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.