Clara Hay toward the end of her life, by Henry Adams.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
John found it hard to share in the merriment. The deaths of King and Nicolay had carried off large pieces of his past, McKinley’s assassination had severed his chief tie to the present, and the loss of Del left him feeling disconnected from the future. Even the largest triumphs failed to lift his gloom. In December 1901, the revised Hay-Pauncefote Treaty had sailed through the Senate virtually unopposed. It was Hay who had had to swallow his fury and start over after Senator Henry Cabot Lodge orchestrated the defeat of the first draft of the treaty, and it was Hay who had persuaded England that the United States should have the authority to do whatever it deemed necessary to protect the Central American canal zone. But as the new pact moved toward ratification and Senator Lodge and President Roosevelt began claiming credit for the success, Hay had no energy for correction. He graciously praised Cabot’s change of heart and told Theodore that the British considered it “most auspicious” to have settled so large a question at the outset of his administration.
At forty-three, Roosevelt was America’s youngest President and twenty years the junior of his secretary of state. Hay dealt smoothly with his new chief by playing the role perfected by Henry Adams—a combination of mandarin and fond uncle. Hay showed him every respect but stopped short of reverence. Soon after McKinley’s death Hay let Roosevelt know that he intended to reserve the title “Mr. President” for official business; the rest of the time he would address him as “Theodore.” Nor did Hay allow his official courtesy to spoil the fun of watching Theodore wrestle with the social burdens of his new station. Writing Adams soon after Roosevelt moved into the White House, Hay reported, “Teddy said the other day: ‘I am not going to be the slave of the tradition that forbids Presidents from seeing their friends. I am going to dine with you and Henry Adams and Cabot whenever I like. But’ (here the shadow of the crown sobered him a little), ‘of course I must preserve the prerogative of the initiative.’”
With his unbounded energy and definitive opinions on every mote in the cosmos, Theodore offered a marvelous distraction from grief, and Hay was grateful. In a burst of enthusiasm early in 1902, he managed to persuade his wife and Henry Adams to attend a small White House dinner. Clara had not dined out since Del’s death in June, and for twenty-five years Henry had adamantly refused to sup at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. On a Friday night in January, the Hays called for Adams in their carriage, and a few minutes later they were seated in the Red Room with Cabot and Nannie Lodge. Waiting for the Roosevelts, Henry felt overwhelmed by “bloody and dreary associations” stretching back to the days of his great-grandmother, Abigail Adams. Though he did not mention it, his last visit to the Red Room was in the spring of 1885, when he took H. H. Richardson to meet Grover Cleveland. Clover had been away, nursing her father in his last illness, the experience that precipitated her suicide. By the time the president and Mrs. Roosevelt appeared, Henry had passed beyond all possibility of pleasure. He found the meal indifferent and badly served, the beverages all wrong, the host insufferable. “Edith was very bright and gay,” he told Lizzie, “but as usual Theodore absorbed the conversation, and if he tired me ten years ago, he crushes me now.” It seemed to Adams that presidential life had deprived Roosevelt of his freshness but not his dogmatism. When Theodore tactlessly lectured him on history, the historian hid his annoyance by feigning ignorance. He came away from the evening with one clear impression: “Hay and I are shoved up to a distinct seniority; we are sages. I felt it not only in Hay’s manner, but in Roosevelt’s too, and it is my creed now that my generation had better scuttle gracefully, and leave Theodore to surround himself with his own rough-riders.”
Adams’s exasperation with the “vanity, ambition, dogmatic temper and cephalopodic brain” of Theodore Roosevelt was a reaction to the man and to the age he symbolized. The twentieth century in which Roosevelt gloried made Henry’s skin “curl,” he told Lizzie. “That nervous tic I have so often told you of—the instinct to roll on the ground and pray to the dynamo, is becoming chronic here with me.” “This huge great ghastly automobile of a country seems just about to roll-over us all, and squash us into one enormous mince-pie.”
