the world, or rather, would the world have been that much different if he had not played his hand so deftly? An isthmian canal would have been built, somewhere. The United States and Great Britain would have bolstered their bond, eventually. But China? China might be a different organism today had it not been for John Hay.
If Hay put any other indelible stamp on the world, perhaps it was that he demonstrated how the United States ought to comport itself. He, not Roosevelt, was the adult in charge when the nation and the State Department attained global maturity. “With Mr. Hay there was not the shade of a shadow of a suspicion of the patriotic gladiator raising his sword to the genius of the Republic with an ‘Ave Columbia Imperatrix! moritorus te salutat,’ ” John St. Loe Strachey eulogized. “All that the world saw was a great gentleman and a great statesman doing his work for the State and for the President with perfect taste, perfect good sense, and perfect good humour.”
William Dean Howells admired Hay’s universality, but he also cherished Hay as the best sort of native son: “John Hay, whatever he knew of the world elsewhere, or however it had interested his mind or amused his fancy, was very helplessly and inalienably American. He was American and he was Western by virtue of that very fineness of spirit, that delicacy of mind, that gentleness of heart, often imagined incompatible with our conditions. There was never in him any peevish revolt from these; he accepted them, as he accepted our heat and cold; they were the terms of our being worth while.
“Something of this is evident in all he wrote,” continued Howells, a westerner himself, who had written the very first biography of Lincoln in 1864 and had been Hay’s first real editor. “In the great history which he contributed to our literature; in the admirable study of foreign life which he left; in the striking, if strikingly unequal, poems of which he always thought so modestly, he avouched his ability to have done what he wished in literature, if only he had wished it enough. He showed in these the potentiality of a great popularity, when he turned from them for the other career which was not more than equally open to him. Yet he chose to do his great service to the public independently of the popular choice, and he, the most innately American of our statesmen, came to represent what was most European in the skill of the diplomacy he practised. We shall all of us love always to think that the frankness, the honesty, the brave humanity which characterized it was the heart of Americanism, [and] in any moment of hesitation concerning this or that fact of it, we could say to ourselves that it must be right because Hay did it.”
To be more like John Hay was good. To have more of him would have been even better.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT SUCCEEDED IN bringing Russia and Japan together for a peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905, ending the Russo-Japanese War. Russia at last was compelled to withdraw from Manchuria; the integrity of China was preserved; and Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as mediator.
Roosevelt replaced Hay with former Secretary of War Elihu Root, who served capably and without extraordinary confrontation or crisis. His relationship with Roosevelt was cordial throughout, and he was not reluctant to speak truth to power. For instance, it was Root, commenting on Roosevelt’s conduct during the Panama revolution, who famously told the president: “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”
After her husband’s death, Clara tried to persuade Henry Adams to write a biography of Hay. Adams resisted but agreed to help her prepare a selection of his letters and diaries. Clara published them in 1908, but in her unwillingness to ruffle feathers, she abbreviated nearly all proper names to first initials, rendering the three-volume collection insipid if not entirely unintelligible to the general public. She kept the house on Lafayette Square but spent little time there, preferring Cleveland, the Fells, and the company of her children and grandchildren. She died in New York at the home of Helen and Payne Whitney in 1914. Both of Helen and Payne’s children made considerable names for themselves: Joan Whitney Payson for her art collection and philanthropy and for founding the New York Mets baseball franchise; John “Jock” Whitney for his polo-playing and playboy lifestyle, for starting the first American venture capital firm, and, finally, for following in his grandfather’s footsteps: in 1957, President Eisenhower named him ambassador to England.
Alice and Jim Wadsworth took up residence in the Lafayette Square house after Wadsworth was elected to the U.S. Senate the year of Clara’s death. The house, along with Adams’s, was razed in 1927, and the Hay-Adams Hotel opened on the site a year later. The family political dynasty continued when Alice and Jim’s daughter, Evelyn, married Stuart Symington, who served in the Senate and then ran against John F. Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. In turn, Evelyn and Stuart Symington’s son, James, served four terms in the House of Representatives.
After Harvard, Clarence Hay became an archeologist and eventually a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He loved the Fells more than did anyone else in the family, and over the years he applied his green thumb to converting rugged pastures into terraced lawns and handsome rock gardens. The house and estate are now preserved as a nature sanctuary and historic site with support from the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The public is welcome.
Henry Adams did not give up the ghost when Hay died, after all. He published a private edition of his autobiographical Education of Henry Adams in 1907, with lengthy appreciations of both Hay and Clarence King. He continued to travel back and forth to Europe, seeing Lizzie Cameron in Paris, until the First World War began. He died in Washington in 1918.
Lizzie Cameron remained in Paris during the war, joining with, among others, Edith Wharton, to care for the refugees who flocked to the city. None of Hay’s letters to Lizzie appeared in Clara’s collection, and she did not allow William Roscoe Thayer to use any of them in The Life and Letters of John Hay (1915). “I am surprised at my forgetfulness when I told you I had letters of Mr. Hay’s which you might care to use,” she excused herself to Thayer. “On looking them over I find that most of them are what would seem to anyone not well acquainted with Mr. Hay, ardent love letters! You, who must have handled many such, will understand that they merely express his hab
it of gallantry, and his love of writing pretty phrases.” After Lizzie read the completed biography, she wrote Adams: “I think Mr. Thayer makes [Hay] more a decided, vigorous character than he really was—to me he seemed timid, un-self-asserting, and almost feminine in the delicacy of his intuitions & in his quickness.” Lizzie’s husband, Donald, died in 1918, five months after Adams, and she never remarried. In her final years she lived in England, where she died in 1944, at the age of eighty-three.
As he was dying in 1901, Clarence King disclosed his true identity to his wife, Ada, and explained that he had left behind a trust fund to take care of her and the children. Over the next thirty years, she received monthly checks from an unknown source. Not until 1933, after Ada filed a legal complaint against the trust, was the identity of the source revealed. First John Hay, then, after his death, Clara, and finally Payne and Helen Whitney had been dutifully sending Ada $50 a month—essentially hush money to protect King’s name.
Hay’s devotion and affection had outlived him. Once a Heart, a Heart forever—the same Heart who, as “J.H.,” had written:
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a-going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.
The subject of the rhyme was a Mississippi river man, Jim Bludso, but the benediction might have applied just as easily to another of Hay’s heroes, Abraham Lincoln. John Hay would never have volunteered any such words about himself; all the same, the virtues they celebrated—loyalty, humility, grace under pressure, unswerving sacrifice—were his own to the very end.
(1) (From left) John George Nicolay, Abraham Lincoln, and John Hay, photographed by Alexander Gardner, November 8, 1863
(2) Hay as New York blade, 1874
All the Great Prizes Page 65
