McKinley years , 1899. John Hay was sworn in as Secretary of State on September 30, 1898. He needed little introduction to Cabinet meetings, and sat at the President's right hand. Meetings were held in the Cabinet Room of the White House, where he found his old office and bedroom each occupied by several clerks. Now responsible for 1,300 federal employees, he leaned heavily for administrative help on his old friend Alvey Adee, the second assistant. Hay believed that America's most valuable foreign relationship "by far" was its relationship with Great Britain. As Secretary of State he did everything he could to cultivate a positive relationship with London. Eventually this proved successful, one example of this success being the
Hay–Pauncefote Treaty. Hay formed a habit of confiding in the British, and sharing sensitive intelligence with them, while at the same time shutting out the governments of Spain, France, Germany and Russia. Senator Mark Hanna remarked that "Hay and McKinley are
outrageously pro-British." The French ambassador remarked that "Hay is friendly to the British and unfriendly to us, we should regard him with much suspicion." By the time Hay took office, the war was effectively over and it had been decided to strip Spain of her overseas empire and transfer at least part of it to the United States. At the time of Hay's swearing-in, McKinley was still undecided whether to take the Philippines, but in October finally decided to do so, and Hay sent instructions to Day and the other peace commissioners to insist on it. Spain yielded, and the result was the
Treaty of Paris, narrowly ratified by the Senate in February 1899 over the objections of anti-imperialists.
Open Door Policy By the 1890s, China had become a major trading partner for Western nations and newly westernized
Japan. China had had its army severely weakened by several disastrous wars, and several foreign nations took the opportunity to negotiate treaties with China that allowed them to control various coastal cities, known as
treaty ports, for use as military bases or trading centers. Within those jurisdictions, the nation in possession often gave preference to its own citizens in trade or in developing infrastructure such as railroads. Although the United States did not claim any parts of China, a third of the China trade was carried in American ships, and having an outpost near there was a major factor in deciding to retain the former Spanish colony of the Philippines in the Treaty of Paris. Hay had been concerned about the Far East since the 1870s. As Ambassador, he had attempted to forge a common policy with the British, but the United Kingdom was willing to acquire territorial concessions in China (such as
Hong Kong) to guard its interests there, whereas McKinley was not. In March 1898, Hay warned that Russia, Germany, and France were seeking to exclude Britain and America from the China trade, but he was disregarded by Sherman, who accepted assurances to the contrary from Russia and Germany. McKinley was of the view that equality of opportunity for American trade in China was key to success there, rather than colonial acquisitions; that Hay shared these views was one reason for his appointment as Secretary of State. Many influential Americans, seeing coastal China being divided into spheres of influence, urged McKinley to join in; still, in his
annual message to Congress in December 1898, he stated that as long as Americans were not discriminated against, he saw no need for the United States to become "an actor in the scene". As Secretary of State, it was Hay's responsibility to put together a workable China policy. He was advised by
William Rockhill, an old China hand. Also influential was
Lord Charles Beresford, a British Member of Parliament who gave a number of speeches to American businessmen, met with McKinley and Hay, and in a letter to the secretary stated that "it is imperative for American interests as well as our own that the policy of the 'open door' should be maintained". Assuring that all would play on an even playing field in China would give the foreign powers little incentive to dismember the Chinese Empire through territorial acquisition. In mid-1899, the British inspector of Chinese maritime customs, Alfred Hippisley, visited the United States. In a letter to Rockhill, a friend, he urged that the United States and other powers agree to uniform Chinese tariffs, including in the enclaves. Rockhill passed the letter on to Hay, and subsequently summarized the thinking of Hippisley and others, that there should be "an open market through China for our trade on terms of equality with all other foreigners". Hay was in agreement, but feared Senate and popular opposition, and wanted to avoid Senate ratification of a treaty. Rockhill drafted the first Open Door note, calling for equality of commercial opportunity for foreigners in China. Hay formally issued his Open Door note on September 6, 1899. This was not a treaty, and did not require the approval of the Senate. Most of the powers had at least some caveats, and negotiations continued through the remainder of the year. On March 20, 1900, Hay announced that all powers had agreed, and he was not contradicted. Former secretary Day wrote to Hay, congratulating him, "moving at the right time and in the right manner, you have secured a diplomatic triumph in the 'open door' in China of the first importance to your country".
