In spite of the moral perversities of government in action, Mrs. Lee clung to her faith in democracy, sure that underneath “the scum floating on the surface … there was a sort of healthy ocean current of honest purpose which swept the scum before it and kept the mass pure.” Longing to have this faith affirmed by a member of the Washington priesthood, she cornered one of Ratcliffe’s Senate colleagues, a sage New Englander, and posed her deepest question: Is America right or wrong?
“I grant it is an experiment,” he told her, “but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts…. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past.”
The question and the answer were pure Henry Adams. He had failed as a reformer and declared himself shut of politics, but as a historian he hoped to influence the future of his country by showing where it had gone wrong in the past. Though Adams would never find a way to practice his political faith outside his writing, Madeleine Lee thought that she knew the solution to the problem presented by Senator Ratcliffe. By becoming his wife, she could reform him, after which he would reform democracy. Friends who recognized the perils of her delusion intervened, showing her a letter detailing the senator’s acceptance of a $100,000 bribe in exchange for a favorable vote. At last the student of democracy grasped that neither Silas Ratcliffe nor the system he represented could be remodeled to her pristine tastes. She called off the marriage and announced her wish to flee to Egypt: “democracy has shaken my nerves to pieces. Oh, what rest it would be to live in the Great Pyramid and look out for ever at the polar star!”
Separated from Washington by thousands of miles and thousands of years, ancient Egypt furnished the novelist with a neat antithesis to modernity and change. Egypt and the Pyramids also set off deeper vibrations in the author, though the Hays and Clarence King probably did not understand them at the time. Like the author, Madeleine Lee was a fearless seeker of truth. In pursuing it, however, and in not caring where the chase might lead, she sometimes verged on the desperation that had burst out of Clover Adams on the Nile. Presented with proof that Ratcliffe had taken a bribe, Mrs. Lee had cried out, “Oh, how I wish I were dead! how I wish the universe were annihilated.” Egypt was the site of the deepest unhappiness Clover experienced on her honeymoon, the Great Pyramid a tomb. Behind Madeleine Lee’s longing for these places it is possible to see an anxious husband’s desire to bury the unmanageable feelings of his wife in the place where he first encountered them.
But in the jolly winter of 1880-81, Democracy was a wonderful lark. To Henry’s delight, the first edition had gone through nine printings, and pirated versions had begun to turn up on newsstands. In private the Five of Hearts could amuse themselves by trading stories of offended Washington matrons who believed that Democracy was the work of an unscrupulous newspaperman, and together they could laugh at the Boston Transcript, which sniffed that the author had obviously not mingled in “the best society of the Capital.”
By the end of April, the uproarious fun of the Five of Hearts had come to an end. King “beams with joy at being out of office,” Clover reported to her father. “He and Mr. Hay were as eager to get out as most fools to get in.” Clara Hay returned to Cleveland, and her husband, almost fatally incapable of refusing a friend, allowed himself to be talked into editing the New York Tribune for six months while Whitelaw Reid honeymooned in Europe. King was also in New York, preparing the U.S. Census report on precious metals, combing art galleries in search of bric-a-brac, and carrying out what he called a “scientific experiment in Wall Street.” Acting on a tip from a friend, he had invested $10,000 and lost it in twenty-four hours. “Would you refrain from bric-a-brac till you had recouped, or would you … put your little remnant into a yellow pot with relief dragons?” he asked Hay. His good cheer was rooted in his optimism. While he finished up the report for the census, he was also planning a grand enterprise in Mexico, where he would rework the fabulous silver mines abandoned centuries before by the conquistadors. What was $10,000 when millions lay waiting in the mountains of Mexico?
John Hay holding a copy of the French edition of Henry Adams’s anonymous best-seller, Democracy. This portrait, taken by Clover Adams, was one of many Five of Hearts jokes about the authorship of the novel, which various accusers attributed to Hay, King, and both Adamses.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
In Washington Henry toiled at his history, and Clover, bored without King and the Hays, passed up tea in favor of long afternoon rides, often staying out until sunset. Years after the winter when the Five of Hearts invented itself in Lafayette Square, Henry remarked that friendship requires “a certain parallelism of life, a community of thought.” The community of thought—a web of patrician convictions and a love of what Adams called “taste and dexterity”—endured. But the lives would veer sharply from parallel.
* Completed in 1888, the structure was later named the Executive Office Building and still later became known as the Old Executive Office Building.
PART TWO
DISTANCES
7
Arrivals and Departures
The first chilly mists of autumn were rolling through the marshes when Clarence King appeared on the Beverly Farms porch of Henry and Clover Adams in September 1881. King, exhausted, had to be put to bed and nursed. For months the geologist had crisscrossed the West, braving malaria, dysentery, floods, and recalcitrant mules in his quest for fortune. Backed by two Boston financiers, King owned interests in a half dozen gold and silver mines stretching from northern California to central Mexico.
