The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  To Henry Adams, the new harmony between Britain and the United States was not in the least paradoxical. Germany, “the grizzly terror,” had simply “frightened England into America’s arms.” How delicious of Fate, he thought. The Kaiser had achieved in a summer what Adamses had tried to do for generations.

  Henry had thought about basing himself in London for the summer to watch the peacemaking, but a quick visit with the ambassador convinced him to move on. As he explained to a friend, “I might innocently annoy Hay by saying—or not saying—what nonsense is my habit to talk by way of holding my tongue. There are idiots enough of the amateur diplomate class without counting me.” At the end of June, he joined the Camerons at Surrenden Dering, a grand Elizabethan manor that was, he said, “about the size of Versailles.” Surrenden’s baronial rooms overlooked the weald of Kent, a deer park, and an immensity of terraced lawn, where guests assembled daily for tea.

  Don Cameron, who saw no reason to suffer either the ritual of tea or the hordes invited by his wife, spent whole days racing along leafy country lanes in a trap drawn by a pair of long-tailed trotters. Each evening as he sat down as head of a table of twenty, he waited on tenterhooks to see what crimes the kitchen staff had committed against the fruits and vegetables he was importing from America at ruinous expense. On one occasion the suspense lasted until dessert, when the cook crowned her feast with a pink mush that upon investigation, turned out to be boiled watermelon.

  Surrenden was only a few miles from Rye, and Henry James came over to study the complicated dance of Henry Adams and Lizzie Cameron. Their affair, unmentionable in the Adams family, was “one of the longest and oddest American liaisons I’ve ever known,” he told a friend. “Women have been hanged for less—and yet men have been too, I judge, rewarded with more.” Rumors of a Cameron separation had been floating around Europe for a year, and James’s visits to Surrenden, where Adams was so much in evidence and Don so pointedly absent, left him feeling “somehow haunted with the American family, represented to me by Mrs. Cameron.” There was no denying her beauty and grace, but he could not bring himself to like her. He found her a bit “hard” and thought she had “sucked the lifeblood of poor Henry Adams and made him more ‘snappish’ than nature intended.”

  In the summer of 1898, Don and Lizzie Cameron rented a mansion in the English countryside. Seated in front are Martha Cameron, left, and the Hays’ daughter Alice. Seated in back, from left, are Ambassador John Hay, his son Clarence, Edith Hoyt, and Hay’s daughter Helen. Standing left to right are Don Cameron, Henry Adams, Spencer Eddy, and Hay’s son Del. It was here that Ambassador Hay learned that President McKinley wanted to appoint him Secretary of State.PRIVATE COLLECTION.

  James must have felt somewhat misplaced among the Americans at Surrenden in the summer of 1898. Far from sharing their zeal for the conquests in Cuba and the Philippines, he looked at the war and saw “nothing but the madness, the passions, the hideous clumsiness of rage.” Like his psychologist brother William, who believed that Theodore Roosevelt was “still mentally in the Sturm and Drang period of early adolescence,” Henry James was deeply suspicious of the brand of patriotism exalted by the most famous of the Rough Riders. The same week the United States declared war on Spain, the novelist had reviewed American Ideals, Roosevelt’s collection of manifestoes on “The Manly Virtues,” “True Americanism,” and kindred matters. A hopeless puerility muddled Roosevelt’s thinking, James said, and he frostily observed that in a task as momentous as the shaping of a national character, “stupidity is really the great danger to avoid.”

  Lizzie Cameron and Henry Adams had hoped to make Surrenden a sort of country house to the embassy, but John Hay, immersed in cables and dispatches, could not leave London until peace was in sight. Early in August, knowing that a preliminary armistice would soon be signed, Hay left the embassy in the hands of Henry White and headed off to his friends. For some time he had suffered from a painful kidney ailment, and he went to Surrenden with the firm intention of getting a rest. Surrounded by friends and family, he soon felt restored. “Don is the finest type of old Tory baronet you ever saw,” he reported to Cabot. “His wife makes a lovely chatelaine, and Oom Hendrik has assumed the congenial functions of cellarer and chaplain.”

