On July 1, 1905, John Hay died of a lingering heart ailment at his Lake Sunapee country house near Newbury, New Hampshire. Adams, an ocean away in Paris, took the news personally. “Hay’s death strands me,” he wrote to Lizzie Cameron on the 2nd. “I am now left quite alone.” Agreeably acquainted for over forty years, Adams and Hay had drawn close on the Lafayette Square social circuit, were occasional travel companions, and, as the years passed and the men in power grew younger, recognized each other as relic survivors of an older republic. On any number of subjects their correspondence slipped easily into a familiar and often farcical inflection—more controlled on Hay’s side, more unbuttoned on Henry’s. Of late they had warmly disdained the self-important Lodge and believed Roosevelt a fatuous bully; on a cure, they had spent much of April touring the Italian Riviera before moving on to Germany. Now bereft of Hay’s familiar presence, Adams felt isolated: “My last hold on the world is lost with him. I am too old to make new efforts or care for new interest.… 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.”1
For years Adams had quietly predicted Hay’s broken health. “I think [him] very far from strong,” he wrote to Brooks in 1901, “and doubt his ability to remain in office.” In the winter of 1904 he warned Lizzie, “Hay… is still too weak to walk around the square. At the same time, he is regularly besieged and overrun by diplomates and colleagues.” The following year Hay himself pled infirmity. “I have great doubts whether this tenement of clay which I inhabit will hold together,” he informed the British historian George Trevelyan. “Walking with Henry Adams the other day, I expressed my regret that by the time I got out of office, I should have lost the faculty of enjoyment. As you know Adams, you can understand the dry malice with which he replied: ‘Make your mind easy on that score, sonny! You’ve lost it now!’ ”2 Henry noticed that his friend tired easily, had visibly aged in the State Department, and suffered from recurring bouts of bronchitis. He may have known too that Hay now kept a journal, had made out a will, and, as if passing a gift on to posterity, recently sat for John Singer Sargent, the leading portrait painter of the Edwardian era. When his friend died, Adams took little time apportioning blame.
“Politics poisoned him,” he flatly told Hay’s widow, Clara. “The Senate and the Diplomates killed him.” He wrote much the same to Lizzie, though adding in a score-settling kind of way that “political bravos like Cabot and Theodore” were equally accountable.3 More generally Henry supposed that Hay, a poet, novelist, and historian, stood no chance of surviving in the contemporary climate; his demise seemed to offer proof that the “best” of his generation, those sensitive, literary, and intellectual, were being summarily ground down in the process of empire-building and fortune-making. Naturally Henry, himself sensitive, literary, and intellectual, assumed that Hay’s passing pointed to his own.
No one understood better than Adams the obligation to commemorate a loved one. Decade after decade, generation after generation, his family had long honored its fallen with carefully crafted editions of letters, biographies, and diary extracts. Naturally, Clara Hay asked Henry to write her husband’s biography. A “print memorial” from a dear friend, a man recognized as one of the nation’s most distinguished historians, seemed an altogether natural and fitting tribute. “No one else,” William James told Adams, “will ever be so qualified.” And Henry, it is true, knew how to salute a fallen colleague. He had recently acknowledged the death of yet another Heart, Clarence King, with a brilliant essay that appeared in Clarence King Memoirs: The Helmet of Mambrino (1904). Published for the Century Association in homage to “their distinguished fellow-member,” the memorial stressed King’s remarkable capacity for friendship, his infectious humor, and his several Cuban adventures. “He was the ideal companion of our lives,” Adams mused.4
But Henry had no interest in writing Hay’s biography. A light, short piece on King, to be circulated among a select circle, allowed its author to emphasize what he wished, suppress the rest, and put friendship above the historical record. A study of Hay, on the other hand, would require an altogether different effort and set of expectations. Hay’s life was in many respects public property. He had served in Lincoln’s White House, represented the United States overseas, and headed the State Department for nearly seven years. No mere confection of warm remembrances would do. And Henry knew that any biography he set his hand to would be taken as a scholarly work, certain to be measured against the Gallatin and the Randolph as well as the History’s finely honed profiles.
