Empire: A Novel

by Gore Vidal

  “The ladies—and Elihu Root. Anyway, he had a tumor removed, and I’m sure he’s all right now. What a president he might have made.”

  “Why do you say ‘might have’?”

  “He is a lawyer, too much involved with the wicked corporations and trusts. And then the miners’ strike …” The miners’ strike of 1902 had caused so much panic in the land that Roosevelt had threatened to take over the mines, as receiver; since public opinion was on the side of the miners, the threat was popular. Although public opinion was seldom heeded, Roosevelt feared that demagogues like Bryan and Hearst might try to unleash the mob, and so, to forestall revolution, he sent Root to force the ownership, J. Pierpont Morgan himself, to give the miners a wage increase while keeping them to a nine-hour day in hazardous conditions. Roosevelt took the credit for settling the strike. Root took the blame from both workers and owners for an unsatisfactory settlement; and lost forever the presidency.

  “To what extent does your brother, Brooks, influence Theodore?” When in serious doubt, Hay believed in directness.

  Henry Adams cocked his head, rather like a bald, bearded owl. “You are with His Majesty every day. I am not.”

  “You see Brooks …”

  “… as little as possible. To see him is to hear him.” Adams shuddered. “He is the most bloodthirsty creature I have ever known. He wants a war, anywhere will do, as long as we end up as custodian of northern China. Domestically, ‘We must have a new deal,’ he wrote me, so we shall have to suppress the states in favor of a centralized dictatorship at Washington. Does he write Theodore often?”

  Hay nodded. “But I am not in their confidence. I don’t love war enough. What shall I say in St. Louis about our enormous achievements?”

  Adams smiled, showing no teeth. “You can say that the most marvellous invention of my grandfather, the Monroe Doctrine, originally intended to protect our—note the cool proprietary ‘our’—hemisphere from predatory European powers, has now been extended, quite illegally, by President Roosevelt to include China and, again by extension, any part of the world where we may want to interfere.”

  “This is not the Hay Doctrine,” Hay began.

  “This is not the Monroe Doctrine either. But my grandfather’s masterpiece was already coming apart in 1848 when President Polk dared to tell Congress that our war of conquest against Mexico was justified by the Monroe Doctrine. My grandfather, by then a mere congressman, denounced the President on the floor of the House, and then dropped dead on that same floor. When Theodore recently announced that we have an obligation, somehow, inherently, through the Monroe Doctrine, to punish ‘chronic wrongdoers’ in South America, as well as ‘to the exercise of an international police power,’ I nearly dropped dead over my breakfast egg.”

  Hay himself was not entirely at ease with all the implications of a national policy in which he had, for the most part, cheerfully participated. Nevertheless, he defended, “Surely, we have a moral—yes, I hate the word, too—duty to help less fortunate nations in this hemisphere …”

  “And sunny Hawaii, and poor Samoa, and the tragic Philippines? John, it is empire you all want, and it is empire that you have got, and at such a small price, when you come to think of it.”

  “What price is that?” Hay could tell from the glitter in Adams’s eye that the answer would be highly unpleasant.

  “The American republic. You’ve finally got rid of it. For good. As a conservative Christian anarchist, I never much liked it.” Adams raised high his teacup. “The republic is dead; long live the empire.”

  “Oh, dear.” Hay put down his cup, which chattered at him in its monogrammed saucer. “We have all the forms of a republic. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that everything? Why else am I now hurtling across Ohio, or wherever we are, to make a speech to persuade the folks to vote?”

  “We let them vote so that they will feel wanted. But as we extend, in theory, the democracy, the more it runs out of gas.” In imitation of Clarence King, Adams now liked to use new slang expressions, often accompanied by a faintly raffish tilt to his head, like a Boston Irish laborer.

  “I don’t weep.” Hay had made his choice long ago. A republic—or however one wanted to describe the United States—was best run by responsible men of property. Since most men of property tended, in the first generation at least, to criminality, it was necessary for the high-minded patriotic few to wait a generation or two and then select one of their number, who had the common—or was it royal?—touch and make him president. As deeply tiring as Theodore was on the human level, “drunk with himself,” as Henry liked to put it, he was the best the country had to offer, and they were all in luck. For good or ill, the system excluded from power the Bryans if not the Hearsts. Hay was aware that the rogue publisher was a new Caesarian element upon the scene: the wealthy maker of public opinion who, having made common cause with the masses, might yet overthrow the few.

