All the Great Prizes

by John Taliaferro

  The main character in The Money-Makers is Archibald Hilliard, whose resemblance to Hay leaves nothing to guesswork: “He glanced in the mirror . . . and smiled complacently at his rosy cheeks, his clear hazel eyes, and graceful tawny mustache, falling in a golden sweep over the corners of his decisive mouth.” Raised in the West, Hilliard serves as an “elegant and refined” secretary to a senator in Washington, learning “to shine in the exclusive drawing-rooms of the capital,” followed by postings to several foreign legations. He finally lands a job as an editorial writer for the Atlas, a moralizing New York daily edited by Horatio Blackdaw—no mistaking Whitelaw Reid—who is in the midst of “solidifying his relations with the clique that controls the fortunes of this country, and before ten years he will own the ‘Atlas’ and use the executive chair in Washington as a footstool.”

  At the Atlas, Hilliard becomes a prima donna, writing brilliantly but only on subjects of his choosing, “to keep his hand in.” He makes a killing in railroad stock, trading on insider knowledge—an allusion to Crédit Mobilier or perhaps to Reid and Hay’s questionable relationship with the shady Jay Gould in New York—and is welcomed into the most exclusive literary and social circles, where he becomes a model of elegance and taste: “If he loved fine things, it was always remarked that he was well and properly placed when surrounded by them. He could put on a glove with such grace that women who saw him would have kissed his hand. He could present a gentleman to a lady with an ease that gave the man a peculiar standing and appreciation in the eyes of the lady.” And yet, “He still persisted, to those who rallied him on the waste of his genius, that he was a journalist and nothing else; that he hadn’t the imagination for fiction.”

  Inevitably, Hilliard is introduced to the daughter of Aaron Grimstone, a self-made railway and steel baron from Valedo, a once “slatternly hamlet” in the state of Appalachia now known for “nothing but business, no literary men, no artists, nothing but stocks, iron, corn, and money-making.” Grimstone is said to have amassed his fortune, estimated to be as much as $50 million, through “sharp practices”; his overriding ambition is to “round his millions out and make the sum so colossal that he can bear down rivalry by the mere weight of his wealth.” The mansion he builds for his family on Geometry (Euclid) Avenue is so garish that it is “a never-exhausted source of mirth” to Valedoans of lesser addresses.

  Before Hilliard meets daughter Eleanor, she is described to him as “not pretty,” with an “awkward” figure and large feet. Hilliard falls for her just the same, convincing himself that he is attracted by more than her father’s millions. “He was in no sense a vulgar fortune-seeker. He had reflected long and deeply on the seriousness of the marriage-contract. He preserved enough of the sentimentality of his boyhood to seek in his wife the companion of his heart, his aspirations, his better impulses. . . . But the more he saw her, the clearer her nature revealed itself, the more certainly he saw that she was not the ideal of his youth.”

  Eleanor, meanwhile, is thoroughly smitten by Hilliard. She sees him as “the ideal of her girlish dreams . . . a creature of poetic refinement.” “ ‘That’s just what I like,’ ” she confides, “ ‘a man whose brains give him rank, and yet who can outshine those who have only money or family to give them precedence.’ ”

  Hilliard finally coaxes his heart to catch up with his material appetites. “ ‘Gad! what beauty there is in her eyes!’ ” he tells himself. “ ‘She is really lovely, and I could form her. Millions in the scale would justify anything, even love: I could love her—I could love her—I will love her—I do love her—I will risk it!’ ”

  Yet, in The Money-Makers at least, the courtship comes to an impasse. Grimstone recognizes Hilliard’s dual impulse and tells him that if he marries Eleanor, he will disinherit her: “ ‘Millions may cover deficiencies as your wife; but as your wife, mark my words, she will never have them!’ ”

  To such needling, Hay may have been able to turn the other cheek, but The Money-Makers’ cruel characterization of Amasa Stone as Aaron Grimstone was beyond toleration. In place of the Ashtabula bridge, the author substitutes the Academy opera house, which collapses, killing three hundred people. Called before a grand jury, Grimstone acknowledges that he is the owner and hears testimony that his greed, parsimony, and alterations of the architectural drawings are to blame for the tragedy. The verdict breaks him: “A robust man of large stature, he was shrunken to mere flesh and bones. . . . [H]e, a Colossus among pygmies, lord of millions . . . was hated, and his humiliation gave the masses more joy than his early popularity.” In the final chapter, Grimstone retreats to his bathroom and shoots himself.