In March 1907 he wrote to Anna Cabot Lodge of his reticence to dissect Hay’s life: “I never knew a mere biography that did not hurt its subject. One must dodge it as one can.” At the same time he observed to the historian James Ford Rhodes, “Unless a man of [Hay’s] importance takes the precaution to write his own life, no one else should risk it for him, in the character of a friend.”5 Seeking to prevent such “a friend”—or an independent scholar—from digging into his own affairs, Adams had only a few months earlier completed a draft of the Education. To now produce an exhaustive “Life of Hay,” or some such construction, would defy the logic of that protective exercise and perhaps suggest a “Life of Adams” to any number of intrepid researchers.
Clara Hay eventually backed away from recruiting Henry—or anyone else—to sketch her husband’s biography. But she remained determined that some type of print tribute be undertaken and successfully enlisted Adams’s editorial aid in a project to be published in three volumes under the title Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary. She wrote to her husband’s chief correspondents, including John Nicolay, Theodore Roosevelt, and the former New York Tribune editor Whitelaw Reid, asking that they forward their collections of Hay’s letters to Adams. With delicacy in mind, Henry, who contributed correspondence from his own private file, never asked Lizzie to share her store. He had considered it fair in the King memorial to draw attention to his subject’s attraction to non-Anglo peoples—“He loved the Spaniard as he loved the negro and the Indian and all the primitives, because they were not academic”—as his clubby readership already knew of King’s autonomous tastes. But Hay had forged a prominent public career while accommodating the Victorian standards of his day. Clara, perhaps realizing as much, did well in securing Henry’s assistance with her husband’s correspondence; he took seriously the sensitive issues of privacy, reputation, and the impending judgment of history.6
The best collection of letters belonged to Reid, a longtime power broker in Republican circles. After receiving Henry’s request for correspondence, he replied asking for guidance. Hay, he reported, had habitually closed his communications with such instructions as “burn when read,” “delenda,” and “destroy.” Obviously Reid, thinking his friend merely overcautious, had kept the letters. But should they now be more generally circulated? Henry responded curiously: “As editor I have always strained liberality of assent. No editor ever spared any one of my family that I know of, and, in return, we have commonly printed all that concerned other people. Whether this state of war ever injured anyone I do not know; but it lasts to this day, and makes me rather indifferent to conventional restraints.”7
Considering Henry’s proficiency in the art of evasion, this remark is either innocent in the extreme or, more likely, self-serving. The exclusion of Hay’s flirtatious letters to Cameron from the memorial is one example; Adams’s highly selective Education, for which he had just read the proof sheets, is yet another. To say that “no editor ever spared” the family, moreover, is a polite fiction, for the Adamses themselves decided what would and would not go into their many homemade memorials. To give but a single illustration, Henry convinced Brooks about this time to suppress his biography of John Quincy Adams, their grandfather’s labors for slaveholder presidents cited as the unpardonable offense. “The sum of it,” he wrote Brooks, is “that he had no business to serve Jefferson or Jackson; that he knew better; that he did it for personal ambition quite as much as for patriotism.”8 The manuscript has sat quietly since then in the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Henry took no joy in editing Hay’s letters, though he counted himself lucky when Clara backed away from the biography. “I am far from willing to publish,” he assured Lizzie, as the letters and permissions began to arrive, “and am driven to it only as a defence against the pressure to write a memoir of Hay.”9
