In December 1870, after his trip to Boston, one of Hay’s first editorials for the Tribune, entitled “The Western School,” saluted their common ground: “[T]here are many good and honest literary workmen who have grown up in the great West, not unmindful of its strange and striking lessons,” Hay pronounced, putting aside his earlier disdain for the “savagery” of his homeland. “Some of them, Howells among the best, have already given some earnest of the promising future. Others are just rising into notice.”
Like James Fields’s Saturday pride of literary lions, western writers were now a force to be reckoned with. One of the strongest, of course, was Mark Twain, whose acquaintance Hay and Howells had made the previous year—Howells when Twain had walked into the Atlantic office to thank the man who had written such a glowing review of Innocents Abroad; Hay at the Tribune office when the tall, shaggy-locked author with drooping mustache brought in a letter he wished printed in the paper. (Hay naturally obliged.) Twain, or Samuel Clemens, was about the same age as Hay (and Howells and Whitelaw Reid), and he was another who had gone through the war wielding a pen instead of a rifle.
One member of the Western School cut a wider swath than all the rest, and that was Bret Harte. Born in Albany, New York, in 1836, Harte had moved to California as a young man. In 1868, he became the founding editor of Overland Monthly, the Pacific’s first great literary journal. Harte’s short stories, “The Luck of Roaring Camp” and “Outcasts of Poker Flat,” brought him overnight acclaim, but it was his poem “Plain Language from Truthful James,” first published in the September 1870 issue of Overland Monthly, that made Harte’s name a household word.
He composed the poem in the vernacular of the western camps and outposts that he knew so well. He had meant it as a lampoon of the profane prejudice shown toward immigrants, particularly the Chinese in California. Low-handed and low-browed, “Truthful James” and his partner set out to cheat Ah Sin, a “heathen Chinee,” at cards, except that it is Ah Sin—“his smile it was pensive and childlike”—who winds up euchring the cheaters.
In his sleeves, which were long,
He had twenty-four jacks,—
Which was coming it strong,
Yet I state but the facts;
And we found on his nails, which were taper,
What is frequent in tapers,—that’s wax.
Most readers did not dwell upon Harte’s intended irony, in which native savvy is embarrassed by a new breed of newcomer, choosing instead to appreciate the poet’s stereotyping of Ah Sin and his drolly realistic depiction of yokels familiar to nearly all Americans but, heretofore, rarely given such mannered treatment in verse. It was the same respectful condescension, or condescending respect, that Twain would display so effectively in his novels, from Huckleberry Finn to Pudd’nhead Wilson. “Truthful James,” better known as “The Heathen Chinee,” was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers, memorized by thousands of its admirers, and illustrated endlessly. James Fields would soon offer Bret Harte an annual salary of $10,000 to write for his magazine, making Harte the highest paid author in the country.
John Hay, who himself spoke a word or two of vernacular, took a special interest in “Truthful James” and Harte’s other “dialect” poems. Along the Mississippi there proliferated characters known derisively as “Pikes,” named for their home counties—Pike County, Illinois, immediately south of Hay’s home county of Hancock, and Pike County, Missouri, just south of Twain’s Hannibal. The typical Pike, or Piker, was described as an “Anglo-Saxon relapsed into semi-barbarism . . . long, lathy, and sallow; he expectorates vehemently; he takes naturally to whiskey.” As the century progressed, Pike County men had wandered westward, joining the rush for gold and land and carrying with them their coarse reputations. In California, Bret Harte tapped the taxonomy for “Truthful James” and for many of his other poems and stories. Hay recognized the genus every bit as well and reckoned that if Harte could dash off a poem in “Plain Language,” he supposed he could, too.
“Little Breeches” appeared in the Tribune on November 19, 1870, shortly after Hay joined the paper and two months after “Truthful James” ran in Overland Monthly. In lilting couplets, it tells the story of a child lost in a blizzard after his father’s wagon bolts with the boy aboard. The poem, narrated by the father of Little Breeches, strikes the same half-earnest, instructional tone as Harte’s poems, and the pitch of the Pike dialect is dead true.
