“Not to mention ambitious. He lusts for office.” Hay wondered at the spontaneity of his own hypocrisy: he sounded, he thought with some amusement, like Cincinnatus, torn from his plow to do reluctant service to the state. But, to be fair, his own ambition was a small thing compared to that of his old friend and colleague Whitelaw Reid, who had inherited the editorship of the
“I told Reid to make up with Senator Platt, but he won’t.”
“Or can’t. Mr. Platt’s a very hard sort of man,” said the soft-looking President, contentedly puffing smoke at Hay, who congenially puffed smoke back at his chief. “I am so relieved to have you here, Colonel. I don’t think I have ever, in my life, been so tired and so… torn, as the last few months, and so without any help of any kind when it comes to foreign relations.”
“You may be tired, sir, but you’ve accomplished a great deal more than any president since Mr. Lincoln, and even he didn’t acquire an empire for us, which you have done.” Hay laid it on, with sincerity.
McKinley liked having it laid on-who does not? thought Hay. But the Major was too shrewd not to anticipate fortune’s capriciousness. “We are going to have to decide, in the next weeks, whether we are really going to set up shop in the empire business or not.”
“There is a question?” Hay sat up very straight; and was rewarded with what felt like a meat-cleaver fairing hard on his lower spine.
“Oh, Mr. Hay, there is the biggest question of all in my mind.” McKinley looked oddly bleak for someone whose whole physiognomy was, essentially, cheerfully convex. “I came here to help the backbone of this country, business. That’s what our party’s all about. We are for the tariff. We are for American industry first, last and always, and we have a very big country right here to look after. Now we’ve got to decide if we really want to govern several million small brown heathens, who live half the world away from us.”
“I think, sir,” Hay was diffident, “that the Spanish converted most of the Filipinos. I think they’re just about all of them Roman Catholics.”
“Yes.” McKinley nodded; he had not been listening. “All of them heathen and completely alien to us, and speaking-what?”
“Spanish, most of them. Of course, there are local dialects…”
“I’ve tried everything, Mr. Hay, including prayer, and I still can’t decide whether or not it’s in our interest to annex the Philippines.”
“But we must keep Manila, sir. We must have fuelling stations all across the Pacific, and up and down the China coast, too.” Hay began to sound, a bit anxiously, like a state paper. “The European powers are getting ready to divide up China. We’ll lose valuable markets if they do, but if we are entrenched nearby, in the Philippines, we could keep the sea lanes open to China, keep the Germans and the Russians and the Japanese from upsetting the world’s balance of power. Because,” Hay realized glumly that he was parroting Brooks Adams, “whoever controls the land-mass of Asia controls the world.”
“Do you honestly think we’re quite ready for that?” McKinley suddenly resembled nothing so much as a seventeenth-century Italian cardinal: bland, clever, watchful.
“I don’t dare speculate, sir. But when history starts to move underneath you, you’d better figure how you’re going to ride it, or you’ll fall off. Well, sir, history’s started to move right now, and it’s taking us west, and we can’t stop what’s started even if we wanted to.”
The Italian cardinal produced a faint self-deprecating smile. “Mr. Hay,
“Would you leave them in Spanish hands?”
“Between us, I’m tempted to keep Manila. As for the other islands, if they seem incapable of self-government, like most of those natives out there, I’d let Spain stay on. Why not? Oh, Mr. Hay,” the cardinal was now a harassed Republican politician from Ohio, “I never wanted any of this war! Naturally, I wanted Spain out of the Caribbean, and that we’ve done. Cuba is now a free country, and if the Puerto Ricans were capable of self-government, I’d free them, too, because I honestly believe it’s a mistake for us to try to govern so many colored heathens whose ways are so different from ours.”
Hay now presented his own foreign policy, already rehearsed in the course of several well-received speeches in England. “Mr. President, I have always thought that it was the task of the Anglo-Saxon races, specifically England, now shrinking, and ourselves expanding, to civilize and to,” Hay took a deep breath, and played his best if most specious card, “
McKinley stared a long moment at Hay. Then he said, “Colonel Bryan was in here last week.”
Hay felt deflated; his eloquence for naught. But then he had forgotten the first rule of politics: never be eloquent with the eloquent. “Who is Colonel Bryan, sir?”
McKinley’s smile was both warm and malicious. “He is a very new untested Army colonel, stationed in Florida. You perhaps know him better as William Jennings Bryan.”
“The cross of gold?”
“The same. My opponent. He came here to try to get me to release him from the Army, but as we still have military problems in the Philippines, I took the position that I just can’t let every politician go home when he pleases.” McKinley was enjoying himself. “Particularly when there’s an election starting up.”
“On the other hand, you let Theodore go home and run for governor.”
“How could I say no to a genuine war hero? Colonel Roosevelt is a special case.”
“As well as a Republican.”
“Exactly, Mr. Hay.” Suddenly, McKinley frowned. “Mr. Platt’s worried. He tells me it’s going to be a pretty close race for us in New York. Of course, the mid-term election’s always bad for the incumbent party.”
“Not when the party leader’s fought and won a war in a hundred days.” All in all, Hay rather wished that he had not used the now much quoted phrase “a splendid little war,” as if he were a jingo, which he was not. The phrase had come to him as he somberly compared the war with Spain to the Civil War, and found the war with Spain both splendid and blessedly unlike the bloody ordeal of Lincoln’s war to preserve the union. Hay had long known that it was good politics never to try to have the last word in a dispute; now he had begun to see the wisdom of not trying to have the first word either.
“I have the impression,” said the Major, stumping out his cigar in a cheap ceramic souvenir mug, depicting his own head with a detachable Napoleonic hat for a lid, “that Bryan is going to give us a difficult time on annexation. His people-the South, the West, the farmers, the miners-seem to have lost interest in free silver, which, thank Heaven, he has not.”
“But the speech is so good he’ll never give it up.”
“Luckily for us. Even so, there is a feeling out there that we ought not to be like the European powers, with colonies full of heathens and so on, and I understand that feeling because I share it, to a point. But Cleveland- usually very sound-is being very difficult while Andrew Carnegie…”
“Has he written you, too?” The wealthy irascible Scots-born Carnegie had been bombarding Hay with letters and messages, denouncing the annexation of the Philippines, or anything else, as sins against the Holy Ghost of the Republic.
“Yes, yes, he has.” McKinley held up the Napoleonic mug, as if searching for some secret message hidden in what, after all, was his own smooth painted face. “I shall go to Omaha,” said the President; he had obviously received a secret message from his ceramic self.
“Omaha? And what will you do in Omaha?”
“I shall make a speech. What else?” The small cardinal’s smile was visible again; the large eyes glowed. “Omaha is Mr. Bryan’s city. Well, I shall begin my tour of the West-which I haven’t visited since ’96-with Omaha. I’ll beard him in his own town, and I’ll persuade the folks to…” The President paused.
“To welcome the annexation of the Philippines?”