Boxer Rebellion Little thought was given to the Chinese reaction to the Open Door note; the Chinese minister in Washington,
Wu Ting-fang, did not learn of it until he read of it in the newspapers. Among those in China who opposed Western influence there was a movement in Shantung Province, in the north, that became known as the Fists of Righteous Harmony, or Boxers, after the martial arts they practiced. The Boxers were especially angered by missionaries and their converts. As late as June 1900, Rockhill dismissed the Boxers, contending that they would soon disband. By the middle of that month, the Boxers, joined by imperial troops, had cut the railroad between
Peking and the coast, killed many missionaries and converts, and besieged the foreign legations. Hay faced a precarious situation; how to rescue the Americans trapped in Peking, and how to avoid giving the other powers an excuse to partition China, in an election year when there was already Democrat opposition to what they deemed
American imperialism. As American troops were sent to China to relieve the nation's legation, Hay sent a letter to foreign powers (often called the Second Open Door note), stating while the United States wanted to see lives preserved and the guilty punished, it intended that China not be dismembered. Hay issued this on July 3, 1900, suspecting that the powers were quietly making private arrangements to divide up China. Communication between the foreign legations and the outside world had been cut off, and the personnel there were falsely presumed slaughtered, but Hay realized that Minister Wu could get a message in, and Hay was able to establish communication. Hay suggested to the Chinese government that it now cooperate for its own good. When the foreign relief force, principally Japanese but including 2,000 Americans, relieved the legations and sacked Peking, China was made to pay a huge indemnity but there was no cession of land.
Death of McKinley McKinley's vice president,
Garret Hobart, had died in November 1899. Under the laws then in force, this made Hay next in line to the presidency should anything happen to McKinley. There was a
presidential election in 1900, and McKinley was unanimously renominated at
the Republican National Convention that year. He allowed the convention to make its own choice of running mate, and it selected Roosevelt, by then governor of New York. Senator Hanna bitterly opposed that choice, but nevertheless raised millions for the McKinley/Roosevelt ticket, which was elected. Hay accompanied McKinley on his nationwide train tour in mid-1901, during which both men visited California and saw the Pacific Ocean for the only times in their lives. The summer of 1901 was tragic for Hay; his older son Adelbert, who had been consul in
Pretoria during the
Boer War and was about to become McKinley's personal secretary, died in a fall from a hotel window. Secretary Hay was at The Fells when McKinley
was shot by
Leon Czolgosz, an anarchist, on September 6 in Buffalo. With Vice President Roosevelt and much of the cabinet hastening to the bedside of McKinley, who had been operated on (it was thought successfully) soon after the shooting, Hay planned to go to Washington to manage the communication with foreign governments, but presidential secretary
George Cortelyou urged him to come to Buffalo. He traveled to Buffalo on September 10; hearing on his arrival an account of the President's recovery, Hay responded that McKinley would die. He was more cheerful after visiting McKinley, giving a statement to the press, and went to Washington, as Roosevelt and other officials also dispersed. Hay was about to return to New Hampshire on the 13th, when word came that McKinley was dying. Hay remained at his office and the next morning, on the way to Buffalo, the former Rough Rider received from Hay his first communication as head of state, officially informing President Roosevelt of McKinley's death.
