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.
After I came in, the first to become such a permanent acquisition was
Ray Stannard Baker. An article on the capture of John Wilkes Booth by
Baker’s uncle, Colonel L. C. Baker, written from personal reminiscences
and documents, was submitted by Baker, then on the staff of the Chicago
_Record_. It was “the General’s” ideal of a _McClure’s_ article. Baker
was urged to write more, and each piece emphasized the first impression.
The year after his first appearance in the magazine, May, 1897, he
joined the staff and became a regular contributing editor.
Baker was an admirable craftsman, as well as a capital team worker. He
had curiosity, appreciation, a respect for facts. You could not ruffle
or antagonize him. He took the sudden calls to go here when he was going
there, with equanimity; he enjoyed the unconventional intimacies of the
crowd, the gaiety and excitement of belonging to what was more and more
obviously a success. He was the least talkative of us all, observant
rather than garrulous, the best listener in the group, save Mr.
Phillips. He had a joyous laugh which was more revealing of his healthy
inner self than anything else about him.
When I learned a few years later that Baker was the author of the wise,
homely, whimsical “Adventures in Contentment,” “The Friendly Road” and
other delightful essays under the nom de plume of David Grayson I said
at once, “How stupid of me not to have known it! Haven’t I always known
that Baker is a David Grayson?” Few practical philosophers, indeed, have
so lived their creed as Ray Stannard Baker, and none have had a more
general recognition from the multitude of people in the country who,
like him, believe in the fine art of simple living. It is a comforting
and beautiful thing to have had as a friend and co-worker over many
years so rare a person as Ray Stannard Baker.
By good fortune _McClure’s_ in this period happened on a reader of real
genius—Viola Roseboro—the only “born reader” I have ever known. I found
her in the office after one of my frequent jaunts after material. It was
as a talker that I first learned to admire and love her. Her judgments
were unfettered, her emotions strong and warm, her expressions free,
glowing, stirring, and she loved to talk, though only when she felt
sympathy and understanding. She loved to share books, of which she read
many, particularly in the biographical field; she wanted none but the
best—no imitation, no mere fact-finding. Her eagerness to let no good
thing slip, her consciousness of the all too little time a human being
has in this world to explore its riches made her rigid in her choice. An
unsleeping eagerness to find talent and give it a chance, and
secondarily, she said, to enrich the magazine, made every day’s work
with the unsifted manuscripts an adventure. If she found exceptional
merit that was also suited to _McClure’s_ she might weep with
excitement. And she stood to it till faith grew in those less sure of
the untried. It was when _McClure’s_ was making a great hunt for a good
serial that I saw her one morning bringing into the editorial sanctum
Booth Tarkington’s “The Gentleman from Indiana,” tears celebrating the
discovery as she cried, “Here is a serial sent by God Almighty for
_McClure’s Magazine_!”
This woman of unusual intelligence, loyalty and of truly Spartan courage
was a precious addition to the crowd. Ill health, threatened blindness,
have never lowered her enthusiasm, her ceaseless effort to find the
best, to give the best. She is still doing it.