The Man from Terre Haute: Eugene V. Debs

Convict Number 9653 was a model prisoner at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1920. Hardened criminals and prison officials alike were touched by his friendliness and concern for all. The son of immigrant parents, he dropped out of high school at age fourteen to work as a painter in the Terre Haute railroad yards for fifty cents a day. Despite this humble background, and his incarceration in a prison cell, the inmate received nearly one million votes as the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate in 1920.

The prisoner was Hoosier union organizer, writer, lecturer, and five-time presidential hopeful Eugene V. Debs. Although during his life his beliefs were frequently out of step with those of his Terre Haute neighbors and the country, many of Debs’s “radical” reforms—an eight-hour workday, pensions, workmen’s compensation, sick leave, and social security—are commonplace today. His philosophy was contained in the short statement: “While there is a lower class, I am in it; While there is a criminal element, I am of it; While there is a soul in prison, I am not free!”

Born on November 5, 1855, Debs was the eldest son of parents who came to Indiana in 1851 from Alsace, a region in France. Leaving school to help his financially strapped family, Debs found a job scraping paint off railroad cars. Later, he became a locomotive fireman. His family members, concerned about his safety, urged Debs to quit, and in 1874 he moved on to a clerking job at the Hulman and Cox wholesale grocery firm.

Even with his new job, Debs retained his interest in the railroad workers’ plight. On February 27, 1875, he became a charter member and the secretary of the Vigo Lodge, Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. By 1880 Debs had become grand secretary of the national Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and editor of the Locomotive Fireman’s Magazine. Also during this time Debs became active in Democratic politics, serving two terms as Terre Haute city clerk and one frustrating term in the Indiana General Assembly as a state representative. During his service in the legislature, Debs supported or drafted bills giving women the right to vote, abolishing racial distinctions, and giving compensation to railroad workers; all met with defeat. He refused to run for reelection.

In June 1893 Debs helped found the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union, which was open to all railroad employees. During its first full year in operation, the union won a major and peaceful victory in its strike against the Great Northern Railway. The union next became involved in a sympathy strike in support of employees of the George Pullman Company, maker of Pullman railroad cars. Approximately 100,000 workers went on strike, halting all railroad traffic in and out of Chicago except trains carrying U.S. mail.

The bitter Pullman strike, often known as the “Debs Rebellion,” ended when President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops. For his refusal of a court order to end the strike, Debs and seven other ARU officials, dubbed the “Woodstock Eight,” were convicted (despite being represented by Clarence Darrow) for contempt of court. During his six-month stay in the Woodstock, Illinois, jail, Debs converted to the socialist cause.

In 1900 in Indianapolis the Social Democrat party held its first national convention and nominated Debs as its presidential candidate—a role he also filled in the 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 presidential elections. In his first run for the White House, Debs captured 86,935 votes. That total rose to 402,489 votes four years later. For the 1908 election Debs took his campaign on the road, traveling coast to coast in his “Red Special” train, which consisted of a locomotive with a coach, sleeper, and a baggage car packed with campaign literature. Debs spoke to some 500,000 people on his journey, many of whom paid to be able to hear his speeches—a far cry from today’s campaigns. In spite of his whirlwind efforts, however, Debs was able to capture only 17,891 more votes than his 1904 total.

The 1912 election was the high-water mark for the Socialist party as 900,369 people, approximately 6 percent of the total vote, marked their ballots for Debs. Four years later, seeing war fever building in the country, Debs declined to run for president and instead tried unsuccessfully for a seat in Congress. His congressional campaign saw Debs speaking forcefully against the war then raging in Europe—a stance he maintained as America entered the war on the Allied side in 1917.

On June 16, 1918, Debs spoke out against the war in a speech in Canton, Ohio. Federal authorities were quick to react, arresting the labor leader later that month in Cleveland and charging him with violating the Espionage Act. During his trial the prosecution argued that Debs, in his Canton speech, had tried to discourage enlistment in the armed forces and promoted insubordination in the ranks. Speaking in his defense, Debs admitted making the speech, but denied the prosecution’s allegations and challenged the validity of the Espionage Act, claiming it violated the constitutional right to free speech.