Theodore Roosevelt administration Staying on Hay, again next in line to the presidency, remained in Washington as McKinley's body was transported to the capital by funeral train, and stayed there as the late president was taken to Canton for interment. He had admired McKinley, describing him as "awfully like Lincoln in many respects" and wrote to a friend, "what a strange and tragic fate it has been of mine—to stand by the bier of three of my dearest friends, Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, three of the gentlest of men, all risen to be head of the State, and all done to death by assassins". By letter, Hay offered his resignation to Roosevelt while the new president was still in Buffalo, amid newspaper speculation that Hay would be replaced. When Hay met the funeral train in Washington, Roosevelt greeted him at the station and immediately told him he must stay on as secretary. According to Zeitz, "Roosevelt's accidental ascendance to the presidency made John Hay an essential anachronism ... the wise elder statesman and senior member of the cabinet, he was indispensable to TR, who even today remains the youngest president ever". The deaths of his son and of McKinley were not the only griefs Hay suffered in 1901—on September 26, John Nicolay died after a long illness, as did Hay's close friend
Clarence King on Christmas Eve.
Panama Hay's involvement in the efforts to have a canal joining the oceans in Central America went back to his time as Assistant Secretary of State under President
Hayes, when he served as translator for
Ferdinand de Lesseps in his efforts to interest the American government in investing in his canal company. Hayes was only interested in the idea of a canal under American control, which de Lesseps's project would not be. By the time Hay became Secretary of State, de Lesseps's project in Panama (then a Colombian province) had collapsed, as had an American-run project in Nicaragua. The 1850
Clayton–Bulwer Treaty (between the United States and Britain) forbade the United States from building a Central American canal that it exclusively controlled, and Hay, from early in his tenure, sought the removal of this restriction. But the Canadians, for whose foreign policy Britain was still available, saw the canal matter as their greatest leverage to get other disputes resolved in their favor, and persuaded Salisbury not to resolve it independently. Shortly before Hay took office, Britain and the U.S. agreed to establish a Joint High Commission to adjudicate unsettled matters, which met in late 1898 but made slow progress, especially on the Canada-Alaska boundary. The Alaska issue became less contentious in August 1899 when the Canadians accepted a provisional boundary pending final settlement. With Congress anxious to begin work on a canal bill, and increasingly likely to ignore the Clayton-Bulwer restriction, Hay and British Ambassador
Julian Pauncefote began work on a new treaty in January 1900. The first
Hay–Pauncefote Treaty was sent to the Senate the following month, where it met a cold reception, as the terms forbade the United States from blockading or fortifying the canal, that was to be open to all nations in wartime as in peace. The
Senate Foreign Relations Committee added an amendment allowing the U.S. to fortify the canal, then in March postponed further consideration until after the 1900 election. Hay submitted his resignation, which McKinley refused. The treaty, as amended, was ratified by the Senate in December, but the British would not agree to the changes. Despite the lack of agreement, Congress was enthusiastic about a canal, and was inclined to move forward, with or without a treaty. Authorizing legislation was slowed by discussion on whether to take the Nicaraguan or Panamanian route. Much of the negotiation of a revised treaty, allowing the U.S. to fortify the canal, took place between Hay's replacement in London,
Joseph H. Choate, and the British Foreign Secretary,
Lord Lansdowne, and the second Hay–Pauncefote Treaty was ratified by the Senate by a large margin on December 6, 1901. Seeing that the Americans were likely to build a Nicaragua Canal, the owners of the defunct French company, including
Philippe Bunau-Varilla, who still had exclusive rights to the Panama route, lowered their price. Beginning in early 1902, President Roosevelt became a backer of the latter route, and Congress passed legislation for it, if it could be secured within a reasonable time. In June, Roosevelt told Hay to take personal charge of the negotiations with Colombia. Later that year, Hay began talks with Colombia's acting minister in Washington,
Tomás Herrán. The
Hay–Herrán Treaty, granting $10 million to Colombia for the right to build a canal, plus $250,000 annually, was signed on January 22, 1903, and ratified by the United States Senate two months later. In August, however, the treaty was rejected by the
Colombian Senate. Roosevelt was minded to build the canal anyway, using an earlier treaty with Colombia that gave the U.S. transit rights in regard to the
Panama Railroad. Hay predicted "an insurrection on the Isthmus [of Panama] against that regime of folly and graft ... at Bogotá". Bunau-Varilla gained meetings with both men, and assured them that a revolution, and a Panamanian government more friendly to a canal, was coming. In October, Roosevelt ordered Navy ships to be stationed near Panama. The Panamanians duly
revolted in early November 1903, with Colombian interference deterred by the presence of U.S. forces. By prearrangement, Bunau-Varilla was appointed representative of the nascent nation in Washington, and quickly negotiated the
Hay–Bunau-Varilla Treaty, signed on November 18, giving the United States the right to build the canal in
a zone wide, over which the U.S. would exercise full jurisdiction. This was less than satisfactory to the Panamanian diplomats who arrived in Washington shortly after the signing, but they did not dare renounce it. The treaty was approved by the two nations, and work on the
Panama Canal began in 1904. Hay wrote to Secretary of War
Elihu Root, praising "the perfectly regular course which the President did follow" as much preferable to armed occupation of the isthmus.
