The pending appointment of William Robertson as collector of customs for the port of New York was seen as nothing less than a toe-to-toe duel between Senator Conkling and President Garfield, with well-armed seconds lobbing taunts and huzzahs at the two combatants. At stake was control of the Republican Party. “I wish to say to the President that in my judgment this is the turning point of his whole Administration,” Whitelaw Reid wrote to Hay before the latter left Washington. “If he surrenders now, Conkling is President for the rest of his term and Garfield becomes a laughing stock. . . . [T]here is no safe or honorable way out now but to go straight on. . . . The least wavering would be fatal.”
Conkling was playing for keeps as well. Since the election, he had not let Chester Arthur out of his sight, rooming with him in Washington, paying for his meals, and plotting with him over patronage. Arthur’s loyalty was hardly a secret; he might be Garfield’s vice president, but he was Roscoe Conkling’s lackey. Also under Conkling’s sway was New York’s newly elected junior senator, Thomas Platt, who would soon wear the spiteful nickname “Me-Too.” Together they figured to exert plenty of influence in the Senate to block Robertson and humiliate the president.
Garfield had his own guardian in Secretary of State Blaine, who made a point to be at the president’s side on the occasions the vice president was permitted in the White House. A majority of the newspapers in the country were rooting for Garfield, too, though none more vociferously than the Tribune.
If Conkling thought that the Tribune would modulate its attack during Reid’s absence, he was sorely mistaken. Hay took up the cudgel against the bully senator with righteous ferocity. “Well, which did the Republican voters decide to trust, and pledge themselves to uphold, Roscoe Conkling or James A. Garfield?” he asked on May 4. “Is it not the business of Republican voters to see that their Senators, in their chronic hunger for patronage and power which has become the curse of political life, do not rob a President of his chances of usefulness? It seems that the issue is joined. If the people want government by Senatorial bosses, let them countenance by their silence the attempt of Senators to usurp a power which does not belong to them.”
The editorial was unsigned, but anyone who knew Hay’s “Balance Sheet” speech recognized the rhetoric: “Have the people lost all that they shouted for, has the Republican party found its fruits of victory turn to Dead sea apples . . . ?”
From then on, the salvos were unrelenting. In an exchange of letters that Hay later tried to have expunged from official files, he and Garfield shared their thoughts on the most effective way to vanquish Conkling. “Give me a line when you can and it shall be my marching orders,” Hay beseeched the president, to which Garfield responded, “You are handling the work with admirable force & discretion. . . . Shall be glad to hear from you at any time.”
All the while, Reid followed the Tribune’s coverage from Europe and encouraged Hay to keep the heat on Conkling. Hay dutifully obliged. On May 14, the Tribune was downright brutal: Conkling was no better than “a patriot of the flesh-pots.” His statesmanship was that of “the feed-trough.” And there was not the slightest evidence that “his soul has ever risen above pap and patronage.”
Around this time, John Russell Young and Henry Watterson, two newspapermen who had known Hay since the Civil War, paid a visit to the Tribune office and were surprised by the transformation that had come over their easygoing friend. “We found little joyousness about him,” Young recalled. “It was a time of political sensitiveness, Republicans at war, the battle fought as the English fight in the Soudan—no prisoners, no quarter. Hay entered into the business with Highland gravity and courage. . . . [He] actually believed in the sincerity of the conflict, and that there were real issues, that it was something more than the mere politicians’ brawl. The Tribune was never so fierce even in Mr. Greeley’s masterful days. The rule of the paper under Reid was that of whips, with Mr. Hay it was that of scorpions.”
Throughout the spring, Conkling, Arthur, and Platt continued their efforts to stymie the appointment of William Robertson. When their schemes fell short and it became apparent that Robertson would be approved, Conkling resorted to the most desperate of acts: on May 16 he gave up his seat in the Senate, and Me-Too Platt did the same. Their tactic, extreme as it seemed, was to withdraw just long enough for the New York legislature to reelect them; emboldened by a fresh grip on the New York machine, they figured to return to Washington and settle the score with Garfield. Immediately upon resigning, Conkling and Platt decamped for Albany to set the scheme in motion.
Conkling’s adversaries were shocked, elated—and cynical. “There is certainly not a statesman in America who excels our Senator in getting into quarrels without cause and out of them without dignity,” clucked the Tribune’s lead editorial of May 17. Bearing the telltale erudition of Hay, the column compared Conkling and Platt to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and their resignation to a French farce in which a man leaves his mistress in a rage but makes sure to leave behind his umbrella “as a pretext for return and a means of reconciliation.”
Two days after the senators’ exit, their erstwhile colleagues approved Robertson as New York customs collector. The reinstatement of Conkling and Platt was not so readily accomplished. For the rest of the month and throughout June, the New York legislature voted time and again without achieving the requisite majority to affirm Conkling, Platt, or any of the other contenders who dared to crowd the ballot. With each round, in fact, Conkling and Platt’s popularity sank lower.
“Roscoe is finished,” Hay wrote to Reid. “That Olympian brow will never again garner up the thunders of yore.” Reid was thrilled by the turn of events and Hay’s role in them. “You’ve made a splendid paper of it—strong, wise, aggressive, a leader & an inspiration,” he wrote from Paris. “If Conk is ruined—as I firmly believe—it is largely your tomahawk that has let out the worthless life.”
