Hay spent the first week of the voyage in his cabin. Thankfully, the Atlantic was calm and the Cretic “as steady as a church,” he reported in his diary. As they reached the Azores, he was able to make turns about the deck. He chose not to go ashore at Gibraltar or Algiers, conserving his energy for lunch and a carriage ride when they put in for a day at Naples. Nearly seven years—seven all-consuming years—had passed since last he set foot in Europe. No man had been more of the world than John Hay; ironically, his labors had kept him from living in it. Now, by getting away from the State Department and returning to the cosmopolitan comforts of the Continent, he hoped to find the restorative he needed. But on April 1, as they prepared to dock at Genoa, the pain in his chest returned. “We have got to find out what is the matter,” Adams wrote to Lizzie Cameron.
At the suggestion of the American consul in Genoa, they drove down the coast to Nervi to consult a German physician. Dr. Stifler examined Hay thoroughly, testing his blood and measuring his pulse and heartbeat. The diagnosis was not simply “nervous” or “dyspeptic,” as Dr. Rixey had supposed. Stifler was sure that Hay’s heart was enlarged, a condition, he said, “very common among public men.” The doctor recommended that Hay go to Bad Nauheim, near Hamburg, and take a course of therapeutic baths. A railway strike and the dulcet Mediterranean air kept the Hays and Adams in Nervi another two weeks, and they did not arrive at Nauheim until April 22.
Nauheim had been known for its regenerative waters since the Iron Age and probably earlier. In the late nineteenth century, under the direction of Dr. Isidore Groedel, the spa began specializing in the care of cardiac patients. The rich and royal made the pilgrimage from all over Europe, Russia, and America to soak in waters naturally high in salt and carbonic acid. “The baths act like external champagne,” Alvey Adee, who knew his way around Europe, wrote to his boss, encouraging him to make the trip. “[T]he carbonic acid bites and tickles the skin as it does the tongue. The circulation is stimulated, the tired nerves wake up, and the whole ganglionic system is put in the way of regaining strength.” If Hay needed any further recommendation, he had only to recall that Lizzie Cameron had been to the spa several years earlier after a bout of influenza was feared to have weakened her heart—which, as her admirers well knew, proved to be plenty resilient.
Dr. Groedel confirmed Stifler’s diagnosis and prescribed a regimen of twenty baths, four per week. When Hay asked the doctor candidly whether his condition was such that he ought to resign as secretary of state, Groedel pointed out that six years earlier Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, secretary of the German navy, had come to Nauheim with a similar heart problem and was still at his post. Nonetheless, Hay wrote Roosevelt, telling him that, even though there was “no reason why the malady should be progressive,” he would understand entirely if Roosevelt decided to replace him. “I will not go through the form of offering you my commission,” he said, “though I often feel I have no right to hold it and not do the work it calls for.”
Roosevelt, who was hunting wolves and bears in Oklahoma and Colorado, wrote back to assure Hay that the job was still his. “I want you to rest almost absolutely this summer so as to be ready for the inevitable worries next winter,” the president counseled. In the meantime, Adee and his fellow assistant secretary, Francis Loomis, could keep the department running, with Secretary of War Taft “sitting on the lid”—Adee’s joke; Taft was obese—while Roosevelt was afield.
Adams went off to Paris, leaving Hay to his treatments. Dr. Groedel put him on a strict diet and forbade him from walking far or fast or uphill or while talking or after meals. Between baths, that left carriage rides, listening to a regimental band on the terrace, and reading. Clara reported to Adams at the beginning of May that her husband was a star patient. “He certainly does look better this morning,” she observed, “having lost that harassed look he had.” Groedel confirmed that the hydrotherapy was working and that the enlargement of the heart was diminishing.
Clara was encouraged enough that she too left for Paris; Hay would follow her when he finished his course at the end of the month. With each bath, the carbonation and salinity were increased and the temperature of the water lowered, stimulating the heart in stages. On May 22, Hay immersed himself in a thirty-two-degree bath and pronounced it “warm and comfortable after [the] first minute.”
