Part 26

But I did more than follow Lincoln about. I wanted to know the Washington of thirty years after Lincoln, and so I went to the Capitol when debates promised excitement, and I missed no great official show. When McKinley’s inauguration came in 1896 I arranged to see it all. Once, I told myself, will do forever for an inauguration—as it has done. I began after breakfast and did not stop until the Inaugural Ball was far on its way. A fine colorful sightseeing experience, leaving a series of pictures which have never quite faded. Years later one of these pictures brought me a curious bit of minor political history. I was trying to persuade Richard Olney to write the story of the Venezuela message for McClure’s and remarked that the first time I met him was at the McKinley Inaugural Ball. To my surprise he flushed.

“Outgoing Cabinet members are not expected to attend the Inaugural Ball of a new President,” he said. (I hadn’t known that, or of course I should not have spoken.) “But there was a reason for my presence. General Miles, then head of the Army, had come to me to say that there were rumors of an attempt on McKinley’s life. ‘Suppose that both he and Hobart should be assassinated before a new Cabinet is appointed,’ he said. ‘You would be Acting President. You must go to the Ball, walk with Mrs. McKinley, and stay until the end.’ I didn’t like the idea, but General Miles insisted; so I went. But the new President walked with his wife, and I had to hang around, conscious that more than one Republican was saying, ‘What’s Olney doing here?’”

What was behind General Miles’ precaution, I never knew. The lives of presidents are always in danger, even in what we are pleased to call normal times, there being always plenty of grievances, real and fancied, to be squared. At the moment of the McKinley inauguration the despair and bitterness of many radicals over the defeat of Bryan were outspoken. The experience of the country with assassination in the thirty preceding years had been alarming. A man in General Miles’ position charged with the safety of the heads of the government must keep in mind all possibilities. It would, of course, have been easy to assassinate the President and Vice President at the Ball. Given clever and determined conspirators, there would have been a chance to seize the government while a new President was being elected. But with a determined man like Olney on the ground, backed by a watchful and sufficient military guard scattered through the great Patent Office where the Ball was held, a temporary government could have been formed while the murderer was being manacled.

How General Miles would have enjoyed such a coup! In the first years of McKinley’s administration I came to know him well, another one of the friendly acquaintances made in carrying out the varied tasks that came my way in my position as a contributing editor of McClure’s Magazine. For several years popular interest in military affairs had been growing. There were several reasons: doubt of the efficiency of our army, talk of revolution, and particularly our strained relations with Spain.

Interest was still further excited in 1896 by the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War, which, starting as a skirmish, soon grew until it looked as if it might involve all southeastern Europe, perhaps England, Russia. Obviously we should have an observer over there, and so in May General Miles and a staff started for the field. He studied the military organization of Turkey and of Greece, watched the armies lined up for battle, saw the end of the war. From Greece he and his staff went to London to represent the United States at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Following that great show he had attended the autumn maneuvers of the greatest of then existing armies, those of Russia, Germany, and France.

Mr. McClure thought there was an important story in General Miles’ observations, and I was commissioned to get it. But General Miles, willing and glad as he was to tell of his European experiences—he had never been abroad before—wanted to tell only of the sights he had seen, sights which had nothing to do with armies, their equipment, and their maneuvers. All that was shop for him. “They’ll think I didn’t see anything but soldiers and guns,” he growled, “think I’m not interested in history and art. People don’t know how wonderful Pompeii is, and I would like to tell them. A lot of them never heard of Alexander’s sarcophagus—finest thing I ever saw. There are countries that would pay a million dollars to get it, and there’s the Parthenon and Moscow and the Tower of London and the Louvre. There are the things I want to write about.” And he was preparing to do it, as I saw by the stack of Baedekers, the volumes of the Britannica, the pamphlets and travel books on his desk. It took all my tact and patience to persuade the General that, whatever his interest, ours was centered only on military Europe.

In the course of this distasteful task I came to have a real liking for General Miles. He was as kindly and courteous a gentleman as I have ever known, and certainly the vainest. One of the real disappointments of his European visit was that the American uniform was so severe. There were hundreds of lesser ranks than himself on parade with three times the gold braid he was allowed. When it came to the Queen’s Jubilee he revolted and had special epaulets designed. I was at Headquarters the day they arrived from London, and nothing would do but I must see them. He ordered the box opened, disappeared into an inner office and came back arrayed in all the glory the American Army allowed him.