  Into this elegant tranquility on the evening of August 14 came Henry White with a cable for Hay from the president:

  IT GIVES ME EXCEPTIONAL PLEASURE TO TENDER TO YOU THE OFFICE OF SECRETARY OF STATE…. IT IS IMPORTANT THAT YOU SHOULD ASSUME DUTIES HERE NOT LATER THAN THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER.

  William R. Day, the current secretary, was resigning at McKinley’s request in order to negotiate the final peace treaty in Paris.

  Hay was shocked and depressed. He felt certain that the State Department would kill him in six months. His tumult is preserved in a trio of letters written the next day. In the first, he declined the appointment because of his health. But after discussing the situation with Adams, Hay decided that it was wrong for any member of a government to refuse his president’s request. Nor did Hay think it proper, after the president had given him a post he wanted, to turn down one he did not. “Your despatch received,” began his official acceptance. “I am entirely and most gratefully at your disposition. But I fear it is not possible to get to Washington by September first. I am suffering from an indisposition, not serious but painful, which will prevent my moving for some little time. I shall require several days to break up my establishment and get away. If about four weeks delay could be granted me I could be there by first of October…. If the need of a change is urgent and it would be inconvenient to wait for me, I hope you will act without reference to me.”

  Still dissatisfied, he wrote privately to McKinley to confess his conflict. “I cannot tell you with what emotion I received your telegram offering me the post of Secretary of State. The place is beyond my ambition. I cannot but feel it is beyond my strength and ability. My first impulse was to express my gratitude and affection and to decline an honor so conspicuous and so exacting. But I reflected that you must have had good reasons for your action and that possibly my declining might disturb other arrangements you had in mind; and that, finally, I had no right to refuse any duty you might think proper to assign me.” Had McKinley not offered the State Department, Hay said, he would have retired from the ambassadorship the following year. “But you have chosen to confer on me this crowning mark of your favor and confidence and whatever may be my dread of the result I can only accept it with affectionate gratitude and a recurrent hope that Heaven may grant me the strength I so sorely need to make me not too unworthy of so great an honor.”

  Clarence King, wandering alone from mine to mine in his futile quest for wealth, had never felt as desolate as John Hay on his new pinnacle. The State Department was a bastion of patronage, which meant that Hay would have little chance to make appointments of his own. “He has no one to rely upon,” Adams wrote to a friend. McKinley’s cabinet was “a heavy load to carry,” and neither Hay nor Adams could conceive of a foreign policy “likely to satisfy anybody.” Hay wanted Adams to succeed him in London,* but both of them knew he would not get his way. Adams was a Democrat, with no standing in McKinley’s crowd. “Nothing short of a cataclysm in America could throw up men without political backing into offices of cabinet rank,” he explained to an English friend. Still, Hay’s idea pleased him. “All my life I have lived in the closest possible personal relations with men in high office. Hay is the first one of them who has ever expressed a wish to have me for an associate in his responsibilities. Evidently something is wrong with Hay—or with me.”

  On a soft September day, Hay came to Surrenden to take his leave. Henry James had welcomed him in Southampton, and with his exquisite sense of completion, traveled to Surrenden to say farewell. A year and a half later, walking his dog in the country, the novelist would recall Hay’s pause “before the plunge, on that great Surrenden terrace,” and he wondered how often the secretary wished he were back in Kent with the “kind
old English air coaxing, and lovely women and distinguished men just respectfully hanging to your coattails.”

  * On August 30, 1898, Hay wrote to Lizzie Cameron that when Queen Victoria asked him who the next ambassador would be, “I could not comfort her; I said she would dote on Whitelaw [Reid], that she could not see enough of [Joseph] Choate, that if she could get [Senator James] McMillan it would be the crown of her career, and if Mr. Adams came she would want to abdicate in his favor.” The embassy went to Choate, a brilliant lawyer.