  Hay did not confront Henry Keenan directly. All he cared about was suppressing the book. He received a copy on February 2, 1885, and immediately wrote to the publisher William Appleton, whose advertisements were billing The Money-Makers “as an answer to the much-discussed ‘Bread-Winners.’ ” Hay made no mention of himself as a target of the book’s attack—nor did he concede that the depictions of him were in any way credible. Instead, he concentrated on the “savage libel” against Amasa Stone. “What the motive of this brutal vengeance can be I cannot imagine,” he told Appleton. “Mr. Keenan, I believe, never saw Mr. Stone in his life. He did know me, at one time, and my relations with him, I thought, were perfectly kindly.” Hay’s tone was civil but insistent. Something must be done immediately “lest this thing should come to the knowledge of Mrs. Stone and her daughters.” He did not threaten legal action, for fear it would draw more attention to the book. But he did request that Appleton cease advertising and offered to pay for any loss that the publisher might incur in letting the book fall into obscurity.

  Appleton responded contritely, allowing that the work was indeed “a malicious attack on Mr. Stone” and offering to do “whatever you may desire to repair the wrong we have so innocently committed.” He promised to cease advertising the book and to alter the death scene and the name of Geometry Avenue; but he chose not to change the name of Grimstone.

  Hay pressed the publisher no further but took measures to buy up every copy on sale in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities. He did not entirely succeed in quashing the first edition, but he kept the damage to a minimum. Still, it must have galled him to read in a Cleveland journal that The Money-Makers was “much better in all its parts” than The Bread-Winners. Whether Clara or her mother ever saw the ugly portrayal of Amasa Stone, he did not say. One thing is certain, however: never did he imagine when he sat down to write his little “social study” that, before it had run its course, Amasa Stone would fall on his sword and a jealous figure from the past would seize upon both occasions to pile insult upon injury.

  NOW MORE THAN EVER, he wanted out of Cleveland. “I eat, sleep, and perform all natural functions like the average Homo Americanus,” he wrote Dr. Mitchell in Philadelphia, but then complained, “I am ready to do anything, go anywhere, stay any length of time, with a fair chance of getting out of this moral fog I am in.” At the end of the summer, he and Nicolay took a trip, just the two of them, to Colorado to look at property in Manitou Springs, near Pike’s Peak. “I came away from Cleveland pretty wretched,” he wrote William Dean Howells from Colorado, “and am already a good deal better.” He and Nicolay did not find any land that suited them, but they vowed to continue looking.

  Henry Adams had a better idea: why didn’t the Hays move to Washington? In October, Adams alerted his friend that a developer was planning to build a six-story apartment building next door to the house that Adams and Clover rented at 16th and H streets, on Lafayette Square. Adams wanted to prevent the construction that would dwarf his house and disturb his peace; more than that, he wanted the Hays as neighbors.

  With Hay remaining in the background, Adams dickered with the developer, and by early December the lot was theirs for $75,000. The plan from the start was to build side-by-side houses. The Adamses, of more modest means, of more austere nature, and childless, did not require as much space as the H
ays and so paid one third of the price and took a proportionately smaller lot on H Street facing the square. The Hays, needing and desiring a much bigger house, paid the other two thirds and took the larger, more prominent lot on the corner of H and 16th. Fleetingly they entertained the possibility of finding space for Clarence King, but they knew they were only dreaming.

  It was agreed that each would build their own house but employ the same architect. Adams and Clover had in mind “a square brick box” with “no stain glass—no carving—no nothing,” small enough that “for extra furniture we shall need only two new corn brooms and a new ice cream freezer,” Clover announced. The Hays, accustomed to the extravagance of Euclid Avenue, wished to fit in with the Adamses and with the more staid vernacular of the capital, but they also desired and could afford something more elegant. Hay had Joseph Ireland, the architect of the Cleveland house, make a preliminary sketch. Adams and Clover preferred their dear friend H. H. Richardson.

