by Joshua Zeitz
Popular culture in the 1890s and early twentieth century reflected a backlash against trends that seemed to have reduced the country to a state of weak-kneed neurasthenia. This was an age of what one historian called “noisy nationalism and spread-eagle patriotism.” John Philip Sousa found success with his soldierly marching music. Harry Houdini held audiences rapt with his displays of strength and courage. Theodore Roosevelt captured the imaginations of urban readers with his sweeping accounts of ranching and hunting in the unsettled West. College football, a relatively new, always rough-and-tumble game, grew more popular and more dangerous, as young men who had not had the opportunity to prove themselves at Gettysburg or Antietam sought to test their mettle on the gridiron. Not everyone bought into the new cult of masculinity. Visiting his son Del at Yale in 1894, John Hay dropped in on football practice but instantly recoiled in “anguish” at the sight of his “first-born son [being] rolled and tumbled and pulverized until he became a sorry spectacle of dirt and misery.” It was not just the violence that repulsed Hay. He saw in his children and their friends a marked immaturity when compared with the young men he had known during the Civil War. “I am sure that you and I were never so young as the boys of to-day,” he told Whitelaw Reid. “The riddle of the painful world suggested itself to us earlier and more imperatively. The fellows who came of age in the Lincoln years were forced to look at life in wider aspects than the Sophomores of to-day.”
Neither did Hay share much enthusiasm for the real-life corollary to college football and marching bands—that is, actual war. Alfred Thayer Mahan, the celebrated naval strategist whose work influenced a rising generation of policy makers, reflected the prevailing spirit of jingoism when he warned that “no greater danger could befall civilization than the disappearance of the warlike spirit (I dare say war) among civilized men.” Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle agreed with an Illinois Republican that “war is healthy to a nation” and with a Kentucky Democrat that “a little blood-letting would be an admirably good thing about this time for the people of the United States.” Chief among the saber rattlers were Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, whom Hay had known for years (and whose father he had befriended during the Civil War), and Henry Cabot Lodge, a young Republican lawmaker who was part of Hay’s social set in Washington but who would prove a stubborn antagonist in the Senate. Like many ultra-expansionists, Lodge believed that military adventurism offered an antidote to domestic malaise. It would “knock on the head . . . the matters which have embarrassed us at home.” Like his close friend and collaborator Theodore Roosevelt, and like many in the imperialist camp, Lodge had been too young to fight in the Civil War. “I was a boy of ten years old when the troops marched away to defend Washington,” he recalled with both fondness and reverence. His “broken but vivid memories” of seeing Robert Gould Shaw lead the all-black Massachusetts Fifty-fourth through the streets of Boston left an indelible mark on Lodge’s consciousness. Soldiers were “heroes and patriots.” “War is a bad thing,” he conceded, “but there are far worse things both for nations and for men.”
Roosevelt and Lodge would never quite understand the more cautious approach of their elders. Hay and McKinley shared their faith in America’s greatness. As long as traditional European powers like Britain, France, and Spain reaped the benefits of empire, and with new aspirants like Germany and Japan thirsting for a broader sphere of influence, they had no objection to taking measures to ensure America’s access to resources and markets. They also shared a condescending belief in America’s responsibility to civilize and elevate the residents of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Theirs was an aggressive, economic expansionism. But they did not invite or romanticize war. In his first two years in office, McKinley resisted the entreaties of war-hungry Republicans who wanted to intercede militarily on behalf of Cuban rebels who were fighting a bloody war with Spanish troops. He wanted the Spanish out of Cuba, if for no other reason than to safeguard American business interests on the island, but he preferred negotiation to saber rattling. “I shall never get into a war until I am sure that God and man approve,” he promised. “I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.” Even after the explosion of the Maine, the president resisted cries for immediate retaliation and awaited the report of an investigative commission. Only when pressure became insurmountable did he call up a volunteer army to invade Cuba. For his part, Hay had little love of war. He surely remembered the youthful enthusiasm of his good friend Elmer Ellsworth, a young law student who had clerked with Lincoln before raising a troop of “Zouave” soldiers in New York. Just a year older than Hay, Ellsworth rode with Nicolay and Hay as part of Lincoln’s official entourage in February 1861 and dazzled Washington with his swashbuckling demeanor and contagious passion. In May 1861, Ellsworth and his Zouaves led a Union invasion of Alexandria, Virginia, where his outfit tore down a rebel flag that had been flying atop the Marshall House hotel in full sight of government buildings. Descending the stairway, Ellsworth encountered the inn’s proprietor, who shot him dead. The first casualty of the Civil War, he became an instant hero throughout the North. His body lay in state at the White House, where Hay and Nicolay looked grievously upon their old friend, and his death became a rallying cry for the Union. He was celebrated in verse and song and memorialized in hundreds of newspapers. Hay still remembered Ellsworth, and he remembered the wounded and dying soldiers he had encountered in South Carolina and Florida in 1863. He remembered nursing his brother Charlie—like so many other soldiers, a victim of battlefield disease—back from death. “I detest war and had hoped I might never see another,” Hay wrote in the early days of the Spanish-American conflict, “but this was as necessary as it was righteous.”
