Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  As the speeches began, Blaise sat next to Thorne. During the night Thorne had spent some time with Dawes, who was now the President’s eyes and ears at the convention. “Something’s happened between McKinley and Hanna.” Thorne was mystified. But Blaise, who knew nothing of politics but a good deal about human vanity, had the answer. “He’s tired of those cartoons of ours, showing him being led around by Boss Hanna.”

  But Thorne suspected all sorts of dark intrigue. Meanwhile, the New York State delegation was trying to make up its mind whom to endorse. For some mysterious reason, Theodore Roosevelt was not even considered; then, on the second day of the convention, word swept the hall that the New York delegation had selected as a favorite-son non-candidate Lieutenant Governor Timothy L. Woodruff, one of Platt’s less gorgeous inventions. Simultaneously came the news that Roosevelt had defied Platt. “This makes no sense,” said Blaise to Thorne, as each tried to cool himself with a palmetto fan in the airless hall.

  But for once the political reporter could instruct the man of the world. “Teddy’s pulled it off, and so has Platt. Teddy can’t ever appear to be Platt’s candidate, so they cooked this up to make the West and the South and the country think that Roosevelt’s fallen out with the boss of his own state.”

  “This is all Platt’s doing?”

  Thorne nodded; and smiled. “It’s smooth work, Mr. Sanford. Seamless, you might say.”

  By afternoon, the West and Wisconsin had come out for Roosevelt. Then the permanent committee chairman, Senator Lodge, was escorted to the platform by his old friend the Rough Rider himself. As Roosevelt and Lodge appeared on stage, the convention hall exploded with sound. “It’s all over!” Thorne shouted into Blaise’s ear.

  Roosevelt stood to one side of the lectern where Lodge had been installed. Roosevelt appeared to be genuinely surprised by the ovation. First, he looked at Lodge; then he gestured for Lodge to take a bow; but the elegant Lodge merely smiled a small smile, and folded his arms, and bowed to Roosevelt.

  At that moment the band struck up “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Roosevelt removed his hat and waved it like a plume. Under the Ohio banner, Senator Hanna fell back in his chair, and shut his eyes.

  On Thursday, the matter was settled. Blaise had talked to Dawes, whom he found to be intelligent as well as charming, a rare combination in a professional courtier. “It’s no secret the President started out not wanting Roosevelt. Now he thinks it’s all for the best.”

  From the press section, the convention floor was, suddenly, colorful as plumes of red, white and blue pampas grass were waved, worn, held. The Kansas delegation, wearing yellow silk sunflowers, demonstrated for Roosevelt. Then Lodge banged his gavel for order; and introduced Senator Foraker of Ohio, who proceeded with due pomp and collegial zeal to renominate for president William McKinley. A demonstration resulted. The band played “Rally ’Round the Flag” in memory of the Civil War, of the origins of the party itself and of Major McKinley. Afterward, there was silence, as Lodge took his place at the lectern, and the elegant voice sounded throughout the hall, “To second the nomination of President McKinley, the Governor of New York …”

  With that, the hall was in eruption. Even Blaise found himself excited. Whoever had stage-managed Roosevelt was a master. Again the band played “There’ll be a Hot Time,” by now the anthem of the Spanish-American War. Rough Rider hat held high, the stout small near-sighted man raced down the corridor from his post beneath New York State’s banner and up the steps to the stage. Again, the ovation was fortissimo, and Roosevelt seemed to grow ever larger as the cheering filled him up, as hot air does a balloon. The teeth shone (the pain must somehow have been killed); the hat was held above his head like victor’s laurel.

  Lodge, much moved, shook his hand and led him to the lectern. Roosevelt’s shrill voice resounded throughout the hall. He said nothing memorable; but he himself was memorable as … Blaise could not think what. Taken detail by detail, he was as absurd a creature as Blaise had ever met, but taken as the whole that was now being presented to the nation, he seemed all high-minded probity, fuelled by the purest energy; he was, literally, phenomenal. As Roosevelt seconded the nomination of McKinley, he himself seized the crown. At last he was at the center of the republic’s stage, and he would never again leave it, Blaise thought, suddenly conscious of history’s peculiar inexorableness. The speech was mercifully short. History does not enjoy too close an examination of its processes.