The ax fell not in a way anyone expected, and Conkling’s head was not the first to fall. On June 30, a group of Platt’s more dastardly detractors followed him to an Albany hotel room and observed him having sex with a woman not his wife. The next day he officially withdrew his candidacy for the Senate.
MEANWHILE, A DIFFERENT SORT of stalker was afoot in Washington. Charles Guiteau, a thirty-nine-year-old former lawyer, debt collector, and peddler of religious tracts, had spent the past year hanging around Republican offices, first hoping to help out in the campaign, next angling for a place in the administration. He was a Grant Stalwart early on, but after Garfield won the nomination, he shifted his attention, if not his wholehearted allegiance, to the party’s new standard-bearer. As a calling card, Guiteau brandished a copy of a speech he had initially written (but never given) on behalf of Grant but then had edited to advocate Garfield. By incessant loitering and pestering, in New York and Washington, he managed to introduce himself to Conkling and Arthur and even achieved a brief interview with Garfield in the White House.
Guiteau followed the nasty fracas between Garfield and Conkling fanatically, and, ever a Stalwart, objected to many of Garfield’s choices, from Blaine as secretary of state to Robertson as customs collector. His disapproval, though, did not keep him from continuing to pursue a slice of patronage for himself. He would prefer a consulship in Vienna—better yet, Paris. Such was his obsession, such was his delusion, that he believed he was a presentable candidate, despite his shabby dress and even shabbier portfolio. He took to hounding Blaine, and it is quite possible that on one or more of his many visits to the State Department in March and April he encountered Assistant Secretary Hay, who remained on the job after the inauguration until his successor was approved.
Finally Blaine had stood enough, and on May 14 he snapped at Guiteau, “Never speak to me again on the subject of the Paris consulship!” This occurred two days before Conkling and Platt resigned, and shortly thereafter a bruised, vengeful, and clearly deranged Guiteau reached the conclusion that the only way he was ever going to right the party’s and the nation’s political wrongs and gain the attention he had been so desperately seeking would be to shoot the president.
On Saturday morning, July 2, Garfield and Blaine took a carriage from the White House to the Baltimore & Potomac Depot, from which the president was to embark on a two-week vacation. Waiting at the station were several of his cabinet members, including Secretary of War Robert Lincoln. None seemed to notice as Guiteau approached, raised a .44-caliber English Bulldog revolver, and shot the president from behind, hitting him once in the upper arm and once in the lower back. Garfield cried out and fell to the floor. Collared immediately, Guiteau blurted: “I did it. I will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart and Arthur will be President.”
THE NEXT DAY’S TRIBUNE gave a full account of the shooting and reported that the president was resting comfortably in the White House with a good chance of recovery. The lead editorial, perhaps not written by Hay but surely an accurate reflection of his thoughts, drew the obvious connections to Lincoln, by name, and to Conkling, by inference: “A second President lies stricken down by assassination. President Lincoln was murdered, not by the rebellion, but by the spirit which gave rebellion life and force. President Garfield has been shot down, not by a political faction, but by the spirit which political faction has begotten and nursed.”
Acknowledging that Guiteau might be considered insane, the Tribune asked, “Yet did not men call Booth a madman? Both were sane enough in all the ordinary walks of life . . . and both were sane enough to prepare . . . for a deed toward which they were moved by a spirit shared by many others.”
Now came the Tribune’s indictment: “Do the leaders of faction ever intend all the mischief which grows from the wild and desperate spirit which they create, feed and stimulate, week after week? Is it not their constant crime against self-government that, by kindling such a spirit, they send weak or restless men beyond the bounds of right or reason? The assassin, it seems, was not ignorant that he was trying to kill one President and to make another. . . . As ‘a Stalwart of the Stalwarts,’ his passion was intense enough to do the thing which other reckless men had wished were done. So the assassin Booth put into a bloody deed the malignant spite of thousands of beaten rebels. His deed stands in history as the cap-sheaf of the rebellion: So the spirit of faction which fired the shots of yesterday gave in that act the most complete revelation of its real character.”
The newspaper’s vehemence was to be expected, although in this instance the Tribune stopped short of naming Roscoe Conkling and Chester Arthur outright. “It is almost impossible to keep from being savage,” Hay confessed to Reid. “I have put the muzzle on editorial writers [William] Grosvenor and [Joseph Bucklin] Bishop and myself and I think we are pretty decent. I know, and everybody thinks, that Conkling is fighting for time . . . solely in the hope that Garfield may die. . . . I know this, and yet it is too vile to print and I will not print it.”
On July 4, however, Hay wrote an editorial that gave little quarter. It began with a tribute to the fallen Garfield, “the people’s President,” whose “good-natured firmness” had won the respect of the public and stirred “the dread of what may come after him if the ‘Stalwart’ bullet proves to have done its work effectively.”
Hay no longer resisted pinning a proper name to this dread: “Arthur is a gentleman of many accomplishments and many amiable and engaging qualities. He is represented to us by those who know him well as one of the most upright of citizens, one of the most loyal and devoted friends. It is precisely here that the public mind finds its cause of doubt and apprehension. It is feared that he is more devoted to his friends than to the public welfare; that he can see nothing but good in them, and nothing but evil in their opponents. If this be true, and if the grief of misfortune is in store for us of losing the noble, enlightened, placable and generous ruler whom we chose in joy and hope last year, then the bitterness of the present sorrow and the weight of the present anxiety will be as nothing to what we shall have to endure in the four troubled years which are to come.”