That same day, however, he received a jolt that raised his blood pressure considerably. Henry Wilson, the American minister in Brussels, wrote Hay that Leopold II—“King of the Belgians” but also the imperialist ravager of the Congo and a “rattlepated old lunatic,” in Hay’s book—wanted to meet Hay in person. “I do not wish to see Mr. Hay as one of the great men of the world, whose services on behalf of civilization can hardly be overestimated,” the king solicited. “I simply want to know him in a democratic every day way, and as one man knows another man.”
Three days later, Hay received a telegram from Charlemagne Tower in Berlin that Kaiser Wilhelm II hoped to make his acquaintance as well. Next he heard from Joseph Choate in London that King Edward VII wished Hay could find a moment to call on his way home.
After consulting with Dr. Groedel, who strongly advised against any such royal intercourse, Hay was able to decline the kaiser’s invitation and reckoned that he had finessed Leopold as well. But two days before he was to leave Nauheim, he walked into his hotel and found the king seated in an armchair by the elevator. Hay had no choice but to invite His Highness up to his room, until, pleading fatigue, he was able to send his guest on his way.
The next day, after a final bath, Groedel informed him that his enlargement was gone, and, “although the heart still seemed rather weak and excitable and the sounds not strong, everything was much better than when I came.” Groedel then gave Hay a list of prohibitions “as long as a chapter of Deuteronomy”: no cabbage, radishes, onions, or anything flatulent; little red meat; no aerated water or champagne; no sweets except the plainest pudding; no public speaking and not much animated conversation, especially after dinner. Groedel also advised him against visiting the foreign offices in Paris and London. He must stay perfectly quiet in the first two weeks after his course of baths—a crucial element of his rehabilitation known as Nachkur (aftercare). “On the whole,” Hay grumbled, “a very dismal prospect.”
He slept well enough that night, but in the morning the chest pain was back. “I seem fated to leave Nauheim as I left New York,” he wrote. “Even when the pain would die away the pulse kept racing.”
He took an overnight train to Paris, and Adams was there to meet him in a brand-new automobile. They spent the day motoring through the Bois de Boulogne, Saint-Cloud, Versailles, and Marly-le-Roi. It was one of those sublime spring days, the roadsides abloom, and doubtless the memories came flooding back—although this was not how he had observed Paris on his previous visit, on the way back to London from Egypt in 1898. They returned to their hotel by five at “an incredible rate of speed.” Over the next two days Hay met with the French foreign minister Théophile Delcassé and took more long outings in Adams’s machine. So much for Nachkur.
Adams dropped Hay and Clara off at the Gare du Nord on the morning of June 2. “Certainly I have done what little I could,” he wrote Lizzie, “and I much doubt its use. Hay has not gained strength yet. Paris pulled him down at once. His nerves are gone. He is in no better physical condition than when we sailed.” Adams, ever the cynical outsider, could not comprehend why Hay did not embrace the inevitable and leave office while there was still life and dignity left in him. “Theodore is his own Cabinet, and especially likes to play with foreign kings,” Adams continued to Lizzie. “Hay has had no choice but to hold the hats and look on. He had better go out, now that his excuse is good. It is true that I have said so from the first:—Get out before you are kicked out! was my standing proverb. He said he wanted to see himself get kicked out. Instead, he merely stays kicked in.”
In London, Hay was even more restive than in Paris; the temptations of his favorite city on earth were too overwhelming. He spent an hour with Foreign Secretary Lansdowne, and the following day, Sunday, he went to Buckingham Palace, where, out of consideration for his health, Edward VII broke with protocol and received him in a small drawing room on the first floor. “He began talking at once with great affability and fluency,” Hay wrote, “laying great stress on the agreeable relations between our two countries”—words that may not have mended Hay’s heart but surely warmed it, for no one had been more instrumental in nurturing and preserving England’s friendship than he.