Relationship with Roosevelt, other events Hay had met the President's father,
Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., during the Civil War, and during his time at the
Tribune came to know the adolescent "Teddy", twenty years younger than himself. Although before becoming president Roosevelt often wrote fulsome letters of praise to Secretary Hay, his letters to others then and later were less complimentary. Hay felt Roosevelt too impulsive, and privately opposed his inclusion on the ticket in 1900, though he quickly wrote a congratulatory note after the convention. As President and Secretary of State, the two men took pains to cultivate a cordial relationship. Roosevelt read all ten volumes of the Lincoln biography and in mid-1903, wrote to Hay that by then "I have had a chance to know far more fully what a really great Secretary of State you are". Hay for his part publicly praised Roosevelt as "young, gallant, able, [and] brilliant", words that Roosevelt wrote that he hoped would be engraved on his tombstone. Privately, and in correspondence with others, they were less generous: Hay grumbled that while McKinley would give him his full attention, Roosevelt was always busy with others, and it would be "an hour's wait for a minute's talk". Roosevelt, after Hay's death in 1905, wrote to Senator Lodge that Hay had not been "a great Secretary of State ... under me he accomplished little ... his usefulness to me was almost exclusively the usefulness of a fine figurehead". Nevertheless, when Roosevelt successfully sought
election in his own right in 1904, he persuaded the aging and infirm Hay to campaign for him, and Hay gave a speech linking the administration's policies with those of Lincoln: "there is not a principle avowed by the Republican party to-day which is out of harmony with his [Lincoln's] teaching or inconsistent with his character." Kushner and Sherrill suggested that the differences between Hay and Roosevelt were more style than ideological substance. In December 1902, the German government asked Roosevelt to arbitrate its dispute with Venezuela over unpaid debts. Hay did not think this appropriate, as Venezuela also owed the U.S. money, and quickly arranged for the
International Court of Arbitration in The Hague to step in. Hay supposedly said, as final details were being worked out, "I have it all arranged. If Teddy will keep his mouth shut until tomorrow noon!" Hay and Roosevelt also differed over the composition of the Joint High Commission that was to settle the Alaska boundary dispute. The commission was to be composed of "impartial jurists" and the British and Canadians duly appointed notable judges. Roosevelt appointed politicians, including Secretary Root and Senator Lodge. Although Hay was supportive of the President's choices in public, in private he protested loudly to Roosevelt, complained by letter to his friends, and offered his resignation. Roosevelt declined it, but the incident confirmed him in his belief that Hay was too much of an Anglophile to be trusted where Britain was concerned. The American position on the boundary dispute was imposed on Canada by a 4–2 vote, with the one English judge joining the three Americans. One incident involving Hay that benefitted Roosevelt politically was the kidnapping of Greek-American playboy
Ion Perdicaris in Morocco by chieftain
Mulai Ahmed er Raisuli, an opponent of Sultan
Abdelaziz. Raisuli demanded a ransom, but also wanted political prisoners to be released and control of
Tangier in place of the military governor. Raisuli supposed Perdicaris to be a wealthy American, and hoped United States pressure would secure his demands. In fact, Perdicaris, though born in New Jersey, had renounced his citizenship during the Civil War to avoid Confederate confiscation of property in South Carolina, and had accepted Greek naturalization, a fact not generally known until years later, but that decreased Roosevelt's appetite for military action. The sultan was ineffective in dealing with the incident, and Roosevelt considered seizing the Tangier waterfront, source of much of Abdelaziz's income, as a means of motivating him. With Raisuli's demands escalating, Hay, with Roosevelt's approval, finally cabled the consul-general in Tangier,
Samuel Gummeré: The
1904 Republican National Convention was in session, and the Speaker of the House,
Joseph Cannon, its chair, read the first sentence of the cable—and only the first sentence—to the convention, electrifying what had been a humdrum coronation of Roosevelt. "The results were perfect. This was the fighting Teddy that America loved, and his frenzied supporters—and American chauvinists everywhere—roared in delight." In fact, by then the sultan had already agreed to the demands, and Perdicaris was released. What was seen as tough talk boosted Roosevelt's election chances.
