The year that followed was surely one of the best of Hay’s life. His work at the embassy was engaging and quite manageable; the society he kept was as elevated and congenial as he could ever have wished for.
If he made the job seem effortless and enjoyed himself a bit too obviously, his contribution to diplomacy was nonetheless crucial. The comity he fostered during his time as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s was unprecedented in the history of the United States and England, and the bond he established set both nations on firmer ground everywhere they chose to venture and in doing so altered the balance of world power for the long haul. What is more, Hay’s experience in London, abbreviated though it turned out to be, prepared him for the greater task ahead—that of secretary of state for a nation whose horizons were expanding by leaps and bounds.
But while Hay would soon play a pivotal role in international relations, he had little to do with setting the table or choosing the guests. By the time he returned from England in September 1898, the United States had fought a war with Spain, occupied Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, and annexed Hawaii. Through all this, Hay’s responsibility was simply to make friends and to pass along the English point of view to Washington. These friends and, moreover, this method of making them—by civil, sociable conversation—would become the cornerstone of his diplomacy, not just with England but with all nations.
Across the Atlantic, the topic that topped all others was the increasing possibility of American military intervention in Cuba. Hay’s familiarity with the situation in Cuba went back nearly thirty years to his time in Madrid, when U.S. Minister Daniel Sickles had tried fruitlessly to persuade Spain to sell the Caribbean island. Later, at the New York Tribune, Hay had written numerous editorials scolding Spain for its oppression of Cuba. More recently, Henry Adams, who had close ties with the Cuban junta for independence in the United States, had shared disturbing accounts of concentration camps, starvation, and extermination inflicted by Spanish soldiers upon Cuban civilians.
Hay did not need to be convinced that the Old World ought to relinquish its colonial possessions in the new, but unlike Senator Henry Cabot Lodge and new Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt, he was not impatient to enforce eviction—and certainly not before his government had a better feel for how continental Europe’s powers would respond to this radical invocation of the Monroe Doctrine. To improve his grasp of England’s disposition, he met with Lord Salisbury in October. Afterward he was able to inform McKinley that “we need apprehend no interference from England if it became necessary for us to adopt energetic measures for putting an end to the destruction and slaughter now going on [in Cuba].”
Later in the year, Hay had another conversation, which, while perhaps not as meaty as his exchanges with the prime minister, various cabinet ministers, and members of Parliament, was every bit as valuable. He had made such a superb first impression on Queen Victoria that she invited him and Clara again to Windsor Castle, this time to dine and spend the night. Clara’s letters home painted a colorful picture of Indian servants in turbans and a table “that did not differ from any other well appointed table only we ate off silver and gold plates for hot things—china for cold.” Again Victoria shook Clara’s hand, but it was Hay who captured Her Majesty’s attentions. “Her custom is to have a member of her family on each side of her at dinner,” he wrote proudly to McKinley. “The table was arranged in this way on this occasion; but the Queen sent for the diagram a few minutes before dinner and changed it so that I should sit next to her. She was extremely gracious and talked freely with me for an hour.”
The next day, Victoria’s daughter Beatrice took tea with Margaret White, wife of embassy secretary Henry White (whose portrait by John Singer Sargent Hay had so admired), with the express purpose, according to Clara, of conveying what a pleasing impression the American ambassador had made on the queen.
HAY’S RAPPORT COUNTED FOR a lot, but for the time being, there was little of substance he could do for his country. And so, anticipating a smoggy winter in London, he booked a trip to Egypt, with McKinley’s assent. For the past half-century, Europeans and Americans had been taking to the Nile like latter-day pharaohs, journeying from Alexandria to Memphis, Cairo, Luxor, and the cataracts at Aswan aboard native dahabiehs, adaptations of traditional river vessels, refitted with all the luxuries that affluent travelers had come to expect on the Orient Express and the Grand Tour.
Adams, who had spent his honeymoon in Egypt in 1872, agreed to go again. Henry James thought about joining them, then sent his regrets. Hay also invited Lizzie Cameron to play the part of Cleopatra—their “ ‘Star Eyed Egyptian and glorious Sorceress of the Nile’ ”—but she had recovered from her collapse and returned to the United States. In the end the party comprised Hay, Clara, Helen and Alice, Adams, and Spencer Eddy, a promising young Harvard graduate whom Hay had brought to London as his personal secretary.
To travel in Egypt, no matter when, is to drop out of time. In Hay’s case, he missed most of a chapter in American history. While McKinley continued to believe that Spain could be persuaded to let go of Cuba without the military intervention of the United States, a growing number of Democrats and jingoistic members of his own party were agitating otherwise. The New York Journal, jingoistic and Democratic, derided McKinley’s caution as “lacking in virility.” McKinley, who had anonymously donated $5,000 of his own money to a Cuban relief fund, vowed to hold his ground until all options for peaceful resolution were exhausted. “I shall never get into a war until I am sure that God and man approve,” the veteran of Antietam declared. “I have been through one war; I have seen the dead piled up; and I do not want to see another.” Events would soon make this position untenable.
At the start of February 1898, the Hay family and friends steamed leisurely up the Nile, encountering along the way former Secretary of State Hamilton Fish; James Angell, Hay’s former language professor from Brown who was now the American minister to Turkey; and Elizabeth Custer, the widow of the reckless general slain at Little Bighorn. Meanwhile, the U.S. battleship Maine lay at anchor in Havana Harbor, not as a show of hostility, but to be on hand in the event that Americans in Cuba needed protection.
A week later, as the Hays continued from Luxor toward Aswan, the New York Journal got hold of a private letter written by Enrique Dupuy de Lôme, Spain’s minister to Washington, in which he characterized President McKinley as a politicastro, translated to mean an ineffectual, would-be politician, but in Spanish literally a castrated politician. To the Journal, which itself had publicly doubted the president’s manhood, the Spanish minister’s gaffe was “The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History.”
Arriving at Aswan on the eighteenth, ten days’ journey above Cairo, seven hundred miles from the Mediterranean, and surrounded by temples of a civilization three thousand years removed from London, Washington, and Cuba, Hay was handed the news that the USS Maine had exploded three days earlier, killing 260 American sailors and wounding ninety. The assumption was that the tragedy had not been accidental. When Adams learned of the hour of the explosion, nine o’clock, he blurted mysteriously, “Then the Spanish did it.”
“We have been much shocked and grieved,” Hay wrote to Henry White in London. “We feel very much out of the world.” To McKinley, he offered perspective and encouragement. “I shall never regret the years I have passed in Europe,” he reflected, “[as] they have rooted in my very soul a confidence and trust in our future, which is beyond and above any temporary or personal disappointments. The greatest destiny the world ever knew is ours.”
Despite the alarming news from home, Hay did not display any particular urgency. Descending the Nile, he and his fellow travelers stopped for several days in Cairo before continuing north to Athens, while Adams went eastward to Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus, Constantinople, and eventually overland to Paris. In Athens, Hay had a pleasant visit with the American minister, William Rockhill, whom he had first gotten to know in Washington several years earlier.