The mines were as remote from civilization as from each other, and conditions at the sites ran a short gamut from difficult to hostile. King’s silver mine in the western Mexican province of Sinaloa lay at the end of a long trail that could be traveled only on foot or by mule. Spanish explorers had christened the place Yedras—poison ivy—a name that was still uncomfortably apt. The mine itself had flooded long ago, when another band of treasure hunters accidentally bored into an underground stream. Before production could resume, the makings of giant pumps and a sawmill had to be carried in, one mule-load at a time. Three hundred miles to the southeast, at Sombrerete in Zacatecas, it took four thousand mule trips to transport the gear needed to reopen the mine.
While Clover worried that King’s entrepreneurial ambitions were making him “reckless of life and strength,” Henry and John Hay were more thrilled than alarmed. Each time King triumphed over an obstacle that neither of them could have conquered, their lofty opinion of him won ringing confirmation. The search for mining properties had proved no challenge at all. King simply contacted an old friend who specialized in evaluating the potential of abandoned mines. Raising capital had been equally uncomplicated; riding on his success with the U.S. Geological Survey, King had only to outline his plans and financiers put up millions. Even language barriers melted before Clarence King. Knowing he would have to supervise native laborers, King spent a stagecoach ride from Tucson to Mexico memorizing words from a Spanish dictionary. Of grammar he knew nothing, but he invented what Hay called “a highly effective and picturesque jargon which delighted the Mexicans and carried him triumphantly to the mines.”
Hay could not resist investing in one of King’s Mexican ventures, and Adams bought into another. In the summer of 1881, when Adams received his first profits, he declared himself as excited as a child on seeing a rabbit pulled from a hat. In the past, he said, he had viewed mining investments “in much the same light as I do a lent umbrella.” But the arrival of a $1,333 check from the Minas Prietas Mining Company made him think he would enjoy having “more money grow mouldy in the same way.”
Henry’s enthusiasm was the tonic King needed when the Adamses tucked him into bed at Beverly Farms. While he still believed he would profit from all his ventures, early results suggested that he would not realize his dream of reaping untold wealth from lost treasures. But a few days of Henry and
Clover’s tenderness left him feeling restored. “It is awfully comfortable and regulating to the mind to stay with you,” he wrote Henry after returning to his business office in New York. “I feel calmer and more like marrying for a week afterward.”
King’s visit marked a turning point for the Adamses, too. After King and the Hays had left Lafayette Square in the spring, Henry had immersed himself in his history, daring to hope that his epic would rival Edward Gibbon’s classic account of the fall of Rome. Clover decided to read Gibbon—“a bone which will take months to gnaw,” she told her father—but books seemed a poor substitute for the companionship of the Five of Hearts. In an outburst reminiscent of her unhappiest days on the Nile, Clover complained that her life was nothing but “read, read, read, till I loathe the very sight of a book.”
Pitch Pine Hill, the Adamses’ summerhouse at Beverly Farms, by Clover.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
In the summer, when the Adamses transplanted themselves to Beverly Farms, Henry passed his days amid the musty, yellowed pages of early-nineteenth-century newspapers while Clover cared for two of her brother Ned’s five daughters. It was an unsettling task. They were two and four, and their mother had died a few months before. Clover had shielded herself from that event, leaving Ned to sorrow alone in Cambridge despite her devotion to him. To her father, Clover explained that she was staying in Washington because Henry refused to let her travel alone and she was “not willing to pull him up from his work.” If the death of Ned’s wife stirred painful childhood memories of her own mother’s death, the act of facing little girls crushed by the same blow may have been more than she could bear.
A summer spent caring for children raised other anxieties. Nearing thirty-eight, Clover had moved into uncomfortably ambiguous terrain—past the typical age of childbearing but not yet into the realm of biological impossibility. Her attitudes toward motherhood swung from one extreme to the other. At one moment she disowned all interest in news of births, at another she cried out, “If any woman ever says to you that she doesn’t want children, it isn’t true. All women want children!” The contradictions paled beside the intensity of her feelings.
Henry shared Clover’s conflict. He had married in 1872 with the hope of having children but by 1876 had realized that his desires might go unfulfilled. In answer to news of a birth and a death, his normally fluid pen developed a stammer: “I wish—wish—wish—well, I wish various things, but among others that the mystery of Birth and the Grave were either less important to us, or more encouraging.” Tiring of questions about his reproductive intentions, he sought to head off inquisitive friends by making pointed declarations of his happiness. He told one acquaintance that he had “never cared enough about children to be unhappy either at having or not having them, and if it were not that half the world will never leave the other half at peace, I should never think about the subject.” On another occasion he announced that he and Clover were “quite well, very busy, and very happy. One consequence of having no children is that husband and wife become very dependent on each other and live very much together.”
The reasons for Henry and Clover’s childlessness remain unknown. Gossips suggested that Henry was impotent; if so, it seems unlikely that he would have felt so comfortable in his first days of marriage. A gynecological treatise found in Henry’s library has led to speculation that the difficulty was Clover’s, though the book offered no clue to a specific problem.
Whatever the state of their feelings about parenthood in the summer of 1881, the Adamses said remarkably little about their young charges. Henry mentioned them only once in his correspondence, explaining to a friend that he hesitated to extend an invitation because of their presence. With the entire Hooper clan summering nearby, Clover wrote few letters, but when she resumed writing to her father in the fall, she said nothing of the experience with her nieces.
