Authors: Gore Vidal
Even so, Hay wrote, in large letters, “The Square Deal,” with slightly embellished capitals; then he ran his pen through the phrase. He was not up to such a speech. Let Theodore do his own ranting. At the last Cabinet meeting, Root had declined the honor of serving as campaign manager; and Theodore had been plainly rattled. The post had gone to the secretary of commerce (a needless new department, created by Roosevelt), Mr. Cortelyou, a soothing presence, and reminder of McKinley’s golden age, now as remote to Hay as Lincoln’s time of blood. There would be no talk of a square deal at St. Louis.
Hay stared out the window, as one lonely village after another moved by the train’s window, an endless cyclorama of sameness. The pale spring light made the houses seem more than ever shabby, in contrast to the bright yellow-green foliage of trees and spring wheat. Was it April 15 or 16? he wondered. Without Adee—or a newspaper nearby—he never knew the date any more. If it was April 15, then it was the thirty-ninth anniversary of the murder of Lincoln. Hardly anyone was left from that time. Mary Todd had died, mad, at Springfield in 1882; her death long since preceded by that of the beloved child Tad. Only the eldest son, Robert Lincoln, survived; a chilly railroad magnate, largely indifferent to his father’s memory. Once Hay and
Nicolay had finished their life of Lincoln, Hay’s connection with Robert was, for all practical purposes, at an end. They were no longer comfortable with each other; yet thirty-nine years ago, they had been drinking together when the White House doorkeeper had rushed into the room, with the news. “The President’s been shot!” And together they had gone to the boardinghouse near Ford’s Theater, to watch the Ancient die.
Hay was beginning to find concentration difficult. Usually, the familiar act of setting pen to paper caused him to think precisely. But now he wool-gathered, lulled by the regular metallic clicking of the train’s wheels on the rails. Foreign affairs would be a safer subject than the evanescent square deal. The war between Russia and Japan was of great significance; but how was he to explain it to the public, when he could never explain it to the President? He found alarming the fact that Kaiser and President were growing altogether too friendly; they were not unalike in their sense of imperial charismatic mission. Each tended to regard the collapse of the Tsar’s eastern empire as a good thing. On the other hand, Hay thought that a victorious Japan in the Pacific would mean nothing but trouble for the United States, and its new bright Pacific empire.
“Open Doors,” Hay wrote, without his usual pride in the famous histrionic formula that had worked once; and might again. Dare he mention the mysterious enlargement of the German fleet? Was there, as some suspected, a German plot to destroy the British empire, and undermine the United States by means of all those—how many millions now?—German immigrants, with their own newspapers, communities, nostalgia? But the President put no credence in such a plot. He thought he understood the Kaiser and the Germans. Hay knew that
he
understood this barbaric tribe; and Hay feared them. With Russia crippled by Japan to Germany’s east, the Kaiser could move west. “Piece,” wrote Hay; was he losing his mind? He crossed out the word; wrote “peace”; then “meat.” At least he spelled that right. Ever since the tainted-meat scandal during the war with Spain, government action had been called for, and, finally, Roosevelt had come up with a Meat Inspection Act, which Congress had rejected. This was definitely good government, but Hay rather doubted if he could extract much rhetorical magic from the subject.
Henry Adams coughed politely. “Do I intrude on the creative process?”
“I was trying to make lyrical the Meat Inspection Act. But nothing
scans.” Hay shut the notebook. A steward appeared with tea. “Mrs. Hay says you are to drink this, sir.”
“Then I shall.”
Hay and Adams stared out the window, as if expecting to see something of great interest. But all was a sameness, thought Hay.
“Theodore Rex worries about his—Rexness,” said Hay, at last.
“No need, even with Mark Hanna dead.” The monster of corruption had died in February, busy collecting a war-chest for the nomination not of himself but of Roosevelt. The two enemies had long since come to an understanding. As for the Democratic side, their paladin William C. Whitney had also died in February. Without Whitney, there was no one—except Hearst—who could finance a winning campaign. Everything would flow Roosevelt’s way; yet Adams was puzzled. “Why didn’t Root take on the job as campaign manager?”
Hay took morbid pleasure in his reply. “He was—is, perhaps, still—convinced that he has a cancer of the breast.”