In two hours of testimony before the jury, Debs had this to say about his Canton speech and beliefs: “In what I had to say there my purpose was to have the people understand something about the social system in which we live and to prepare them to change this system by perfectly peaceable and orderly means into what I, as a Socialist, conceive to be a real democracy. . . . I am doing what little I can, and have been for many years, to bring about a change that shall do away with the rule of the great body of the people by a relatively small class and establish in this country an industrial and social democracy.”  

On September 14, 1918, Judge D. C. Westenhauer issued his sentence, sending Debs to prison for ten years. An appeal by Debs to the U.S. Supreme Court failed, and in April 1919 he entered the Moundsville, West Virginia, state prison (which housed some federal detainees) to begin serving his jail term. Two months later he was transferred to the Atlanta federal prison from which he ran his fifth and final presidential campaign. In the 1920 election Debs captured his highest vote total ever (913,664), but the Socialist party’s total vote percentage dropped to 3 percent.

On December 23, 1921, the man who defeated Debs for president, Warren G. Harding, commuted his sentence to time served (effective on Christmas Day), and Debs returned home to Terre Haute. Although Debs continued to speak and write for the socialist cause during the next few years, he was in poor health due to his prison experience and the effects of his grueling work schedule throughout his adult life. He died in Lindlahr sanitarium just outside of Chicago on October 20, 1926.

During his days living in Terre Haute, Debs hosted a variety of famous figures of the period at his home, including James Whitcomb Riley. In fact, Riley was such a frequent visitor that the guest bedroom was named in his honor. Debs’ close friendship with Riley prompted the poet to observe: “God was feelin’ might good when he made Gene Debs, and he didn’t have anything else to do all day.”

 

"The Politics of Joy": John Bartlow Martin and Hubert Humphrey's 1968 Presidential Campaign

In late August 1968 John Bartlow Martin, a former Indiana newspaperman, freelance writer for national magazines, and speechwriter for a number of Democratic presidential candidates for the previous sixteen years, was walking down Michigan Avenue in Chicago with a friend. Martin, who lived in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, was in the city for the Democratic National Convention at the International Amphitheater.

Martin came across a limousine stalled in a traffic jam near the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Inside was Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who stuck his head out of the window and called out to him. “We shook hands,” Martin recalled, “and he said, grinning but his jaw thrust out at the same time . . . ‘I’m going to get it [the presidential nomination] and I want you to help me in the fall.’”

At first, Martin demurred, responding to Humphrey with, “We’ll see how this one comes out,” meaning the convention. Martin had known the vice president since the 1950s and had appreciated Humphrey’s support for him when he had been unjustly attacked in Congress as a communist sympathizer during his service as President John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to the Dominican Republic. 

With Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination after winning the California primary, Martin, who had been an invaluable part of the Kennedy campaign, especially here in Indiana, believed he was through with politics for good. His revulsion at the possibility of the Republican presidential candidate, Richard Nixon, sitting in the Oval Office, however, galvanized him into action. He put aside his writing projects and joined Humphrey’s campaign staff as a speechwriter. Martin said he would only be able to live with himself during the next four years if he knew he had “done everything possible” to prevent Nixon from winning the election.

To cope with his grief over Robert Kennedy’s death, Martin, in late June, had retreated to a place that had been for him for several years a place of comfort and solace—the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He had tried to start again on a project he had been working on before he joined Kennedy’s campaign—a biography of Illinois governor and two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson, the person responsible for getting Martin involved in politics by serving on his speechwriting staff for his 1952 race against Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Martin found, however, that he could not concentrate on his manuscript, feeling nothing but “bleak despair.” After all, the only three politicians he had ever cared about—Stevenson and the Kennedy brothers—were dead. “There is a point in working for the principles of Robert Kennedy,” said Martin, “but no Robert Kennedy.”

In the days leading up to the Democratic convention, Martin received a request from his old friend from his days with Stevenson, George Ball, that he work directly for the Humphrey campaign. Martin declined the offer, but said in a July 10 letter to Ball that down the road he could do for the vice president what he had done for both Robert and John Kennedy—not writing set speeches, but doing a job he had created, “editorial advance,” which involved “going out ahead of the candidate, talking to local people, then advising him on what issues to discuss and what approach to take to them in each place” via detailed briefing sheets.