Tall, red-haired, and suavely handsome, Rockhill was a character straight out of an H. Rider Haggard novel. Born in Philadelphia but raised in France, he had graduated from the French military academy Saint-Cyr, after which he served two years in the Algerian desert as an officer in the French Foreign Legion. Even while at Saint-Cyr, he had devoted his spare hours to studying Tibetan Buddhism, and after leaving the Foreign Legion, he mastered Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Chinese in order to translate Buddhist scriptures and to publish his own Life of Buddha. His extraordinary talents were soon recognized in more than academic circles, and he landed an appointment as a secretary to the American legation in Peking. Insatiably curious and thoroughly intrepid, he undertook two harrowing treks into Tibet, becoming the first Westerner in half a century to penetrate the Himalayan kingdom from China. If State Department appointments had been based purely on merit, Rockhill’s ascent would have been meteoric; instead, he took whatever he could, serving briefly as an assistant secretary of state under Richard Olney. The best he could squeeze out of McKinley was Greece, which is where Hay found him, “bored into extinction,” in March 1898. Undoubtedly the two men had a great deal to talk about: Cuba of course, the senility of Secretary of State John Sherman, their mutual friends Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt, and surely China, the topic always foremost in Rockhill’s mind. War against Spain had not yet been declared, and Hawaii and the Philippines were still not annexed, but Rockhill could see more clearly than most the place China ought to fill in America’s emergent extracontinental scheme.
Hay arrived back in London the last week in March, after an absence of two months. On the twenty-eighth, McKinley sent to Congress the report of the investigation on the Maine, which blamed the explosion on external causes. The president had bought as much time as he could, hoping that Spain would relinquish Cuba peacefully, but the American public would cut the administration no more slack. McKinley finally delivered his war message to Congress on April 11; the blockade of Cuba commenced on April 22; McKinley called for 125,000 volunteers on the twenty-third; Congress declared war two days later; and on May 1, on the far side of the world, Admiral George Dewey sank or captured Spain’s entire Pacific squadron and blockaded Manila.
“We are all very happy over Dewey’s splendid Sunday’s work,” Hay wrote a few days later to Theodore Stanton, son of the suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. “I detest war, and had hoped I might not see another, but this was as necessary as it was righteous.”
After the navy’s easy triumph in the Philippines, the war’s outcome was all but inevitable, though the end game was still not clear. The concern in Britain, and among the other “Great Powers”—Germany, France, Italy, Russia, and Japan—was not what would become of Cuba, for it was a foregone conclusion that Spain would resist perfunctorily, then capitulate, allowing the United States either to annex the island or to grant independence outright. The bigger question was the Philippines, which ostensibly had nothing to do with why the United States had gone to war in the first place. None of the powers, including the United States, cared very much about the Filipinos as a sovereign people, but they were keenly interested in who would wind up controlling the archipelago, and how much of it, most particularly its harbors. Manila, like Hawaii, Guam, Samoa, and the Caroline Islands, was a valuable coaling station on the trade route to China, the prize that stirred the greatest jealousy and ambition among the empire builders.
And any play by one power for overseas territory wound up affecting the relationships of all the others. The term “colony” was gradually being replaced by the less possessory euphemism “sphere of influence,” yet, as national economies expanded and competition for foreign markets increased, the desire to stake claims, both commercial and strategic, continued unabashed. The United States was not especially worried that another power would side with Spain in the Caribbean, but, even as Admiral Dewey was besieging Manila, the German navy hovered nearby, like buzzards over ripe carrion, its strength quickly exceeding that of the American fleet. Later in the summer, Germany’s foreign minister confided to his ambassador in Washington that the kaiser—Wilhelm had been succeeded by his grandson, Wilhelm II—“deems it a principal object of German policy to leave unused no opportunity which may arise from the Spanish-American War to obtain maritime fulcra in East Asia.”
Hay had followed the rise of German nationalism since his time in Vienna and had observed the well-drilled aggression of Bismarck during the Franco-Prussian War. Now that Spain had been put in its place, he recognized it was Germany that bore watching above all other powers. “The jealousy and animosity felt toward us in Germany is something which can hardly be exaggerated,” he wrote Lodge. “They hate us in France, but French hate is a straw fire compared to German. And France has nothing to fear from us while the Vaterland is all on fire with greed, and terror of us. They want the Philippines, the Carolines, and Samoa—they want to get into our markets and keep us out of theirs. . . . There is to the German mind something monstrous in the thought that a war should take place anywhere that they not profit by it.”
Germany’s animus, not just toward America but also toward Anglo-American friendliness, had been building for some time. Well before the Spanish-American War began, Wilhelm II had complained about “the American-British Society for International Theft and Warmongering.” The kaiser’s characterization may have been extreme, but his anxiety was legitimate. The United States remained emphatically opposed to entangling alliances, and Britain’s stance during the Spanish-American conflict was officially neutral, yet each nation was increasingly outspoken in its affinity for the other. Addressing the lord mayor of London at an Easter banquet the day before the U.S. Navy commenced its blockade of Cuba, Hay was especially eloquent in his affirmation of the connection. “The reasons of a good understanding between us lie deeper than any considerations of mere expediency,” he said. “All of us who think cannot but see that there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us to a sort of partnership in the beneficent work of the world. Whether we will it or not, we are associated in that work by the very nature of things, and no man and no group of men can prevent it.”
Three weeks later, after Dewey’s victory at Manila, Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain delivered his now-famous address in Birmingham, in which he expressed Britain’s long-term duty to the United States: “It is to establish and to maintain bonds of a permanent amity across the Atlantic. They are a powerful and generous nation. They speak our language, they are bred of our race. . . . I do not know what arrangements may be possible with us, but this I know and feel,—that the closer, the more cordial, the fuller, and the more definite those arrangements are, with the consent of both peoples, the better it will be for both and for the world. And I even go so far as to say that, terrible as war may be, even war itself would be cheaply purchased if in a great and noble cause the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack should wave together over an Anglo-Saxon Alliance.”
Chamberlain’s speech was circulated throughout Europe and America, much to the satisfaction of Hay, who claimed that the secretary’s remarks were “partly due to a conversation I had with him.” Indeed, he had done his work well. Writing to Henry Cabot Lodge, Hay declared, “For the first time in my life I find the ‘drawing room’ sentiment altogether with us.” Some weeks later he elaborated further: “The Royal Family, by habit and tradition, are most careful not to break the rules of strict neutrality, but even among them I find nothing but hearty kindness and, as far as is consistent with propriety—sympathy.”