Adams’s look of surprise was highly pleasing. “Surely, only the ladies have been chosen for this especial mark of God’s favor.”
“The ladies—and Elihu Root. Anyway, he had a tumor removed, and I’m sure he’s all right now. What a president he might have made.”
“Why do you say ‘might have’?”
“He is a lawyer, too much involved with the wicked corporations and trusts. And then the miners’ strike …” The miners’ strike of 1902 had caused so much panic in the land that Roosevelt had threatened to take over the mines, as receiver; since public opinion was on the side of the miners, the threat was popular. Although public opinion was seldom heeded, Roosevelt feared that demagogues like Bryan and Hearst might try to unleash the mob, and so, to forestall revolution, he sent Root to force the ownership, J. Pierpont Morgan himself, to give the miners a wage increase while keeping them to a nine-hour day in hazardous conditions. Roosevelt took the credit for settling the strike. Root took the blame from both workers and owners for an unsatisfactory settlement; and lost forever the presidency.
“To what extent does your brother, Brooks, influence Theodore?” When in serious doubt, Hay believed in directness.
Henry Adams cocked his head, rather like a bald, bearded owl. “You are with His Majesty every day. I am not.”
“You see Brooks …”
“… as little as possible. To see him is to
hear
him.” Adams shuddered. “He is the most bloodthirsty creature I have ever known. He wants a war, anywhere will do, as long as we end up as custodian of
northern China. Domestically, ‘We must have a new deal,’ he wrote me, so we shall have to suppress the states in favor of a centralized dictatorship at Washington. Does he write Theodore often?”
Hay nodded. “But I am not in their confidence. I don’t love war enough. What shall I say in St. Louis about our enormous achievements?”
Adams smiled, showing no teeth. “You can say that the most marvellous invention of my grandfather, the Monroe Doctrine, originally intended to protect our—note the cool proprietary ‘our’—hemisphere from predatory European powers, has now been extended, quite illegally, by President Roosevelt to include China and, again by extension, any part of the world where we may want to interfere.”
“This is not the Hay Doctrine,” Hay began.
“This is not the Monroe Doctrine either. But my grandfather’s masterpiece was already coming apart in 1848 when President Polk dared to tell Congress that our war of conquest against Mexico was justified by the Monroe Doctrine. My grandfather, by then a mere congressman, denounced the President on the floor of the House, and then dropped dead on that same floor. When Theodore recently announced that we have an obligation, somehow, inherently, through the Monroe Doctrine, to punish ‘chronic wrongdoers’ in South America, as well as ‘to the exercise of an international police power,’
I
nearly dropped dead over my breakfast egg.”
Hay himself was not entirely at ease with all the implications of a national policy in which he had, for the most part, cheerfully participated. Nevertheless, he defended, “Surely, we have a
moral
—yes, I hate the word, too—duty to help less fortunate nations in this hemisphere …”
“And sunny Hawaii, and poor Samoa, and the tragic Philippines? John, it is empire you all want, and it is empire that you have got, and at such a small price, when you come to think of it.”
“What price is that?” Hay could tell from the glitter in Adams’s eye that the answer would be highly unpleasant.
“The American republic. You’ve finally got rid of it. For good. As a conservative Christian anarchist, I never much liked it.” Adams raised high his teacup. “The republic is dead; long live the empire.”
“Oh, dear.” Hay put down his cup, which chattered at him in its monogrammed saucer. “We have all the
forms
of a republic. Isn’t that enough? Isn’t that
everything
? Why else am I now hurtling across Ohio, or wherever we are, to make a speech to persuade the folks to vote?”
“We let them vote so that they will feel wanted. But as we extend,
in theory, the democracy, the more it runs out of gas.” In imitation of Clarence King, Adams now liked to use new slang expressions, often accompanied by a faintly raffish tilt to his head, like a Boston Irish laborer.
“I don’t weep.” Hay had made his choice long ago. A republic—or however one wanted to describe the United States—was best run by responsible men of property. Since most men of property tended, in the first generation at least, to criminality, it was necessary for the high-minded patriotic few to wait a generation or two and then select one of their number, who had the common—or was it royal?—touch and make him president. As deeply tiring as Theodore was on the human level, “drunk with himself,” as Henry liked to put it, he was the best the country had to offer, and they were all in luck. For good or ill, the system excluded from power the Bryans if not the Hearsts. Hay was aware that the rogue publisher was a new Caesarian element upon the scene: the wealthy maker of public opinion who, having made common cause with the masses, might yet overthrow the few.
