The American Diplomat: John Hay of Indiana

Doctor Charles Hay, after an arduous horse ride from his home in Lexington, Kentucky, arrived in the small town of Salem, Indiana, which at that time numbered approximately eight hundred inhabitants, on June 5, 1829. The young doctor managed to set up his practice shortly after his arrival on the Hoosier scene, but Hay, in the twelve years he resided in Salem, barely managed to earn a living, eventually moving his practice and family to Warsaw, Illinois.

Although a failure in Salem, Hay did achieve his life’s ambition. “I have hoped,” he wrote on his seventy-fifth birthday, “to leave behind me children, and children’s children—and the greater the number, the better I would be pleased—with whom intelligence, honor, and thrift would be matters of instinct and tradition.”

Born in Salem on October 12, 1838, John Hay, the third of six children raised by Charles and. Helen Leonard Hay, more than met his father’s wish for success. In a diplomatic/political career that spanned this country’s transformation from an agrarian nation to a worldwide industrial power, John Hay worked tirelessly to see that markets remained open to burgeoning American trade—as Hay described it, to ensure “a fair field and no favor.” 

Private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, author of the acclaimed Pike County Ballads, editorial writer for the New York Tribune, successful businessman, U.S. minister to Great Britain, and Secretary of State under two strong presidents—William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt—Hay is best known for helping to strengthen ties between America and England, and his Open Door notes regarding trade in China.

The diplomatic success enjoyed by this “great American gentleman” is mixed at best. While minister to Great Britain, Hay did help cement Anglo-American cooperation, but failed to win several agreements desired by the United States government. Although his actions regarding China were popular with the American public, Hay’s Open Door notes—actually written by a State Department assistant and an Englishman—did little to stop China’s dismemberment by European powers. The path Hay took from a boyhood on the frontier to the pinnacle of American diplomacy is a fascinating one, however, as it offers a blueprint on how to win friends and influence people long before Dale Carnegie. “Hay never started at the bottom of anything,” his biographer, Taylor Dennett, said of his subject. “He never had to.”   

Although his father eked out a living as a country doctor, Hay’s childhood memories were bucolic ones of days passed near the banks of the Mississippi River. “The boys of my day,” he recalled, “led an amphibious life in and near its [the Mississippi’s] waters in the summer time, and in the winter its dazzling ice bridge, of incomparable beauty and purity, was our favorite playground.” Encouraged by his father, who possessed an extensive personal library, Hay became a voracious reader and displayed an aptitude for learning foreign languages, especially Latin, Greek, and German. From an early age he also possessed the ability, as his sister observed, “of stringing words together into rhymes”—a habit he made pay in later years by writing best-selling poetry.

With his academic talents outstripping Warsaw’s limited local schools Hay, through financial assistance from his Uncle Milton Hay, a prosperous Springfield, Illinois, lawyer, was sent in 1849 to study at the Pittsfield Private Academy in Pike County, Illinois. The aid offered by his uncle was the first in a series of incidents where Hay’s talents would be recognized by those who could help further his career. Hay helped himself along by becoming what Elihu Root termed “the most delightful of companions,” able to forge friendships that lasted a lifetime.

After some college-level study at Springfield, Hay journeyed east at age seventeen to attend Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Hay found that life at the eastern university, he wrote to his family, “suits me exactly. The Professors are all men of the greatest ability, & what is more, perfect gentlemen.”

The young man from the primitive west took some ribbing at first from his more sophisticated classmates, but Hay won them over with his ready wit. He also impressed his classmates through his brilliance in the classroom. “It was the general opinion that Hay put his book under his pillow and had the contents thereof absorbed and digested by morning. His quick perception, ready grasp of an idea and wonderful retentive memory made a mere pastime of study,” one Brown University student recalled.

Graduating in 1858, Hay returned to Illinois and pondered what to do with his life. Although he considered becoming a minister, or returning to the east to try his hand as a writer, his family urged him to study law instead. “They would spoil a first-class preacher,” Hay wrote a friend, “to make a third-class lawyer of me.” Bending to his family’s wishes, Hay moved to Springfield to read law in his uncle’s successful office (located adjacent to the law firm of Lincoln and Herndon). 