Hay solidified this sympathy throughout the summer. At a Fourth of July banquet for the American Society of London, he reciprocated Chamberlain’s espousal of amity. “We are glad to think that this is no passing emotion, born of a troubled hour,” he stated. “[I]t has been growing through many quiet years” and “[n]ow that the day of clear and cordial understanding has come . . . may we not hope it to last for ever?” Then, broadcasting his remarks over the heads of his immediate audience, in the direction of Spain, Germany, and as far as Russia, he added: “It threatens no one; it injures no one; its ends are altogether peaceful. . . . We shall still compete with each other and the rest of the world, but the competition will be in the arts and the works of civilization, and all the people of goodwill on the face of the earth shall profit by it.”
THE WAR IN CUBA ended in mid-July, shortly after the U.S. Navy destroyed the Spanish fleet as it attempted to escape Santiago and less than four weeks after the first American soldiers waded ashore at Daiquirí. A month later, the United States controlled Puerto Rico, Guam, and Manila. Hay followed the campaigns through the newspapers. He did not question the strategic and moral reasons for the war; nor did he exult in them overly much. He was pleased with the outcome, but if he was less than ebullient, perhaps the reason had to do with being so far removed, in both miles and years. Then, too, Spain had hardly been a formidable adversary.
Hay’s modulated enthusiasm is apparent in a letter he wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, acknowledging his contribution to the Cuban campaign. Roosevelt, as the entire world knew, had resigned his position as assistant secretary of the navy and led a regiment of voluntary cavalry known as Rough Riders in an assault on the hilly defenses surrounding Santiago. “I am afraid I am the last of your friends to congratulate you on the brilliant campaign which now seems drawing to a close,” Hay began with fitting bonhomie. “When the war began I was like the rest; I deplored [that you left] your place in the Navy where you were so useful and so acceptable. But I knew it was idle to preach to a young man. You obeyed your own daemon, and I imagine we older fellows will all have to confess that you were in the right.”
Hay’s next paragraph, or the first sentence of it, would be repeated for generations to come, too often ironically, in light of the not so proud events that would ensue in the Philippines. While his words were without a doubt sincere, they were more a reflection of his relief than of his sanguinity or even, as some historians would eventually aver, of his cavalier imperialism.
“It has been a splendid little war,” Hay told Roosevelt, “begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave. It is now to be concluded, I hope”—and here is the phrase that more fairly captures Hay’s temperance—“with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.”
These were sentiments Abraham Lincoln might well have conveyed: engage in the fight for proper reasons, honor the soldier; then, once victory is achieved, hold the moral high ground. Also embedded in Hay’s phrasing was the inference that the United States was not like other countries—brutal Spain or greedy Germany—and that America ought to set a better example, wielding its authority more decently and more wisely.
Little did Hay consider when he wrote to Roosevelt that in two months he would be expected to put his inchoate philosophy into applicable policy as secretary of state; or that in three years Roosevelt would be a president who believed, based on his giddy run to the top of San Juan Hill and his own inflated exceptionalism, that most any war could be splendid.
ON AUGUST 12, 1898, McKinley signed a protocol, already approved by the Spanish Cortes, stipulating that Spain evacuate Cuba immediately and that it cede sovereignty over all its possessions in the West Indies, including Puerto Rico. The fate of the Philippines was purposefully left vague. At the time of Dewey’s surprise attack on Manila, the majority of Americans, including many in the administration, perhaps even the president, could not find the Philippines on the map. But once Manila had fallen, the archipelago was recognized as not only a vital interest but a point of national pride as well. “While we are conducting war and until its conclusion we must keep all we get,” McKinley observed sensibly, and “when the war is over we must keep what we want.”
But what did the United States want? Should it annex all the Philippine Islands, as it had done the Hawaiian Islands a month earlier, or hold on to only one or two as “hitching posts” on the road to China? If McKinley merely took Manila, or perhaps the entire island of Luzon, then Germany would surely gobble up the rest. There was also the matter of the Filipinos themselves, who, like the Cubans, expected the United States to enable their independence. All of these issues required a clearer definition of national interests abroad. Were Americans conquerors or liberators, imperialists or merely “expansionists”? Was it America’s duty to enlighten the benighted Filipinos or to let them find their own way? McKinley, a cautious commander in chief who had never seen the Pacific, was in a quandary. “If old Dewey had just sailed away when he smashed that Spanish fleet, what a lot of trouble he would have saved us,” he remarked. But Dewey had not sailed away, and so the president chose to defer his decision until the time when a final treaty could be negotiated with Spain later in the year.
The newspapers conjectured that Hay would be appointed one of the peace commissioners, on the assumption that the conference would take place in London. He was not the least interested, however, and Clara dreaded the thought of having to entertain the delegation, whether her husband was a member or not.
Still, there was no escaping the changes that were about to transform the State Department. Secretary of State Sherman had muddled through the spring, forgetful and disgruntled. To make up for Sherman’s disabilities, McKinley had appointed Judge William R. Day, a trusted friend from Canton, to serve as Sherman’s first assistant secretary, knowing that Day’s surrogacy would provide only a temporary fix. In April, with war imminent and after one too many lapses of memory, Sherman had been persuaded to resign, and Day had replaced him as secretary of state. Day served ably enough during the war, supported, as he was, by the department’s true mainstay, Second Assistant Alvey Adee, Hay’s colleague and fellow traveler from Madrid. Yet Day, while undoubtedly a quick study, had no experience in statecraft beyond the Stark County courthouse, and now that the American portfolio bulged with new acquisitions, McKinley needed a secretary with deeper experience and more lustrous credentials. Hay should not have been surprised to find his name atop the list, especially after his impeccable showing in London during the past year.
IT WAS TOO SOON to think about going home. Hay and Clara were thoroughly comfortable with their life in London. The entire family was in England for the summer; Helen and Alice had stayed on after the trip to Egypt, and Del and Clarence arrived from America once the school year was over. Del had finished Yale, and his father found things for him to do at the embassy, where he seemed to enjoy himself immensely.
There was yet another reason for staying put: the Camerons had rented a country house in Kent near Dover. Lizzie and Don were reconciled, at least to the point of living under the same roof for a few months, and according to their long-standing custom, they invited their “tame cat” to take up residence with them. Adams, after ambling through the Holy Land and Europe, arrived in England in early June.
The estate was named Surrenden Dering—“Surrender Daring,” to the Americans—a rambling, thirty-bedroom Elizabethan elephant “filled with handsome, ponderous and uncomfortable furniture and enlivened only by dull family portraits,” remembered Adams’s niece Abigail, one of many guests that summer. The setting, though, more than made up for the dowdiness of the house, with gardens and grassy terraces overlooking a deer park and the lush Weald of Kent. Abigail described her uncle leading excursions to parish churches and riding the lanes with Martha Cameron on “two chubby brown ponies.” Don Cameron was his usual vulgar self; he scorned tea and ordered his favorite foods sent over from the States. The cook acquitted herself with corn on the cob, but she stewed watermelon as if it were squash.