Nor did the Tribune spare Conkling, who, after the assassination, sequestered himself in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. The New York legislature had yet to elect new senators, and the thought of Conkling returning to Washington, with or without Arthur as president, was unthinkable to those who had toiled so doggedly to keep him at bay. “It can do no good, but will do great harm, to represent that nobody has been to blame, and that one fanatical Stalwart is the only person in all this land who has done anything wrong,” the Tribune advised. “[T]he world knows that Mr. Conkling has done everything in his power to destroy the character of the brave and true statesman who lies at the door of death . . . and has spared no pains to make the people believe that the Republican party was being ruined, and the Republic itself was being endangered, solely by the bad conduct and bad faith of the President.”
Sympathy for Garfield and the merciless excoriation of Conkling by the Tribune and numerous other papers, including the New York Times, had their effect on New York legislators, who, on July 22, on the fifty-sixth ballot, awarded Conkling’s former seat to a mild-mannered congressman from Canandaigua, Elbridge Lapham. Conkling at last had been routed. Three weeks later, Hay wrote to Reid, “It is perfectly amazing to see how utterly Conkling is forgotten for the moment. Of course he will come up again, but for the present, he simply is not.”
President Garfield, meanwhile, hung on, and each day’s Tribune reported faithfully on his condition, which was alternately hopeful and grievous throughout the summer.
During the vigil, Hay’s thoughts naturally turned to Robert Lincoln, with whom he had shared the long evening of April 14, 1865. Two days after the attack on Garfield, he had wired his friend: “Please send me what you can. We are living on telegrams.” Hay was playing the diligent newspaperman, but he was also acting on a more intimate impulse: the shooting of a president in Washington had struck a common nerve. In the weeks that followed, he and Lincoln kept in touch, as Garfield gained and then worsened. “I wish I felt better about the President,” Lincoln wrote Hay in late July. “He is an awfully wounded man.”
Doctors never succeeded in finding the bullet in Garfield’s back, and their unsanitary probing of the wound assured only lethal infection. On September 5, Garfield was moved from the White House to a cottage on the New Jersey shore, where it was believed the sea air might be more salubrious. On the nineteenth, exhausted by a long season on the ramparts of the Tribune, Hay set out for Cleveland to spend a few days with Clara and the children. “I go West tonight,” he wrote Garfield’s private secretary. “I hope and pray good news will follow me.”
It did not: shortly after ten o’clock, as Hay’s train rolled across New York State, joining the Lake Shore line west of Buffalo, Garfield fell back on his pillow and died, eighty days after Charles Guiteau had kept him from boarding the train that would have taken him on his own justly deserved vacation.
Upon learning of Garfield’s death, Hay hurried back to New York, then returned to Cleveland a week later to join the assembly of dignitaries at Garfield’s burial in Lake View Cemetery. Secretary of State Blaine and his wife stayed with Hay and Clara, while Robert Lincoln and his wife were next door with the Stones.
When the last guest had left, Hay took to his bed, physically and emotionally drained. On Garfield he had already said his piece in a letter to Reid: “[S]o brave and good and generous—how much eloquence, good cheer, poetry and kindness, how much capacity for work and enjoyment, extinguished by a hound too vile for anger to regard. . . . [T]he dismal prospect of Garfield’s death and Arthur’s accession takes all the heart for political work out of me.”
For the rest of the fall Hay kept watch over the Tribune, counting the days of his “interim-ity,” until Reid’s homecoming, now anticipated for November.
CLARENCE KING WAS IN New York that fall, and he and Hay dined together regularly at the Union League Club. After leaving the Geological Survey, King had thrust himself into a series of mining ventures in Mexico, Arizona, and California, vouching for their potential, managing their erratic production, and drumming up investors; Hay invested in at least one. King’s proven expertise and contagious energy left little doubt that he would soon be a very wealthy man. For the time being, at least, he was able to pay most of his bills.
Clara came to New York at the end of October, coinciding with Henry and Clover Adams, who were en route to Washington after a summer at Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. The reunion was all very gay. The Adamses stayed four days at the Brevoort House, which was also King’s hotel. Two nights in a row they all dined at Delmonico’s, the ephemerally flush King picking up the tab for one of the meals. Afterward, they went to the theater, an opéra bouffe, Les noces d’Olivette, and Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan’s latest.
At some point, perhaps at one of the bibulous dinners at Delmonico’s, Hay and King pressed Adams on his authorship of Democracy. By now they were already fairly sure that he had written it, although Adams continued to wink his denial. After holding his feet to the fire, the others knew for certain. To seal the conspiracy and to toast their incomparable friendship, they made up a name for their merry band: “the Five of Hearts.”
A few days later, Hay ordered stationery printed with a simple monogram of a five-of-hearts playing card in the upper left corner. He sent several sheets to Adams for use as “the official correspondence of The Club.” King later had a tea service made with a five-of-hearts motif; on the pot was painted a clockface with the hands set at five, the hour that Clover served tea. The service was seldom used, never so much as the stationery, and rarely were all the cups filled at once. Indeed, their collective correspondence indicates that, after their rendezvous in New York, all five Hearts were assembled in the same room perhaps no more than a half-dozen times—a poverty of attendance that did nothing to diminish the value of their relationship.