Life in the Midwest, however, was a far cry from what Hay had experienced while rubbing elbows with the gentlemen attending Brown. Decrying the crass materialism he believed inundated the frontier, Hay expressed to his friend Nora Perry in Providence that  by living among the barbarians in the West he would “turn from ‘the rose and the rainbow’ to corner-lots and tax-titles, and a few years will find my eye not rolling in a fine frenzy, but steadily fixed on the pole-star of humanity, $!” He denigrated the typical Westerner as someone who “always spells badly and rides well,” and possesses “profound contempt for goodness and grammar.”

Despite his complaints about wasting away in Springfield, Hay actually was in the perfect spot in which to find a means for escaping Western life. His uncle’s law firm was one of the most prestigious in the state, counting as its former partners two Illinois governors and Lincoln himself. Hay used his uncle’s friendship with Lincoln, and his own with JohnNicolay, Lincoln’s private secretary, to secure an appointment as the president’s assistant private secretary. Hay had finally managed to find a way back to his beloved East.

From a seemingly innocuous position as assistant private secretary, Hay, during the trying days of the Civil War, worked his way into Lincoln’s good graces, gradually handling more difficult assignments than just routine correspondence--dealing with office seekers, investigating alleged secret societies plotting against the Union cause, and traveling to Canada with New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley to meet with Confederate representatives on a possible peace proposal. Under the president’s tutelage, Hay received “a graduate course in the art of living.”

Hay learned his lessons well, becoming friendly with Secretary of State WilliamSeward—a friendship that blossomed into a job as secretary of the American legation in Paris following Lincoln’s assassination. Other diplomatic posts followed in quick succession: chargé d’affaires at Vienna and secretary of the legation at Madrid. His experiences abroad made him an attractive catch for Greeley’s Tribune, where Hay became an assistant editor in October 1870.

While on the Tribune Hay won literary fame with such dialect poems as “Little Breeches” and “Jim Bludso.” In his editorials written for the newspaper, Hay developed a politically independent reputation through his support for a wide variety of reform measures. Hay, who would later be known as the “Republican laureate” for his Lincoln biography (co-authored by Nicolay) and relentless attacks on the Democrats, went so far as to vote for Democrat Samuel Tilden in his race for governor of New York. Hay continued to chart a politically independent course upon his move to Cleveland in the summer of 1875 with his new wife Clara Louise Stone, daughter of Cleveland railroad tycoon Amasa Stone.

Joining his father-in-law’s business, Hay became a wealthy man himself in the process. The work was far from strenuous, however, as Hay related in a letter to his friend Alvey Adee: “I am here in a nice little shop where I do nothing but read and yawn in the long intervals of work, an occupation that fits me like a glove. My work is merely the care of investments which are so safe that they require no care.” With time on his hands, Hay continued to write for the Tribune and pursue politics.

Disliking life in Cleveland (Dennett described Hay as “a spiritual outlander” in that midwestern city), Hay looked for any opportunity to return to Washington, D.C. His independent political stand, however, especially his opposition to fellow Ohioan Rutherford B. Hayes, elected to the presidency in 1876, kept him out of office. When a position as American minister to Berlin opened in December 1878, Whitelaw Reid, Tribune publisher, suggested to Secretary of State William Evarts that Hay be given the job. Evarts refused Reid’s suggestion, noting that Hay “had not been active enough in political efforts.”

Stung by this rejection, Hay abandoned his political independence for that of a party regular, traveling the country giving speeches blasting the Democrats. Impressed by Hay’s return to the GOP fold, Hayes in October 1879 named Hay to replace the outgoing Assistant Secretary of State Frederick Seward. Hay remained in that post until March 31, 1881, when President James Garfield took office.

Along with his burning desire to hold political office, Hay’s return to Republican orthodoxy was also influenced by labor unrest that swept the country in 1877. “I feel that a profound misfortune and disgrace has fallen on the country, which no amount of energy or severity can now wholly remedy,” Hay wrote his father-in-law about the strikes. As he had when he returned to Illinois from college, Hay displayed his disregard for those not in his social class when he proclaimed that the “very devil seems to have entered the lower classes of working men.” The strikes so unsettled Hay that he began work on a novel The Bread-winners: A Social Study (published in 1883) blasting labor unions and their leaders.

Although close to Garfield, Hay was left in the political wilderness after his stint as assistant secretary of state ended in 1881. His political aspirations were hamstrung by his support for such losing presidential contenders as James Blaine and John Sherman. Hay managed to keep busy, producing not only The Bread-winners, but also working with Nicolay on a history of Lincoln, published serially in Century magazine for which the duo received the then staggering sum of $50,000. Hay could afford to live a life of leisure. Upon his father-in-law’s death in 1883, Hay and his wife inherited $3.5 million--money Hay would put to good use in furthering his political ambitions.

