Empire

by Gore Vidal

  “I was over talking to Mr. Cortelyou…”

  “The President’s secretary,” said Caroline, helpfully, to Blaise, who was again turning a healthy pre-transport red.

  “He said there’s no news from the Philippines. Then when asked what the President was doing at the moment, he said, ‘He’s out driving,” and I said, ‘Well, that’s not much of a story,’ and he said, ‘Well, he’s driving in a motor car for the first time.’ So there’s an item, I guess. A smallish item, I guess.”

  Trimble sighed. “A very smallish item. For the social page.”

  “No,” said Caroline. “For the front page.” She had never felt so entirely heroic as she did now, showing off to Blaise.

  “What’s the lead?” asked Trimble.

  “First president ever to drive in an automobile.” Caroline was prompt.

  “But is that true?” asked Trimble.

  “Mr. Hearst wouldn’t care, and, I’m afraid, I don’t either.”

  “I think it’s true,” said the political reporter. “Grover Cleveland tried to get into a motor car several years ago. But because he’s so fat, he wouldn’t fit. Fact, nothing fits him except this one orange summer suit that his young wife hates, and finally got him to give away when she threatened to denounce him to the Irish as an Ulsterman.”

  “Wonderful!” Caroline was indeed pleased. “That’s what we want in your story. Do write it all. Now.”

  As the reporter was shuffling toward the Remington, Caroline stopped him. “What sort of motor car was it?”

  “A Stanley Steamer, Miss Sanford.”

  Caroline turned to Trimble. “Put that in the sub-head. Then we shall ask the Stanley Steamer people to advertise.”

  “Well…” Trimble was grinning now; he had got her range. Then both started as the door to the room was slammed shut. Blaise had fled.

  “Your brother’s kind of… moody?”

  “Well, his mood is certainly black today. He and Mr. Hearst did want this paper, in fact, he just asked me to sell it to him, and I said no.”

  Trimble frowned. “Would you make a profit?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should sell. We haven’t a chance. The Star and the Post have us beat.”

  Caroline’s pleasure in the Stanley Steamer story was now replaced by that sense of doom which often visited her when she awakened in the early hours of the morning, and wondered what on earth she was doing in a small house in Georgetown, publishing a newspaper that might, eventually, ruin her. “If it’s so hopeless, why does Hearst want to buy?”

  “He’ll pour in money. He don’t care what he loses. And he’ll have a Washington power-base. He’s running for president.”

  Caroline was momentarily distracted. “How do you know that?”

  “Friend at the Journal told me. Hearst thinks Bryan can’t win, and he can.”

  “How curious! The first time I spoke to him, he said he wanted Admiral Dewey.” But Caroline had grasped a point interesting to her in a way that politics was not. “You haven’t been talking to the Journal about a job, have you?”

  Trimble’s pale blue eyes now avoided her own, she hoped, steady gaze. “We’re losing circulation every month,” he said.

  “Not on the newsstands.”

  “That’s no money really. Advertising rates are fixed by your paid subscriptions.”

  “Then we’ll hold a-what is it?-you know, money for nothing? A lottery.”

  “With what money?”

  “If you stay, I’ll go in deeper.”

  Trimble looked at her, most curiously. “Why are you doing this?”

  “I want to.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I should think that that was everything.”

  “But no woman… no lady has ever run a newspaper that I know of, and there aren’t many men who have the knack either.”

  “You will,” said Caroline, no question in her voice and no appeal, “stay.”

  Trimble smiled. They shook hands gravely.

  FIVE

  1

  FROM ONE END TO THE OTHER of the Brooklyn Bridge, electric lights spelled out “Welcome, Dewey,” so many points of arctic light against the night sky; while downriver, the Admiral’s flagship, the Olympic, was equally illuminated. Sirens blared. Occasional fireworks exploded along the Palisades. The hero of Manila had come home.