Lincoln had spoken warmly and winningly of the common man, but he had been as remote from that simple specimen as one of Henry’s beloved dynamos from an ox-cart. One
rode
public opinion, Hay had more than once observed. Theodore thought that public opinion could be guided by some splendid popular leader like himself, but, in practice, Roosevelt was mildness itself, never appearing above the parapet of his office when hostile bullets were aimed his way. Hearst was different; he could make people react in ways not predictable; he could invent issues, and then solutions—equally invented but no less popular for that. The contest was now between the high-minded few, led by Roosevelt, and Hearst, the true inventor of the modern world. What Hearst arbitrarily decided was news was news; and the powerful few were obliged to respond to his inventions. Could he, also, a question much discussed amongst the few, make himself so much the news that he might seize one of the high—if not the highest—offices of state? Theodore sneered at the thought—had the American people ever
not
voted for one of the respectable few? And if nothing else, it was agreed by everyone (except, perhaps, the general indifferent mass of the working class) that Hearst was supremely unrespectable. Even so, Hay had his doubts. He feared Hearst.
The train clattered to a stop at the depot of a small town called, according to the paint-blistered sign, Heidegg. Clara and Abigail appeared in the doorway to the parlor. “We’re stopping,” Clara announced, in a loud authoritative voice.
“Actually, my dear, we’ve stopped.” Hay vaulted to his feet, an acrobatic maneuver which involved falling to the right while embracing with his left arm the back of the chair in front of him; gravity, the ultimate enemy, was, for once, put to good use.
Adams pointed to a small crowd at the back of the train. “We should go amongst the people in whose name we—you and Theodore, that is—govern.”
“We’ll be here fifteen minutes, Uncle Henry,” said Abigail, and led him to the back of their private car, where a smiling porter helped them onto the good Ohio (or was it now Indiana?) earth. Hay stepped into the cool day, which had been co-existing separately from that of the railroad car, whose atmosphere was entirely different, warmer, redolent of railway smells, as well as of a galley where a Negro chef in a tall white cap performed miracles with terrapin.
For a moment, the earth itself seemed to be moving beneath Hay’s feet, as if he were still on the train; slightly, he swayed. Clara took his fragile arm in her great one and then the four visitors from the capital of the imperial republic, led by John Hay, the Second Personage in the Land, mingled with the folks.
The American people, half a hundred farmers with wives, children, dogs, surrounded the Second Personage in the Land, who smiled sweetly upon them; and lapsed into his folksy “Little Breeches” manner which could outdo for sheer comic rusticity Mark Twain himself. “I reckon,” he said, with a modest smile, “that well as I know all the country hereabouts—” He was positive that he was now in Indiana, but one slip … “—I’ve never had the luck to be in Heidegg before. I’m from Warsaw myself. Warsaw, Illinois, as I ’spect you know. Anyway, we’re on our way now to the big exhibition in St. Louis, and when I saw that sign saying Heidegg, I said, let’s stop and meet the folks. So, hello.” Hay was well pleased with his own casualness and lack of side. He did not dare look at Henry Adams, who always found amusing, in the wrong sense, Hay’s Lincolnian ease with the common man.
The crowd continued to stare, amicably, at the four foreigners. Then a tall thin farmer came forward, and shook Hay’s hand. “
Willkommen
,” he began; and addressed the Second Personage in the Land in German.
Hay then asked, in German, if anyone in Heidegg spoke English. He was told, in German, that the schoolteacher spoke excellent English, but he was home, sick in bed. Hay ignored the strangled cries of Henry Adams, trying not to laugh. Fortunately, Hay’s German was good, and he was able to satisfy the crowd’s curiosity as to his identity. The word had spread that he was someone truly important, the president of the
railroad, in fact. When Hay modestly identified himself, the information was received politely; but as no one had ever heard of the—or even a—secretary of state, the crowd broke up, leaving the four visitors alone on a muddy bank where new grass was interspersed with violets. As Abigail collected violets, Adams was in his glory. “The people!” he exclaimed.