  19

  A Taste of Empire

  On September 30, 1898, his first day as Secretary of State, John Hay spent the morning stewing about his wardrobe. His steamer trunks had arrived from England, but the keys were nowhere in evidence, and no amount of poking or prodding persuaded the locks to yield. Meticulously barbered and manicured, the secretary was annoyed to think that when he went to the White House for his induction into the third-highest office in the land, he would have nothing to wear but one of the two suits he had chanced to carry home in a valise.

  John Marshall Harlan, associate justice of the Supreme Court, administered the oath to Hay in the presence of William McKinley and his cabinet, after which Hay took the secretary of state’s seat; at the president’s right, for a “talkative” cabinet meeting. In the afternoon he walked next door to the overgrown architectural bonbon that housed the State, War, and Navy departments, taking possession of a spacious, sunny suite looking out upon the green lawns of the Ellipse and his friend Clarence King’s least favorite monument, the huge white phallus that paid tribute to George Washington, father of the country. Hay signed letters for an hour, shook hands with everyone in the department, and at five o’clock called for the carriage at his disposal. “The first drive I ever took deliberately, without you,” he wrote his wife, who was at Lake Sunapee. He had promised to dine with Senator Mark Hanna, but there was time to ride out Connecticut Avenue as far as the zoo and back home to Lafayette Square, corner of Sixteenth and H.

  Though Hay did not say what he thought about as he sat alone in the back of the victoria, his letters to Clara during the next two weeks showed how deeply he resented his new burdens. “I will not give up to the miserable habit of lunching at the Department,” he told her. “I get an hour off, from one to two, and then go back till 4:30. I think that earns my salary.” As for his colleagues at the State Department, he had not found one congenial soul: “I have never, not even in a foreign country, felt so absolutely alone.”

  The enormity of Hay’s task undoubtedly sharpened his sense of isolation. The splendid little war, a mere ten weeks of scuffling over an impoverished Caribbean island and an obscure Pacific archipelago, had transformed the United States into a world power—the peer of England and France, a threat to Germany, the guardian of the Western hemisphere, and a potent new force in the Orient. Few people, he told a friend, “appreciate what an immense shop it is we have been put in charge of.” As secretary of state, Hay had more responsibility for this sprawling new concern than anyone but the president.

  The first order of business in the autumn of 1898 was the Philippines. In the rush to trounce the Spaniards, little thought had been given to the next chapter of Philippine history, and President McKinley had hoped that the United States would make a quick exit after the Spanish surrender. But war among rival native factions and the possibility of German intervention convinced him that the situation called for more. Anguishing over the proper course, McKinley paced the floor night after night and sometimes fell to his knees to ask “Almighty God for light and guidance,” he later told a group of clergymen.

  And one night late it came to me this way—I don’t know how it was, but it came: (1) that we could not give them back to Spain—that it would be cowardly and dishonorable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France or Germany—our commercial rivals in the Orient—that would be bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to themselves—they were unfit for self-government—and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain was; and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker), and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States, and there they are, and there they will stay while I am President!

  Translating the Lord’s wishes into temporal terms, McKinley paid Spain $20 million for official title to the islands. To Mark Twain, who believed that the Philippines belonged to the Filipinos, the very idea of such a bargain seemed “divinely humorous,” but most Americans thought the sum of $20 million had a fine, generous ring. The fact that the United States had embarked on a war to free Cuba and had ended by imposing itself on the Philippines troubled no one but a few cranks.

  Unhappily for the president and his new secretary of state, one of the malcontents was their rich and powerful friend Andrew Carnegie. A Scottish immigrant with a keen interest in the affairs of the British empire, Carnegie saw imperialism as a spectacularly bad investment. “That Britain ‘possesses’ her colonies is a mere figure of speech,” he warned in the North American Review; “that her colonies possess her is nearer the truth. ‘Our Colonial Empire’ seems a big phrase, but, as far as material benefits are concerned, the balance is the other way. Thus, even loyal Canada trades more with us than with Britain. She buys her Union Jacks in New York. Trade does not follow the flag in our day; it scents the lowest price current.” Totting up Spain’s recent credits and debits in the Philippines, Carnegie found only minuscule gains. Even these, he reckoned, would be wiped out by the cost of the soldiers and sailors the United States would need to maintain order in the political chaos of the Philippines.