  Blaise sat beside the Chief in the back of his motor car, the top put down the better to enjoy the display, and the cool autumn night. Madame de Bieville sat in the seat opposite, next to Millicent and Anita Willson. To Blaise’s surprise, Anne was amused by the girls and, like all women, bemused by the Chief. For a week, Anne had taken the girls shopping in order to dress them up-or rather down-for Europe. Hearst had decided to go to Europe in November; winter would be spent aboard a yacht, on the Nile. Although Blaise had been cheated of his return to Europe, Anne’s arrival was consolation. Together they had gone to Newport, Rhode Island, and the fierce Delacroix grandmother had been openly scandalized and privately thrilled by the liaison between her youthful grandson and this French woman of the world. But like all good Newporters, Mrs. Delacroix dearly loved a French lady and a moneyed one was even more loveable. She had installed Madame in the east wing of her Grand Trianon and Blaise in the west wing, and when Mrs. Fish had suggested that there might be wedding bells between June and October, Mrs. Delacroix had said, in a voice, reputedly, of thunder, “Mamie, mind your own business.” Mrs. Fish had done so: a business that included a picnic on the rocks by the sea, with Harry Lehr in charge of an artificial waterfall; but instead of water, champagne, sold by Lehr on commission, cascaded over the rocks.

  Anne had said to Blaise that she now understood the French Revolution. Blaise had said that he now understood why there could never be an American revolution. The sumptuous extravagance of the rich suited everyone, particularly the readers of the Journal It was still believed, he was magisterial, that in the United States anyone could strike it rich, like the Chief’s father, and, once rich, “anyone” was obliged to live out every dream that everyone had ever had. There was still wealth to be had for the lucky; as for the rest, they could daydream, their imaginations fed by the Journal. Anne could not believe that it was possible to keep the unlucky forever content with stories of the fortunate and their extravagances, but Blaise thought it possible to string them, as the Chief would say, along forever, or as long as there were still mountains of gold and silver to be broken into and new inventions to be thought of. The native-born American still believed that hard work would earn him all the beef his family required; believed, also, that blind luck might translate him overnight to a palace on Fifth Avenue. The immigrants were somewhat different.

  Blaise recalled a conversation with a manufacturer at Mrs. Fish’s dinner table: “The Germans are the best workers, if they haven’t been told about socialism and labor unions. The Irish are the worst, and always drunk. Dagos and niggers are lazy. All in all, the best worker is still your average Buckwheat.” A “Buckwheat,” it turned out, was the name employers gave to any sturdy young native-born Protestant from the countryside. The Buckwheat obeyed orders, worked hard and stayed sober. If he dreamed, he dreamed only the right sort of dreams, which might even come true. Anne found all of this mystifying. In France everyone knew his place; and wanted to change it or, more exciting, change someone else’s for the worst. Of course, France was filled up, while the United States was still relatively empty. Although the frontier had ended with the invention of California, the newly acquired Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean were now American lakes, filled with rich islands and opportunities, and the far-away look could once again be detected in the noble Buckwheat’s eyes. Blaise had composed a panegyric to the Buckwheat, and gave it to the managing editor, Arthur Brisbane, who took out everything original, including the word “Buckwheat,” and published it in the Sunday Journal: “No derogatory nicknames for the native-born American,” said Brisbane.

  The Chief told the chauffe
ur to drive them downtown. “I want to see the arch lit up,” he said. “I want to see Dewey,” he added, looking at Blaise, as if Blaise were the Admiral’s keeper. “I want to talk to him.”

  Blaise did his best to give an impression that he would deliver the Admiral to the Journal offices for the next day’s editorial meeting. “The messenger to Manila,” as the Chief’s courier was known at the paper, had got nothing at all out of the old hero, who seemed interested only in his new admiral-ate. Mention of the presidency bored him, the courier had reported.

  As the motor car glided through the cool autumnal darkness of Central Park, the Willson girls broke beautifully into song: “I Met Her by the Fountain in the Park,” a particular favorite of the Chief, as well as of the girls, whose father, a buck-and-wing dancer-singer, had made the song famous in vaudeville. Hearst’s high toneless voice joined in. Anne beat time with a gloved hand, and smiled at Blaise, who felt embarrassed. It was always hard to present the Chief to the world as a serious man; yet he was.