In some ways, actually, it was easier for them to be apart. As the friendship between Hay and Adams grew, a little distance allowed them to express feelings that were only implied when they were in each other’s company; and for the peripatetic King, his absences allowed him to indulge his exotic appetites, not just for wild places but, as Hay and Adams only remotely understood, for women whom King was not anxious to introduce to his fellow Hearts. Their correspondence became a tender, slightly lopsided triangle of reinforcement and empathy: in their letters, Hay and Adams talked about King; when they wrote to King, they talked to him about each other. It was an oblique form of intimacy, but it was honest and unequivocal, and it worked.
Of the three, King was the most magnetic, although he was in no way the charge that fused the Hearts. He did precious little to bring them together and for months at a time was lost to them entirely. Yet he was not the odd man out, either. It was his desire for closeness and unity, separate from his ability to achieve it, which bound the five together. The other four were forever urging him to marry, settle down, and live more as they did. But he bridled always. For him, the point was for the others to be as they were so that he didn’t have to. Through the Hays and Adamses, he achieved a vicarious, intermittent, unclaustrophobic normalcy. Meanwhile, the two married men found something between escape and fulfillment in their appreciation of their elusive Proteus. “[T]he men worshipped not so much their friend,” Adams explained, “as the ideal American they all wanted to be.”
Adams had first met King a decade earlier in Colorado and had been instantly taken with his virtuosity. “He knew more than Adams did,” Adams wrote in his quirky autobiography, in which he always referred to himself in the third person. “[King] knew more . . . of art and poetry; he knew America, especially west of the hundredth meridian, better than anyone; he knew the professor by heart, and he knew the Congressman better than he did the professor. He knew even women; even the American woman; even the New York woman, which is saying much.”
Hay was similarly dazzled. “It was hard to remember,” he was to write after King’s death, “that this polished trifler, this exquisite wit, who diffused over every conversation in which he was engaged an iridescent mist of epigram and persiflage, was one of the greatest savants of his time.”
No one recognized the effect that King had on Adams and Hay better than Clover. In one of her frequent letters to her father, she observed, “I never knew such fanatic adoration could exist in this practical age.”
HAY DID NOT NEGLECT his other friends during his final weeks at the Tribune. In September, William Dean Howells volunteered to review Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, a novel Howells had edited. Twain’s history with the paper was checkered at best. After Roughing It and The Gilded Age had received less than worshipful attention, he damned Whitelaw Reid as a “contemptible cur” and threatened to write a vengeful, “dynamitic” biography of him. Twain and Howells decided to take advantage of Reid’s absence when they proposed the review to Hay, three months before the book’s publication. Hay didn’t mind obliging two authors he greatly admired, but he was politic enough to alert Reid of his intention. “I took into account your disapproval of Mark in general and your friendship for Howells—and decided for the benefit of The Tribune,” he advised the honeymooning editor. “If it does not please you—wait for his next book and get Bret Harte to review it. That will be a masterpiece of the skinner’s art.”
Reid was grouchily acquiescent. “As to Twain,” he wrote Hay from Vienna, “it isn’t good journalism to let a warm personal friend [Howells] . . . write a critical review of him in a paper wh[ich] has good reason to think little of his delicacy & highly of his greed. So, if you haven’t printed it yet, I w[ou]ld think of this point before doing so. If you have, there’s no harm done.”
The review, which ran on October 25, was long, laudatory, and unsigned. Howells praised Twain’s “Cervantean” humor and “poetic delicacy.” The Prince and the Pauper was both a “satire on monarchy” and “a manual of republicanism . . . airy and flawless . . . so solidly good and wholesome in effect that one wishes it might have happened.” In return for the Tribune’s kindness, Twain abandoned the biographical bomb he had intended for Reid.
HAY USED THE TRIBUNE to help out one more writer that fall. Thirty-eight-year-old Henry James was by then thoroughly established; his previous novels, The Bostonians, The Europeans, Washington Square, and especially the short story “Daisy Miller,” had won widespread public favor, if not yet resounding critical or financial success. He had high hopes for his new novel, The Portrait of a Lady, the story of Isabel Archer, an American woman who moves to Europe to establish her independence, only to be tricked into a loveless marriage. To James’s consternation, however, the early reviews, particularly those from England, were lukewarm. The Portrait of a Lady, they averred, had no faith, “no heart,” no proper ending.
The book was published in the United States on November 16, a week before Hay was to be released from a “summer” of stewardship that had lasted more than seven months. He was back in Cleveland by the first of December, but he did not forsake Henry James. Ignoring Whitelaw Reid’s admonishment against reviewing the work of friends, he composed a thorough and thoughtful defense of Portrait. “It is a remarkable book . . . perfectly done,” he wrote Reid, enclosing his review.
Hay applauded James’s manner of drawing his characters “entirely from the outside.” Any “vagueness of our acquaintance with Miss Archer,” he declared, was in fact what made the novel so engaging. “[A]fter all, when we lay the book down, we cannot deny, if we are candid, that we know as much of the motives which induced her to refuse two gallant gentlemen and to marry a selfish and soulless scoundrel as we do of the impulses which lead our sisters and cousins to similar results.”
