The imperious Henry Cabot Lodge, by John Singer Sargent, 1890.NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. GIFT OF THE HONORABLE HENRY CABOT LODGE.
Roosevelt’s pastiche of Turner and Mahan added up to an idea whose time had not yet come. A costly naval buildup clashed with the mood of the country and with President McKinley’s inaugural pledge to avoid “the temptation of territorial aggression” presented by the unrest in Cuba. The new assistant secretary, never one to shirk a task on grounds of mere impossibility, set out to change the temper of his time. Without Henry Adams’s breakfast table, he made the Metropolitan Club his noon-hour pulpit and energetically proselytized for overseas expansion and the requisite navy. He also let it be known that if he had his way, Spain would be ejected from the Caribbean tomorrow. Adams in Paris missed out on the details, but within three weeks of Roosevelt’s return to the capital, one of the old breakfast circle passed along the essentials: “Theodore the Talkative is having a hard time trying to be reticent.”
There was even less reticence to come. In June Roosevelt told an audience at the Naval War College in Newport that a powerful American fleet would mean peace, not war, because foreign navies would not dare to attack. But if they did—and he seemed to hope they would—the war that followed would be a just war. “All the great masterful races have been fighting races,” he declared, “and the minute that a race loses the hard fighting virtues … it has lost its proud right to stand as the equal of the best.” Fretting that education had made men soft, he implored his listeners to remember that there were “higher things in this life than the soft and easy enjoyment of material comfort. It is through strife, or the readiness for strife, that a nation must win greatness. We ask for a great navy, partly because we feel that no national life is worth having if the nation is not willing, when the need shall arise, to stake everything on the supreme arbitrament of war, and to pour out its blood, its treasure, and its tears like water, rather than submit to the loss of honor and renown.”
Back in Washington, the perfervid assistant secretary came in for a sharp “wigging,” but the private reproaches of his superior were lost in a thunder of public applause. Newspapers across the country reprinted his address and praised him for a job well done.
Ambassador John Hay needed only a week or two in his office at 5 Carlton House Terrace to remember why he had sworn off diplomacy. His calendar told a tale of appointments and disappointments, of streams of callers—American citizens, members of Parliament, arms merchants hoping for an American war with Spain. To Hay it seemed that everyone who came to see him wanted some favor beyond his power to grant.
The chief vexation of his first few months was the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria. To console Whitelaw Reid, President McKinley asked him to head a special American delegation to the Jubilee without realizing that British protocol would exclude most of the contingent from the choicest balls and banquets. ‘Our special Embassy consists already of some dozens of whom only one will receive any special attention, and the rest will kick so hard as to be heard on the roof of the world,” Hay moaned to Adams. “And your poor old friend, J. Makepeace Hay, will take all the kicking.” London in the throes of Jubilee was abominable, he added. “Six miles of lumber deform the streets. The fellow-being pullules. How well you are out of it!”
Adams lolled in Paris and Henry James fled to the seaside resort of Bournemouth, but the American ambassador had no such options. He dutifully acquired a collapsible top hat, packed his wife and daughter Helen and the trains of their satin gowns into a rented brougham, and swam through oceans of ceremony. For all his elitism, the author of The Bread-Winners did not feel entirely at ease among English aristocrats, but he turned in a fine performance. “The Hays conduct themselves admirably,” beamed Henry White, the ambassador’s chief aide and a polished veteran of London society. They were “perfectly simple” but easily made the acquaintance of “the royalty and such people as they should talk to.”
By early July, Hay could tell Adams that Jubilee was “gone like a Welsh-rabbit dream.” The adulation of Queen Victoria filled him with amazement. “What a curious thing it is—that there has been no King in England since Elizabeth of special distinction—most of them far worse than mediocre—only the foreigner William III of any merit—and yet the monarchical religion has grown day by day, till the Queen is worshiped as more than mortal, and The Prince will be more popular still when he accedes. And to look at him as he waddles across the floor at a state ball! but I rap on wood and stop.”
Apart from the jubilee, the embassy asked little of John Hay in 1897. The business pending between the United States and England was neither urgent nor critical. On behalf of Canada, Britain wanted to settle a long-standing disagreement over the Alaskan boundary as well as quarrels over fishing rights in Newfoundland and the hunting of seals in the Bering Sea. Hay also organized a conference to explore the possibility of an international pact on “bimetallism”—currency based on silver as well as gold. Though McKinley had campaigned as a goldbug, he had promised to investigate bimetallism. As he soon learned from Hay, there was no point in pursuing the matter. London’s financiers, the most powerful in the world, were wedded to gold.
The autumn passed quietly, and the ambassador began to enjoy himself. His workload was heavier but less difficult than he had expected, and in December, when he finally had his own moment with Queen Victoria, he came away as enchanted as the most ardent royalist. Just before a dinner at Windsor Castle, Her Majesty had examined the seating plan and advised the Lord Steward of a change: she wanted Mr. Hay at her side. “I prepared myself for a silent evening,” Hay wrote to Clarence King. But the frail old queen proved surprisingly “chatty and amiable. I was told the next day that they had rarely seen or heard her talk so much.”