  Just north of Madison Square on Fifth Avenue, the crowds began. Everyone was moving toward the arch which had been built over the avenue at Twenty-third Street. Special lights had been craftily arranged to illuminate the white magnificence of what the Journal had called the most splendid triumphal arch ever shaped by the hand of man. Mr. Brisbane, not Blaise, was the author of this hyperbole. But the huge version of Rome’s arch of Septimius Severus was indeed impressive, despite the streetcars that passed, diagonally, in front of it, toward Broadway as it converged with Fifth Avenue. Three sets of columns on either side of the avenue made an approach to the arch. On top of the arch, a statue of Victory held a laurel wreath. Life-size military figures, entwined with banners, sabres, guns, adorned column-bases; upon the arch itself, the Admiral was depicted, a latter-day Nelson come home to glory in a confusion of flood-lights, hansom cabs, motor cars and red-white-and-blue bunting, courtesy of Knox’s Hats on the Avenue’s east side. The Hearst car stopped in front of Knox’s, and even the Chief was impressed by the masses of people who, although it was after midnight, wanted to pay homage to the hero-or his monument.

  As the horse of a hansom cab predictably reared in passing the alien motor car, the Chief observed with predictable pleasure, “Roosevelt must be chewing up the carpet with those big teeth of his.” But Anne said, shrewdly, Blaise thought, “Why should he chew? The Admiral’s old. He’s young.”

  “Dewey’s sixty-two. That’s not too old to be president.” The Chief looked uncharacteristically sullen. “He’s in love.”

  “At sixty-two?” The Willson girls spoke as one; and everyone laughed. A newsboy, selling the Journal, waved a paper in Hearst’s face. “Evening, Chief!”

  “Hello, son.” The Chief was again smiling; he gave the boy ten cents, to the ragged accompaniment of a group of Sixth Avenue types who were now singing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Opposite them, beneath a column, a well-dressed woman wept. “He’s all set to marry John McLean’s sister. She’s a general’s widow. He’s a widower. She’s Catholic,” the Chief added, brightening somewhat.

  “There is still such a feeling against Catholics?” Madame de Bieville looked almost her age by the harsh light of a street lamp directly overhead. Blaise wished she would turn her head to the left an inch, and allow flattering shadows to mask her. Talk of age always disturbed him when she was present. The Willson girls had already worked out his relationship to what, in their eyes, despite her foreign glamour, was an old woman. If the Chief suspected, he made no allusion. But then, in sexual matters, he had a maiden’s tact.

  “Well, it’s the Irish mostly that keep on giving Catholics such a bad name,” said Hearst vaguely. “Germans, too, I guess. He’s a powerhouse, her brother.” The Chief looked at Blaise, without reproach, which was the worst reproach of all.

  John R. McLean was the owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer. He lived in Washington where his mother and wife jointly reigned much as Mrs. Astor did, alone, in New York. McLean was fierce, partisan, powerful. He would do anything to keep Hearst out of Washington. Blaise’s failure to buy the Tribune was a blow to Hearst, who was not about to begin, from nothing, a newspaper in the capital. The Tribune had been an ideal acquisition, and Blaise could never adequately explain to his partner-employer no longer: Blaise merely lent the Chief money at the going rate-that he had lost the paper to his own sister, who, to his surprise, eight months later, was still, if only barely, in business. They now communicated through lawyers. Anne thought that he should come to terms with Caroline, but Blaise refused. He would fight her to the end, which would come, rather anti-climactically, one way or another, in five years.

  “Who built the arch?” Anne changed the dangerous subject.

  “A committee,” said Blaise. “The National Sculpture Society.”

  “The American style.” She smiled into the light; and the resulting lines made Blaise both nervous and sad. “And what is the arch made of? Marble? or stone?”

  “Plaster and cheap wood,” said the Chief with obscure pleasure. “And lots of white paint.”

  “But then when the winter comes…”

  “It will fall apart.” The Chief’s tone was dreamy.