Henry took refuge from Theodore and the dynamos in his beloved twelfth century. Closeted in his study, he plunged into a revision of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, emerging only to preside over the breakfast table or to entertain Quentin Roosevelt, age four, whom he found “considerably older and less school-boy-like than his father.” Once Henry finished the new draft, he meant to have the book printed in a private edition. As the manuscript “swelled to the size of ox,” he feared the printing costs, but commercial publication was out of the question. “My only hope of heaven is the Virgin,” he explained. “If I tried to vulgarize her, and make her as cheap as cow-boy literature, I should ask for eternal punishment as a favor.”
Next door, the Hays were spending the winter in as much seclusion as a cabinet post and a society wedding would permit. Still in mourning, they wrote letters on stationery edged in black, refused invitations, and rarely entertained. Couriers brought wedding presents by the score—silver candelabras from the Astors, a diamond-studded warming pan from the father of the groom, an immense silver punchbowl from Andrew Carnegie, three table services, and, according to Henry Adams, “pitchers, pots and plates enough to supply the Walkyrie and Valhalla.” (His own gift was a small Rodin.) On the eve of the wedding Henry grieved to see Helen surrounded by gold and silver, “blind with headache, and stupendously out of place in all that New York menagerie.” His little Helen—“simple, foolish, helpless, unstylish, unfashionable, unconventional”—had to become either “a New York swell or a failure,” he lamented. Put off by the ostentation, Adams stayed home from the ceremonies. John La Farge got as far as the church portal, felt intimidated by the glittering crowd, and scurried back to Adams in his hermitage. In the evening, when Clara sent John next door to see why Adams and La Farge had not come to the reception, Adams could only shrug. As he told Lizzie, “one can’t give one’s why.”
At the end of February, Hay stood before both houses of Congress to deliver an address in memory of William McKinley. In anger and bewilderment, he observed that the assassination of an American president was as pointless as it was horrific. The death of a dictator could change an empire, the end of a royal line might create an opening for a new dynasty, but in a well-ordered republic, the death of a ruler caused no state tremor. Summing up the achievements of McKinley’s brief tenure, Hay declared that he had guided America to unprecedented greatness. The financial center of the world was no longer London’s Lombard Street but Wall Street, and through “sheer reasonableness,” McKinley had bettered America’s position with all the great powers. Courteous to the last, McKinley had apologized for the damage his death would cause the Buffalo exposition. In his life, Hay concluded, President McKinley showed “how a citizen should live, and in his last hour taught us how a gentleman should die.”
Adams felt no more inclination to go to Capitol Hill to hear Hay than he had had to go to Helen’s wedding, but when he read the eulogy in the newspaper, he thought it excellent. So did Edith Wharton, who admired its “restrained eloquence” and “the way in which idea and expression hold the same high level, and move, all through it, at the same majestic pace.” The only objections came from House Democrats, who accused Hay of making a “Republican stump speech.” Angered by his praise of McKinley’s economic policies, they sourly voted against a resolution thanking the secretary for coming to Congress to deliver the address.
Hay barely noticed. The griefs of 1901 plus four years at the helm of the State Department had dulled his sensitivity to criticism and enabled him to accept the existence of enemies even though he did not understand the reason for their hostility. Henry Adams understood it perfectly. Hay, he told Lizzie, “no more represents the average American than a nightingale represents a hawk. They loathe him instinctively and justly, from their point o
f view, as they would loathe me…. He is personally too much of a so-called gentleman; they don’t trust him.” On occasion Hay still threatened to resign, but Henry had stopped believing him. “We are sixty-four years old, and we can’t step out, except into our graves.”
If Adams expected the grave to bring repose, the case of his newly departed friend Clarence King must have given him pause. It is not clear who told Adams and Hay the secret King had hidden for thirteen years, but they quickly became aware of Ada and the children. The family had left Toronto shortly after King’s death, moving back to New York, where Ada placed a newspaper advertisement asking King’s friend James Gardiner to contact her. Gardiner sent his secretary, a Mr. Dutcher, who assured her that she would have no financial worries because King had left $80,000 for her in Gardiner’s care.
Ada soon began receiving sixty-five dollars a month from Gardiner’s office. When she brought up the $80,000, she was informed that she would have to wait. There would be no money until King’s assets were sold and his debts paid.