I come into town with some turnips,
And my little Gabe come along,—
No four-year-old in the county
Could beat him for pretty and strong,
Peart and chipper and sassy,
Always ready to swear and fight,—
And I’d larnt him to chaw terbacker
Just to keep his milk-teeth white.
When the search for the boy grows cold, his father “flopped down on my marrow-bones,/Crotch-deep in the snow and prayed.” Finally, with divine guidance, the child is found in a sheep shed, huddled safely among the lambs.
How did he git thar? Angels.
He could never have walked in that storm.
They jest scooped down and toted him
To whar it was safe and warm.
And I think that saving a little child,
And bringing him to his own,
Is a derned sight better business
Than loafing around The Throne.
“Little Breeches” was signed simply “J.H.,” but the poet’s identity spread quickly. “[L]et me thank you heartily for your Pike County view of special Providence,” James Fields wrote in early December. “The Lord smile on you for those verses; they are good and will do good.”
Within days the poem was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers. “That ridiculous rhyme of mine has had a ridiculous run,” Hay told Nicolay. He claimed not to be proud of it, yet he was pleased enough by its reception to try another piece of dialect. “Jim Bludso” appeared in the semi-weekly edition of the Tribune on January 6, 1871, again attributed to “J.H.” The voice is the same, breezy yet preachy, and the hero, Jim Bludso of the Mississippi steamboat Prairie Belle, is rough but right-minded.
He were n’t no saint,—them engineers
Is all pretty much alike,—
One wife in Natchez-under-the-Hill
And another one here, in Pike;
A keerless man in his talk was Jim,
And an awkward hand in a row,
But he never flunked, and he never lied,—
I reckon he never knowed how.
One night the Prairie Belle makes the mistake of racing a newer boat, pouring on steam—“With a nigger squat on her safety-valve,/And her furnace crammed, rosin and pine.” Disaster results, and Jim Bludso stands tall:
The fire bust out as she clared the bar,
And burnt a hole in the night,
And quick as a flash she turned, and made
For that willer-bank on the right.
There was runnin’ and cursin’, but Jim yelled out,
Over all the infernal roar,
“I’ll hold her nozzle agin the bank
Till the last galoot’s ashore.”
True to his word, Jim Bludso puts the boat on the bank, saves the passengers, and only he burns up with the Prairie Belle. As with “Little Breeches,” the ballad ends with a populist sermon:
He were n’t no saint,—but at jedgment
I’d run my chance with Jim,
’Longside of some pious gentlemen
That wouldn’t shook hands with him.
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.
One of the first to compliment Hay on “Jim Bludso” was Mark Twain. Though Twain’s letter is now lost, Hay’s reply makes clear that its praise came with a slight quibble from the former Mississippi River pilot. Twain pointed out, teasingly no doubt, that Jim Bludso ought to have b
een a pilot, not an engineer, to steer the ship to shore. Hay insisted that the poem was based on a true story and that the saviour of the Prairie Belle had indeed been an engineer. Still, he promised Twain he would revise Bludso’s job description, and he even proposed to Twain a change for his approval; but by then the poem was too popular to tinker with.
Most critics overlooked Hay’s gaffes of navigation and nomenclature and welcomed the poem as worthy and inspirational. The Courier-Journal of Louisville saw “a dash of Browning’s marrow and backbone” in Hay’s verse. “It has been many a day since our literature produced anything nearly so good as ‘Jim Bludso’ and ‘Little Breeches.’ . . . The vulgate is not strained. The sentiment is not stilted.” Hay’s own paper, the Tribune, was high-minded in its approbation: “These specimens of Western dialect . . . though couched in the boldest forms of the sylvan vernacular, have no expression of coarseness. . . . They are to be taken as the spontaneous expression of the spirit of the age, which, in its yeasty effervescence, is throwing off all falsities in order to fill the cup of refreshment with the pure elixir of life.”