The pace did not slacken. He and Clara dined with Lord and Lady Algernon Gordon-Lennox and their nephew, who had recently returned from Manchuria. Hay lunched with Whitelaw Reid, who had just begun his ambassadorship. He saw the artist Edwin Abbey and admired his latest sketches. After a morning of shopping, he visited the Royal Academy, where in the past he had spent so many cherished hours, to see John Singer Sargent’s latest masterpiece, a portrait of the Duke of Marlborough and family. “An astonishing piece of work,” Hay declared, “worthy to rank with the greatest groups of portraits in the history of art.”
There just wasn’t enough time. On the final evening in London, a parade of devotees dropped by the hotel to say hello and goodbye: the diplomat and international gossip Cecil Spring-Rice, the journalist John St. Loe Strachey, the baronet Sir Robert Cunliffe, and James Bryce, author of The American Commonwealth. The attention was touching and bittersweet. Before heading to Liverpool to board the ship for home, Hay wrote a letter to Sir John Clark in Scotland, to whom he had been introduced by Adams twenty years earlier. “When I left Nauheim the German Doctor Groedel told me I must not pass by Paris and London except under bonds to see nobody, and do nothing either sensible or amusing,” he explained contritely. “So I go away from these two homes of my heart as if I had passed through them in a nightmare. . . . Farewell, dear and generous friend. We never forget you when we think of this beautiful Elder world, and the happy days we have spent here.”
ONE NIGHT DURING THE crossing, he had a dream. “I went to the White House to report to the President who turned out to be Mr. Lincoln,” he recorded in his diary. “He was very kind and considerate, and sympathetic about my illness. He said there was little work of importance on hand. He gave me two unimportant letters to answer. I was pleased that this slight order was within my power to obey. I was not in the least surprised at Lincoln’s presence in the White House. But the whole impression of the dream was one of overpowering melancholy.”
The next morning, as they were approaching New York Harbor, they received a Marconi—a wireless telegram, a first for both of them—announcing the birth of a son to Alice and Jim Wadsworth, named for his father.
Helen and Payne met their ship. They spent the weekend with the Whitneys on Long Island, and on Monday, Hay took the train to Washington, intending to stay long enough to “say Ave Caesar! to the President,” he told John Clark, and to straighten his desk if he could. “I owe you a thousand thanks for your generous forbearance in my disablement,” he wrote the president from New York. “How far I can continue to accept it is a question we can talk over when we meet.”
He dined with the Roosevelts at the White House on Monday night. The president, he was relieved and mildly chagrined to learn, had the nation’s foreign affairs well in hand. Roosevelt had gotten around the Senate’s rejection of the Dominican debt-collection impasse by implementing it as a modus vivendi, a temporary agreement that the Senate could only derail post hoc.
Roosevelt’s much greater achievement was in coaxing Japan and Russia to consider peace. On May 27, the day Hay left Nauheim, the Japanese navy attacked the Russian fleet as it attempted to slip through the Strait of Tsushima, between Korea and Japan, en route to Vladivostok. It was the most decisive naval victory since Trafalgar, exactly a century earlier. When the smoke cleared, thirty-four of thirty-eight Russian ships were sunk, ruined, or captured, and ten thousand Russian sailors were dead or wounded. Japan lost only three torpedo boats and a hundred sailors.
In the days that followed, first Japan and then Russia accepted Roosevelt’s offer to mediate a meeting between the two combatants in order “to discuss the whole peace question themselves.” Hay had received the happy news when he landed in New York. “It was a great stroke of that good luck which belongs to those who ‘know how’ and are not afraid,” he congratulated Roosevelt. “I need not have worried about my being sick and away. I have evidently not been missed. Reid once told me when I had been running the Tribune in his absence that ‘the paper has been disgustingly good.’ That is what I find your management of the State Department during my truancy.”
Neither would have been so ungentlemanly to say so, but it was now quite obvious: the proprietorship of the State Department had changed hands.
HAY HAD NO DESIRE and even less strength to linger in the simmering heat of the capital. But first he had one more call to make before heading to New Hampshire to join Clara. He had heard from Adams that Lizzie Cameron had finally moved back into her house on Lafayette Square. On his first day in Washington, he stepped the short distance to her door, only to find that she had already left for Newport. Greeted by “silence and bitter-sweet memories,” he wrote her a letter, full of news about Nauheim and Adams. He signed it gallantly, demurely, wistfully, “Love to Martha” (her daughter) “and things unutterable to you.”