Hay could not get away from his desk until the season was nearly over. From London he wrote Lizzie wistfully, “I am a ghastly wreck and nothing but Surrenden air will bring me round.” He also regretted having missed her when she came through London. “I had most dexterously arranged things so as to shake the diplomatic complications and take you to supper. In advance I indulged my vanity by imagining people saying, ‘Who is that beautiful woman with old Hay?’ ”
The Hays finally arrived on August 6, and Abigail observed the differences between Clara and their American hostess: “Mrs. Don Cameron was on the whole the most socially competent woman that I ever met. . . . She was not perhaps strictly beautiful, but she was such a mass of style and had such complete self-assurance that she always gave the appearance of beauty and she gave everyone a good time when she set out to please.” Mrs. Hay, meanwhile, “was a most majestic-appearing person with an alarming exterior but a warm heart. She was kind, generous, unpretentious, and completely unselfconscious. . . . Though she made no pretense of being an intellectual, she had a wonderful fund of common sense.”
As for Hay, Abigail noticed beneath his “lighthearted wit and conviviality” a certain “nervous tension”—a tension that increased dramatically on August 14, when Henry White arrived from London, bearing a telegram. McKinley had named William Day to head the commission that would hash out a final treaty of peace with Spain, and he wanted Hay to return to Washington as the new secretary of state.
The news that Hay had been offered the highest cabinet post in the administration, a position that ranked beneath only the vice president, was not cause for jubilation at Surrenden Dering. If anything, the opposite was true. Hay was naturally flattered to be asked, and he would have felt bruised if the job had been offered to someone else; yet as much as he had wanted the ambassadorship and had intrigued to get it, he did not relish the prospect of promotion. He was “utterly depressed” by McKinley’s invitation, Henry White noted. Hay confided to White that the strain of being secretary of state would likely kill him in six months. And if he decided not to accept the offer, he realized that he would have to resign as ambassador, for, as Adams commented, “No serious statesman could accept a favor and refuse a service.”
Hay spent the rest of the day deliberating and finally wrote McKinley a frank but tentative letter of acceptance: “The place is beyond my ambition. I cannot but feel it is beyond my strength and ability.” He told the president that he had not been feeling well lately (his kidneys this time) and could not get away from England until the middle of September. “If you conclude after all to order me home,” he continued tepidly, “it will be with unfeigned anxiety and diffidence that I shall enter upon the duties of an office I have never aspired to, and which I honestly think too great for me.”
Hay’s consternation so alarmed Henry White that he sent outgoing Secretary Day a rather bold cable: “I think it is my duty to let the President and you know that it is very doubtful whether the Ambassador’s present condition of health is equal to [the] onerous duties of your office. In fact . . . such are his devotion to and desire to be with the President that he will not tell him so.”
White told Hay what he had done, assuring him that he had acted purely out of duty and heartfelt concern and with no treachery intended. Hay did not take offense; nor was McKinley deterred. The one upshot was that the president consented to let Hay stay in England for another month to regain his health and to close out his affairs.
He lingered at Surrenden Dering until the end of August, and then, before returning to London, made a short visit to the Isle of Wight for one more audience with Queen Victoria. Again he was invited to sit by the queen’s side at dinner, and the next morning she unexpectedly invited him to her apartment for another talk. “That’s what you get by being a royal favorite,” Hay wrote Clara, who had gone to Paris with the girls to shop. Afterward, Victoria told the British minister to the United States, Julian Paunceforte, that Hay was “the most interesting of all the Ambassadors I have known.”
For the next two weeks, the British papers were full of congratulations and regrets: congratulations for Hay’s promotion, knowing that Anglo-American relations would improve further with him as secretary of state; regrets over losing such an amiable ambassador. Speculation over Hay’s successor focused on Whitelaw Reid, especially after Reid was appointed to the peace commission that was to convene in Paris (not in London, as had first been thought). On the day that Hay left England, he wrote Reid, extending “the old love, the old confidence, the old trust.” He was less fulsome about his own prospects. “[Y]ou can imagine with what solemn and anxious feelings I am starting for home,” he told his old colleague. “Never, even in war times, did I feel anything like it. But then I was young and now I am old.”
To another friend he confessed: “I am full of hurry and full of dread, but perhaps I may pull through.”
HAY WAS SWORN IN as secretary of state on September 30, 1898, whereupon he took his seat at McKinley’s right hand. The mantle of authority was new, but the milieu was familiar, with a few obvious differences. The first floor of the White House had been spruced up nearly twenty years earlier to suit the Gilded Age appetites of Chester Arthur, but the second floor, where the president worked and lived with Mrs. McKinley, was hardly more opulent and possibly even more hectic than during the Lincoln years. The first telephone had been installed while Hay was serving in the Hayes administration, and electricity had arrived while Benjamin Harrison was president. Light bulbs now festooned the formerly gas-lit chandeliers, and a labyrinth of wires latticed the ceilings. The bedroom in the northeast corner once occupied by Hay and Nicolay and the adjacent office shared by Hay and the third secretary, William Stoddard, were jammed with the desks of more than a dozen secretaries and clerks. Nicolay’s office had become the telegraph office—no more journeying across the White House lawn to the War Department, as Lincoln had done with ritual solemnity.
Yet for all the amenities and innovations that had modernized life in the White House over the years—a steam-heating system, bathrooms with running water, and an elevator—privacy and quiet were still in short supply. On the first floor, only the dining room was closed to public gawkers. Upstairs the halls were jammed with the same petitioners, reporters, and pests who had annoyed Hay and Nicolay three decades earlier. McKinley became so distracted by the traffic traipsing in and out of his office—the same south-facing room where Lincoln had worked—that he usually repaired to the cabinet room next door, using the end of the cabinet table as a desk.
Cabinet meetings were held on Tuesdays and Fridays, and Hay needed neither introduction nor initiation. In the years to follow, spanning part or all of four different presidential terms, the responsibility of advising the president and interacting with the other cabinet secretaries would bring forth the best of John Hay’s talents as conciliator, problem solver, and sounding board. The greater challenge was the actual management of the State Department.
His forte had never been administration, and suddenly he found himself in charge of nearly ninety employees in Washington and twelve hundred dispersed in embassies, legations, and consulates overseas. For support, Hay tried to bring William Rockhill back from Athens as his first assistant secretary, but McKinley gave the job to David Jayne Hill, president of the University of Rochester, who, while a well-regarded expert on international law, had even less experience in the State Department than did Hay. Fortunately, the capable and nearly indefatigable Alvey Adee continued as second assistant. Hay quickly came to rely on him for almost everything. Adee’s hearing was worse than ever; nevertheless, he and Hay would communicate with little difficulty for the next seven years.
But even with Adee guarding the door of the office in the State, War and Army Building, Hay could not avoid a certain amount of aggravation. “I receive twenty or thirty worrying visits a day, all from people wanting something,” he wrote Clara. “[T]wo or three chargés d’affaires call; from fifty to a hundred despatches must be read and signed. . . . I get the hour off from one to two & then go back till 4:30.” A week later, a few days after turning sixty, he lamented to her again: “I feel so dull and worthless I almost dread to have you come and plunge into this life of dreary drudgery. It is going to be vile—the whole business. . . . All the fun of my life ended on the platform at Euston [Station]. I do not mean . . . that England was so uproariously gay—but this place is so intolerable.”