  When Carnegie learned of the plan to pay Spain $20 million, he grandly offered to put up the money himself and give the Filipinos the independence he saw as their inalienable right. Rebuffed, he descended upon the White House in a wrath and told McKinley that he hoped the rebels would gun down any Americans who tried to take control. Awed by the fury of a man renowned for his self-possession, one newspaper correspondent guessed that Carnegie would not be “invited to call again in the near future.”

  His next target was the secretary of state. McKinley was being ill-served by his advisers, Carnegie told Hay. It was wrong for cabinet members to say that the president was doing his duty by acceding to the popular clamor for the Philippines. It was Carnegie’s belief that a president’s duty lay in telling Congress “not what any section of the people thinks, nor what all parties think, but what he himself thinks best.”

  “Andrew Carnegie really seems to be off his head,” Hay reported to a friend. “He writes me frantic letters signing them ‘Your Bitterest Opponent.’ He threatens the President, not only with the vengeance of the voters, but with practical punishment at the hands of the mob. He says henceforth the entire labor vote of America will be cast against us, and that he will see that it is done. He says the Administration will fall in irretrievable ruin the moment it shoots down one insurgent Filipino.” In a caustic reference to a bloody uprising at a Carnegie steel mill several years before, Hay added, “He does not seem to reflect that the Government is in a somewhat robust condition even after shooting down several American citizens in his interest at Homestead.”

  Hay dealt with Carnegie’s rage as he dealt with most conflict—he ignored it and hoped it would go away. For his part, Carnegie did his best to maintain his friendship with Hay despite their quarrel. Over the Christmas holidays he sent Hay a supply of Scotch for a cold. Hay responded with an invitation to dinner. The Philippines went unmentioned. But away from the civilities of Lafayette Square, the secretary lobbied the Senate for ratification of the peace treaty with Spain while Carnegie vigorously worked against it. On Decembe
r 27, the same day he wrote Hay as a “staunch Republican” to warn that farmers and laborers would vote Democratic because they feared competition from cheap Philippine imports, he also volunteered to help spread such fears. Writing to Carl Schurz, the aging idealist who was fighting one of his last great crusades, Carnegie offered money to print and distribute one of Schurz’s numerous anti-imperialist speeches. “I will be your banker,” he said. “That is the way in which I can aid the good work. You have brains and I have dollars. I can devote some of my dollars to spreading your brains.”

  Carnegie, Schurz, and the other anti-imperialists (the “aunties,” as Theodore Roosevelt called them) could be noisy and nettlesome, but their opposition merely inspired the president and his men to cloak their policies in terms even loftier than those used by the protesters. Self-government would come when the Filipinos were ready, McKinley promised. In the meantime, the United States was morally obliged to preserve order. To those who insisted that America had betrayed its highest principles by forcing itself upon an unwilling people, the secretary of state had a ready answer: “I cannot for the life of me see any contradiction between desiring liberty and peace here and desiring to establish them in the Philippines.”

  With the peace treaty moving toward ratification, it seemed to Henry Adams that the secretary of state’s worst trouble at the beginning of 1899 was an overburdened social calendar. After ten cabinet dinners in six weeks, Hay swore he would expire from tedium. Beset by sore throats and headaches (which he blamed on overexposure to bores), the secretary occasionally managed to excuse himself from a dinner or a ball, but his absence rarely escaped notice. The first lady overflowed with indignation one night in January when she discovered that Clara Hay had come alone to a party. “I don’t understand these wives who put their husbands to bed and then go out to dinners,” she scolded. “When I put Mr. McKinley to bed, I go to bed with him.” Forwarding this nugget to Lizzie Cameron in Paris, Henry added, “Certainly Mrs. McKinley’s suggestion that Mrs. Hay was going to bed somewhere else was poetic and even lyric.”