Betting his political future on Ohio governor William McKinley, Hay used his fortune to help ensure that the former congressman enjoyed a swift rise to the nation’s top office. In 1893 McKinley found himself deeply in debt after a friend, whose note for approximately $100,000 he had endorsed, went bankrupt. Realizing that a debt-ridden McKinley would never be a successful presidential contender, his wily political handler, Mark Hanna, called upon Hay and other wealthy Republicans to come to McKinley’s aid.

In 1897 McKinley appointed Hay as ambassador to England—an American diplomatic post then second only in importance to that of Secretary of State. “I would give six-pence,” Adams (a Democrat) proclaimed, “to know how much Hay paid for McKinley. His politics must have cost.” Whatever the final cost, it was worth it; after only a year and a half as ambassador, Hay was called back to America to serve as McKinley’s Secretary of State, a post he held until his death in 1905.

Hay’s time in England, at first glance, was a failure. He was unable to achieve agreements on two problems that occurred during his tenure—American claims against Canadians hunting Alaskan seals and an attempt to organize an international conference on bimetallism (the free coinage of silver). One of his few successes came during the Spanish-American war, when Britain remained neutral, and afterwards when the English government acquiesced to America’s decision to hold the Philippines.

Hay’s real success as an ambassador came not in reaching binding agreements with the British, but in continuing to push for Anglo-American solidarity. In a speech in London in April 1898 Hay hit on that theme, proclaiming: “We [England and the United States] are bound by a tie which we did not forge and which we cannot break; we are joint ministers of the same sacred mission of liberty and progress, charged with duties which we cannot evade by the imposition of irresistible hands.” The one, “indispensable” feature of America’s foreign policy, Hay wrote privately while Secretary of State, “should be a friendly understanding with England”—something he achieved in his seventeen months as ambassador.

On September 30, 1898, Hay was sworn in as McKinley’s new Secretary of State, replacing William R. Day, who left to become one of the commissioners to the peace conference with Spain. The State Department of Hay’s day was a small department numbering about sixty employees and unprepared for the modern age. “The typewriter was viewed as a necessary evil and the telephone was an instrument of last resort,” Dennett noted. 

Along with inertia at the State Department, Hay had to deal with the U.S. Senate, a body he believed tried too often to interfere in the administration’s conduct of foreign affairs, and various politicians’ demands for patronage jobs. Despairing at the work facing Hay, Adams claimed that “converting an old Mississippi-raft of a confederate government into a brand-new ten-thousand-ton, triple screw, armoured, line of battleship is the work of a hundred years.”

Hay brought with him to his new post, however, a philosophy that attempted to move the department into the twentieth century and further America’s growing status as a world power. “We have kept always in view,” the Secretary of State told the New York Chamber of Commerce in 1901, “that our normal activities are in the direction of trade and commerce; that the vast development of our industries imperatively demands that we shall not only retain and confirm our hold on our present markets, but seek constantly . . . to extend our commercial interests in every practicable direction.” Also, Hay was able to craft a staff to his liking with such friends as William Rockhill (as a Far Eastern expert) and Alvey Adee (as assistant secretary).

The major test of Hay’s diplomatic talents during his seven years in office came on a matter pertaining to America’s quest for expanded markets for its products—the  carving up of China by European powers. Although on such issues as aborting the 1850 Clayton-Bulwer Treaty with Britain to clear the way for an American-controlled isthmian canal the Secretary of State had to deal with “the howling fools in the Senate,” in the case of China Hay judiciously maneuvered to keep negotiations as far removed from involvement by that legislative body as possible.

On March 8, 1898, shortly before the Spanish-American War broke out, the English government sent a confidential inquiry to U.S. Secretary of State JohnSherman warning that certain “foreign Powers may restrict the opening of China to the commerce of all nations.” The memorandum went on to ask whether the British “could count on the co-operation of the United States in opposing such action by foreign Powers and whether the United States would be prepared to join with Great Britain in opposing such measures should the contingency arise.” 

Preoccupied with the coming war with Spain, Sherman and President McKinley declined Britain’s offer noting they were sticking to “our traditional policy of respecting foreign alliances and so far as practicable avoiding interference or connection with European complications.” Rebuffed by the Americans, the British joined the scramble for their own sphere of influence in China.