Martin also emphasized his role with the campaign’s schedulers to try and “make the schedule fit editorial and political needs rather than be devised arbitrarily by advance men, geographers, and local politicians.” Martin told Ball he thought these activities might be useful to Humphrey, if at all, more in September and October rather than in July. “In the meanwhile,” said Martin, “I gather that he [Humphrey] does have serious problems, not so much in winning the nomination as in getting nominated in such a way as not to lose the election.” He offered to produce memos from time to time leading up to the convention addressing possible problems facing the candidate and what he could do to solve them.

On August 4 Ted Van Dyk, a close assistant to Humphrey and the vice president’s chief executive officer during the upcoming presidential campaign, wrote Martin to say that his offer to write memos was “certainly a welcome one,” and told him to send them directly to him. Van Dyk also hinted at working something out with Martin’s offer for doing editorial advance work for the vice president in the fall campaign. Five days later, Martin crafted a four-page memo to Humphrey, through Van Dyk, offering some of the same advice he had given Robert Kennedy on what he should do after the California primary.

Martin wrote that the vice president seemed too much a creature of President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Democratic Party machinery and needed to establish his independence without a direct break with the president. To do so, Martin suggested, as he had for Kennedy, a whistlestop railroad trip across the country before the convention, what he called a “whistle-and-listen” journey, staying out of large cities for the most part, and hitting instead small towns and suburbs. “You would not so much speak to the people as listen to them, find out what’s on their minds, what their concerns are, what they think should be done about them,” said Martin. “You should not meet with local political leaders but with private citizens—businessmen, workingmen, farmers, housewives, etc.”

As did many other Democrats who were in Chicago for the convention, Martin could not believe what he saw on the streets of the city he loved, calling the entire proceedings, where Humphrey received the party’s nomination, a disaster for his party. He noted that Johnson had been in many ways an admirable president, and Daley stood as the best mayor Chicago had ever had, but he had become appalled at the two men’s behavior at the convention. “As Daley’s police beat the kids in the streets, and as Johnson’s political operatives smothered the convention, one could only feel that two stubborn old men were destroying any chance the Democratic party had to keep the unspeakable Richard Nixon out of the White House,” said Martin.

On Sunday, September 29, Martin went to Washington to begin his work with the Humphrey campaign. Although at first Martin believed he would be doing the editorial advance work he had pioneered, the situation had changed, and he worked as one of Humphrey’s speechwriters under the administrative leadership of John Stewart, a legislative assistant for the vice president. Adlai Stevenson III had written Martin on Monday, September 23, that he had talked with Humphrey and he had passed along a request that Martin give him “some desperately needed help with speech writing. Ted [Van Dyk] now knows that what Hubert really wants is rhetoric, not advance work.” Stevenson said he felt “terrible” about diverting Martin from his work on his father’s biography, but the situation called for him to do all he could for Humphrey.

To Martin, the vice president’s early campaign speeches sounded “wooden, more like position papers,” not surprising because the writers were not “professional political speech writers; they were issues men, legislative assistants and others from the VP staff.” After he arrived, and the campaign swung into full gear, the speeches got more political. They also got that way because Humphrey had begun to feel more like a candidate instead of the vice president. “He need not give statesmanlike addresses benefitting the high office he held,” said Martin. “He could get out in the gutter and slug . . . like any other candidate.”

Humphrey began becoming his own man again after a September 30 television broadcast from Salt Lake City, Utah, in which he had taken an independent stance from Johnson’s war policies by noting, “As President I would be willing to stop the bombing of the North as an acceptable risk for peace.” Contributions began trickling in and Van Dyk noticed the absence of major heckling during the vice president’s campaign appearances. “It was as if someone had turned off a switch,” he said. Martin watched Humphrey’s speech at the Washington home of his friend, journalist John Steele. “He [Humphrey] did not go as far on Viet Nam as I wished,” Martin recalled, “but he did open the door, I thought, to move away from LBJ a little at a time.”

The enormity of the challenge still ahead, however, hit Humphrey full force at a meeting with his advisers, Martin included, on Friday, October 4, at the vice president’s apartment in Washington. As they discussed the details of a national print advertising campaign, Humphrey interrupted, saying, according to Martin: “What I want to ask you is where the hell is the campaign? I’ve been going around the country, for 15 days, beating my brains out, making speech after speech; and after each somebody in the crowd comes up to me and asks me for some buttons, or bumper stickers, or something, and I say I haven’t got any but I’m sure my local organizer does have—then I turn to him and by God he hasn’t got any either. Now where the hell is the campaign?”