Even in the more limited capacity of an editor, however, Henry took care to conceal his connection to the project. “My part is quite mechanical,” he told Gaskell, “and Mrs Hay’s name will alone appear.” He did agree to draft the (unsigned) introduction to Letters of John Hay, and that itself served as something of an abridged life story. Though an appreciative account, it notes with some small envy Hay’s “easy” climb up the political mountain. “He went to Springfield to study law,” Adams telescoped years of obscure apprenticeship, and “the rest was simple”; Hay’s important relationships with Nicolay and Lincoln are described as springing merely from “chance” and “accident.” A dismissive tone also inched into Henry’s remarks on Hay’s early writings, which included the travelogue Castilian Days and a collection of poems, Pike County Ballads—these, he noted offhandedly, had won “a sudden popularity,” but he offered no account as to why. Of the masterwork Lincoln, Henry said almost nothing, except to glancingly note that it was “laboriously edited in the Century [Magazine] and afterwards published in ten volumes.” Writing of Hay’s elevation to the Court of Saint James’s, by contrast, Henry put down words that he longed to have attached to his own name: “The choice was personal rather than political, and showed regard for the fitness of the public service rather than reward for service in the party.”10
Whether intended or not, the introduction can also be read as an awkward juxtaposition of Hay’s rising fortunes in the new West with his memoirist’s diminishing returns in the old East. Adams devotes more than four pages of a relatively brief prelude to his subject’s genealogy. Of Scottish origin, the original John Hay (grandfather to the future Heart) was born in Berkeley County, Virginia, in 1775. Before reaching adulthood he migrated to Lexington, Kentucky, and, critical of slavery, moved again, in 1830, to Sangamon County, Illinois. Adams notes that Lincoln, nineteenth-century America’s symbol of social mobility, made a similar pilgrimage, leaving Kentucky in 1816 for Indiana, and later sojourning to New Salem, a small village in Sangamon County. These overlapping migrations, from southern peasantry to northern opportunity, suggested that the Lincolns and the Hays mirrored the emerging Midwest’s restless spirit. Henry, by inference, could excuse his own failure to emulate his ancestors’ distinguished careers as a question of geography.
During the winter of 1908 Clara Hay put her heavy editing hand to the memorial manuscript with unfortunate results. She forwarded a copy to Adams along with an ominous explanatory note: “You see I have suppressed all names. I thought it best, as it seems less personal.”11 In her well-meaning but artless way, Clara had made the memorial practically unreadable. An 1888 letter from Hay to Adams, sent from the posh Tuxedo Club in the Ramapo Mountains of Tuxedo Park, New York, is an all too typical entry: “This is a beautiful place and it makes one happy to think how much money it has cost P—— L ——, who being a Democrat and a free-trader is the predestined prey of the righteous. We pass our Sunday here, and Monday go back to the Hotel B—— and then, if K—— is ready, we will go to S——. Give our fondest love to S—— R——”12
Remarkably, Clara edited herself out of the memoir as well, making it, as she wished, a “less personal” project. One perfectly innocuous entry reads, “We went up Pike’s Peak to-day. The kids were amused. Mrs. H—— and I found something to be desired. We start for home the day after to-morrow.” Adams quietly dismissed the memorial as “a chaos of initials.”13
Privately printed, Letters of John Hay, even with its protective suppression of identities, generated considerable conversation in the capital. Not all of it appreciative. Clara Hay’s careful editing to the contrary, her husband’s critical view of Roosevelt came through. TR took note. In a 1909 letter the president responded, indicating to Lodge his attitudinal distance from Hay—and Adams as well. His negative verdict stands as a condemnation of Lafayette Square snobbery in favor of the strenuous life:
[Hay’s] temptation was to associate as far as possible only with men of refined and cultivated tastes, who lived apart from the world of affairs, and who, if Americans, were wholly lacking in robustness of fiber. His close intimacy with Henry James and Henry Adams—charming men, but exceedingly undesirable companions for any man not of strong nature—and the tone of satirical cynicism which they admired, and which he always affected in writing them, marked that phase of his character which so impaired his usefulness as a public man.14
Pairing Hay and Adams is fitting in more ways than Roosevelt perhaps knew. For the Letters project overlapped with Henry’s own autobiography, the Education, thus extending the “close intimacy” of the old Hearts beyond the grave. A complex man, overly impressed by paradox and more moved by his emotions than he guessed, Henry sought in this work to tell a universal story of inevitable fragmentation and breakdown. Naturally he counted himself among its many casualties. While applying the manuscript’s finishing touches he wrote to Lizzie Cameron, mocking it as an exercise in authorial immolation: “All memoirs lower the man in estimation.”15