American policy in China changed, however, when Hay moved into the Secretary of State’s office. The successful conclusion of the war with Spain had given the United States an opportunity for a Pacific empire; McKinley, with Hay’s approval, decided to take the Philippines and make “the extension of American markets in the Far East a leading policy of his administration.” Although Hay, as a businessman, supported any opportunities for increasing American trade, he had little knowledge of China. For aid in formulating the McKinley administration’s response to the threat posed to the open door by European powers he turned to Rockhill, who had served as second secretary of the Peking Legation in 1884.

Rockhill received help in his deliberations from Alfred E. Hippisley, a British citizen and member of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs Service, who visited his American friend in the summer of 1899. “I went over as frequently as I could to Washington [from his wife’s family home in Baltimore],” Hippisley recalled, “to discuss the conditions in China with him [Rockhill] and especially what could be done to maintain the ‘open door’ or equality of opportunity for all nations in that country.” 

Working from a memorandum on China drawn up by Hippisley, Rockhill prepared his own version for Hay, which the Secretary of State distributed to Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy on 6 September 1899, and to Japan on 17 November 1899--a diplomatic notice seeking an equal economic playing field for all nations trading in China that became known as the first Open Door Note.

The note itself, which had been met with popular acclaim in America, offered no serious deviation from standard American policy. Hay’s true diplomatic skill on this issue came not from the writing of the note, which credit belongs to Rockhill and Hippisley, but in his dealings with the response from the European powers. Most European governments followed the lead of Great Britain, which had declared it would agree to follow the note’s dictates if the other powers also assented. With matters up in the air, Hay acted decisively. On March 20, 1900, he issued a circular proclaiming the “final and definitive” agreement from all the countries involved. A gleeful Rockhill wrote Hippisley that “none of the European Powers are prepared to have this question made a subject of heated debate and controversy.” Hay had scored a diplomatic coup.

The Secretary of State had little time to enjoy his success. In the summer of 1900 in China there occurred an outbreak of anti-foreign violence that became known as the Boxer Rebellion. With foreign compounds in China under siege, an allied military force--including five thousand American troops from Manila--was organized to relieve the embattled legations. With China in disarray, various powers, especially Russia, Germany, and Japan, were posed to use the disruption as an excuse for enlarging their spheres of influence in that country.

With his carefully crafted China policy under attack, and nearing time for McKinley’s re-election campaign, Hay moved to forestall China’s dismemberment. On  July 3, 1900, with the president’s approval, he sent a circular note (the second Open Door Note) to the various powers stating that it was the policy of the United States to preserve China’s “territorial and administrative entity, protect all rights guaranteed to friendly powers by treaty and international law, and safeguard for the world the principle of equal and impartial trade with all parts of the Chinese Empire.”

At first, Hay’s bold move had seemed to curb the European powers’ appetite for dismembering China. The American press and public hailed what the New York Journal of Commerce called “one of the most important diplomatic negotiations of our time.” Hay realized, however, that China’s integrity as a nation was held by a slim thread. “The talk about `our preeminent moral position giving us the authority to dictate to the world,’” he told Adee, “is mere flapdoodle.” The policy succeeded at first only because America had a military force in China (the troops sent to relieve the besieged legations) to check the ambitions of the foreign powers, who warily circled each other in the coming years.

Even Hay came to realize that attempting to hold together the collapsing Chinese government from total foreign domination was an impossible task. Just five months after his note proclaiming America’s intention to uphold China’s territorial integrity, the Secretary of State instructed the American minister in Peking to try and acquire a coaling station for the U.S. Navy at Samsah Bay. The idea for the station may have been dropped, but the government seemed unwilling to live up to the claims it had made in Hay’s second open door note. Asked by Japan if it would join it in stopping Russian activity in Manchuria, Hay declined, saying that the United States was not “prepared to attempt singly, or in concert with other Powers, to enforce these views in the east by any demonstration which could present a character of hostility to any other Power.” The open door Hay had touted was closing fast.

Hay’s Open Door adventure had a far-reaching effect on American diplomacy in the Far East in the twentieth century. Instead of seeing Hay’s policy ensuring the territorial integrity of China as a failure, subsequent State Department officials made the mistake of trying to live up to a discredited policy. “The idea of preserving Chinese territorial and administrative entity, in itself a somewhat ambitious policy,” noted Robert Ferrell of Indiana University, “gave way almost unconsciously to the idea of downright guarantee of Chinese territory.” This policy put the United States on a collision course with another growing power in the Far East—Japan. In its own way, Hay’s work started America on the path to World War II.