Gore Vidal - Empire

Fresh from the Senate cloakroom and its intrigues, Lodge joined Hay: more than ever a bumblebee today. “I think we’ve got all the Republicans, except Hoar. We’re getting several Democrats. I may bring them in here to you.”

“I’ll do what I can, dear Cabot. But what can I do?”

Lodge was not listening. But then Hay knew that senators, particularly when they were at home on their side of the Capitol, lost their never overwhelming auditory powers. Lodge produced a press-cutting from his frock-coat. “Did you see this? In yesterday’s Sun?”

Hay had indeed read their friend Rudyard Kipling’s contribution to the American political process. Although English, the prodigious Mr. Kipling had lived for some time in the United States; during 1895, he was a good deal in Washington, where Hay and his circle had come to know and admire him. Theodore Roosevelt, in particular, had taken him up, and their muscular minds, Hay’s happy phrase, lifted, as it were, dumb-bells together. Now Kipling had launched a thunderbolt, in the form of a poem, carefully timed to affect, if possible, the treaty vote. “Theodore sent me an advance copy last month. He thought it poor poetry but good for the expansionist cause. I happen to think it’s quite good as a kind of hymn, pretending to be a poem.”

“A hymn to the god of war,” said Hay, who had indeed been struck by the poem, not least by its alarming title, “The White Man’s Burden.”

“I’m using some of it in a speech.” Lodge quoted,

“ ‘Take up the White Man’s burden-

Send forth the best ye breed-

God bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need.’

I also like the warning to us, that we must take over from England, the torch is passing and we must-where is it? Oh, yes.” Again Lodge read,

“ ‘To wait in heavy harness

On fluttered folk and wild-

Your new-caught sullen peoples

Half devil and half child.’

That describes those Malays to a T, don’t you think?”

“Well, they are certainly sullen at the moment. And even the excellent Rudyard admits that we’re in for trouble.” Hay took the cutting and read the quatrain that had most struck him:

“ ‘Take up the White Man’s burden-

And reap his old reward:

The blame of those ye better,

The hate of those ye guard…’ ”

“What’s that?” asked a deep voice from behind them.

Hay turned toward the door, where stood a tall, noble-looking young man in a frock-coat that had been made famous-like the wide mouth, square jaw-by a thousand cartoonists. Lodge greeted William Jennings Bryan with a cry of joy. Hay never ceased to delight in the spontaneous hypocrisy of the true politician, always at his most appealing when faced in the flesh by a bitter enemy. But the enemies were, this day, allies. As titular head of the Democratic Party, Bryan had been rallying his troops in the Senate to the treaty. But senators are seldom anyone’s troops, particularly those of a defeated presidential candidate. Bryan’s task was made more difficult by the ambition of one Senator Gorman, who saw anti-imperialism as the means to get for himself the Democratic nomination in 1900. Although the weekend had been hectic, Bryan looked calm and at ease. No, he had not seen Kipling’s poem. As he read it, lips moving, sounding the phrases, Hay wondered if Bryan had indeed ever heard of Kipling before. Then Bryan returned the cutting to Lodge . “Well, it can be read two ways,” he said. The smile was wide, perhaps a trifle cretinous; but the eyes were shrewd and watchful. “And, all in all, I’d rather not have either way read today. We’re having a hard enough time as it is. There is no one more anti-imperialist than I…”

“Colonel Bryan, we’re all agreed that there will be no long-term annexation. We’re all anti-imperialists.” Lodge lied with perfect sincerity.

“We’d better be,” said Bryan; and left the room in order to avoid his nemesis, fat, white Mark Hanna.

“I can’t stand seeing that anarchist in this place,” growled Hanna. “Where’s Hobart?“

No one had seen the Vice-President, an obscure New Jersey corporation lawyer who had been chosen to be vice-president by Hanna for no reason that Hay could see other than his wealth. Would wealthy men one day buy the great offices of state as they had during Rome’s decadence? Adams thought that the practice was already common. After all, state legislatures elected United States senators. Many legislators were for sale. Hadn’t New York’s sardonic Roscoe Conkling boasted that he had paid only two hundred thousand dollars for his seat? a bargain price back in the seventies? Hay argued that the presidency was still different. A party leader, like McKinley, slowly and openly evolved; or, thanks to a sudden shift in popular opinion, he emerged like Bryan. In neither case could the leadership have been bought, assuming that the would-be leader had had the money, or access to it. But it was on the word “access” that Adams looked dour. Hanna had financed McKinley on a scale unknown until now. What would prevent a Carnegie or a Jay Gould from selecting some nonentity and then, through adroit expenditure, securing for himself the presidency’s power, all in the nonentity’s name? Hay felt that Adams, once again, took too dark a view.

They were joined by another of McKinley’s intimates, Charles G. Dawes, a personable, red-haired young politician from Nebraska, who had played a significant role in the election of McKinley. When Bryan began to take the country by storm and the multitude thought him the greatest orator in American history, Hanna panicked. Although the money interest was solidly behind McKinley, the South and the West were for Bryan. Since the farmers were penniless, Bryan promised to increase the money supply. Silver coins would be minted, sixteen to one in relation to gold. America, intoned Bryan, in speech after speech to the largest crowds anyone could remember, would not be crucified upon a cross of gold. Meanwhile, McKinley seldom strayed from his hometown of Canton, Ohio, where he conducted his own low-key campaign from his own comfortable front porch, a gift of admirers. After twelve years in the House of Representatives and four as Ohio’s governor, he was a poor man; hence, honest. Hanna thought McKinley should take to the stump. McKinley was tempted; but, as Hay had heard it, young Mr. Dawes persuaded the Major to stay right where he was. When it came to demagoguery, he could not compete with Bryan; so why try? As McKinley recounted it later to Hay, “If I hired a train to campaign in, he’d hire a single car. If I bought a Pullman car berth, he’d buy a cheap seat. If I bought a cheap seat, he’d ride the freight. So I decided to stay put.” In response to Bryan’s cross of gold, McKinley was vigorous and vague. He was, he declared, in favor of both gold and silver money, an admirable sentiment as acceptable as it was unintelligible, to get the largest popular vote. Finally, crucially, a majority preferred the Major’s placid solidity to Bryan’s fieriness. For a moment, class war was in the air. Then the border states, which had made Lincoln president, shifted from Bryan to McKinley; and he was elected with the largest popular vote of any president since Grant.

Young Mr. Dawes had been astonished not to be included in the Cabinet; but the Major had soothed him with the office of comptroller of the currency, where he could amuse himself with the chimera of bimetallism while his wife, Caro, amused Ida McKinley.

Dawes greeted Hay warmly; introduced him to a tall young man named Day, the assistant comptroller and a Democrat. “On his way home to run for Congress, something I should be doing. You, too, Mr. Hay.”

“Oh, not me. Not now. I’m not even an Ohioan any longer.” Neither Adams nor Hay, as full-time residents of the District of Columbia, ever voted in those presidential elections which so entirely absorbed them. If the irony had been, by some accident, lost on them, Lodge and a host of others were quite willing to torment the self-disenfranchised statesmen. Hay had been offered a seat in Congress in 1880; but the price quoted by the local Republican boss was too high, or so his father-in-law decreed. Then came the move to Washington; and a limbo that was now quite filled with power’s unexpected rainbow.