His woebegone mood was decidedly out of step with the rest of the country. The quick and “splendid” victory over Spain had brought the nation together to a degree that had not existed since the onset of the Civil War. America was now the dominant force in its own hemisphere and a formidable presence in the Pacific. “We have never in all our history had the standing in the world we have now,” Hay wrote McKinley shortly after the war ended. The American economy was booming again, exports at an all-time high. The discovery of gold (by Americans) in the Canadian Klondike, so near to Alaska, seemed almost providential. “ ‘We’re a gr-reat people,’ ” one of humorist Finley Peter Dunne’s barroom regulars boasted to his Irish-American sage, Mr. Dooley, who in turn replied, “ ‘We ar-re. . . . We ar-re at that. An’ th’ best iv it is, we know we ar-re.’ ”
It was hard for Hay to stay glum, now that he was back in his own house on Lafayette Square, amid his beloved books and art collection. Although Adams was still in Europe and Vice President Hobart continued to occupy the Cameron house, life resumed much of its familiar cycle. Hay’s carriage could deliver him to the State Department in ten minutes, to the White House in half that.
And he liked his boss. Hay had always been effusive in his praise of McKinley, but once he was in a position to observe the man more closely, his respect for his leadership grew even greater. “The President rules [the cabinet] with a hand of iron in a mitten of knitted wool,” he told Lizzie Cameron. “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.” Then he paid McKinley the highest of compliments: “He is awfully like Lincoln in many respects.”
McKinley had won election as a promoter of domestic prosperity, not as an international visionary. Foreign affairs, beyond the pocketbook ramifications of tariffs and trade reciprocity, had never aroused him. State dinners, or anything the least bit exotic, made him uncomfortable. Yet during the first critical months of his administration, he had been obliged to act as his own secretary of state, suffering the liability of John Sherman and getting by on the lieutenancy of William Day. After a season of war, he was only too glad to turn responsibility for the country’s foreign relations over to the man whom, McKinley acknowledged, ought to have been in charge from the beginning. “He scared me by saying he would not worry any more about the State Department,” Hay told Clara, who was still abroad.
THE MOST PONDEROUS ISSUE before him remained the Philippines. While in London, Hay had informed McKinley that it would be a considerable disappointment to the British if the United States did not take control of the entire archipelago; beyond that he had not taken a conspicuous position on the matter—which was not the case with most public men he knew.
The leading advocate for annexation was Henry Cabot Lodge, whose bully pulpit was the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Eschewing the term “imperialism,” Lodge preferred to call his brand of international aggrandizement a “large policy”—in which he couched America’s self-interest abroad in terms of Christian benevolence and divine inevitability. “I do not believe that this nation was an accident,” he told his fellow senators. “I do not believe it is the creation of blind choice. I have faith that it has a great mission in the world. . . . I wish to see it master of the Pacific. I would have it fulfill what I think is its manifest destiny.”
Theodore Roosevelt was even less varnished in his pronouncements on the subject. America’s manifest destiny, he had once asserted, was “to swallow up the land of all adjoining nations who were too weak to withstand us.” He was thinking of the American West when he wrote these words, but to him and other large-policy proponents, the Philippines were the new frontier (and the Filipinos another Indian tribe). In November, on the strength of his Rough Rider exploits and contagious patriotism, Roosevelt would win the New York governorship.
McKinley, meanwhile, still had mixed feelings about seizing all or any of the Philippines. Having once deplored “the greed of conquest” and having regarded annexation as “criminal aggression,” he now acknowledged the “new duties and responsibilities which we must meet and discharge as becomes a great nation.” He exhorted the peace commissioners to exercise “moderation, restraint, and reason” in their negotiations with Spain, and then he embarked on a tour of the Midwest to take the country’s pulse. He returned to the White House, convinced that “the American people would not accept it if we did not obtain some advantage from our great victories at Manila” and that “the well-considered opinion of the majority would be that duty requires we should take the archipelago.” He did not believe the Philippines were capable of self-rule even as a U.S. protectorate, like Cuba, and he was now quite certain that anything less than full annexation would invite predation by Germany and others. If he did nothing, allowing Spain to retain the Philippines, he feared that America would be the laughingstock of the world.
Finally the pious president got on his knees and prayed for guidance. “[O]ne night late it came to me,” he told a group of Methodist ministers, “that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift them and civilize and Christianize them [although many were already Roman Catholic], and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly, and the next morning I sent for the chief engineer of the War Department . . . and I told him to put the Philippines on the map of the United States.”
On October 26, at McKinley’s request, Hay directed the peace commissioners to insist upon cession of the entire Philippine archipelago. Two days later, to clarify that the administration had not abandoned the path of righteousness, he sent the commissioners another cable. “It is imperative upon us that as victors,” he reaffirmed, “we should be governed only by motives which will exalt our nation. Territorial expansion should be our least concern; that we shall not shirk the moral obligations of our victory is . . . the greatest.”
Not everyone applauded McKinley’s decision or swallowed Hay’s avowal of national virtue—not the Filipinos, who had cooperated with the American military with the expectation that their sovereignty would soon be recognized; not Democrats, who had a new brickbat to use against Republicans in upcoming elections; and not the bipartisan coalition of critics who regarded the decision to annex the Philippines as an exercise of tyranny that would lead to proportionate tyranny at home—or so proclaimed Carl Schurz, a friend of Hay’s since the Greeley presidential campaign.
Schurz was one of the founders of the Anti-Imperialist League, whose membership grew to include a number of men Hay knew and respected: Henry Adams’s brother Charles Francis Adams; Henry James’s brother William James; Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and even former Secretary of State John Sherman. The Anti-Imperialists did not dwell on the economic implications of imperialism; rather, their main grievance was that their government would do precisely what McKinley and Hay pledged it would not—that is, inflict irreparable damage on American values and turn the United States into a “vulgar, commonplace empire.”
Despite their vociferous efforts to intercede, the Anti-Imperialists had little effect on the outcome of the peace negotiations in Paris. On November 28, Spain capitulated to nearly all the American demands and agreed to renounce all rights to Cuba, to cede Puerto Rico and Guam, and to sell the Philippines for $20 million. But the Anti-Imperialists did not surrender as quickly as the Spaniards, and they now turned their wrath to blocking congressional approval of the peace treaty.
Their opposition put Hay in a particularly awkward spot. Earlier in the summer, for example, he had congratulated Andrew Carnegie on an article the steel baron had written in the North American Review, in which he warned that “Triumphant Democracy” was on the brink of “Triumphant Despotism.” Carnegie had taken Hay’s compliment to mean that their views on the Philippines and American expansion were not so far apart. But once Hay backed McKinley and the peace commissioners on annexation of the Philippines, Carnegie wrote Hay a four-page screed, first accusing the president of plunging the country into an abyss and then condemning Hay for associating with a “military dictator.” “You have made a mistake,” he told Hay, scrawling at the bottom of the letter, “Bitterly opposed to you yet always your friend.”