I was working on the Miles articles on February 16, 1898, when the Maine blew up in Havana harbor. As no message came canceling my appointment with General Miles that morning I presented myself as usual though with some misgiving, for it seemed as if the very air of Washington stood still. At Headquarters there was a hush on everything, but the routine went on as usual. As we worked an orderly would come in with the latest report: “Two hundred fifty-three unaccounted for, two officers missing, ship in six fathoms of water only her mast visible, sir.” Then a second report: “All but four officers gone, sir, and there are two hundred women up in the Navy Department.” (The Army and Navy were in the same building in 1898.)

The General made no comment, but every now and then blew his nose violently, while his smart Chief of Staff, a gallant simple-minded officer with a bullet hole in his cheek, kept saying to himself: “Ain’t it a pity! By Jove, ain’t it a pity!”

Through the two months between the blowing up of the Maine and the declaration of war I vacillated between hope that the President would succeed in preventing a war and fear that the savage cries coming from the Hill would be too much for him, as they were in the end. I honestly believed then as I do now that he was doing his best, and this in spite of the fact that my heart was hot with resentment for what I considered his cowardly desertion of my Poland friends in 1893.

McKinley was patient, collected, surprisingly determined. Everybody indeed in the departments where the brunt must fall if war came seemed steady to me, as I watched things in my frequent visits to General Miles’ Headquarters. Everybody was at his post, everybody except Theodore Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He tore up and down the wide marble halls of the War and Navy Building—“like a boy on roller skates,” a disgusted observer growled. More than once he burst into General Miles’ office with an excited question, an excited counsel. Already he was busy preparing his Rough Riders for the war to be if he had his way. Already he saw himself an important unit in an invading army.

I remember this because it shocked me more than anything else I was noting. What chance had government in peace or war if men did not stay on their jobs? Was not fidelity to the trust committed to you a first obligation? And if Theodore Roosevelt felt—as he evidently did—that he was needed in the Army, did not good manners if nothing else require resignation? I was very severe on him in 1897, the more so because he had bitterly disappointed me in 1884 when he had refused to go along with the mugwumps in the revolt against Prohibitive Protection, refused and gone along with my particular political abomination, Henry Cabot Lodge. I had not been able to reconcile myself to him even when as a Police Commissioner of New York City he made his hearty and effective fight on the town’s corruption.

The steadiness of General Miles and his staff in the weeks between the blowing up of the Maine and the breaking out of war with Spain raised my respect for Army training as much as Roosevelt’s excited goings-on antagonized me. At the same time my contempt for the outpouring of Congress in a crisis was modified by almost daily association with one of its oldest members, the Senator from Massachusetts, George Frisbie Hoar.

When I had decided in 1894 that sufficient materials were at hand in Washington for the sketch McClure’s wanted, to go with Gardiner Hubbard’s Napoleon portraits, I went to live at a boarding house on I Street between Ninth and Tenth recommended by Mrs. Hubbard, chiefly because Senator and Mrs. Hoar lived there. The neighborhood had been not so long before one of the desirable residential sections of the town, but business and fashion were pushing well-to-do residents into Connecticut and Massachusetts avenues, into Dupont Circle and beyond. The fine old brownstone houses left behind were being used by trade and occasionally by owners, whose incomes had been cut or destroyed, as rooming or boarding houses. The head of the house into which I was received was a Mrs. Patterson, the widow of a once distinguished Washington physician. She and her daughter Elizabeth made of their home one of the most comfortable and delightful living places into which I had ever dropped. Such food! And best of all the Senator.

At this time Senator Hoar was close to seventy years of age. He had been in Congress for twenty-six consecutive years, seventeen of them in the Senate, and everybody knew that as long as he lived Massachusetts Republicans would insist on returning him. He embodied all the virtues of the classic New Englander and few of the vices. His loyalty was granite-ribbed; he revered the Constitution and all the institutions born and reared under it. He was proud of the United States, but his heart belonged to Massachusetts. In his mouth the name took on a beauty and an emotion which never ceased to stir me—Westerner that I was.