Final months and death Hay never fully recovered from the death of his son Adelbert, writing in 1904 to his close friend Lizzie Cameron that "the death of our boy made my wife and me old, at once and for the rest of our lives". Gale described Hay in his final years as a "saddened, slowly dying old man". Although Hay gave speeches in support of Roosevelt, he spent much of the fall of 1904 at his New Hampshire house or with his younger brother Charles, who was ill in Boston. After the election, Roosevelt asked Hay to remain another four years. Hay asked for time to consider, but the President did not allow it, announcing to the press two days later that Hay would stay at his post. Early 1905 saw futility for Hay, as a number of treaties he had negotiated were defeated or amended by the Senate—one involving the British dominion of
Newfoundland due to Senator Lodge's fears it would harm his fisherman constituents. Others, promoting arbitration, were voted down or amended because the Senate did not want to be bypassed in the settlement of international disputes. By
Roosevelt's inauguration on March 4, 1905, Hay's health was so bad that both his wife and his friend Henry Adams insisted on his going to Europe, where he could rest and get medical treatment. Presidential doctor
Presley Rixey issued a statement that Hay was suffering from overwork, but in letters the secretary hinted his conviction that he did not have long to live. An eminent physician in Italy prescribed medicinal baths for Hay's heart condition, and he duly journeyed to
Bad Nauheim, near
Frankfurt, Germany. Kaiser
Wilhelm II was among the monarchs who wrote to Hay asking him to visit, though he declined; Belgian King
Leopold II succeeded in seeing him by showing up at his hotel, unannounced. Adams suggested that Hay retire while there was still enough life left in him to do so, and that Roosevelt would be delighted to act as his own Secretary of State. Hay jokingly wrote to sculptor
Augustus Saint-Gaudens that "there is nothing the matter with me except old age, the Senate, and one or two other mortal maladies". After the course of treatment, Hay went to Paris and began to take on his workload again by meeting with the French foreign minister,
Théophile Delcassé. In London, King
Edward VII broke protocol by meeting with Hay in a small drawing room, and Hay lunched with Whitelaw Reid, ambassador in London at last. There was not time to see all who wished to see Hay on what he knew was his final visit. On his return to the United States, despite his family's desire to take him to New Hampshire, the secretary went to Washington to deal with departmental business and "say
Ave Caesar! to the President", as Hay put it. He was pleased to learn that Roosevelt was well on his way to settling the
Russo-Japanese War, an action for which the President would win the
Nobel Peace Prize. Hay left Washington for the last time on June 23, 1905, arriving in New Hampshire the following day. He died there on July 1 of his heart ailment and complications. Hay was interred in
Lake View Cemetery in Cleveland, near the grave of Garfield, in the presence of Roosevelt and many dignitaries, including Robert Lincoln. ==Literary career==