Readers made the connection between Hay and Harte right off, and most believed there was ample room in the firmament for both stars. “Bret Harte and Col. John Hay sit at the very head of the list of dialect poetry makers,” proclaimed an unnamed devotee. “Their style, at once quaint and peculiar, has developed a new thought and awakened something more potent than mere evanescent popularity. A chord of the heart has been touched, and the most indifferent, imperturbed reader lays down the poems he has been reading in a frame of mind new to him. A sort of ‘gushing’ feeling passes over him, and he feels very much in the humour to grasp the first man he meets by the hand and vow eternal friendship for him forever, simply because he is human.”
Inevitably a few prudes chose to read Hay’s verse as blasphemy. “It is poor poetry, foolish argument, wretched logic, and shameful theology,” the Hartford Post said of “Little Breeches.” Little lost Gabe was deemed filthy and depraved, and his father a drunkard. As for Jim Bludso, he was nothing but a foul-mouthed bigamist. One pious reviewer declared Hay’s description of “loafing around the throne” a “prostitution of the mission of poetry. It is vulgar doggerel.”
Hay did not protest this appraisal and was astonished and slightly embarrassed by the continued attention the poems were receiving. “I am no poet—I make no claim whatever that way,” he confessed to Richard Henry Stoddard, whose own reputation as a poet was well established. “[P]eople who wouldn’t read you or Tennyson to save their lives read this and guffawed over it.” To John Bigelow, he dismissed the Pike County ballads as “a temporary disease of taste” and fretted good-naturedly that he would be “nothing but the ‘author of’ them henceforth, until people forget them.”
But they did not forget them quickly. The poems were printed over and over, read and read again, and the name of the author was no longer a secret. “After Bret Harte,” one critic declared, “John Hay has become more popular more suddenly than any writer of recent years.”
Reluctantly he squeezed out two more Pike County ballads, “Banty Tim” and “The Mystery of Gilgal,” which, while not nearly so clever, helped to appease his hungry readership. Magazines wanted anything else of his they could get their hands on. Harper’s Weekly had previously rejected “Kane and Abel,” a pat and predictable short story about twin brothers who live gaily in Paris until a can-can dancer comes between them. Before Harper’s could make another bid, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated grabbed up the tale, publishing it under the byline “John Hay, Author of ‘Little Breeches,’ ‘Jim Bludso,’ ‘Banty Tim,’ Etc.”
“Reputation is very convenient for a man doomed to write,” quipped one of Hay’s newfound admirers. “Having that, he has the passport to success.”
James R. Osgood, the Boston publisher, wrote Hay that he wanted his poems even more than Castilian Days, which he was then preparing for publication. He pulled together some of Hay’s more traditional verse, including “Sunrise in the Place de la Concorde,” his best Paris effort; “Northward,” written aboard ship returning from Florida during the war; and “On the Bluff,” set in Warsaw. Osgood hurried Pike County Ballads and Other Pieces into print in May 1871, shortly after publishing Bret Harte’s first book of poetry. The two were frequently reviewed in tandem, to the advantage of both. Castilian Days, meanwhile, was postponed until the fall.
Lecture bureaus wanted him, too. The esteemed Boston Lyceum Bureau, which represented the likes of Harte, Twain, Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, Horace Greeley, and Petroleum V. Nasby, contracted with Hay to reminisce on his years with Lincoln and to freshen up his talk on “The Progress of Democracy in Europe.” Audiences who came to hear the author of the famous dialect poems were pleasantly surprised that someone so young-looking could hold forth so intelligently on subjects so meaty. “His countenance is fresh and his cheeks are full, the youthfulness of his expression relieved only by a moustache,” a reporter in Rochester observed. “He is very fastidious in his dress, but not flashy. The impression he leaves upon hearers after talking to them for an hour is that they have been listening to a sensible, manly gentleman of superior ability and culture.”
On another evening, Hay delivered a “prose epic . . . illuminated by such vivid lights and deepened by such broad shadows as only a true artist can use in a masterpiece of word-painting.” After presenting “The Progress of Democracy in Europe” at Lincoln Hall in New York, he relented and recited “Banty Tim” for his audience, which responded with “vociferous and prolonged applause.”