Hay had not been the author of the Philippine doctrine, nor had he been especially outspoken in advocating extracontinental expansion. But now he had to withstand the crossfire as best he could. Moreover, the new world charted by the Treaty of Paris was his to navigate.
HENRY ADAMS WAS TOUCHED when Hay suggested that he would make a worthy successor as ambassador to England. But he recognized that he could be of greater service to his dear friend in the unofficial capacity of counselor and comforter. After settling Lizzie Cameron in an apartment in Paris for the winter, Adams arrived at Lafayette Square in mid-November. “Hay needs an alter or double,” he wrote to Nannie Lodge, “somebody like me, as intimate and as imbecile, but with traces of energy still left.”
Thus commenced a new phase of Adams and Hay’s relationship. The teas and dinners during the Five of Hearts days had been convivial and the talks lively, but this was something different. The two friends fell into the habit of walking together after Hay finished up at the State Department—the dour historian and beleaguered diplomat in top hats and high-buttoned topcoats, clearing their heads and collecting each other’s thoughts. “[W]e tramp to the end of 16th Street discussing the day’s work at home and abroad,” Adams related to Lizzie.
In his own letter to Lizzie, Hay gave his version of the ritual: “I go to the Department at nine and work till five and then carry home a little portfolio of annoyances. . . . If it were not for that blessed Dor [one of Martha Cameron’s nicknames for Adams] my lot would be most pitiable. He takes me for a walk in the gloaming and predicts catastrophes and ruin till my own cares fade away in the light of the coming cataclysm.”
Adams would never warm to McKinley, and while not a member of the Anti-Imperialist League, he thought annexation of the Philippines a shameful error. “I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare,” he wrote Lizzie, “[in which] we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways.” Yet neither he nor Hay ever argued over politics or found fault with each other. Instead, they “united in trying to help each other to get along the best way they could,” Adams wrote in his Education, “and all they tried to save was the personal relation.” Even then, Adams added, he “would have been beaten, had he not been helped by Mrs. Hay who saw the necessity of distraction, and led her husband to the habit of stopping every day to take his friend off for an hour’s walk, followed by a cup of tea with Mrs. Hay afterwards, and a chat with anyone who called.”
One of the callers that fall was Cabot Lodge, who lived a few short blocks away on Massachusetts Avenue. In many ways, Hay and Adams’s relationship with Lodge was even odder than their relationship with Don Cameron. Cameron was dull, and now that he was retired from the Senate, he was even easier to finesse. Besides, with Don also came La Dona. Cabot Lodge, on the other hand, was hard-nosed and arrogant, as self-serious as Hay and Adams were self-deprecatory. The romance between Hay and Nannie Lodge, such as it was, had long since dimmed, with Cabot and Clara none the wiser—their ignorance evidenced by the fact that the Hay and Lodge families continued to see a great deal of each other. All the same, neither Hay nor Adams could look at Lodge without seeing the hint of horns poking from his patrician brow.
As difficult as Lodge was socially, his political style was what really grated. Hay and Lodge were both Republicans, but Lodge was much less moderate and immensely more intractable. Lodge still regarded McKinley as meek and felt somewhat the same about Hay. As for Lodge’s large policy, the larger the better. When it came to asserting America’s place in the world, no one was as aggressive and cocksure as Cabot Lodge, unless it was Theodore Roosevelt. And if the world was Lodge’s oyster, so too was the State Department. Since gaining a seat on the Foreign Relations Committee, he had come to regard the department as his virtual fiefdom, its secretary and staff on call to do his senatorial bidding.
Hay, though, was not so easily cowed by Lodge’s forceful nature, nor did he readily subscribe to the senator’s ultra-expansionist rhetoric. Hay had been around his share of egotists and knew that the best way to accommodate them was to let them have their say and to hold one’s ground as calmly and politely as possible. Such was his approach when Lodge began dropping by Lafayette Square in December. After one of these sessions, Adams described to Lizzie Cameron the chill he saw growing between the two statesmen: “[T]he Senator, while agreeing in general approval of the Secretary of State’s health, expresses an earnest wish that he would not look so exceedingly tired when approached on business at the department; while the Secretary with sobs in his voice assures me that the Senator gives him more trouble, about less matter, than all the governments of Europe, Asia and the Sulu Islands [in the Philippines], and all the Senators from the wild West and the Congressmen from the rebel confederacy. Tell me, does patriotism pay me to act as a buffer-state?”
Adams’s snide humor was not lost on Lizzie, for she was one of four people who understood why Hay was willing to put up with Lodge but would never entirely bend to his will. After all, she and Adams had been the other “Two on the Terrace.”
THE MATTER THAT HAY and Lodge spent so much time discussing over tea was the Treaty of Paris and its chances for ratification. All treaties, even after they had been agreed upon by the nations of interest, still required a two-thirds vote of the Senate. In the case of the treaty with Spain, the Anti-Imperialists and obstructionist Democrats mounted a formidable front against the annexation of the Philippines, their moral objections strengthened by the legalistic contention that the U.S. Constitution forbade acquisition of territory not intended to become a state. (On the other hand, there was little or no public outcry against the cession of Cuba, Puerto Rico, or Guam.) To block ratification they needed only 28 votes. And they might well have succeeded if a new war had not broken out in the Philippines.
Filipinos, who had cooperated with the Americans in ousting the Spanish, felt bitterly betrayed when the United States proceeded to enforce military rule over the archipelago and scoffed at a newly written Philippines constitution and fledgling government. Filipinos likewise bristled when American soldiers routinely dismissed them as “niggers,” “jungle babies,” and “gugus,” and the leader of their independence movement, Emilio Aguinaldo, as a “halfbreed adventurer.” When Aguinaldo and his cohorts were excluded from the peace negotiations with Spain and barred from Manila, the city that they had helped to liberate and hoped would become the capital of an independent Philippines republic, the crisis ignited. On February 4, 1899, a standoff between natives and their occupiers turned violent, killing some sixty Americans and perhaps as many as three thousand Filipinos. The insurrection that ensued was to last four years and would require a force of more than seventy thousand American troops to suppress.
On February 6, one day after news of the outbreak of fighting reached Washington, Vice President Hobart put the Treaty of Paris to a vote of the Senate. The tally was 57 to 27, one more than the required two-thirds majority. Annexation accomplished.
Ten days later, McKinley gave a speech in Boston, reiterating his reasons for taking the Philippines. “Our concern was not for territory or trade or empire, but for the people whose interests and destiny, without our willing it, had been put in our hands,” he explained, even as the rebellion escalated. “We were doing our duty by them, as God gave us the light to see our duty, with the consent of our own consciences and with the approval of civilization. . . . Nor can we now ask for their consent. . . . It is not a good time for the liberator to submit important questions concerning liberty and government to the liberated while they are engaged in shooting down their rescuers.”