  Lincoln had spoken warmly and winningly of the common man, but he had been as remote from that simple specimen as one of Henry’s beloved dynamos from an ox-cart. One rode public opinion, Hay had more than once observed. Theodore thought that public opinion could be guided by some splendid popular leader like himself, but, in practice, Roosevelt was mildness itself, never appearing above the parapet of his office when hostile bullets were aimed his way. Hearst was different; he could make people react in ways not predictable; he could invent issues, and then solutions—equally invented but no less popular for that. The contest was now between the high-minded few, led by Roosevelt, and Hearst, the true inventor of the modern world. What Hearst arbitrarily decided was news was news; and the powerful few were obliged to respond to his inventions. Could he, also, a question much discussed amongst the few, make himself so much the news that he might seize one of the high—if not the highest—offices of state? Theodore sneered at the thought—had the American people ever not voted for one of the respectable few? And if nothing else, it was agreed by everyone (except, perhaps, the general indifferent mass of the working class) that Hearst was supremely unrespectable. Even so, Hay had his doubts. He feared Hearst.

  The train clattered to a stop at the depot of a small town called, according to the paint-blistered sign, Heidegg. Clara and Abigail appeared in the doorway to the parlor. “We’re stopping,” Clara announced, in a loud authoritative voice.

  “Actually, my dear, we’ve stopped.” Hay vaulted to his feet, an acrobatic maneuver which involved falling to the right while embracing with his left arm the back of the chair in front of him; gravity, the ultimate enemy, was, for once, put to good use.

  Adams pointed to a small crowd at the back of the train. “We should go amongst the people in whose name we—you and Theodore, that is—govern.”

  “We’ll be here fifteen minutes, Uncle Henry,” said Abigail, and led him to the back of their private car, where a smiling porter helped them onto the good Ohio (or was it now Indiana?) earth. Hay stepped into the cool day, which had been co-existing separately from that of the railroad car, whose atmosphere was entirely different, warmer, redolent of railway smells, as well as of a galley where a Negro chef in a tall white cap performed miracles with terrapin.

  For a moment, the earth itself seemed to be moving beneath Hay’s feet, as if he were still on the train; slightly, he swayed. Clara took his fragile arm in her great one and then the four visitors from the capital of the imperial republic, led by John Hay, the Second Personage in the Land, mingled with the folks.

  The American people, half a hundred farmers with wives, children, dogs, surrounded the Second Personage in the Land, who smiled sweetly upon them; and lapsed into his folksy “Little Breeches” manner which could outdo for sheer comic rusticity Mark Twain himself. “I reckon,” he said, with a modest smile, “that well as I know all the country hereabouts—” He was positive that he was now in Indiana, but one slip … “—I’ve never had the luck to be in Heidegg before. I’m from Warsaw myself. Warsaw, Illinois, as I ’spect you know. Anyway, we’re
on our way now to the big exhibition in St. Louis, and when I saw that sign saying Heidegg, I said, let’s stop and meet the folks. So, hello.” Hay was well pleased with his own casualness and lack of side. He did not dare look at Henry Adams, who always found amusing, in the wrong sense, Hay’s Lincolnian ease with the common man.

  The crowd continued to stare, amicably, at the four foreigners. Then a tall thin farmer came forward, and shook Hay’s hand. “Willkommen,” he began; and addressed the Second Personage in the Land in German.

  Hay then asked, in German, if anyone in Heidegg spoke English. He was told, in German, that the schoolteacher spoke excellent English, but he was home, sick in bed. Hay ignored the strangled cries of Henry Adams, trying not to laugh. Fortunately, Hay’s German was good, and he was able to satisfy the crowd’s curiosity as to his identity. The word had spread that he was someone truly important, the president of the railroad, in fact. When Hay modestly identified himself, the information was received politely; but as no one had ever heard of the—or even a—secretary of state, the crowd broke up, leaving the four visitors alone on a muddy bank where new grass was interspersed with violets. As Abigail collected violets, Adams was in his glory. “The people!” he exclaimed.