With The Portrait of a Lady, Hay attested, James had matured to his full potential. “Of the importance of this volume there can be no question,” he wrote in conclusion. “It will certainly remain one of the notable books of the time. It is properly to be compared, not with the light and ephemeral literature of amusement, but with the gravest and most serious works of imagination which have been devoted to the study of the social conditions of the age and the moral aspects of our civilization.”
Reid made no protest, and Hay’s review was published in the Tribune on Christmas Day. It was not the first nor by any means the only appreciative notice to appear in the American press. Most likely the book would have done well had Hay never given it his blessing; in the first month, it sold a respectable three thousand copies. Yet Hay’s recognition of the momentousness of The Portrait of a Lady meant a great deal. Henry James, post-Portrait, would join a pantheon of American fiction writers that included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and Hay’s announcement helped make it so. The novel is not simply “one of the notable books of the time,” but stands today as one of the most brilliant literary achievements of any time or country. That Hay recognized this and had the confidence to say so is a testimony to his own literary acuity and his appreciation of a new group of writers who were at work refining the art form—Howells, Twain, Adams with Democracy, and the new master, Henry James. Within a year, Hay would submit his own contribution to the canon, The Bread-Winners, an anonymous novel he subtitled “A Social Study.”
FIRST, THOUGH, HE PLEDGED to Nicolay that he would bear down on Lincoln. He wrote diligently until March 1882, when, inevitably, his health gave out. This time it was diphtheria, and this time he planned a convalescence even lengthier than his Rest Cure of 1878. The previous fall, Clara’s sister, Flora, had married Samuel Mather, heir to an iron-mining fortune, and a man with a good head for business, and Clara at last felt comfortable leaving her aging parents for an extended vacation. They booked passage to Europe in July. The plan was to deposit the children with their nurse “at some warm sand” on the Mediterranean while Hay and Clara wandered afield, after which the whole family would pass the winter in the South of France. “I never promised myself that much of a spree in my life,” Hay told Howells, who, he was delighted to learn, was to be in Europe for the summer as well. They also hoped to see Clarence King, who was somewhere in England or on the Continent, ostensibly to drum up investors for his mines.
In the meantime, Hay consulted a variety of doctors who “pounded and sampled” him. His newest complaint was heart palpitations, for which he was prescribed digitalis. Finally he was able to finish the seventeen chapters he had agreed to write on Lincoln’s early years. He promised Nicolay that he would continue writing in Europe, but to Howells he confessed that the notes he was taking in his trunk would more likely serve as “ballast.”
There was another reason that his work on Lincoln slowed. Sometime that winter or spring he started writing The Bread-Winners, and, once he began, he could not let go. He finished the manuscript in June and sent it to Richard Watson Gilder, editor of Century Magazine, who pronounced it “a powerful book.” It is not clear whether Hay was offering the manuscript to Gilder for publication at this point or merely seeking criticism. In his response to Hay, Gilder made no formal bid, but he had good reason to curry favor. He knew that Hay and Nicolay were at work on the Lincoln biography, and he very much wanted to excerpt it in the Century.
Besides Gilder and members of the Hay family, the only other person who possibly knew about The Bread-Winners was Adams; that, anyway, is the inference of a letter Hay wrote to his fellow Heart in early June. Hay attached a newspaper clipping that declared him, Hay, the author of Democracy, and, feigning injury at the misplaced attribution, complained to Adams, “First, if people get into their heads that I wrote ‘Democracy,’ they will require of me a glitter of style and lofty tone of philosophical satire far beyond me . . . or else they will say of me, ‘Did it once, can’t do it twice.’ ”
THE HAY FAMILY LANDED at Liverpool on July 24. “The children have stood the trip beautifully,” reported Clara, who was no great veteran of sea travel herself. The nurse, whose name was Reade, was English and the happiest of all to be ashore. Leaving the children with her at St. Leonards-on-the-Sea, in Sussex, Hay and Clara went up to London. At a dinner at the house of the American minister, the poet James Russell Lowell, Hay was seated between Henry James and Robert Browning. Next they were off to Scotland as the guests of Adams’s dear friends Sir John and Lady Clark, whose estate, Tillypronie, commanded a magnificent view of the rolling hills and lush moors of Aberdeenshire. Both Hay and Clara were so smitten by the “purple glory of the heather” that after three weeks in Scotland, “the beauty and verdure of the Lowlands seemed commonplace.”
Back in London, Hay found the atmosphere no less heady. “I assisted last night at the most remarkable gathering of vagrant poets I ever saw collected at one table,” he told Samuel Mather. Henry James was on hand. Bret Harte came down from Glasgow. Clarence King arrived mercurially. Howells was also in town, as were Edwin Booth, the venerated Shakespearean actor and brother of Lincoln’s assassin; the American abolitionist Moncure D. Conway; and Charles Dudley Warner, the Hartford newspaper editor who co-wrote The Gilded Age with Mark Twain. The dinner was hosted by yet another American sojourner, James Osgood, the book publisher and owner of the Atlantic Monthly. Hay called the gathering “so improbable that a bet of a million to one against it ever happening would be a good bet.”