  The roll-call of the states began. But there were so many cries to make unanimous the renomination of McKinley that Lodge, in a general storm of confused parliamentarianism, did precisely that, and Iowa jumped the gun and nominated Roosevelt for vice-president. There was more confusion. Finally, Lodge declared that Governor Roosevelt was indeed the unanimous choice of the convention for vice-presidential candidate, having received every vote save one. The Governor, in a paroxysm of modesty, had declined to cast a vote for himself. At that glorious moment, a huge stuffed elephant appeared in the hall, attended by waving red, white and blue pampas grass. History had been made.

  As Blaise entered the Walton Hotel, Senator Platt was leaving, surrounded by members of the press. The Easy Boss was more than ever easy; and the ashen color of the weekend had been replaced by his normal pallor; but he moved stiffly, carefully, as though afraid he might break. “Are you pleased at Governor Roosevelt’s nomination?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes,” murmured Platt.

  “But, Senator, weren’t you for Woodruff?”

  “We are all of us for the Republican Party,” said Platt gently. “And the full dinner pail.”

  “The full what?”

  “Dinner pail,” another reporter answered.

  This must be, Blaise thought, a campaign phrase, to emphasize the new prosperity in the land, thanks to McKinley’s policy of expansion and, of course, high tariffs.

  “Any other thoughts, Senator?”

  “Naturally, I am glad,” said Platt, now at the door, “that we had our way.”

  “What?” asked a journalist, affecting surprise. “I mean, who’s ‘we’?”

  Platt covered himself smoothly. “The people have had their way.” The Senator disappeared through the door.

  Blaise found Thorne in the bar, not yet crowded with delegates. The convention was still in session. The two men sat at a small round marble-topped table, more suitable for an ice-cream parlor than a serious hotel bar-room. Blaise joined Thorne in whiskey, not his favorite drink. “I’ve already filed,” said Thorne, contentedly. “In fact, I filed this morning before the convention. The whole story.”

  “You knew what would happen?”

  Thorne nodded. “Easy to see it all coming. Now I’ve sent on the details. The Examiner’s going to have everything first. In the West, that is.”

  “I just telephoned Mr. Brisbane. Then he makes it all up.”

  “Same thing. Now Bryan will be renominated in July, and we’ll have the election of ’96 all over again. I can write that one in my sleep. Sixteen to one silver versus solid money …”

  “What about imperialism?”

  “The party of Lincoln,” said Thorne quickly, “has freed from the yoke of Spanish bondage ten million Filipinos.”

  – 3 –

  JOHAN HAY sat with the President in the Cabinet room. Dawes had finished his report of the convention. McKinley was seated at his usual odd angle to the end of the Cabinet table, left elbow resting on the table, his legs, as always, off to the right and never under the table. He even wrote with his weight on his left elbow, his right arm crossing the considerable waistcoated paunch. He seemed to regard the entire seating arrangement as being, in some way, temporary. Hay occupied his usual Cabinet chair. Dawes sat across from them. Overhead, an electrical fan slowly stirred the humid air. To Dawes’s left the large globe of the world needed dusting. In fact, thought Hay glumly, the entire White House needed a thorough cleaning. It was curious how quickly in the absence of an energetic presiden
tial wife the place took on the appearance of a politician’s somewhat sleazy clubhouse.

  “I suppose, all in all,” said McKinley at last, “it was the hat that did it.”

  Hay laughed inadvertently. The President could be mildly droll, but seldom humorous. “The acceptance hat, it was called.” Hay quoted a newspaper story.

  “What’s the proper name for those Rough Rider hats?” McKinley seemed genuinely curious.

  “I think they’re called sombreros,” said Dawes. “Teddy never took it off, the whole time. Except to wave it, of course.”

  “A curious creature,” said McKinley, stretching his legs so that the great paunch, as large and round as the globe of the world itself, rested comfortably on his huge thighs. “I suppose we can live with him. Of course, we’re going to hear a lot about the bosses from Bryan.” McKinley frowned; removed his eyeglasses; rubbed his eyes.