Lizzie read his letter and replied immediately. “My Dear and Great Friend,” she began. “The sight of your familiar handwriting . . . filled me with joy. . . . [W]hy didn’t you come sooner and spend two blissful and hot weeks with me in Washington?” Then, alluding to the mysterious kiss exchanged in Hay’s poem “Two on the Terrace,” she disclosed, “I drove up to the Capitol one hot moon-filled night, and around the Monument, and thought how very unchanged it all was, and yet how different.” She suggested that he join her at Nauheim the following summer. “Do! We can walk around the lake, which is the one thing allowed, and drink black coffee on the terrace like the best of Germans.”
She signed off: “Goodbye, dear Mr. Hay. When shall I see you? Could you not come through this way?”
ON FRIDAY, JUNE 23, Hay had a brief interview with Cassini and then saw Dr. Rixey, who listened to his heart with some concern and sent him on his way. He left Washington with Clarence that evening, and they arrived at the Fells the following afternoon. “The night was delightfully cool,” he wrote Roosevelt on Sunday, “and the morning air is like that of a new made world.”
But he was not long for it. Later in the day, he grew increasingly uncomfortable, unable to urinate, a painful problem that had afflicted him some years earlier. Worried about the strain on his heart, Clara summoned a local doctor and also telegraphed Dr. Charles S. Scudder at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Scudder enlisted a colleague and rushed to Newbury by special train, making the trip in a near-record two hours. He initially diagnosed uremia, an indication of kidney malfunction, but later suspected merely a bladder infection. He inserted a catheter, and within twenty-four hours Hay was reported to be “in no immediate danger” and “doing nicely.” Scudder noted that Hay’s heart was weak but predicted that he would be up and about in a few days. Clara urged Helen and Payne to go ahead with their trip to Europe; their ship left New York on Tuesday.
In Paris, meanwhile, Henry Adams read of Hay’s illness in the Herald and wrote to Lizzie Cameron: “Although I could not have prophesied it to a day, I fully expected it this week. . . . The doctors had been all wrong about him. . . . I imagine that Hay’s life is as good as ended.”
Dr. Scudder returned on Friday evening and was pleased with Hay’s progress. He was sitting up in bed, still very weak, but able to sign papers and dictate to Clara a short letter to the State Department. Then he asked for a sheet of stationery, saying he wanted to write a memorandum, Clara recalled, “but he was so tired after he had dictated the letter that I said he better not do it”—the memorandum—“and he said, ‘If you promise me I will be better tomorrow I will wait.’ ” With that he bid her good night and went to sleep.
A few moments after midnight, the nurse noticed him struggling for breath and summoned Scudder and the other doctor, who had remained at the Fells throughout the week. When Clara reached her husband’s bedside, she found him groaning as the doctors attempted artificial respiration and injected him with nitroglycerine. “I did not know he was dying till I saw the look of horror on the nurse’s face,” she later wrote. “Then the Doctors tried the stethoscope & neither could hear anything and he was gone.”
John Milton Hay departed the world at 12:25 am on July 1, 1905.
AFTERWARD, WHEN CLARA OPENED his diary, she discovered that he had made no significant entry since returning to the United States. On June 13, he had recorded his dream of Lincoln in the White House. On June 14, the day before landing in New York, he had jotted these words, surely recognizing that they might be his final testament:
“I say to myself that I should not rebel at the thought of my life ending at this time. I have lived to be old, something I never expected in my youth. I have had many blessings, domestic happiness being the greatest of all. I have lived my life. I have had success beyond all the dreams of my boyhood. My name is printed in the journals of the world without descriptive qualification, which may, I suppose, be called fame. By mere length of service I shall occupy a modest place in the history of my time. If I were to live several years more I should probably add nothing to my existing reputation; while I could not reasonably expect any further enjoyment of life, such as falls to the lot of old men in sound health. I know death is the common lot, and what is universal ought not to be deemed a misfortune; and yet—instead of confronting it with dignity and philosophy, I cling instinctively to life and the things of life, as eagerly as if I had not had my chance at happiness & gained nearly all the great prizes.”