The treaty, he elaborated, committed the Filipinos “to the guiding hand of the liberalizing influences, the generous sympathies, the uplifting education, not of their American masters, but of their American emancipators.” And finally McKinley aimed his rhetoric not just at the Anti-Imperialists but also at the nations of the world who wondered at the true nature of America’s intent: “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind,” the president asserted. “They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose. Our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun.”
WHILE THE WAR DEPARTMENT endeavored to smother insurgency in the Philippines, the State Department took up the far more complex task of making the world smaller, or at least more accessible. With America’s billowing presence in the Pacific and the enchanting promise of the Far East, the need for a shorter and speedier route to foreign fronts and markets was greater than ever. After the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, a comparable project across Central America had at last seemed feasible. A French company was the first to try, digging in Panama for seven years, from 1882 to 1889, before going broke. Hay had been assistant secretary of state—and in-house translator—when the director of the French project, Ferdinand de Lesseps, attempted to get the United States involved; but President Hayes and Secretary of State William Evarts wanted nothing to do with a French canal. Any endeavor involving the United States, Evarts declared, would be an American canal under American control. Furthermore, he insisted, the United States would not consent to the surrender of this control to any European power or to any combination of European powers.
This view grew only stronger during the Spanish-American War, when the battleship Oregon required ten anxious weeks to steam from Puget Sound to Key West. An American-controlled canal between the Pacific and the Atlantic would have given the U.S. Navy an enormous strategic advantage; a canal controlled by an enemy or blocked by a neutral power could have been disastrous.
In 1887, the Maritime Canal Company, an American firm, had begun to dig in Nicaragua, a much longer route, but one considered by most American engineers to be less problematic. This effort collapsed in the Panic of 1893, but thereafter Nicaragua was regarded as “the American route.” In Congress, the greatest champion of Nicaragua was Senator John Tyler Morgan of Alabama, a seventy-five-year-old former Confederate general whose enthusiasm for an interoceanic canal predated the urgency of the Spanish-American War but now benefited from it enormously. In June 1898, as the navy blockaded Manila and Santiago, Morgan introduced a bill calling for the federal government to rehabilitate the Maritime Canal Company’s concession and renew work on the canal across Nicaragua—a canal built and owned by Americans. The war ended before the Senate could take up the legislation, but in his annual address to Congress in December, McKinley stressed the indispensability of “a maritime highway” and urged Congress to act without delay. The president expressed optimism for the Nicaragua route—and made no mention whatsoever of Panama.
On January 21, 1899, the Senate passed Morgan’s canal bill by an overwhelming majority. “Permit me to congratulate you most heartily,” John Hay wrote the senator. “I hope you will not consider it presumptuous in me to express my admiration of your work, and that you may soon see the complete accomplishment of it.”
What Hay did not mention to Morgan at the time was that a canal across Central America was in clear violation of a treaty that proscribed precisely what Morgan and the Maritime Company were proposing to do. By the terms of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850, Great Britain and the United States pledged that neither country would exclusively control or fortify any prospective isthmian canal and that both would guard the safety and neutrality of any canal they might build.
The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty was not put to the test, at least not immediately, for the Morgan bill hit an impasse in the House, where William P. Hepburn, a Republican from Iowa (Morgan was a Democrat), smelled something funny in the Maritime arrangement. Hepburn had come under the sway of a new group of canal advocates who had reasons, both mercenary and patriotic, to believe that Panama, not Nicaragua, ought to be the American way. To Morgan’s dismay and frustration, his bill was tabled until a newly created Isthmian Canal Commission could investigate the relative merits of both paths. So began “the battle of the routes,” which would drag on for four more years and alter the politics of Latin America for at least the next century. Hay would be in the very thick of it—but first he had to dismantle Clayton-Bulwer.
HIS TASK WOULD HAVE been much more straightforward if the British Foreign Office had not insisted on entangling the old canal treaty with more recent and far testier negotiations to resolve the boundary between Canada and Alaska.
The boundary in question was the rugged, jig-sawed coastline of northern British Columbia, delineated rather hazily in an 1825 treaty between Britain and Russia. The ambiguity of the boundary had been of no consequence when the United States purchased Alaska in 1867; the American assumption was that the boundary followed the coastline, including all inlets and harbors. But the Canadians, whose foreign policy was still determined by Great Britain, believed that the boundary cut across the mouths of inlets, making the inlets theirs. Neither side pushed the issue until the gold rush began in 1897—at which point Canada became convinced that there ought to be an all-Canadian route to the gold fields via the Lynn Canal, the longest inlet and the preferred jumping off point to the mountain passes that connected the coast to the Klondike. From distant Washington and London, the controversy appeared rather picayune, but to the Canadians it was regarded as a national affront. Such was their indignation that a joint high commission had been impaneled in 1898, before Hay became secretary of state, to work out an amicable solution.
Bickering continued through the fall and into the winter, proving irksome to the State Department and embarrassing to the British Foreign Office, whose stubborn North American dominion threatened to bruise the newly ripened friendship between the two countries. With resolution nowhere in sight, Prime Minister/Foreign Secretary Salisbury seized on the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty as the lever that could break the Alaskan logjam: If America would give ground in the north, Britain would give ground in the south, consenting to a revised treaty that would allow for an American canal.
Hay had no desire to stir up trouble with Britain, but, on the other hand, he was sure that the Canadian claims were “ridiculous and preposterous,” and it galled him that the canal could be held hostage. “The two questions have nothing to do with each other,” he vented to Henry White, who was the acting ambassador in London until Hay’s replacement was appointed. “Every intelligent Englishman is ready to admit that the canal ought to be built, that the United States alone will build it, that it cannot be built except as a Government enterprise, that nobody else wants to build it, that when built it will be to the advantage of the entire civilized world, and, this being the case, it is hard to see why the settlement of the matter ought to depend on the fish duty or the lumber duty or the Alaska boundary. . . . We shall have to make the best we can of a bad situation.”
A week later, the high commission adjourned until the end of the summer, without reaching a settlement and without agreeing on even basic ground rules for arbitration. Hay went into the spring “convinced that the Canadians prefer that nothing shall be settled between the two countries. . . . I cannot at this moment look forward in any hopeful spirit to a renewal of our negotiations.” He had accomplished nothing; worse still, he knew that men like John Morgan and Cabot Lodge would not let a fifty-year-old treaty with Britain keep the United States from building a canal. Unless he succeeded in separating Clayton-Bulwer from the Alaskan boundary, a great deal of the goodwill he had worked so hard to establish between the two countries would be dashed.
