Empire

by Gore Vidal

  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 The Easy Boss was more than ever easy; and the ashen color of the weekend had been replaced by his normal pallor; but he moved stiffly, carefully, as though afraid he might break.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

  JOHN 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 presidential 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 eye
s 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 Empress, 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…”

  “American weight?” Hay provided the image.

  “I must,” said McKinley, sadly, “exercise more.”

  Dawes reported on Bryan’s mood. He would attack the Republican management of the new empire but not the empire itself. Silver would be soft-peddled, as a result of Congress’s acceptance, in March, of the gold standard for American currency.

  Mr. Cortelyou announced General Sternberg, the surgeon general of the Army. Hay and Dawes rose to leave. McKinley sighed. “Imperialism may cease to be an issue,” he said, “if we don’t stop the yellow fever in Cuba.”

  “It’s just the result of all that filth, isn’t it?” asked Dawes.

  General Sternberg overheard Dawes, as he entered the Cabinet room. “We think it’s something else.”

  “But what?” asked the President, giving the small general his largest warmest handclasp.

  “I’m sending out a commission of four medical men to investigate, sir. With your permission, of course.”

  “Of course. There is nothing, in my experience, quite so efficacious as a commission.” Thus, McKinley made one of his rare excursions into the on-going humor of government’s essential inertia, in itself the law of energy in reverse, thought Hay. If nothing could possibly be done, nothing would most certainly be, vigorously, done.

  Hay returned, alone, to the State Department. Already there were signs that the government was shutting down for the hot months. Except for important-seeming naval officers, the steps to the colonnaded masterwork were empty.

  Adee hissed a warm welcome. “I am writing some more open doors for you, Mr. Hay. I do love writing open doors.”

  “Don’t let me stop you. Any word from Peking?”

  “The diplomats have vanished, as far as we can tell. They are, probably,” Adee giggled, inadvertently, Hay hoped, “all dead.”

  As Hay entered his office, he glanced at a stack of newspapers to see which ones contained stories about him-marked in red by Adee, with an occasional marginal epithet. Except for the Journal, which maintained that he was England’s secret agent in the Cabinet and a sworn enemy to the freedom-loving Boers, the press was not concerned with the Secretary of State. The vice-presidential candidate governed the headlines.

  Wearily, Hay took up his “tactful” silver pen, the gift of Helen. For some reason this particular pen, once set to work upon the page, could, in a most silvery way, celebrate whomever he was w
riting to, in a tone of perfect panegyric, with no wrong notes struck. This letter was, of course, to “Dear Theodore.”

  Without thought or pause, Hay’s hand guided the pen across his official stationery: “June 21, 1900. As it is all over but the shouting, I take a moment of this cool morning of the longest day in the year to offer you my cordial congratulations.” With any other pen Hay might have been tempted to add, “and my congratulations to Platt and Quay who have given us you, a precious gift,” but the silver pen lacked iron as well as irony. “You have received the greatest compliment the country could pay you…” This brought a tear to Hay’s own eye: he must have his blood pressure taken; such tears were often a sign of elevated pressure. “… and although it was not precisely what you and your friends desire,” Hay had a glimpse of the sweating Roosevelt slapping mosquitoes as governor-general of the Philippines while sly Malays shot at him from behind jungle trees, “I have no doubt it is all for the best.” Here, Hay and his silver pen were as one. There was no mischief that a vice-president could make under a president as powerful as McKinley. More gracious phrases filled up the page. What small liking that Hay had ever had for Roosevelt was currently in abeyance, thanks to his sabre-rattling over the canal treaty, abetted by the treacherous Lodge. Henry had promised to bring Lodge around; and Henry had failed. Hay’s pen signed the letter, warmly. Hay himself sealed it. As he did, Adee entered. “I sent around the copy of Del’s letter to Miss Sanford. But she is gone.”

  “Where to?”

  But Adee was looking out the window; and heard nothing. Hay shouted, “Where has she gone?”

  “No answer to your letter to the Mikado.” Adee liked to pretend that his hearing was acute at all times. “You know how long Tokyo takes to answer anything.”

  “Miss Sanford’s gone where?”