CLARA TOOK HER HUSBAND to Cleveland to be buried. “As he had told me once he did not care where I laid him and as our boy was there, it seemed more like home,” she reasoned. The flag-draped casket was placed for public viewing in the Chamber of Commerce Auditorium for a day, awaiting the arrival of Roosevelt, the vice president, the cabinet, and the rest of the mourners, a list that included current and former senators, a Supreme Court justice, the governor of Ohio, and a delegation of foreign ministers. Robert Lincoln came; Lizzie Cameron had intended to be there but changed her mind once she learned that the funeral was to be so large and “official.”
On the morning of July 5, twenty-four carriages, escorted by an honor guard of cavalry, followed the hearse from Public Square along Euclid Avenue to Lake View Cemetery. After a simple service at the cemetery’s chapel, a quartet sang “For All the Saints Who from Their Labors Rest,” and Hay was interred beside Del—their graves halfway between the Rockefeller family plot and the massive monument to James Garfield. Services were held the same day at the Church of the Covenant in Washington and at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Helen and Payne Whitney arrived in England in time to attend the latter.
The headline in the next day’s Cleveland Plain Dealer read, “Prince of Peace Was Loved by All,” and judging by the outpouring of condolences and memorials, it was true.
Most said the same things, in different ways. They touched on the Lincoln years and the Lincoln biography and continued to the Open Door, the Boxer Rebellion, and the Panama Canal. They reprinted and recited “Jim Bludso” and “Little Breeches.”
Yet it was not the litany of Hay’s deeds that distinguished him as much as the manner in which he had conducted himself while achieving them. “He was not only the foremost statesman of his time; he was the tenderest, dearest, most attractive man of men, and the finest gentleman books make any mention of,” James Hoyt of Cleveland attested. “With no thought of self-seeking, simply by . . . the charm of his own personality, he rose step by step until at last he came to be recognized for what he was, the greatest prime minister that this republic has ever had.”
One eulogist after another stressed Hay’s thoughtfulness—toward subordinates, complete strangers, his peers, and the world. One of the news clippings that Clara added to Hay’s scrapbook avowed, “Among his many admirable traits, none was more notable than his deep human sympathy, which leaped the boundaries of home and state and nation and went out to the suffering of all lands.”
Above all, they praised his forthrightness. “At first men began to talk about ‘shirt sleeve’ diplomacy, as if frankness were something brutal,” the Independent of New York observed. “Mr. Hay believed that simple straightforward directness is good in international as well as personal affairs.”
And he was credited with an impeccable sense of timing: “If, as the old Greeks said, Opportunity has only a forelock, so that he cannot be seized after he has passed by,” the Independent continued, “John Hay was always alert to catch him at the right moment.”
Some of the most profound appreciations came from Jews, who regarded the Kishinev petition as a turning point in the government’s acknowledgment of anti-Semitism. “[W]e have lost our mightiest friend among the nations; a friend who dared to do in behalf of the Jews that which no man in so high a position has ever dared before,” the Tiphereth Zion Society of Pittsburgh proclaimed in an official resolution. Moses Gries of the Central Conference of American Rabbis said in Cleveland on the day of Hay’s funeral: “As rabbi, and for the moment as representative of Jews of the land, I honor and revere the name of John Hay. He was clean and pure and belonged to the pure and upright among men.”
Hay was not a churchgoer himself; he left that to Clara, a solid Presbyterian. Yet he could quote the Bible with fluency and allowed some of his verse to be turned into hymns. “My faith in Christ is implicit. I am a believer,” he had assured Hiram Haydn, pastor of the Old Stone Church in Cleveland, who presided over the wedding of both of Hay’s daughters and the funerals of first Del and now his father. The Reverend Teunis Hamlin, pastor of the Church of the Covenant in Washington, said much the same thing of the late secretary of state that had once been said of President Lincoln: “It would be difficult to find in the New Testament a trait of character described as Christian that was not exemplified in Mr. Hay.”