As for bets, guessing the authorship of Democracy was one of the liveliest games in London that summer. Hay sent Adams a sixpenny edition he had bought at a train station. The book was selling “by the thousands,” he told its clandestine author. “I think of writing a novel in a hurry and printing it as by the author of ‘Democracy.’ Have you any objection?” Adams responded with equal facetiousness, encouraging Hay to “repudiate for me and my wife all share or parcel in the authorship” and to take credit for himself. “I expect to see you a lion in British society . . . and your portrait by [Edward] Burnes-Jones at Grosvenor Gallery, with ‘Democracy’ under your arm.” (The prank was too droll to resist; later Clover Adams took a formal photograph of Hay holding a copy of the French edition of the book, Démocratie.)
At some point that summer, Hay showed the completed manuscript of The Bread-Winners to Howells, who in turn recommended it to Thomas Aldrich, the new editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Aldrich offered to serialize the book “unsight and unseen,” Howells informed Hay, but only on the condition that it bear Hay’s name. This Hay would not do. He wrote again to Richard Watson Gilder at Century, who cheerfully agreed to honor Hay’s anonymity and offered $2,500 for the serial rights.
Before leaving England, Hay and Clara paid a visit to two more of Adams’s friends, Sir Robert and Lady Cunliffe, at their country estate in Wales. Like the Clarks in Scotland, the Cunliffes would become lifelong favorites. Sir Robert, in addition to being a baronet, was a member of the House of Commons, and he generously provided Hay entree to the inner circles of British politics. For Clara, the hospitality shown by the Clarks and Cunliffes provided an invaluable primer in English customs. Her letters to Flora and her mother chronicled the smallest details of table and service: “The breads & muffins were at the four corners, the butter on each side. In the centre of the table was a revolving porcelain tray with jams of two kinds and two cream jugs”—and so on.
The family passed the rest of the fall in Paris, where they were again pleased to have the company of King, who had taken to Europe, and the Europeans to him, as if he had lived there all his life, when in fact this was his first trip outside North America. “Do you think you know the aforesaid King,” Hay wrote Adams. “The revised edition bears little likeness—though it is equally loveable. . . . He is run after by princes, dukes and millionaires, whom he treats with amiable disdain. He never answers a letter and never keeps an engagement, and nobody resents it.”
In Paris they were glad to meet up with a fellow Clevelander, Constance Fenimore Woolson, who was an aunt of Samuel Mather and a distant relative of James Fenimore Cooper. She was also a somewhat frustrated friend of Henry James and an accomplished author in her own right. Her short stories appeared frequently in Harper’s; her first novel, Anne, a mystery set in the Great Lakes, had been published earlier in the year.
Hay and Clara introduced Woolson to King, who scarcely gave her the time of day. She, on the other hand, adored King at first sight. She promptly ordered a copy of his Mountaineering and was charmed all the more. After her time with Hay and King, she became convinced that they were the authors of Democracy. “They wrote it together,” Woolson proclaimed to Clara. “In this way they escape direct falsehood. They wrote it during that first winter of Col. Hay’s residence in Washington when you were not with him. Voilà.”
While in France, Hay also had the good fortune to meet one of the greatest writers of the age. Bearing a letter of introduction from Henry James, he pressed a call upon the ailing Ivan Turgenev, who was living out the final year of his life in Bougival, just outside Paris. “I never saw a great man so kind and simple,” Hay reported to James. “It fills one with a brute rage to see the mighty and gentle soul crippled by disease when thousands of people need his work.”
Hay was still quite anxious about his own health. His complaints included “dizziness, deep depression towards evening, a sense of uncertainty in my gait, irregular pulse after any muscular effort—over all the invincible sense of something worse waiting just around the corner.” In Paris, he put himself in the care of Jean-Martin Charcot, the preeminent neurologist in Europe—“the Napoleon of neuroses.” Charcot diagnosed “Neurasthenia Céphalique”—nervousness of the head—and prescribed the customary treatment for most ailments, a regimen of douche baths. When the treatment brought no improvement, Hay consulted another doctor, who suggested he might just as well continue the baths somewhere sunnier. By Christmas the entire family was installed at the Hôtel Beau Site in Cannes.
The three children adapted well to hotel life and the periodic absences of their parents. Helen, nearly eight, was petite and pretty and already an avid reader and writer of rhymes—“quite reasonable and thoughtful for her years,” according to her proud father, whom she took after most closely. Six-year-old Adelbert, or Del, as he was called, was another story. Big-boned and dark-browed, he looked more like his mother and seemed always a trial to his father. “Del is more heedless but I hope he will profit by the course of his years,” Hay wrote to his mother-in-law. This was how he would forever tend to see his son—endowed with great potential but somehow always on the brink of falling short. Meanwhile, the baby, Alice, was healthy, jolly and the joy of the family.
AFTER THE FIRST OF the year, Hay heard from Gilder, informing him that serialization of The Bread-Winners in the Century was to be delayed from May until August 1883. Gilder also presented a list of editorial quibbles, though he assured Hay that he was even more enthusiastic than ever about the book and the sensation it was bound to stir.