HE DID NOT HANDLE the strain well. Adams noticed that Hay’s temper had turned “quite savage.” After a dinner party to celebrate Hay and Clara’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, attended by Cabot and Nannie Lodge, among others, Adams wrote to Lizzie Cameron: “I am in daily terror lest Hay should bolt the course. I can see, beneath his silence, how he suffers under the imbecility of his colleagues, and the increasing difficulties of his situation. Yesterday, or rather Friday, everything seemed to give way together—The Canada Joint Commission broke down, dragging with it the Clayton-Bulwer negotiation and all Lord Salisbury’s honeymoon. . . . [T]he whole work of the winter was in ruins.”
(Adams also couldn’t resist mentioning that Clara had worn her wedding dress to the dinner. “I did not dare to ask how much alteration it required.”)
Hay’s letter to Lizzie two days later was no less forlorn: “[I]t is an evil life I am living—hounded by fellow-creatures from dawn till snowy eve, and not one soul of them but wants me to do something difficult or improper.” Some weeks later he was able to give an only slightly sunnier report to Henry White. “I am horribly rushed, and not very well,” he wrote. “By the time you get this, I shall have been in this place of punishment six months—the limit you and I set last August to my probable endurance. I may have deteriorated somewhat . . . but not fatally, and if I could get rid of a beastly cold which makes my life miserable, I should be pretty fit.”
Some of that fitness he owed to two recent appointments. Whitelaw Reid, despite his valuable service on the peace commission, had not been named the next ambassador to England. Instead, McKinley had given the job to New York attorney Joseph Choate, a law partner of William Evarts and a trusted adviser to Wall Street. Besides being one of America’s foremost legal minds, he was also a most charming public speaker. Everybody, it seems, had his favorite Choate witticism. (Asked who he would like to be if he could not be himself, he replied: “Mrs. Choate’s second husband.”) Like Hay, he was worldly and well-to-do—but without the grandiosity of Reid—and in London, where he arrived in March, Choate too could afford a house on Carlton House Terrace. A loyal Republican, with the admirable battle scar of having run for Senate against Thomas Platt, he would serve Hay steadfastly and adroitly for the next five years.
The other valuable addition to Hay’s team was William Rockhill. After failing to find a place for Rockhill in the State Department, Hay had tried to secure a sinecure for him as librarian of Congress, only to be blocked by Cabot Lodge, who wanted the job for a defeated Massachusetts politician. Finally in April, he succeeded in having Rockhill appointed director of the Bureau of American Republics, founded in 1890 to promote cooperation between eighteen nations of North, Central, and South America (the forerunner of the Organization of American States). The tacit understanding was that Rockhill would perform his duties for the Americas with an efficiency that would leave plenty of time to advise the State Department on Far Eastern affairs. The salary was meager, but Rockhill leapt at the offer and reported for duty in mid-May.
The placement of Choate and Rockhill enabled Hay to persevere, for even with the canal and the Alaskan boundary at an impasse, he felt encouraged that Choate would carry the administration’s brief with tact and determination without twisting the lion’s tail unduly. And with Rockhill close by, the State Department was poised to take the next step in American foreign policy. The Philippines, Hawaii, and the canal, whether in Nicaragua or Panama, were all links in the same chain, the jewel of which was China. In John Hay’s career as secretary of state, no two issues would loom larger or contribute more indelibly to his legacy than the interoceanic canal and China. The related diplomacy he accomplished with such determination and delicacy in the coming year would not only shrink the globe but also forestall goodly portions of it from falling apart.
MEANTIME, HE DID HIS best to keep his friendships intact as well. Hay had known since October that Reid would not win the English ambassadorship, but had been obliged to remain mum until the president was ready to make his decision public. The most awkward moment came at Christmas, when the peace commissioners arrived in New York and were escorted to Washington, at McKinley’s request, by Del Hay to present the signed treaty. At the end of Christmas Day, Reid had come to tea with Hay and Adams, and even then Hay was obliged to keep Reid in the dark. “Poor Hay had to bear the brunt of Whitelaw’s insane voracity for plunder,” Adams confided to Lizzie Cameron after the tea. Writing that same day to Flora Mather, Hay confessed, “I fear he [Reid] will never forgive me for not having been able to get him the English Embassy.”
Hay apologized to his friend for being less than forthcoming and begged Reid’s understanding: “I shall continue to hope that no cloud shall ever come between us. Your friendship has been one of the greatest pleasures of my life, and in the short space which remains to me I trust I shall retain it.” But the cloud had come just the same, and, without either of them ever saying so, the friendship was thenceforth mentioned mostly in the past tense.
IN MID-JUNE 1899, CLARA and the children left Lafayette Square to spend the summer at the Fells, leaving Hay to hold down the State Department. In the muggy heat of summer, the government fell into a state of semi-torpor; socially the city was dead. Hay and Adee worked out an arrangement by which Adee would take his vacations in June and early July—most years cycling in France—and, upon his return, Hay would depart for the Fells, remaining through September. “[T]he State Department, always impossible, has been a little Hell,” Hay told Adams, who was gone as well, staying in Lizzie Cameron’s apartment in Paris. “It was bad enough before you went away; but it has grown constantly worse, and there being nobody to talk to, and call it names, makes the whole thing intolerable.”
As usual when Hay was alone, he wrote to Lizzie. With Adams in Paris, she was back in the States, biding her time in New York and avoiding going to the Cameron farm in Pennsylvania. Hay beseeched her to come to Washington. Her house was vacant, Vice President Hobart having taken his failing heart to the New Jersey shore for the summer. “Did you ever spend the hot season in Washington?” he asked her. “I have, several times—but one forgets. Certainly I have no recollection of such steady, dense, unpitying heat. One loses one’s mind, heart, and conscience.” If she preferred not to trespass in her own house, there was always Adams’s. “But come and do not delay,” he pleaded five weeks later. “I would fain refresh my worn and weary eyes—bleared with too much diplomacy, by contemplating something more attractive.” He was frightfully busy, he told her somewhat mischievously. “I could not dedicate to you more than 24 hours per day.”
When she did not accept his invitation, he asked if he might not see her in New York on his way to New Hampshire. When she hesitated even then, he did not relent. “I am afraid you will not take time to think of that scheme I proposed this morning . . . because it does not amuse you,” he wrote just before leaving Washington. “But that is the wrong way to look at it: you should think how it will amuse me. And I am the elder & should be considered. And where shall I see you and where shall we have lunch? Is the Metropolitan Museum—near the Rembrandts—too far away? And the Metropolitan Club Annex—how is that? But anywhere you say will suit me.”
He closed his letter with a stiff “Regards to J.D.C.” (James Donald Cameron), but those regards were perfunctory at best. The only one he ever longed for was Lizzie. “It seems so unreal and impossible that I am to see you again—if I am,” he mused with ardent anticipation. “Are you as beautiful as ever, and as heartless? I hope so. It would be such a pity if you grew kind. Men are so numerous and unworthy. But be kind enough to say Yes this time and send your letter to my house and not to my shop.” Until then, he assured her, “I shall not sleep.”
Finally she did consent to have lunch with him, and it was enough to sustain him until the next time.