With little of significance on his agenda, Hay threw himself into planning a Nile cruise for his first official leave, set for mid-January. “Mrs. Hay says you must go,” he informed Adams. Henry replied at once: “If Mrs. Hay says I am going to Egypt with you, you may bet your life it is so.” Hay also sent invitations to James and King, but neither could come. Having just purchased Lamb House in Rye, James felt pressed to stay home and work. King’s excuses were vague and pocked with contradictions. The Nile was out, he said, because he could not leave his mother. But in the next breath he said he expected to spend the winter working out West, and in the next he admitted he had no assignment. “What an abject idiot he is not to chuck it all and come over to us, as I am eternally begging him,” Hay fumed to Adams.
Between the anniversary of Clover’s suicide and the prospect of returning to the scene of her breakdown on the Nile, Henry passed a turbulent December in Paris. He battled the demons by immersing himself in medieval poetry, but a dinner with Augustus SaintGaudens forced his thoughts to the peaceful bronze at Clover’s grave. For days he longed to join his wife in Rock Creek. Trying to describe his gloom, he had told a niece, “When one has eaten one’s dinner, one is bored at having to sit at the table. Do you know that I am sixty in six weeks and that I was only forty-seven when I finished my dinner?”
Though Cairo did not upset him, the moment he boarded the Hays’ dahabeah he came undone. “I knew it would be a risky thing,” he told Lizzie, “but it came so suddenly that before I could catch myself, I was unconsciously wringing my hands and the tears rolled down in the old way, and I had to get off by myself for a few minutes.” Regaining his composure, he pronounced himself able to “stand anything.” But he had to admit that no amount of will could diminish the intensity of this encounter with the past: “there is hardly a moment when some memory of twenty-five years ago is not brought to my mind.”
For four weeks the steam-powered dahabeah chuffed along the green river, stopping to let the travelers stroll among sunbaked ruins or make dusty forays to distant temples arid tombs. Clara Hay, too dignified to ride the donkeys supplied for these excursions, traveled “like Cleopatra,” Henry reported, “on a throne borne by
strong Nubians, and visible from miles across the plain.” Self-conscious about the fragility of his nerves, Henry was piqued to find that the Hays never seemed to feel irritable, even when they had headaches. On the whole, however, he decided that Egypt was “better than opium. It soothes and smooths one’s creases out.”
On the last day of February the ambassador’s party returned to Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, where they found the American colony in a state of high excitement. While the Hays and Henry Adams were lazing on the Nile, an American battleship, the U.S.S. Maine, had blown up in Havana on February 15. When Adams asked for the precise time of the explosion and learned that it had happened after dark, at 9:40, he blurted out his awful conclusion: “Then the Spaniards did it.”
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt held the same opinion, but President McKinley desperately hoped otherwise. The Maine’s visit to Cuba, arranged in advance with the Spanish ambassador, had been intended as a sign of reduced tension between the United States and Spain. Spanish naval officials in Havana had accorded the Maine all the requisite courtesies, and when the explosion occurred, they hurried to the rescue.
More than 250 sailors perished on the Maine, and the newspapers cried for vengeance. McKinley, pleading for calm, appointed a court of inquiry to determine whether the disaster was an affair of chance or malevolence.
Assured by the embassy that there was no need to shorten his vacation, Hay and his family moved on to Athens. Adams, refreshed by his encounter with the lost civilizations of Egypt, went off to study the antiquities of the Near East, wholly unperturbed by the prospect of war. “I lose my head when other people are calm,” he wrote to Brooks. “For two years, the Cuban business drove me wild, because other people stupidly and brutally and wilfully refused to listen to its vital warnings. For two years, with the Senate to back me, we moved heaven and earth to get the people into a track. Now that the countries have pitched into the ditch, I’ve no more to do with it…, [M]y business is to look ahead.”
Toward the end of March, while Hay sat at his desk in London and Adams haggled with antique-coin dealers in the bazaars of Smyrna, McKinley’s court of inquiry concluded that the Maine had been sunk by an “external explosion.” The report stopped short of blaming either the Spanish or Cuban rebels desperate for American intervention.
To the disgust of Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley was still “bent on peace.” The president offered to let the Spanish pay an indemnity for the Maine and tried to persuade them to sell Cuba to the United States. “McKinley,” seethed Roosevelt, “has no more backbone than a chocolate eclair.”
Ambassador Hay canvassed London for opinion on the Maine affair and assured the President that no one in Britain opposed an American war with Spain: “The commonest phrase (from Liberals, Conservatives and Radicals) is ‘We wish you would take Cuba and finish up the work.’”
By April 25, both countries had declared war, and a few days later the obstreperous assistant secretary of the navy resigned to join a cavalry regiment, a move deplored by all who knew him. “He has lost his head,” said his superior, Secretary of the Navy John D. Long. To the secretary it seemed that Roosevelt was “deserting the post where he is of most service and running off to ride a horse and, probably, brush mosquitoes from his neck on the Florida sands. His heart is right, and he means well, but it is one of those cases of aberration—desertion—vainglory; of which he is utterly unaware. He thinks he is following his highest ideal, whereas, in fact, as without exception every one of his friends advises him, he is acting like a fool. And, yet, how absurd all this will sound if, by some turn of fortune, he should accomplish some great thing.”