  “But there’s a subscription to rebuild it in marble. This is just the model.” As a young, new New Yorker of means, Blaise had already made his contribution to the fund.

  “It doesn’t look at all temporary.” Anne was admiring.

  “That’s the American way,” said the Chief. America personified, Hearst thought of himself; and, perhaps, thought Blaise, he was. Everything here was equally new, self-invented, temporary.

  2

  THE SECRETARY OF STATE and the new Secretary of War, Elihu Root, stared at one another across Hay’s desk. Root had replaced Alger in August. A New York lawyer of uncommon brilliance and sly wit, Root gave Hay more pleasure than the rest of the admittedly dim Cabinet combined. Root’s hair was cut short like Julius Caesar’s, with a dark fringe over the brow, and a modest moustache. The black eyes were as quick as the wit; and the swift smile was both frank and agreeably murderous. “If you really want the Philippines,” said Hay, “you can have them. I’ve got too much on my hands as it is.”

  “I don’t want them, dear fellow. I’ve got quite enough with Cuba.” Root lit a cigar. “In fact, I’ve told the President that State should have all our island possessions. War just isn’t suited to run a peacetime colonial government. Of course, Cuba isn’t really a colony.” Root frowned. “I wish we could think of a better word than ‘possession’ for our…”

  “Possessions?” Hay smiled; the pains in his back were in remission. A summer in New Hampshire had restored if not his weary soul his spinal column. “We must face what they are.”

  “I’ve just divided Cuba into four military districts, rather the way we did the South in 1865. In due course, we’ll come home, but then what happens to Cuba?”

  “Germany?” Lately the “German menace” was much discussed at Cabinet, where it was generally thought that the German fleet was making itself too much at home in both the Caribbean and the Pacific; and all-or almost all-agreed that if Germany were to obtain a single port anywhere in the Caribbean, there would be war.

  The Major’s recent discovery of the Monroe Doctrine had been galvanizing. But then, as Henry Adams always said, his family’s masterpiece only came to irritable life once every other generation or so. Plans were now afoot to buy the Virgin Islands from Denmark; unfortunately, the Danes had assumed that the government of the United States was so corrupt that it would be necessary to pay off the relevant officials. Hay himself had been crudely approached; severely, he had told the eager Dane, “You must pay off Senator Lodge first. He is the key, and a very expensive one, too, because he is from Massachusetts, and their senators still idolize-and emulate-Daniel Webster, who was ‘retained’ by everyone.” Cabot had not been amused by the subsequent advances. Adams had not stopped laughing for a day.

  “I don
’t think Germany is going to amount to much on this side of the Atlantic.” With a forefinger, Root dusted the silver-framed portrait of the Prince of Wales. “Poor man. He’ll never be king, will he?”

  “Queen Victoria cannot live forever, as far as we know. She has been queen all my life; yours, too. She adds whiskey to her claret at table.”

  “That explains her longevity. It’s going to be Leonard Wood in Cuba.”

  “As governor-general?”

  Root nodded. “Or whatever we’ll call him. He wants to clean up, literally, Cuba. You know, collect the garbage. Educate the children. Give them a constitution where only men of property can vote.”

  Hay inhaled the smoke from Root’s cigar: Cuban, he noted, of the best quality. “No one can ever accuse us of exporting democracy. Poor Jefferson thought that he had won, and now we are all Hamiltonians.”

  “Thanks to the Civil War.”

  Adee opened the door, and put his elegant head into the room. “They are coming, Mr. Hay,” he softly quacked.

  “Who,” asked Hay, “are they?”

  A high screeching falsetto shouting “Bully!” promptly identified one of them.

  “I should have warned you,” said Root, baring his teeth in an anticipatory smile.

  “Theodore approaches…” Hay held on to the edge of his desk, as if battening down, whatever that nautical verb meant, a hatch.

  “With his invention…”

  The door was flung open and in the doorway stood the portly young Governor of New York, and the portly old Admiral Dewey. “There you two are! We’ve been with Secretary Long. Nice to have the three of you all in the same building. You look bully, Hay.”