More mixed were the expressions of grief from Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams. When the president received word at Oyster Bay that Hay had died, he promptly issued a public statement: “His death, a crushing sorrow to his friends, is to the people of this country a national bereavement, and in addition, it is a serious loss to mankind.” That same day he wrote to Clara: “I dearly loved him; there is no one who . . . can quite fill the place he held. He was not only my wise and patient advisor in affairs of state; he was the most devoted and at the same time the most charming of friends.”
But immediately after returning from Hay’s funeral, Roosevelt began putting distance between himself and his former secretary of state, enriching his own esteem by poaching from Hay’s. “Hay was a really great man,” Roosevelt allowed in a letter to Senator Albert Beveridge, “and the more credit is given him the more I am delighted, while the result of the last election showed how futile it was for the Evening Post, the Sun, and the rest of my enemies to try to draw the distinction between what Hay did and what I did. Whether I originated the work, or whether he did and merely received my backing and approval, is of no consequence to the party, and what is said of it is of no earthly consequence to me.”
Except that it was. “Of course, what I am about to say I can only say to a close friend, for it seems almost ungenerous,” Roosevelt confided to Cabot Lodge in the now notorious (and previously quoted) letter of July 11, 1905. “But for two years [Hay’s] health had been such that he could do very little work of importance. His name, his reputation, his staunch loyalty, all made him a real asset of the administration. But in actual work I had to do the big things myself, and the other things I always feared would be badly done or not done at all.”
Spoken like a son jealous of his father’s shadow.
Had Adams known of Roosevelt’s letters, he would not have been shocked by their self-serving disrespect. He had been deeply disgusted by the American political system since at least the Grant administration and now blamed it—and the treaty process in particular—for the death of his best friend. “The Senate killed Hay,” he wrote bitterly to Lizzie Cameron from Paris. “Our friend Cabot helped to murder him, [as] consciously as possible, precisely as though he put strychnine in his drink.”
Writing to Clara Hay, he was not quite so graphic but equally incensed. Adams was convinced that the cause of Hay’s physical decline was not his heart. Hay had done well at Nauheim, lost ground in Paris and London, then improved during the voyage home. But the prospect of going to Washington weighed on him, Adams averred. “[I]t was not physical fatigue . . . that caused collapse, but merely the renewed strain of nervous worry. His diplomates tired him out, after his Senators had poisoned him.”
Having spilled the cup of bile, Adams let it flow. “I admit that I draw my conclusions largely from myself. Senators poison me, and therefore I avoid them. Diplomates, especially American Ambassadors”—his father had been one of the few good ones—“bore me beyond endurance, and I never go near them. . . . If I had to deal with them, they would kill me, as, in my opinion, they did him.”
After the death of his wife twenty years earlier, Adams had gradually pulled himself together, but he was not sure he could do so again. “As for me it is time to bid good-bye,” he wrote Clara. “I am tired. My last hold on the world is lost with him. I am too old to make new efforts or care for new interests. I can no longer look a month ahead, or be sure of my hand or mind. I have clung on to his activities till now, because they were his, but except as his they have no concern for me, and I have no more strength for them. He and I began life together. We will stop together.”
THERE ARE MANY THINGS Hay was not. He was not so much a striver as he was an inquirer, an insatiable self-improver. He was not a man of the people, like Lincoln, yet if he was guilty of snobbery, he directed it more often toward other snobs than toward the nation’s breadwinners.
He was kind and quite generous—giving not just to candidates but also to charities ranging from mission societies to vocational schools for Negroes—but he was not one hundred percent empathetic to the world. One of the reasons he had interceded on behalf of Jews after the Kishinev massacre was out of concern that such pogroms would increase the flow of unwelcome immigrants to the United States. Similarly, it went without saying that the Open Door swung one way only; he did not ask the Chinese for their permission to send out his celebrated notes to the powers; nor was he inclined to open America’s door to China’s predominant export: its citizens.