In the first days of the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt implored Lodge to “prevent any talk of peace until we get Porto Rico [sic] and the Philippines as well as secure the independence of Cuba.” McKinley, on the other hand, moved slowly, deliberating cautiously over the decision to take over the former Spanish islands. When in the end he embraced annexation, he did so with the patronizing intent to “educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize them.” Of course, many Filipinos were Christians, and they most likely regarded themselves as already sufficiently civilized, but McKinley’s motives were both self-serving and sincere. The United States reaped enormous economic benefits from its colonial project, but it also constructed millions of dollars of schools, roads, hospitals, and public buildings that served the islands well.
As McKinley’s secretary of state, from September 1898 until the president’s death three years later, Hay was an active participant in annexation and empire building, but he ran repeatedly into a brick wall with ultra-imperialists in his own party. Like McKinley’s, his zeal for empire was more temperate than that of certain younger Republican officeholders. When he brokered a treaty with Britain that would allow the United States to build a canal across the Panamanian isthmus, Lodge killed the agreement in the Senate, objecting to a provision that would keep the canal zone demilitarized and open to ships from all countries. “The American people can never be made to understand that if they build a canal at their own expense and at vast cost,” fumed Lodge, “which they are afterwards to . . . keep open and secure for the commerce of the world at equal rates, they can never be made to understand, I repeat, that the control of such a canal should not be absolutely within their own power.” When Roosevelt, now serving as governor of New York, joined the chorus of disparagement, Hay protested. “Et tu!” he complained with scorn. “Cannot you leave a few things to the President and the Senate, who are charged with them by the Constitution?” So bitter was the feud between Hay and Lodge that the Massachusetts senator soon began interfering with consular appointments, going so far as to eliminate appropriations for certain offices when he objected to Hay’s selections. In early 1900, Hay offered his resignation to McKinley, finding that “the action of the Senate i
ndicates views so widely divergent from mine in matters affecting, as I think, the national welfare and honor, that I fear my power to serve you in business requiring the concurrence of that body is at an end.” The president refused Hay’s offer, seeing him as indispensable. They were, after all, fellows who came of age in the Lincoln years.
• • •
The White House had changed markedly since the Civil War. Upon reporting to the president for duty, Hay was surprised to find the bedroom that he formerly shared with George Nicolay now converted into a massive office, brimming with a dozen bright-eyed clerks. Nicolay’s old office had been converted into a telegraph room. Telephone lines crisscrossed the walls and ceilings. The president’s office, where Lincoln first presented his draft of the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to the cabinet, still looked much the same, but an electric chandelier had replaced the old gas fixtures.
Hay admired the president even before he took his place in the cabinet. Now he came to respect him. Regarded for many decades after his death as a stodgy conservative of limited abilities, McKinley has undergone a modest historical revision in recent years, as scholars have come to see in him the same strong, able executive and master politician that Hay detected during his tenure at State. The first president since Lincoln to expand the authority of his office, McKinley wielded power quietly but ably. “The President rules [his cabinet] with a hand of iron in a mitten of knitted wool,” Hay wrote to a friend. “It is delightful to see the air of gentle deference with which he asks us all our opinions, and then decides as seemeth unto him good. He is awfully like Lincoln in many respects.” In public, Hay declared that it “may well be doubted if in any century of the glorious future before us, there will ever appear two such sincere, high-minded, self-respecting lovers of the people as the last fifty years have shown us in Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley.” He was not just saying it for effect; he meant it. For his part, McKinley saw something invaluable in Hay’s pedigree. When the administration’s opponents attacked Hay, the president testily asked his staff why they did not reply, “Yes, he was trained under Abraham Lincoln.”
McKinley’s murder in 1901 deeply affected Hay. By a “strange and tragic fate,” three presidents in his day had been cut down by an assassin’s bullet. He had worked for two of them and turned down an invitation to work for the third. He knew them all intimately and counted them as friends. Chosen to deliver McKinley’s official memorial address before a joint session of Congress, Hay dwelled extensively on the straight line that ran between the martyred presidents. “The men who are living to-day and who were young in 1860 will never forget the glory and glamour that filled the earth and the sky when the long twilight of doubt and uncertainty was ending and the time of action had come,” he intoned. “A speech by Abraham Lincoln was an event not only of high moral significance, but of far-reaching importance; the drilling of a militia company by Ellsworth attracted national attention.” Invoking McKinley’s military service, Hay placed the late president in the generation of men whose hearts and minds were shaped by the experience of the Civil War. “He was a Republican,” he said of McKinley. “He could not be anything else. A Union soldier grafted upon a Clay Whig.” “There is not one of us but feels prouder of his native land because the august figure of Washington presided over its beginnings; no one but vows it a tenderer love because Lincoln poured out his blood for it; no one but must feel his devotion for his country renewed and kindled when he remembers how McKinley loved, revered, and served it.”
By all outward appearances, Hay established a warm and cordial relationship with the new president. “If the Presidency had come to you in any other way,” he told Roosevelt in September 1901, “no one would have congratulated you with better heart than I. My sincere affection for your father—would he could have lived to see you where you are!—would have been deeply gratified . . . With your youth, your ability, your health and strength, the courage God has given you to do right, there are no bounds to the good you can accomplish for your country and the name you will leave in its annals.”