Combined with his patriotic loyalties was a passionate devotion to classic literature—Greek, Roman, English. He knew yards of Homer and Virgil, as well as of the greatest of the early English writers, and not infrequently at our Sunday morning breakfasts he would repeat long passages in his sonorous voice. This was the one hour in the week when the Senator laid aside all formality and became our entertainer. He never spoiled things by opinions on current events, but poured forth daily whatever came into his mind. We were a good audience, willing to sit until noon if he would talk. He claimed that it was Mrs. Patterson’s codfish balls and coffee that put to flight all his cares and loosened his tongue. That Patterson Sunday morning breakfast was enough to put gaiety into any heart. Senator Hoar had already celebrated it in a widely circulated letter to a Pennsylvania editor who attacked him for never having done a stroke of useful work in his life and, what greatly amused the Senator, living in Washington on “champagne and terrapin!”:

My dear man [he wrote the irate critic], your terrapin is all in my eye, very little in my mouth. The chief carnal luxury of my life is in breakfasting every Sunday morning with an orthodox friend, a lady who has a rare gift for making fish balls and coffee. You unfortunate and benighted Pennsylvanians can never know the exquisite flavor of the codfish, salted, made into balls and eaten on a Sunday morning by a person whose theology is sound, and who believes in all the five points of Calvinism. I am myself but an unworthy heretic, but I am of Puritan stock, of the seventh generation, and there is vouchsafed to me, also, some share of that ecstasy and a dim glimpse of that beatific vision. Be assured, my benighted Pennsylvania friend, that in that hour when the week begins, all the terrapin of Philadelphia or Baltimore and all the soft-shelled crabs of the Atlantic shore might pull at my trouser legs and thrust themselves on my notice in vain.

As we all knew, Senator Hoar had no money for “champagne and terrapin.” He had sacrificed his law practice to public service, “getting a little poorer year by year.” As a matter of fact he had no interest in making money. I never saw him more irritated than after taking a difficult case for which he was to get a fee of twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand dollars.

“Earning money is hateful to me,” he said. “Never in all my life before have I undertaken a thing I did not want to do simply for money. Some things I like to do, believe that I can do better than I could do anything else. I never was such a donkey before. There are so many things I long to do; one of them is to learn Italian well enough to read Dante and Boccaccio and Ariosto in the original; and I want to commit Homer to memory. I would like to have my head packed with Greek.”

The Senator’s Sunday morning talks were rich with anecdotes of New England types. He had his antipathies—Margaret Fuller Ossoli was one of them. He used to tell the story of an old Concord doctor who was called up in the night by a quavering voice outside his window asking, “Doctor, how much camphire can a body drink without its killing ’em?” “Who drunk it?” he asked. “Margaret Fuller.” “A peck,” snapped the doctor, shutting his window with a bang.

Dr. Mary Walker, who in her rather shabby man’s attire was a familiar figure in those days, was a particular abomination. She made him “creepy,” he said. Simply to mention her, I found, would dry up his talk. But the mention of Jonathan Edwards’ name, although he particularly detested him, always loosened his tongue. “He was an inhuman cuss,” he said one morning. “There is a true story of his riding through Northampton with a slave boy whom he had just bought tied to a cord and trotting behind the horse. ‘Is thee doing as thee would be done by?’ a woman of his faith called him, and Edwards said, ‘I’ll answer you some other time.’”

Senator Hoar rather enjoyed calling a man whose acts he disliked by hard names. Indeed he very much enjoyed salty words generally, and one morning ably defended them: “‘Dammit’ is a useful word. It eases one’s feelings.” He also put up a strong argument for “whoppers.” “They are,” he contended, “a valuable weapon with the impertinent and the imbecile.” There was much boyish mischief in him. He greatly admired our wholesome big-hearted Elizabeth, daughter of the house, her common sense and her gaiety, and loved to pinch her plump arm. He did it in the presence of us all and in spite of Mrs. Hoar’s reproaches. “Do you know, Elizabeth,” he said one evening as he followed us up the stairs from the dining room, “that it has taken nineteen hundred years of Christian civilization to produce a man who does not pinch a girl’s pretty ankle when she is going upstairs ahead of him?”