King’s mother, in her eighties, knew nothing of his debts, and when apprised of the situation (minus the complications of Ada and the children), she responded with more defensive pride than gratitude. “I should have better understood his broken condition if I had known that he had become a borrower,” she wrote to Hay. “The only wrong he ever did me was to keep this from my knowledge. It was from mistaken kindness and the ever watchful tenderness with which he sought to guard my declining years.”
During the next two years, Gardiner raised at least $120,000 by selling King’s paintings, bric-a-brac, library, and securities, the bulk of which went to John Hay in settlement of King’s IOUs. For Ada there would be nothing but the monthly check of sixty-five dollars. Inquiring about the source of those funds, she learned only that they came from a benefactor Gardiner had promised not to name.
In June 1903, acting on Gardiner’s instructions, Dutcher purchased a house for Ada in his own name. Gardiner promised Ada that she would one day have the deed, but when the title was transferred, it was from Dutcher to Gardiner. Frustrated, Ada went to Gardiner’s office and noisily threatened to sue. Dutcher countered with another threat: any legal action would bring an immediate halt to the monthly checks. In desperation she revealed that she possessed a stack of letters from King—evidence that might strengthen her claim to his estate. When Dutcher expressed an interest in the letters, Ada brought them to him, undoubtedly hoping to win him to her point of view. They were never seen again.
King had left other loose ends, which his loyal friends labored to tie up. His half-brother, George Howland, was under the impression that the U.S. Geological Survey had appropriated $1,200 for a portrait of King, who had served as the agency’s first director. George wrote Hay asking for help in securing the commission, and when the agency declined, the imaginative Hay suggested that the Century Club might want to add a picture of King to its portrait collection. The Century agreed to consider it. George finished the portrait in his Paris studio in December 1902, in time for Adams to carry it home on his annual winter crossing. Though Adams shared Hay’s low regard for George’s talent, he liked the painting. It was a good likeness, he thought, and, as a seated half-length figure, it did not “offend by over-ambition.” He deposited it at the Century, where it was hung in the gallery for reaction. A few weeks later the art committee rendered its verdict: “unsuitable.”
It is not clear whether the committee considered George’s work poor company for the Sargents and Whistlers and La Farges that graced the Century’s paneled walls, or whether the spreading gossip about King’s subterranean life made them think that the man himself was unsuitable. The tactful Centurions would say only that the art committee was obliged to take “high ground” in making decisions; otherwise the club would be overrun with mediocre paintings commissioned by the families of deceased members. Undaunted, Hay, Adams, and several others pooled $500 for George and donated the portrait to the U.S. Geological Survey.
Whatever the real objection to the painting, the Century eventually paid an affectionate tribute in Clarence King Memoirs, a volume of essays by friends and colleagues. The book was no place to bare the sadder facts of a life, but for those who wondered how an undependable, deceiving scapegrace had won so many hearts, here were the answers. Hay explained that the secret of King’s charm lay in his rare blend of humor and kindness, which enabled him to befriend cowboy and clergyman alike, and which gave him an “astonishing power of diffusing happiness wherever he went.” W. D. Howells remembered the sweltering summer day thirty years before when the boyish King arrived in Cambridge to proofread the galleys of Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada. To Howells’s everlasting delight, King had paraded through staid old Cambridge in a pith helmet. John La Farge fondly recalled their candlelight suppers, the stained-glass fantasy they concocted for General Grant’s tomb, and the midnight forays to the rented room where King’s art awaited the mansion he would build as soon as his Mexican silver mines surrendered their treasure.
Adams served up a rollicking account of his adventures with King among the Cuban rebels, in the course of which he dared to hint at King’s other life. The geologist’s real interest was not science, Adams told the Centurions, but “man, meaning chiefly woman.”
You remember his famous aphorism: “Nature never made more than one mistake, but that was fatal; it was when she differentiated the sexes.” In his instincts I think he regarded the male as a sort of defence thrown off by the female, much like the shell of a crab, endowed with no original energy of his own; but it was not the modern woman that interested him; it was the archaic female, with instincts and without intellect. At best King had but a poor opinion of intellect, chiefly because he found it so defective an instrument, but he admitted that it was all the male had to live upon; while the female was rich in the inheritance of every animated energy back to the polyps and the crystals. If he had a choice among women, it was in favor of Indians and negroes.