  Richardson was at the zenith of his celebrated career, his beefy, monumental, neo-medieval style expressed in the stone and brick of courthouses, railway stations, libraries, Trinity Church in Boston, the State Capitol in Albany, and, most recently, the handsome house of Nicholas Anderson on K Street, a block from the Adamses’ address. In many ways, Richardson was ideally suited to satisfy his two newest clients. He was the antithesis of late Victorian frippery; yet all of his buildings conveyed a formalism that was stately in its understatement. Clover dubbed the Richardsonian aesthetic “Neo-Agnostic,” and soon they were all believers. They met with Richardson in Washington in January and again in March, when he presented a set of drawings that pleased everyone.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE MUCH to keep Hay away from Cleveland. While in Washington he received a telegram from Clarence King in London, urging him to come to England on a bachelor holiday. Hay sailed from New York on April 19, 1884. As usual, he felt better once he got away, afflicted by nothing more than homesickness for Clara. “God bless you & keep you till I take you to my arms again,” he wrote her from aboard the Britannic. “My mind and heart, the very pulses in my blood are full of you, my beauty and my love. I wish you were with me. How much gayer and brighter this journey would be with your dear face beside me.”

  The next two months were a pageant of dinners and teas and visits to galleries and artists’ studios. First off, he made appointments at his tailors in New Bond Street and Savile Row to be fitted for shirts, suits, overcoats, and a new top hat. He found King, as usual, on the brink of financial ruin, sustained by credit, bluff, and the kindness of friends. He spent time with Henry James and Constance Woolson, gossiping to Clara that “James tells me he has seen a good deal of Miss Woolson & evidently likes her on further acquaintance.” He hosted a breakfast for James, King, Bret Harte, James Russell Lowell, the foreign correspondent George Smalley, and the urbane young secretary of the American legation, Henry White. At a private showing at the Royal Academy, one of the paintings he particularly admired was a portrait of White’s wife by John Singer Sargent—a “beautiful, stylish . . . distinguished looking picture, splendidly painted.” He fell in with the English landscape painter Alfred Parsons and his American studio mate, Edwin Abbey. He bought several of Parsons’s pieces, and in mid-May, Hay, Parsons, Abbey, and King dashed across the Channel to Paris to take in the spring Salon. The spree finally came to an end, and Hay, replenished by the non-stop social excitement, returned to Cleveland in mid-June, where Clara, three months’ pregnant, greeted him with her large and grateful heart, as always.

  BY THE TIME HE arrived home, the presidential campaign was in full swing. Rather than allow Chester Arthur, the accidental incumbent, to top the ticket, Republicans nominated their tarnished but unbowed knight, James Blaine of Maine. The Democrats chose Grover Cleveland, who was barely known outside his home state of New York, where he had served one year as mayor of Buffalo and two as governor. Hay remained a steadfast Blaine man, although many of his fellow Republicans no longer trusted Blaine to carry the standard; these apostates earned the nickname “Mugwumps,” a made-up Indian word for a renegade tribe whose “mugs” were on one side of the fence, their “wumps” on the other.

  Hay had little patience with his friends—Adams among them—who favored Cleveland, and he could not bear the thought that, after five successive Republican presidents, a man whom he regarded as an obscure “rural sheriff” might unseat the party of Lincoln. “You know perfectly well that the Republican party contains, on the whole, the majority of the better sort,” he ranted to Richard Watson Gilder. “Do you think that if you put Cleveland under the microscope you would find him more faultless than the Maine man? . . . [B]etween Blaine and Cleveland, Blaine is the more civilized.”

  The campaign was hard-fought and nasty, the low point reached when Republicans publicized that the otherwise spotless Cleveland had fathered an illegitimate child. Still, enough voters forgave Cleveland and enough Mugwumps jumped the fence to tip the vote in his favor. Hay was bitterly disappointed. At the very moment he was ready to shed one Cleveland, he was now preparing to move to the neighborhood of another.