Hay may have insisted on anonymity, but he nonetheless left clues lying about on almost every page. Arthur Farnham, the central figure of The Bread-Winners, bears a flattering likeness to its author. His face, Hay wrote, “suited the hands—it had the refinement and gentleness of one delicately bred, and the vigorous lines and color of one equally at home in field and court. . . . His clothes were of the fashion seen in the front windows of the Knickerbocker Club [where Hay was a member]. . . . He seemed, in short, one of those fortunate natures, who, however born, are always bred well, and come by prescription to most of the good things the world can give.” (In a paragraph deleted from the manuscript, he also wrote: “His shoes might have come from distant Piccadilly—they were so strong and sensible and ugly—the sort a cad envies but never dares to put on.”)
After the Civil War, Farnham served in the army on the frontier, as had Hay’s brother Leonard. Farnham is chairman of his local library board, as was Hay’s father. Farnham keeps a greenhouse of exotic flowers; Hay’s other brother Charles was a flower fancier. Hay’s Farnham is, for the sake of the novel, a widower, whose principal occupation is to look after the “Farnham millions,” which have exercised upon him “a sobering and educating wisdom.” With a group of friends similarly heeled and enlightened, Farnham endeavors, unsuccessfully, to “rescue the city” from corrupt ward bosses; Hay’s own high-minded and deep-pocketed efforts to reform Cleveland’s government had likewise fallen short.
The setting of The Bread-Winners is the biggest giveaway. Farnham lives in a large stone house on Algonquin Avenue in Buffland, “a young and thriving city on Lake Erie.” Readers are handed the following directions: Algonquin Avenue “is three miles long and has hardly a shabby house in it, while for a mile or two the houses upon one side, locally called ‘the Ridge,’ are unusually fine, large, and costly. They are all surrounded with well-kept gardens and separated from the street by velvet lawns.”
As the story begins, Farnham sits in a room “marked, like himself, with a kind of serious elegance. . . . All around the walls ran dwarf book-cases of carved oak, filled with volumes bound in every soft shade of brown and tawny leather. . . . The whole expression of the room was one of warmth and good manners.” Hay’s own stamped-leather wall covering, the palm-leaf frieze, and even his collection of bronze and porcelain bric-à-brac are described in detail.
The “social study” of the novel is one of class. Maud Matchin, a “hearty, blowsy” girl of humble home and upward ambition, asks Farnham for help in getting a job at the library. Inflamed by the “unhealthy sentiment found in the cheap weeklies,” her greater dream is to marry a rich man, and she sets her cap on Farnham. Seeking romantic counsel at a séance, she is advised that the way to win love is to “tell your love,” which she does during a visit to Farnham’s greenhouse. Farnham, who has practiced flattery “in several capitals with some success,” is not immune to Maud’s home-sewn dress that “held her like a scabbard.” “[I]t was a pity she was so vulgar,” he thinks, “for she looked like the huntress Diana.” He gives her roses and succumbs to her “breathless eagerness,” stooping to kiss her “with hearty good-will.”
Two other women vie with Maud for Farnham’s attentions: his next-door neighbors, Mrs. Belding, genteel widow of a “famous bridge-builder,” and her daughter, Alice, of “bonny face” and “pure and noble” lineament. Meanwhile, in pursuit of Maud, not counting Farnham, are the two extremes of American labor. Representing goodness is the blond, blue-eyed carpenter Sam Sleeny, whose sense of “contented industry” serves as “a practical argument against the doctrines of socialism.” His nemesis is the dark-skinned, “oleaginous” Andrew Jackson Offitt, ringleader of the Brotherhood of Bread-winners. The Bread-winners are not a proper union, but made up of “the laziest and most incapable workmen in the town . . . a roll-call of shirks,” who preach “what they called socialism, but was merely riot and plunder.” To Offitt and his motley cohort, “wealth and erristocracy is a kind of dropsy,” Algonquin Avenue a “robbers’ cave,” and Arthur Farnham a “vampire”—this last a nod to Hay’s Vampires Club. Offitt organizes a general strike in Buffland, calling for “downfall of the money power,” although his more sinister goal is to rob Farnham’s safe and make away with Maud, fooling her into believing that he has made a fortune—shades of Clarence King—in a Mexican silver mine.
The story gallops to a melodramatic finale: Farnham’s genteel composure saves him from further forwardness with Maud; he musters a militia of army veterans, who gallantly repel Offitt’s strikers; Offitt brains Farnham with a hammer, framing Sleeny for the crime; Sleeny escapes jail and breaks Offitt’s neck; Farnham is nursed back to health by proper Alice; Sleeny is acquitted on all charges and at last wins the heart of Maud; and Buffland forges onward, its sky “reddened by night with the glare of its furnaces, rising like the hot breath of some prostrate Titan, conquered and bowed down by the pitiless cunning of men.”
In his only published commentary on The Bread-Winners, Hay explained, anonymously still, that his account of the labor unrest that rattles Buffland was drawn from the strikes and riots that tore through the East in the summer of 1877. What he did not mention was that in June 1882, workers at the Cleveland Rolling Mills—of which the Stone brothers, Andros and Amasa, were major stockholders and whose president, William Chisholm, was one of Hay’s Euclid Avenue neighbors—staged a virulent strike which on several occasions turned violent, as union members fought to keep scabs from entering the mills. Hay’s June 30 letter to Gilder of the Century suggests that he was shaping his harsh depiction of the Bread-winners right when the Rolling Mills unrest took place.