It must also be said that on some level—one that will never be fully ascertained—he was not faithful. Then, too, there was one great prize that, as much as he desired it, he never did attain to his satisfaction.
IF ROOSEVELT’S HARSH POSTMORTEM judgment of Hay is valid, why, then, did the president not release him from service on the many occasions that Hay invited him to do so? The answer most often posited is that Roosevelt employed Hay as the venerable, avuncular pilot of the administration’s warship as it parted the waves of the world. Still, Roosevelt’s diminishment of Hay did not alter their actual relationship; it only reframed how Roosevelt wanted that relationship perceived in the pages of his own self-inflated record.
In the twentieth century, moderation and neutrality—not merely diplomatic neutrality but also moral evenhandedness—fell into disuse and disfavor. Hay’s treaties were said to be soft; they lacked teeth. Perhaps so, but they were not shortsighted. Hay was a romantic but not the sort who clung to rosier yesteryears. He had sought a new and better world since his boyhood in Illinois, since the Kansas-Nebraska Act had brought America to a fork in the road that changed everything. Republicans, to Hay, were futurists, in the United States and in the Spain of Castilian Days. He had a notion of what the New World ought to be, but he was never grandiose in his designs; there was no Hay Doctrine per se. Only in hindsight did his footsteps reveal a path and his decisions exceed the sum of their parts.
Did he remake the world, or rather, would the world have been that much different if he had not played his hand so deftly? An isthmian canal would have been built, somewhere. The United States and Great Britain would have bolstered their bond, eventually. But China? China might be a different organism today had it not been for John Hay.
If Hay put any other indelible stamp on the world, perhaps it was that he demonstrated how the United States ought to comport itself. He, not Roosevelt, was the adult in charge when the nation and the State Department attained global maturity. “With Mr. Hay there was not the shade of a shadow of a suspicion of the patriotic gladiator raising his sword to the genius of the Republic with an ‘Ave Columbia Imperatrix! moritorus te salutat,’ ” John St. Loe Strachey eulogized. “All that the world saw was a great gentleman and a great statesman doing his work for the State and for the President with perfect taste, perfect good sense, and perfect good humour.”
William Dean Howells admired Hay’s universality, but he also cherished Hay as the best sort of native son: “John Hay, whatever he knew of the world elsewhere, or however it had interested his mind or amused his fancy, was very helplessly and inalienably American. He was American and he was Western by virtue of that very fineness of spirit, that delicacy of mind, that gentleness of heart, often imagined incompatible with our conditions. There was never in him any peevish revolt from these; he accepted them, as he accepted our heat and cold; they were the terms of our being worth while.
“Something of this is evident in all he wrote,” continued Howells, a westerner himself, who had written the very first biography of Lincoln in 1864 and had been Hay’s first real editor. “In the great history which he contributed to our literature; in the admirable study of foreign life which he left; in the striking, if strikingly unequal, poems of which he always thought so modestly, he avouched his ability to have done what he wished in literature, if only he had wished it enough. He showed in these the potentiality of a great popularity, when he turned from them for the other career which was not more than equally open to him. Yet he chose to do his great service to the public independently of the popular choice, and he, the most innately American of our statesmen, came to represent what was most European in the skill of the diplomacy he practised. We shall all of us love always to think that the frankness, the honesty, the brave humanity which characterized it was the heart of Americanism, [and] in any moment of hesitation concerning this or that fact of it, we could say to ourselves that it must be right because Hay did it.”
To be more like John Hay was good. To have more of him would have been even better.
THEODORE ROOSEVELT SUCCEEDED IN bringing Russia and Japan together for a peace conference at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in August 1905, ending the Russo-Japanese War. Russia at last was compelled to withdraw from Manchuria; the integrity of China was preserved; and Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his role as mediator.