  “Mark Hanna’s taken the whole thing very well,” said Dawes, picking up rather too rapidly, thought Hay, on the President’s reference to Platt and Quay.

  “He’s poorly, I think. He’s a bad color. I worry about him. What did he say?” McKinley looked over his left shoulder at Dawes, who was nicely reflected in the glass of a mahogany credenza, containing documents that no one, as far as Hay could tell, had ever examined.

  Dawes chuckled. “He said he was going along with the party, as always. But with Roosevelt as vice-president, it was your constitutional duty to survive the next four years, to save us from the wild man.”

  McKinley smiled. “Well, that’s the constitutional minimum, I suppose. Who was the last vice-president to be elected president when the president’s term was up?”

  “Martin Van Buren,” said Hay. “More than sixty years ago. Poor Teddy’s on the shelf, I’m afraid.”

  Dawes laughed. “You know what Platt said when they asked him if he was coming to the inauguration? He said, ‘Yes. I feel it my duty to be present when Teddy takes the veil.’ ”

  Hay’s own feeling toward Roosevelt, never entirely sympathetic, was now more hostile than not. In March, Lodge had risen in the Senate to denounce the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, using language similar to Roosevelt’s but adding the insufferable thesis that the treaty-making power was, essentially, the Senate’s preserve. Hay had then written out his resignation, and given it to the President at the end of the Cabinet meeting. McKinley had responded with charm and firmness. Hay was to remain until the end. They would fight side by side for virtue. Hay remained, as he knew all along that he would. Without good health, without office, there would be, simply, no life left. Also, he had enjoyed a considerable success with his marvellously imaginative approach to collapsing China. Hay had serenely announced, as the world’s policy, an “open door” approach to China. He had informed the relevant predatory nations that this was the only sensible course for them to pursue, and though the Russians and the Germans had been privately outraged, they were obliged to subscribe, if only by silence, to the cause of international virtue and restraint. Overnight, Hay had become a much applauded world statesman. Even Henry Adams praised his friend’s guile. The formula is meaningless, of course, the Porcupine had noted, but no less powerful for its lack of content. Hay regarded the “open door” as buying time until the United States was in a stronger position to exert its will on the Asian mainland. For the American press, the popular author of “Jim Bludso” had acted in a straightforward, decent, American way; he would, one editorial maintained, “Hole her nozzle agin the bank, ’til the last galoot’s ashore.” McKinley had read this editorial to the Cabinet, sonorously quoting “Jim Bludso.” Hay had felt his usual hatred for the poem that had made him famous.

  Dawes asked for news of the disturbances in China. McKinley sighed; and turned to Hay, who said, “ ‘The righteous, harmonious fists’—better known as the Boxers—are pounding away. We’ve had no word out of Peking. Most of the foreign diplomats are in the grounds of the British legation.”

  “Are they dead?” asked Dawes.

  “I assume not.” It was Hay’s view that the Chinese zealots who had risen up to drive the foreigners out of China would be the first to tell the world if they had, indeed, been able to kill the various ambassadors who had taken refuge in Peking’s Tartar City. After all, that was the object of their desperate enterprise.

  “This is very delicate.” McKinley pushed his chair farther away from the table so that now his back was to Dawes, the papal left profile to Hay, the eyes on the lighting fixtures, a new tangle of wires from the ceiling now able to incapacitate several Laocoöns and their sons. “Bryan will talk imperialism for the rest of the year, as he’s been talking all along …”

  “Anything to get away from silver.” Dawes was the Administration’s authority on Bryan.

  “Whatever.” McKinley had no personal interest in any of his opponents, which made him unlike any other politician that Hay had known. Even Lincoln enjoyed analyzing McClellan’s character. But McKinley was papal. He was, to himself, so securely right and in the place where he ought to be that he seemed hardly to notice those who tried to unseat him. In any case, he allowed the devoted, the impassioned, the—why not the word?—besotted Mark Hanna to lay about him, bloodily, in order to secure the McKinley throne.