In July, 1898, after Congress had adjourned Senator Hoar made up a party for a trip through the Berkshire Hills and I had the good fortune to be asked to join it. I had heard him talk much of his walking trips there in Harvard days with his favorite classmate, Francis Child: “as great a man at seventeen when he entered college,” he said, “as when he died—a real genius.” From the moment our little caravan left his home at Worcester the trip was like champagne to him. Trees, graveyards, epitaphs, views, the homes of the honored in this day and past days kept him busy. There was the Sheffield elm which we must stop to measure, the grave of Mumbet with the inscription his favorite Catharine Sedgwick had written for it; there was the best view of the Sleeping Napoleon on Cedar Mountain—this for me. Then we must spend the night at a certain inn on Mount Washington to give Elizabeth plenty of time to look up family graves and records. Her father had been born on Mount Washington, which was one of many reasons why the Senator admired her. He went with her to look up the graves and, returning late, said, “If we had not feared you would wait supper we would have stayed and been buried there.”

I have certainly never known anyone for whom life at seventy was more joyous and full. He hated weakness, as well as everything that impaired his dignity, his self-reliance. He was a true untouchable and would fall into a rage if friend or stranger offered to assist him. “Unhand me,” he thundered at a street car conductor who one day seized his arm to help him up the steps, and his wrath lasted until he had told us about the indignity at the dinner table. On this Berkshire trip a little accident happened to him which caused an explosion of the same nature. We were at an inn in the mountains, and after dinner had gone on to the lawn. The Senator was sitting on a rustic bench which gave way, turned him on his back, feet in the air. We all ran to assist him but were stopped in our tracks by a stentorian voice which roared, “I decline to be assisted.”

But this was the Senator on a vacation, the Senator of our Sunday morning’s breakfast. Take him when public affairs were in a serious tangle, and he was glum, unapproachable. He suffered deeply over the trend to imperialism after the Spanish-American War. To save Cuba from the maladministration of Spain, to watch over her until she had learned to govern herself seemed to him a noble expression of Americanism, but to annex lands on the other side of the globe for commercial purposes only, as he believed, was to be false to all our ideals. He had the early American conviction that minding one’s own business was even more important abroad than at home. He wanted no entangling alliances, and in those days following the treaty of Paris he feared as never before for the country. Certainly there were far fewer Sunday morning breakfast table talks. His greatest speech against the advancing imperialism was made in April of 1900. At the head of the printed copy of his speech distributed by the Senate he placed these sentences:

No right under the Constitution to hold Subject States. To every People belongs the right to establish its own government in its own way. The United States can not with honor buy the title of a dispossessed tyrant, or crush a Republic.

I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged with public service, of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments, ideals. And it was not long before I was saying to myself, as I had not for years, You are a part of this democratic system they are trying to make work. Is it not your business to use your profession to serve it? But how? That was clearly now my problem. I could not run away to a foreign land where I should be a mere spectator. Indeed, I was beginning to suspect that one great attraction of France was that there I had no responsibility as a citizen. I must give up Paris. Between Lincoln and the Spanish-American War I realized I was taking on a citizenship I had practically resigned.

The war had done something to McClure’s as well as to me. In all its earlier years its ambition had been to be a wholesome, enlivening, informing companion for readers, to give fiction, poetry, science of wide popular appeal—an ambition which it must be admitted opened the pages occasionally to the cheap, though it rarely excluded the fine. An eager welcome was given new writers. Indeed it was always a great day in the office when we thought a “real one” had reached us. While it fostered new writers it held on to the best of the old. It had touched public matters only as they became popular matters. Thus, when the Spanish-American War came it was quickly recognized that it yielded more interesting material than any other subject. There was a great war number and there was a continuous flow of war articles. McClure’s suddenly was a part of active, public life. Having tasted blood, it could no longer be content with being merely attractive, readable. It was a citizen and wanted to do a citizen’s part. It had a staff sympathetic with this new conception of the work. Mr. McClure had had in mind from the start the building of a permanent staff of good craftsmen, reporters on whom he could depend for a steady stream of contributions, as well as of editorial ideas. He wanted them versatile, flexible, as interested in the magazine as in themselves, capable of sinking themselves in a collective effort.