  “Oh, do shut, up, Henry!” Hay had seldom been so annoyed with his old friend, or with himself for having handled with unusual clumsiness an occasion fraught with symbolism of a sort that Adams would never cease to remind him.

  As they dined, Adams talked and talked. Clara ate and ate, course after course, marvelling, occasionally, at what remarkable dishes were emerging from the small galley. Abigail stared out the window at a great muddy river, surging through the twilight, from the Great Lakes to New Orleans. “You must—Theodore must—someone must,” Adams declared, “cross the country, like this, by car, and stop—but I really mean stop, and stay, and look and listen. The country’s full of people who are strange to us, and we to them. That river,” Adams pointed dramatically at the river on whose banks were set square frame houses with square windows in which lights now began to gleam; each house was set in its own yard, strewn with scrap iron, scrap paper, cinders, “could be an estuary of the Rhine or the Danube. We are witnessing the last of the great tides of migration. We are in Mitteleuropa, surrounded by Germans, Slavs and—what were the people of Heidegg?”

  “Swiss,” said Hay, deciding that he would take his chances with broiled Potomac shad and its roe.

  “You were born on this river, John, and now it’s stranger to you than the Danube. When Theodore goes on and on about the true American, his grit, his sense of fairness, his institutions, he doesn’t realize that that American is as rare as one of those buffalos he helped to kill off.”

  “We shall,” said Hay, mouth filled with roe, “transform those Germans and Slavs into … buffalos. Ail in due course.”

  “No,” said Adams, revelling as always in darkness, “they will transform us. When I was writing about Aaron Burr …”

  “Whatever became of that book?” asked Clara, addressing herself to what looked like a side of buffalo.

  “I have burned it, of course. Publish in total secrecy, or burn …”

  “In secret, too?” Hay remembered that Clover had said that her husband’s life of Burr was far superior to his published life of John Randolph. Hay had always thought Burr an ideal scamp to write about. But something in Burr’s character or life had made Henry uneasy; he had decided that Burr was not a “safe” scoundrel to deal with, and if he were let out of the history books where he had been entombed alongside Benedict Arnold, he might cheat the world all over again. Hay rather suspected that Adams had not destroyed the book but used parts of it for his study of Jefferson.

  “In his old age, Burr was walking down Fifth Avenue with a group of young lawyers, and one of them asked him how he thought some aspect of the Constitution should be interpreted. Burr stopped in front of a building site, and pointed to some newly arrived Irish laborers, and he said, ‘In due course, they will decide what the Constitution is—and is not.’ He understood, wicked creature, that the immigrants would eventually crowd us out and re-create the republic in their own image.”

  Abigail looked at her uncle, who had, happily, run out of breath, and said, “But the country’s not all Catholic yet. That’s something.”

  “Everyone in the Swiss Indiana village of Heidegg was Catholic …”

  “Lutheran,” said Hay, who was quick to learn essentials whenever votes were involved.

  “Anyway, I incline now to Catholicism, too,” said Adams perversely.

  “Mariolatry.” Hay’s heart fluttered disagreeably. He had a vision of himself addressing twenty thousand people at the fair; and dropping dead.

  “Catholic maids are always pregnant. I can’t think why,” said Clara.

  “Luckily, steam-power, like this train, is going to make all these different races into one. The way the idea of the Virgin—hardly Mariolatry—united the Europeans of the twelfth century.”

  Abigail interrupted her uncle. Hay silently commended her bravery. “Why St. Louis for a world’s fair?”

  Hay, as the Nation’s Second Personage, answered: “It is the fourth-largest city in the country. It is centrally located. The new Union Station is the world’s largest, or so they claim. Finally, the late revered William McKinley, whenever he was in doubt as to what the people of this great nation wanted him to do, would say, ‘I must go to St. Louis.’ The city is our heartland. Now the city fathers, to celebrate the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase—illegal purchase by Mr. Jefferson,” Hay added for Adams’s pleasure, “are holding the largest fair of its kind in the history of the world. There will be,” he added ominously, “innumerable dynamos and other pieces of dull machinery.”