WORD PAINTING FOR THE Tribune presented an entirely different challenge. The “Old Rookery” on Park Row, facing City Hall (and Boss Tweed’s bloated, yet-to-be-completed city courthouse), was a gritty calliope of chugging steam presses and clattering type forms, its five floors connected by a crude system of dumb waiters and speaking tubes. The editorial office was beyond disheveled. There were not enough places for the thirty or so writers and reporters, and as one veteran recalled, “There was scarcely a desk . . . that had not been for many years in a state of well-nigh hopeless decrepitude, and scarcely a chair with its full complement of original legs.” One of Hay’s colleagues, Isaac Bromley, is said to have implored of art critic Clarence Cook, “[A]re you through with that desk? If you are, scrape off the blood and feathers and let me come.” The room was thick with cigar smoke. Those who didn’t smoke chewed and spat on the floor.
Hay and the others on the editorial staff typically straggled into the office around midday and spent the afternoon reading newspapers, sorting through the wires, and gathering their thoughts. They would write into the evening, often not turning in their final copy until after midnight. “I manufacture public opinion until 2 in the morning,” Hay told John Bigelow, “and then I calm my agitated mind with a piece of pumpkin pie and go to bed. This is my daily life.”
Editorials in the Tribune were never signed, but Hay’s can be traced by way of his scrapbooks. His forte, naturally enough, was foreign affairs, and Reid encouraged him to become the paper’s voice on matters relating to England, France, Germany, Russia, and especially Spain and its ongoing difficulties in Cuba. Often Hay expressed some variation on his favorite theme, “The Progress of Democracy.”
Monarchies were in the midst of rapid, if stubborn, evolution, he maintained, and despite the corruption corroding American politics—sins that were laid bare in nearly every edition of the Tribune—the United States was still a sterling role model. “The leading liberal minds of the Old World clearly recognize that the American system of government is the nearest to perfection of all that have ever been evolved from the intelligence of man and the force of circumstance,” he averred. “We do not mean that they think of adopting our constitution and our organization in a lump, nor do we have the presumption to say that such action is desirable. But . . . [by] observing the nature, the method, and the result of our Democratic system, it may be possible [for other coun
tries] to settle upon some analogous form which may meet the requirements of those people of Europe who may desire to better their condition.” The message was idealistic, optimistic, and realistic—and within it grew the germ of a Hay philosophy on foreign relations.
For the most part, he steered clear of local politics. He took whacks at the Tweed Ring, but plenty of more experienced Tribune writers had their pens pointed at Tammany Hall full time. He contributed the occasional art review and obituary, and with increasing frequency, he expressed his frustration with Grant’s presidency. One especially sore point was the arbitration between the United States and Britain over violations of British neutrality during the Civil War—the so-called Alabama claims, named for one of the Confederate ships built in England that had destroyed or disrupted many millions of dollars in American shipping. Secretary of State Seward had wanted Britain to hand over Canada as indemnity—the greater design being to link the continental United States with Alaska, which Seward had bought from Russia in 1867. Grant and his secretary of state, Hamilton Fish, were not nearly so strident and saw the Alabama negotiations as a means to settle a number of other rankling issues, such as fishing rights and a disputed boundary. Hay took a stand closer to the middle but nonetheless cautioned the administration against forsaking “not only the interests but the dignity of the country, at the dictation of the English Ministry, and in obedience to a cowardly spirit of political expediency.”
Such criticism of the Grant administration was stout brimstone for a historically Republican paper. But by 1871, quite a few formerly staunch Republicans had grown dismayed with Grant and, in Hay’s words, “the corrupt cabal which has gained control of him.” During the past year, shady dealings by some of Grant’s cronies had doomed his bid to annex Santo Domingo. Worse, the president’s brother-in-law and wife had been implicated as accessories and beneficiaries in a brazen gambit to corner the country’s gold market—a scheme foiled by Grant at the eleventh hour but which nevertheless triggered a panic on Wall Street.
All the Great Prizes Page 17