  The other blow that autumn was the death of Dr. Charles Hay, of heart disease. “He was 83 years old but so well and alive last spring that I felt sure he would live to be a hundred,” Hay told Adams. “He laughed and talked with visitors while he was dying, to avoid giving my mother pain. . . . She is 80 and cannot walk but has the spirit and wit of a young woman. What trick of breeding has made me the son of such people? I feel ashamed of myself, when I think what a poor devil I am.”

  Yet while losing a father, he gained a second son. Clarence Leonard Hay was born in Cleveland on December 19, 1884. “The Doctor scared the five wits out of me early in the evening,” he told Adams, “but subsequently behaved himself like a gentleman and presented me with a fine gaillard of a fellow, eleven pounds of him in the garb of Paradise.” The choice of name honored Clara, more so Clarence King.

  WITH A DEMOCRAT IN the White House, The Bread-Winners behind him, and his Washington house under construction, the time had come to bear down again on the Lincoln biography, which he had barely touched during the past year and a half. Nicolay, too, picked up the pace after his own spate of eye trouble.

  In January, Nicolay sent Robert Lincoln the chapters covering the first forty years of Lincoln’s life, all of them written by Hay. Although most of Hay’s account of this portion of Lincoln’s history was based on interviews conducted by Nicolay and on secondary sources, including Ward Hill Lamon’s warts-and-all biography, Hay assured Robert that he and Nicolay would still honor the original agreement to allow Robert to review the entire manuscript before publication. “I need not tell you,” Hay assured Robert, “that every line has been written in a spirit of reverence and regard. Still you may find here and there words or sentences which do not suit you. I write now to request that you will read with a pencil in your hand and strike out everything to which you object. I will adopt your view in all cases whether I agree with it or not.”

  Lincoln, once his term as secretary of war ended in March, had time to go over the manuscript with care. He took issue with Hay’s depiction of Thomas Lincoln, the president’s shiftless father: “It is beyond doubt that my departed grandfather was not an enterprising man & it is likely that your graphic assaults upon him . . . are not undeserved but I could not help feeling better if you would ‘let up’ on him a little in a final revision. He did not have much chance to prepare & pose in the reflection of his son’s fame & I feel sorry for him.”

  For the most part, though, Robert was delighted with Hay’s rendering of his father. Indeed, Hay had treated Lincoln with great sensitivity and adoration. Unlike Lamon (working with William Herndon’s material), Hay trod politely, almost apologetically, through the Lincoln genealogy, and of Lincoln’s aborted romance with Ann Rutledge, which had driven him to the brink of suicide, Hay mentioned merely that Lincoln was “profoundly affected by her death.”

  He did give a frank
account of Lincoln’s engagement and marriage to Mary Todd and of the uncertainty and depression it prompted: “The engagement was not in all respects a happy one, as both parties doubted their compatibility, and a heart so affectionate and a conscience so sensitive as Lincoln’s found material for exquisite self-torment in these conditions.” But then, after pointing out that “[t]his taint of constitutional sadness was not peculiar to Lincoln; it may be said to have been endemic among the early settlers of the West,” Hay discreetly drew the curtain on this sad but formative episode of Lincoln’s life: “It is as useless as it would be indelicate to seek to penetrate in detail the incidents and special causes which produced in his mind the darkness as of the valley of the shadow of death. There was probably nothing worth recording in them; we are only concerned with their effect upon a character which was to be hereafter for all time one of the possessions of the nation. It is enough for us to know that a great trouble came upon him, and that he bore it nobly after his kind.”

  Robert Lincoln, whose mother (now dead) had given him a full measure of torment and whose father’s tenderness he had received in small and intermittent doses, allowed this segment of the narrative to stand just as it was.

  Nicolay had been even more productive than Hay, carrying forward Lincoln’s life through the debates with Stephen Douglas, his nomination and election as president, to the outbreak of rebellion. After twenty years of preparation and postponement, the co-authors buckled down and wrote much of the remainder of the biography in less than two years, with Hay taking on nearly all the military chapters: Chancellorsville, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Petersburg, Chattanooga, Chickamauga, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, Jubal Early’s assault on Washington, Sherman’s March to the Sea, Sheridan in the Shenandoah, Farragut at Mobile Bay, the Monitor versus the Merrimac, and the campaigns in South Carolina and Florida.