  “Oh, dear,” said Abigail.

  “Oh, joy,” said Adams.

  “Oh, waiter,” said Clara, “more beef.”

  “Everyone,” Hay sighed, “will be there.”

  – 4 –

  MR. AND MRS. John Apgar Sanford occupied a small suite of the Blair-Benton Hotel in Market Street, the main street of St. Louis, not far from the stone-paved Front Street, locally known as the levee, since that is exactly what it was, some four miles of river-front which was used not only as a river-port but, also, as a promenade.

  “We were lucky to get even this,” said Sanford, indicating the bedroom with its single four-poster bed; he had duly noted Caroline’s displeasure. They did not, except in emergencies, ever share the same bed. When Sanford had told her that a number of his inventors and their business sponsors would be at the fair, and that he, as their patent attorney, was expected to be on hand to examine all the exhibitions and determine whose patent was being infringed, Caroline had told him that she thought he should go. There was a chance, after all, of additional fees for tea-kettles that were silent, for electrical sockets that did not shock, for engines that would—what was Langley’s phrase?—“free man from earth.” When the Tribune’s best reporter took ill, Mr. Trimble had convinced Caroline that she should herself describe the Exposition, at least the inaugural ceremonies. And though Clara Hay had proposed that the Sanfords join them in their private car, Caroline had spared the Hays and the Adamses the experience of John, who had grown more and more glum, no bad thing, but more and more apologetic for his life, a very bad thing indeed.

  They had been shown to the suite by the manager himself. “Everyone,” said the manager, “is in St. Louis this week.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Caroline, sweetly, and thanked him for his courtesy.

  As John unpacked, Caroline made dutiful notes. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition, as it was properly called, covered one thousand two hundred forty acres, of which two hundred fifty were roofed over—pavilions, halls, restaurants. They had caught a glimpse of the Secretary of State and Clara riding through the brightly decorated city. As Caroline worked at an octagonal table of the shiniest black walnut, John went through a file of papers, with a worried frown. “This
should be,” said Caroline, by now an expert at making marital conversation, “a paradise for a patent lawyer.”

  “I certainly hope so. Except,” John was already defeated, she could tell, “there is no longer a way of really winning a patent suit. Every inventor takes out a dozen patents for the same invention. If you threaten to sue, he’ll drop three patents but keep nine others in order to confuse the courts and his rival inventors.”

  “What an excellent opportunity for the lawyer, endless litigation.”

  “They,” said John, at wit’s end plainly, “always settle. Is there any news?”

  “Yes. I went to the Jews, as Mr. Adams would say. These particular Jews are a Yankee firm by the name of Whittaker. They are devoted Presbyterians. I asked, as you requested, for half a million dollars, at the going rate.”

  “Why did they say no?” John had now been a husband long enough to be able to finish Caroline’s sentences, if not enter, as it were, her bed. A single attempt to fulfill their conjugal duties had failed. Each had been apologetic. Caroline had given what she thought was a convincing performance of a devoted wife. She had even, against her by now better judgment, followed Marguerite’s advice, which was to shut her eyes and imagine that the large body on top of her was that of James Burden Day. But the smell was wrong; the texture odd; the attack askew. She had always known that she was deficient in imagination, as their first and last attempt demonstrated; and she envied those women who could go from one new body to another, like an explorer loose in an endless archipelago of men—women, too, in Paris at least—enjoying this island for its luxuriant trees, and that for its silvery springs. She was no explorer; she was a contented land-lubber, in a familiar satisfying landscape. The attempt to leave home, as represented by James Burden Day, for John was like abandoning a perfect oasis for the surrounding Sahara. John, in no position to complain, complained. Caroline, in no position to moralize, moralized. In time, the matter was dropped. John’s sexuality was soon subdued by the financial ruin which had overtaken him. He could think of nothing else, and, lately, neither could Caroline.