Roosevelt replaced Hay with former Secretary of War Elihu Root, who served capably and without extraordinary confrontation or crisis. His relationship with Roosevelt was cordial throughout, and he was not reluctant to speak truth to power. For instance, it was Root, commenting on Roosevelt’s conduct during the Panama revolution, who famously told the president: “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”
After her husband’s death, Clara tried to persuade Henry Adams to write a biography of Hay. Adams resisted but agreed to help her prepare a selection of his letters and diaries. Clara published them in 1908, but in her unwillingness to ruffle feathers, she abbreviated nearly all proper names to first initials, rendering the three-volume collection insipid if not entirely unintelligible to the general public. She kept the house on Lafayette Square but spent little time there, preferring Cleveland, the Fells, and the company of her children and grandchildren. She died in New York at the home of Helen and Payne Whitney in 1914. Both of Helen and Payne’s children made considerable names for themselves: Joan Whitney Payson for her art collection and philanthropy and for founding the New York Mets baseball franchise; John “Jock” Whitney for his polo-playing and playboy lifestyle, for starting the first American venture capital firm, and, finally, for following in his grandfather’s footsteps: in 1957, President Eisenhower named him ambassador to England.
Alice and Jim Wadsworth took up residence in the Lafayette Square house after Wadsworth was elected to the U.S. Senate the year of Clara’s death. The house, along with Adams’s, was razed in 1927, and the Hay-Adams Hotel opened on the site a year later. The family political dynasty continued when Alice and Jim’s daughter, Evelyn, married Stuart Symington, who served in the Senate and then ran against John F. Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. In turn, Evelyn and Stuart Symington’s son, James, served four terms in the House of Representatives.
After Harvard, Clarence Hay became an archeologist and eventually a curator at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He loved the Fells more than did anyone else in the family, and over the years he applied his green thumb to converting rugged pastures into terraced lawns and handsome rock gardens. The house and estate are now preserved as a nature sanctuary and historic site with support from the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. The public is welcome.
Henry Adams did not give up the ghost when Hay died, after all. He published a private edition of his autobiographical Education of Henry Adams in 1907, with lengthy appreciations of both Hay and Clarence King. He continued to travel back and forth to Europe, seeing Lizzie Cameron in Paris, until the First World War began. He died in Washington in 1918.
Lizzie Cameron remained in Paris during the war, joining with, among others, Edith Wharton, to care for the refugees who flocked to the city. None of Hay’s letters to Lizzie appeared in Clara’s collection, and she did not allow William Roscoe Thayer to use any of them in The Life and Letters of John Hay (1915). “I am surprised at my forgetfulness when I told you I had letters of Mr. Hay’s which you might care to use,” she excused herself to Thayer. “On looking them over I find that most of them are what would seem to anyone not well acquainted with Mr. Hay, ardent love letters! You, who must have handled many such, will understand that they merely express his habit of gallantry, and his love of writing pretty phrases.” After Lizzie read the completed biography, she wrote Adams: “I think Mr. Thayer makes [Hay] more a decided, vigorous character than he really was—to me he seemed timid, un-self-asserting, and almost feminine in the delicacy of his intuitions & in his quickness.” Lizzie’s husband, Donald, died in 1918, five months after Adams, and she never remarried. In her final years she lived in England, where she died in 1944, at the age of eighty-three.
As he was dying in 1901, Clarence King disclosed his true identity to his wife, Ada, and explained that he had left behind a trust fund to take care of her and the children. Over the next thirty years, she received monthly checks from an unknown source. Not until 1933, after Ada filed a legal complaint against the trust, was the identity of the source revealed. First John Hay, then, after his death, Clara, and finally Payne and Helen Whitney had been dutifully sending Ada $50 a month—essentially hush money to protect King’s name.
Hay’s devotion and affection had outlived him. Once a Heart, a Heart forever—the same Heart who, as “J.H.,” had written:
He seen his duty, a dead-sure thing,—
And went for it thar and then;
And Christ ain’t a-going to be too hard
On a man that died for men.
The subject of the rhyme was a Mississippi river man, Jim Bludso, but the benediction might have applied just as easily to another of Hay’s heroes, Abraham Lincoln. John Hay would never have volunteered any such words about himself; all the same, the virtues they celebrated—loyalty, humility, grace under pressure, unswerving sacrifice—were his own to the very end.