More than that Adams forbore to tell. King’s decision to conceal his deepest emotional tie from his most intimate friends seemed not to matter. “We were his slaves, and he was good to us,” said Adams. “He was the ideal companion of our lives.”
To Henry Adams in the winter of 1902, it seemed that John Hay no longer cared for anything. While Adams may have mistaken Hay’s apathy for his own, it was true that Hay’s élan now belonged to the past. Ground down by the incessant wrangling over consulates—“the vast Senatorial suck,” as he called it—he also despaired of practicing the gentlemanly art of diplomacy among men who cared more for money and power than principle.
Well before the second Hay-Pauncefote Treaty cleared the Senate, he had begun negotiating for the Canal Zone with the Republic of Colombia, proprietor of the Isthmus of Panama. In the beginning, the Colombians eagerly cooperated in order to persuade the United States to build the canal in Panama rather than Nicaragua. But fellow feeling turned to hostility in the fall of 1902, when the Panamanians launched one of their many revolts against the government in Bogota. As it had on other occasions, the United States dispatched Marines to guard the Panama Railroad, this time moving the troops without Colombia’s prior consent. Bogota was furious, its envoy in Washington implacable. After weeks of refusing to see the secretary of state, he resigned.
Peeved, Roosevelt insisted that the new Colombian diplomat, Dr. Tomás Herrán, be made to understand that if Colombia did not agree to the terms Hay had reached with Herrán’s predecessors, the United States would dig the canal in Nicaragua. Hay presented Roosevelt’s ultimatum on January 21, 1903. The next afternoon, Hay and Herrán signed their treaty. The agreement gave the United States control of a six-mile-wide strip of the isthmus for a century—longer if the United States chose to renew. In exchange, Colombia would receive $10 million in cash and annual rent of $250,000. Zipping through the Senate with only five nays, the treaty went off to Bogota for ratification. The Colombians temporized for months then decided
to press for more money and stronger sovereignty in the isthmus.
Roosevelt, furious with “the Bogota lot of jack rabbits,” bellowed to Hay that they must not be allowed to bar “one of the future highways of civilization.” Hay counseled patience. Roosevelt was summering at Sagamore Hill, Hay was at Lake Sunapee, and nothing of substance could be done before Congress convened in the fall. “I venture to suggest you let your mind play a little about the subject,” Hay advised. The United States had alternatives: there was Nicaragua, and there might arise a chance to exploit the perennial tension in Panama.
Much of the friction between Secretary of State John Hay and the Senate centered on his friendships with English political figures. In this editorial cartoon, Hay and one of his treaties are being dragged by the British lion while senators assault the secretary with ink-pots, canes, and other missiles.JOHN HAY COLLECTION, JOHN HAY LIBRARY, BROWN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY
On November 3, the rebellious Panamanians declared their independence from Colombia. U.S. troops landed the next day, seized the railroad, and prevented Colombian soldiers from crossing the isthmus to quash the revolt. Within days, the United States recognized the new republic.
Neither Hay nor Roosevelt felt the slightest compunction about this course of action. For Hay, it was a simple choice between mayhem and order. To Roosevelt the episode marked the end of a long and melancholy spectacle. For fifty years Colombia had proved “utterly incapable” of keeping order on the isthmus, he said. The United States had acted “in the interest of the commerce and traffic of the whole civilized world.” When Roosevelt asked his cabinet’s opinion of this defense, Elihu Root, the secretary of war, drew a withering analogy: Theodore, having been accused of seduction, had conclusively proved himself guilty of rape.
The deal-making moved as swiftly as the revolution. On November 9, Philippe Bunau-Varilla, a character who seemed to have stepped from the pages of a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto, lunched alone with John Hay on Lafayette Square. A dapper Frenchman with a waxed mustache, Bunau-Varilla presented himself as Panama’s “Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary near the Government of the United States.” Nine days after their lunch, Hay and Bunau-Varilla met in the small blue drawing room at 800 Sixteenth Street to sign their treaty. The Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary having no seal of his own, the secretary of state supplied a signet ring with the Hay family coat of arms.
The Five of Hearts Page 40