  “I think we are—home free on the Philippines issue.” McKinley gazed, without visible pleasure, at the tangle of electrical cords. “I speak only for the purposes of the election,” he added. He looked at Hay. The dark circles beneath the large eyes gave him the look of an owl in daytime, deceptively brilliant of eye, intensely staring, blind. “Judge Taft is a popular choice, I think.”

  McKinley had gone to the Federal bench and appointed a circuit judge from Cincinnati—always Ohio, thought Hay, himself a beneficiary of that state’s political mastery of the union. Although Judge William Howard Taft had not been, as Taft himself had somewhat nervously put it, an imperialist, McKinley had persuaded him to take charge of the commission whose task would be to restore a degree of civilian rule to the archipelago, where the fighting continued to be fierce and Aguinaldo continued to assert his legitimacy as the first president of the Philippine republic, now supported, he had recently maintained from his jungle retreat, by the Democratic Party and its anti-imperialist leader Bryan. Bryan’s Marble Chamber work for the treaty in February of 1899 was apparently unknown to Aguinaldo.

  “How do we keep from the press Judge Taft’s problems with General MacArthur?” Dawes was not supposed to know of Judge Taft’s reception in Manila on June 3 when the General—filled with proconsular self-satisfaction—refused to greet in person the commission. But the next day he had deigned to tell the commission that he regarded their existence as a reflection upon his regime and that, further, he disapproved of bringing any sort of civilian rule to the islands while a war was being fought.

  Hay had been in favor of the immediate removal of MacArthur, an unsatisfactory if not entirely unsuccessful military commander. McKinley had murmured a few words, half to himself, in which the only word that Hay had heard clearly was “election,” while Root had said that he would be more than happy to explain to his insolent subordinate the meaning of civilian rule. Hay was reminded of Lincoln’s complaints about generals in the field who spoke with the authority of Caesar while performing with the incompetence of Crassus.

  “We shall have to do something in China.” The Major looked more than ever like a Buddha.

  “Surely, an ‘open door’ is more than enough.”

  “Unfortunately, the Boxers have shut the door. We must open it again, Colonel Hay, or seem to. First, the Boxers.” The Buddha smiled, for no reason other than delight in the perfection of his enlightenment. “Then the Boers—”

  “Yes, the Boers,” said Dawes, frowning. He was directly involved in the reelection of the candidate. China was far away; and the Boxers were exciting but exotic. As long as they did not kill any Americans, they would not affect the election one way or another. Even their evil genius, the sinister Dowager Empre
ss, had her admirers in the popular press. But the Boers were a matter of immediate concern. German and Irish voters hated England. For them, the Boers were honest Dutch folk, fighting a war of independence against England. Therefore, all right-thinking Americans must be against England, except the intelligent ones, like Hay himself, who saw the Boers as primitive Christian fundamentalists at war with civilization in all its forms.

  McKinley inclined to Hay’s view. But he needed the votes of the Irish and the Germans. Meanwhile, earlier in the spring, a delegation of Boers had appeared in Washington. Hay had received them with all the charm that he could simulate. Del had written him alarming reports from Pretoria. Apparently, England could lose the war. Hay’s earlier offer to mediate between the two sides was no longer possible. England would lose any mediation. McKinley had been willing to play the honest broker, but Hay persuaded him that between the Boers and the English, the United States needed England. He reminded the President of England’s support during the war with Spain, when Germany threatened to move against American forces in the Far East.

  “I believe, Mr. Dawes,” Hay looked straight at the little man across the table, “that I must be given full credit for being a dupe of England, while the President is above the battle, working hard for American interests.” The Buddha’s smile was more than ever sublime during this. “As well as German and Irish interests,” Hay added; and the smile did not lessen.

  “We must be wary,” said McKinley. “Did you know that Judge Taft weighs three hundred pounds?” He looked thoughtful. “While, according to the Sun, his fellow commissioners each weigh over two hundred pounds.”

  “Does this create a good impression, Major?” Dawes—small and lean—frowned.

  Absently, McKinley patted his own fawn waistcoated belly. “In Asia, it seems that, inadvertently, I am regarded as a political genius. Fat men are held in the highest esteem, and the Filipinos have never before seen so many truly large white Americans as I have sent them. I am sure that it is now only a matter of weeks before Aguinaldo surrenders to … to …”