John Hay had intended to laze away the spring and summer of 1881 as editor of the New York Tribune. Standing in for Whitelaw Reid, Hay had not expected to work full time or even stay in New York. Reid had asked him “merely to give direction” to policy and promised that “an hour a day would cover all the serious work.” Hay took him at his word, spending most of his time in Cleveland, where he worked on the Lincoln biography. But on July 2, in what Henry Adams called “one of the disregarded chances of life,” a malcontent named Charles Guiteau fired two bullets into President Garfield. Hay raced to New York to supervise the Tribune’s coverage of the event.
Bulletins on the president’s condition were posted outside the Tribune’s offices on Park Row. A few blocks away, on Wall Street, stock prices plunged 5 percent, scaring nearly everyone but Hay’s father-in-law, Amasa Stone. When Hay asked him how the assassination attempt would affect a recent investment, Stone offered chilling reassurance: “I think you are all right … although you might have bought lower at a later date, and still lower should Prest. Garfield die.”
Garfield died on September 19. The stock market, which had anticipated his demise for some time, showed almost no change and closed early.
Contemplating the new president, Chester Alan Arthur, Clarence King decided the nation was in good hands. Calling himself “a sort of Saul of Tarsus,” King told Adams he was finally ready to embrace the cause of political reform. “Why? because reform is getting within the possibilities. So long as it was a thin gray streak of dawn in the East, a chilly three o’clock in the morning thing, I felt it to be futile to get up and spoil people’s sleep by crying out ‘awake! arise! behold there will be breakfast.’ Now that one can see to read and the regular rank and file are up and dressing and the machine men are seeing which way the wind blows there will be reform and I … will help to do the thing.”
King did not know his man. A dandy who owned a hundred pairs of trousers, Arthur had risen through Republican Party ranks during his tenure as customs inspector for the Port of New York. All who were caught importing goods without paying duty were invited to escape large fines by making contributions to the Republican Party and the pockets of the many-trousered Chester Arthur. Henry Adams, noting that reformers “vanished like smoke” when Arthur took office, joked that he too would throw in his lot with the new president, “whose social charms we now understand to be most extraordinary, although only last spring we were assured by the same people that he was a vulgar and a dull animal.”
From Europe, Whitelaw Reid signaled his satisfaction with Hay’s management of the assassination coverage and most other editorial matters, but the two men found themselves at odds over a book review. Mark Twain, almost finished with The Prince and the Pauper, asked his friend W. D. Howells to review it for the Tribune. Howells put the proposition to Hay, saying that he would use the occasion to write about the “unappreciated serious side” of Twain’s “curious genius.” From his own dealings with Howells after the Ashtabula train disaster, Hay knew that Howells was incapable of dispassion where friends were concerned, but he was inclined to accommodate the request. As he explained to Reid, “I took into account your disapproval of Mark in general and your friendship for Howells—and decided for the benefit of the Tribune.” If Reid disapproved, Hay suggested he balance the scales by assigning Twain’s archenemy, Bret Harte, to review Twain’s next opus. Reid protested. “[I]t isn’t good journalism to let a warm personal friend, and in some matters literary partner, write a critical review of him in a paper wh. has good reason to think little of his delicacy and highly of his greed. So, if you haven’t printed it yet, I wld. think of this point before doing so.” Hay stood by his decision, and on October 25 the Tribune allotted more than three columns to Howells’s unsigned hymn to Twain.
When the review appeared, the Five of Hearts were enjoying a reunion in New York. Henry and Clover had stopped off en route from Beverly Farms to Washington, Clara Hay was visiting from Cleveland, and King was in Wall Street tending the financial side of his mining affairs. On Broadway they saw Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan’s new satire of the foppery of Oscar
Wilde. In Tiffany’s, Clover gaped at leg garters decked with diamonds. Dining twice at Delmonico’s, they sampled duck with fried hominy and turkey stuffed with chestnuts.
They talked about Henry James, now a confirmed Londoner, who was about to make his first visit to the United States in six years. One of Clover’s New York friends, who had disapproved of the forward heroine of Daisy Miller, pointedly asked if the novelist were coming home in search of “raw material.” James’s latest novel, The Portrait of a Lady, would soon be the object of an enthusiastic Tribune review (also unsigned) by his friend John Hay. In Hay’s view, the novel would “remain one of the notable books of the time” and as such deserved comparison with “the gravest and most serious works of imagination which have been devoted to the study of the social conditions of the age and the moral aspects of our civilization.” Clover strenuously disagreed. Where Hay saw nuance and subtlety, she saw a thin plot and overstuffed prose. James’s Portrait was “nice” and “charming,” she conceded, “but I’m ageing fast and prefer what Sir Walter called the ‘big bow-wow style.’” Henry had not enjoyed the novel either but decided to give it the benefit of the doubt since friends whose judgment he respected found reason to “admire it warmly, and find it deeply interesting.”
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