Hay was considerably more scornful. By joining “a cowboy regiment,” Roosevelt was giving up a position “where he had the chance of his life,” the ambassador wrote to Adams. Adams, reading the news in Constantinople and thinking of the economic and military decrepitude of Spain, predicted that the Spanish would be forced to surrender long before Theodore had a chance to prove his virility. John La Farge disapproved on more esoteric grounds. Seeming to forget that he had for all practical purposes abandoned his own wife and children, La Farge clucked that Roosevelt was “behaving very badly in leaving his family for a junket like this; he is going because he wants to;—that’s what is so deplorable in a husband and father.”
By August, the war was over, and it seemed to many that Theodore Roosevelt had won it. He had not only charged Kettle Hill with his Rough Riders, he had also set the stage, months before his resignation from the Navy Department, for Commodore George Dewey’s conquest of Manila, where Filipino insurgents had been fighting the Spanish in a struggle much like the one in Cuba. A week or so after the sinking of the Maine, Secretary Long, bleary with fatigue, had taken a day off to get a massage and see his podiatrist about some painful corns. Roosevelt had seized the moment to fire off a cable ordering Dewey and most of the Asiatic squadron to Hong Kong:
… KEEP FULL OF COAL. IN THE EVENT OF DECLARATION OF WAR SPAIN, YOUR DUTY WILL BE TO SEE THAT THE SPANISH SQUADRON DOES NOT LEAVE THE ASIATIC COAST, AND THEN OFFENSIVE OPERATIONS IN PHILIPPINE ISLANDS …
Colonel Theodore Roosevelt of the Rough Riders, heroes of the Spanish-American War.LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
“[T]he very devil seemed to possess him yesterday afternoon,” Long moaned in his diary. He vowed never to leave his assistant in charge again, but he did not order Dewey to change course.
When the Spanish surrendered in Santiago, the town where rebels had once whispered their secrets to Clarence King, John Hay gracefully admitted that he had misjudged Roosevelt:
When the war began I was like the rest; I deplored your leaving your place in the navy where you were so useful and acceptable. But I knew it was idle to preach to a young man. You obeyed your own daemon, and I imagine we older fellows will all have to confess that you were in the right. As Sir Walter wrote, ‘One crowded hour of glorious life, Is worth an age without a name.’ You have written your name on several pages of your country’s history, and they are all honorable to you and comfortable to your friends. It has been a splendid little war; begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave. It is to be concluded, I hope, with that fine good nature which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.
Hay was beginning to sound like a statesman. From the start he had shared Henry Adams’s vision of a short conflict, and both of them turned their thoughts to peace well before Roosevelt saw combat. At the end of May, Adams had offered the ambassador his terms for an armistice: Cuban independence, autonomy for Puerto Rico, withdrawal of Spanish troops from the Caribbean, and withdrawal of American forces from the Philippines “on condition of retaining a harbor of convenient use for a coaling station.”
Hay had been thinking along the same lines but doubted that they would get their way. “The weak point in both of our schemes is the Senate,” he told Adams. “I have told you many times that I did not believe another important treaty would ever pass the Senate. What is to be thought of a body which will not take Hawaii as a gift, and is clamoring to hold the Philippines? Yet that is the news we hear today. The man who makes the Treaty of Peace with Spain will be lucky if he escapes lynching.”
From his London post, Hay had been sounding out Europeans on the peace, and he saw less reason to worry about Spain than Germany. Cecil Spring Rice, now second secretary at the British embassy in Berlin, sent alarming intelligence. “The jealousy and animosity felt toward us in Germany is something which can hardly be exaggerated,” Hay warned Henry Cabot Lodge. According to Spring Rice, the Germans wanted “the Philippines, the Carolines, and Samoa—they want to get into our markets and keep us out of theirs.” If the United States annexed Hawaii, as seemed likely, Spring Rice predicted that Germany would demand some Pacific outpost, perhaps Samoa, as compensation. Above all the Germans did not want the United States, in its eagerness to quit the Philippine
s, to turn them over to England or France.
To McKinley, who had little desire to preside over a Pacific empire, Hay reported that England hoped the United States would retain control of the Philippines. “[O]f course we can consider nothing but our own interests,” he added, “and the more I hear about the state of the Tagalo population and their leaders the more I am convinced of the seriousness of the task which would devolve upon us if we made ourselves permanently responsible for them.”
As Hay waded through the currents and crosscurrents of imperial politics, he was struck by a curious paradox: “the only power cordially friendly to us on this side of the water is England and England is the one power which has most to dread from our growing power and prosperity. We are her most formidable rival and the trade balances show a portentous leaning in our favor. But notwithstanding all this the feeling here is more sympathetic and cordial than it has ever been.”
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