In their personal correspondence, Hay alternated between addressing Roosevelt as “Theodore” and “Mr. President.” In his diary, quite probably meant for the prying eyes of historians, Hay spoke of him only as “the President.” The two men took care to keep in each other’s best graces. “I wonder if you realize how thankful I am to you for having stayed with me,” Roosevelt wrote to his secretary of state. “I owe you a great debt, old man.” In a fawning reply, Hay assured TR that it was “a comfort to work for a President who, besides being a lot of other things, happened to be born a gentleman.” “As Secretary of State, you stand alone,” Roosevelt said in all flattery. “It is hard for me to answer your kind letter,” Hay responded. “I know better than any one how far I am from deserving all that you say; but I am nonetheless proud and glad of your confidence.” Roosevelt’s accidental ascendance to the presidency made John Hay an essential anachronism. As one of the most economically conservative members of the cabinet, Hay gave cover to the president’s increasingly progressive domestic agenda. The wise elder statesman and senior member of the cabinet, he was indispensable to TR, who even today remains the youngest president ever to have occupied the White House. Hay played the part expertly, saluting the “young, gallant, able, brilliant president” before the Ohio Society of New York. The president responded, “Edith and I were saying last night that if I died we could wish that others would put on my tomb the words you spoke . . . [T]hey describe what I wish I were, not what I am; no one else has ever so spoken of me.”
Abraham Lincoln loomed large over the relationship between the president and his secretary of state. On summer vacation at his family’s estate at Oyster Bay, Long Island, Roosevelt breezed through all ten volumes of the Nicolay-Hay biography. He professed to have learned much and to have been humbled by the example of his predecessor. In 1904, as the president stood before the voters to earn his own term in office, Hay showed him the original copy of the now-famous “blind memo,” in which Lincoln pledged to cooperate with George McClellan in the event that the general should defeat him at the polls. “He was much impressed,” Hay noted, “and went on as he often does to compare Lincoln’s great trials with what he calls his little ones.” When Roosevelt was inaugurated in 1905 in his own right, Hay presented him with a ring. Inside the setting was a strand of hair “from the head of Abraham Lincoln. Dr. Taft cut it off the night of the assassination, and I got it from his son—a brief pedigree. Please wear it to-morrow; you are one of the men who most thoroughly understand and appreciate Lincoln. I have had your monogram and Lincoln’s engraved on the ring.” Roosevelt was “deeply moved” by the gesture. He likely had no idea that Hay had presented McKinley with his own Lincoln ring in 1896 and that in 1877 he had bestowed upon Rutherford B. Hayes a ring consisting of a lock of hair clipped from George Washington’s head. It was John Hay’s winning way with presidents-elect.
Roosevelt and Hay needed each other, but they were different men of entirely different generations. Theirs was in some measure a marriage of convenience. Privately, Hay groused that when “McKinley sent for me, he gave me all his time till we got through, but I always find T.R. engaged with a dozen other people, and it is an hour’s wait and a minute’s talk—and a certainty that there was no necessity of my coming at all.” Just three weeks after Hay’s death, Roosevelt told his friend Henry Cabot Lodge that Hay had not been a “great Secretary of State . . . He had a very ease-loving nature and a moral timidity which made him shrink from all that was rough in life and therefore from practical affairs. He was at his best at a dinner table or in a drawing room; and in neither place have I ever seen anyone’s best that was better than his.” But as “Secretary of State under me he accomplished little . . . In the Department of State his usefulness to me was almost exclusively the usefulness of a fine figurehead.” In later years, Roosevelt complained to Lodge that Hay had been too ill to serve effectively a
s America’s chief diplomat. “His name, his reputation, his staunch loyalty, all made him a real asset of the administration. But in actual work I had to do all the big things by myself, and the other things I always feared would be done badly or not done at all.”
It is true that Hay grew increasingly frail as his term in office wore on, but Roosevelt’s memory, which became more self-aggrandizing with time, did him a disservice. Certainly he felt that he needed Hay in 1904, when he beseeched his aging secretary of state to take to the hustings for one last canvass. In a highly reported speech delivered on the fiftieth anniversary of the Republican Party’s founding, Hay returned to the theme that he knew best and felt most intimately.
“The Republican party had a noble origin,” he said to much applause. “It sprang directly from an aroused and indignant national conscience. Questions of finance, of political economy, of orderly administration, passed out of sight for the moment, to be taken up and dealt with later on. But in 1854 the question that brought the thinking men together was whether there should be a limit to the aggression of slavery; and in 1861 solemn inquiry turned to one still more portentous, ‘Should the nation live or die?’” The party that was born five decades earlier forced a “discussion of the right and wrong of slavery . . . the light was let in, fatal to darkness. A system which degraded men, dishonored women, deprived little children of the sacred solace of home, was doomed from the hour it passed into the arena of free debate. And even if we shut our eyes to the moral aspects of that heartless system, and confined ourselves to its economic merits, it was found to be wasteful and inefficient.”