YET HE MIGHT NOT have written The Bread-Winners at all if he had been able to foresee the tragedy about to transpire in the real Buffland.
Amasa Stone never got over the Ashtabula bridge collapse and the public shame that followed. He continued to keep a close watch on his investments—railroads, steel mills, banking, Western Union—but he was not the man of strength and confidence he once had been. After Ashtabula, he gave generously to a number of worthy causes—the city’s charity hospital, the Children’s Aid Society—and was the principal benefactor of the Cleveland Home for Aged Women. Yet still there were those who whispered that he ought to have followed the example of Charles Collins, the bridge engineer who had taken his own life.
In 1880, Stone bequeathed a half-million dollars to Western Reserve College on the condition that it relocate from Hudson, Ohio, to Cleveland. At the same time, the philanthropist Leonard Case, Jr., conveyed $1 million to found a polytechnic school in Cleveland to be called the Case School of Applied Science. Adjacent sites were found for the two institutions on Euclid Avenue, three miles east of downtown. In honor of Stone’s son who had drowned while a student at Yale, the academic department of the newly minted Western Reserve University was named Adelbert College. The college’s first building, Adelbert Hall, was dedicated two years later, in October 1882, after Hay and Clara had left for Europe. For Amasa Stone, it was the last great achievement of his life. From then on, everything went drearily downhill.
Stone wrote frequent letters to Hay in Europe, discussing business but dwelling mainly on his health. Insomnia and chronic indigestion indicated a deepening depression, and by the first of the year, Stone began suggesting that the Hays consider abbreviating their trip. “[S]hould I be taken away,” he told Hay, “you are the one to take the helm.”
However flattered Hay may have been by his father-in-law’s trust, he was reluctant to interrupt his itinerary or his own rest cure. “I came abroad hoping to get some benefit to my [own] health,” he answered Stone, adding even more selfishly, “As this is the last visit we shall make to Europe for many years, perhaps we shall ever make, I want to see as much as convenient.”
They had accepted invitations to the Clarks in Scotland, the Cunliffes in Wales, and several more country houses. American minister Lowell had promised to present Clara to Queen Victoria at one of the first drawing rooms of the season. Both she and Hay were thoroughly in love with England, but for Hay the communion was especially profound, and thus his disgruntlement at being pulled away prematurely was more pronounced. “If I am able to spend a month or two of the early summer in London,” he reasoned with his father-in-law, “I can meet and make the acquaintance of a considerable number of the leading men of letters and science in London, whose acquaintance and perhaps occasional correspondence will be a pleasure and advantage to me the rest of my life.”
Throughout the winter, Stone’s letters grew more pitiful and his hints more plaintive. “I seem to have lost vigour,” he wrote in early March 1883. “You should not be asked to come home until you are fully ready, but it may be for your interest to come home at an early day.” It was hard to believe he was near death; then again, he honestly seemed on the verge of losing his grip. Finally Hay and Clara could stand no more mewling, and they booked passage for May 10, cutting their trip short by four months.
They were not deprived of all diversion. At the end of January they enjoyed a short jaunt through Provence, and in February they made their way to Florence and Siena, catching up with Howells and Constance Woolson. By the third week of March, they were in Paris, tarrying not as long as they would have wished but allowing plenty of time for Clara to be fitted by Worth and several other couturiers. They crossed the Channel on April 2, with a full month remaining before they had to sail home.
In London they found hardly a moment’s rest. King was in town, still tearing about, trying to round up buyers for his Mexican mines. They also saw a good deal of the Clarks, Cunliffes, and two more friends of Henry Adams, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Milnes Gaskell, all of whom were in London. They were given private tours of Windsor Castle and the galleries of the Royal Academy. At a reception hosted by Lord Granville, the foreign secretary, Hay met “many of the Diplomatic Body and principal nobility of the kingdom,” he reported to his father-in-law, whom he knew was decidedly averse to such pomp and circumstance. “As a rule the higher the rank, the uglier and queerer they looked and the worse they were dressed.” Regrettably, the queen’s drawing room receptions were delayed, due to the death of her personal servant, John Brown, at the end of March. The first was now scheduled for the day the Hays were to depart London.
There was little that either of them could say to cheer up Amasa Stone. His spirits had sunk even further after the failure of the Union Iron & Steel Company of Chicago and three more companies in which he was a major investor. “[E]verything combined to go wrong all at once,” he lamented to Hay.
Hay wrote from London a week before his departure, offering one more cup of sympathy and encouragement to his suffering father-in-law: “You have had a hard and distressing winter and spring. It seems very hard that one who like yourself has spent his life in doing good to others should now be placed in a position where nobody can do you any good. . . . I rely on your strong constitution, your sober and moral life, the reserve of vitality you have about you, to wear out all your present troubles and to bring you to a healthy and happy condition again. You have so much to live for—to enjoy the results of the good you have done, and to continue your career of usefulness and honor.”
These were his last words to Stone, and they might not have reached him in time. On the afternoon of May 11, two weeks after his sixty-fifth birthday, Stone locked himself in an upstairs bathroom of his Euclid Avenue house, climbed into the tub, and shot himself through the heart with a revolver.
Hay, Clara, and the three children were by then aboard the steamship Germanic, one day beyond the English coast. They would not receive word of Stone’s suicide until they reached New York a week later.