Finally, Humphrey’s campaign director, Larry O’Brien, gave the vice president the news that while the mockups of promotional materials had been prepared, the Democratic Party did not have enough cash or credit to produce them, could not even pay for the fuel for the vice president’s jet. (As of mid-September, the Humphrey campaign had only $200,000 in cash on hand. Humphrey had estimated that he needed $10 million to $15 million to run a proper campaign). The Democratic party also had little chance of raising any substantial contributions because of the public’s perception that Humphrey stood no chance of winning.

Humphrey sat in silence for a moment, Martin noted, before saying, “Well. All right. I can raise money. I’ll go out and make speeches at fund-raising dinners. We’ve got to do it.” As Martin furiously took notes for use in upcoming speeches, the vice president also set out the themes he wanted to emphasize as the campaign moved forward. Humphrey said, “Only three things matter. Number One, who can you trust? Number Two, who can get peace? Number Three, who can hold this country together?” Humphrey added that his opponent’s greatest weakness was that he was untrustworthy. “I’m compassionate. I’m not very smart. But I’m not tricky,” Humphrey reminded his advisers. “Nobody ever said that. They’ve said I’m gabby, I talk too much, said I wobble or try to please too many people. But they don’t think I’m a cheat or tricky.”

By the week of October 14 the Humphrey campaign had begun to catch fire as several things happened at once, noted Martin. Humphrey had staked out his own position on Vietnam and had begun to benefit from his underdog status, with Nixon’s campaign seemingly stagnant, stuck on its message of a secret plan to end the war. “Nixon ran a campaign of avoidance—he avoided the issues, he avoided Humphrey, and he avoided the people,” noted O’Brien. “We were never able to get a hand on him.” Martin viewed the election as different from the ones he had previously been involved in. Ordinarily an incumbent defends his record, he said, while his opponent attacks. “In this case the incumbent, HHH, swung to the attack, while his opponent, Nixon, merely talked about the need for new leadership,” Martin said.

As for the third person in the race that year, former Alabama governor George Wallace, the presidential candidate for the American Independent Party, Martin believe that once voters began to start paying attention to the election, sometime after the World Series had ended, Wallace’s support among what he called “blue-collar hillbilly Democrats in the North” would start to erode. “I had never thought Wallace could possibly retain the 21 point vote the polls showed for him in September,” Martin reflected. “I had always thought the unions and the Democratic party would bring those people home.” Although he believed Wallace’s vote percentage would end up being about 9 or 10 percent of the total; it ended up at 13.5 percent.

Martin developed a routine for his time with the Humphrey campaign. In the morning, he traveled with the candidate on his plane. When the plane landed at an airport for a rally, Martin remained onboard to write. “In the evening when we arrived at the overnight stop airport,” he recalled, “I would usually get a car and cut out of the motorcade and go straight to the overnight hotel to write.

While campaigning in Ohio, Martin secured a car and a driver at the first stop and had him take him to the town scheduled for the last appearance of the day, sometimes writing as the car sped on. Once he arrived at his destination, Martin would “hole up in a motel to work.” He usually saw the candidate “most often and at the greatest length while we were airborne together between stops; thought I sometimes saw him at night in his hotel room.”

Unlike Adlai Stevenson, who always wanted something new from his speechwriters for every appearance, Humphrey did not object to delivering the same speech twice, said Martin. The vice president always requested a set text when he made a speech. “But, except when he had TV or radio time, he deviated widely from it,” Martin said. “He would take a 20-minute speech and talk for a full hour. . . . He would take a well-structured carefully phrased speech and butcher it, rambling on and on.” Humphrey’s ad-libbing habit proved to be “very unreliable,” Martin added, as sometimes he was “very effective, more often than not a bore. He just talked too damn much. I told him so, so did everybody else; but it did not good.”

As Election Day neared, Martin believed that Humphrey had closed the gap on Nixon, helped in no small part by last-minute, vital financial and logistical support from organized labor. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations registered 4.6 million voters, distributed 115 million pieces of campaign literature, and spent millions of dollars aimed at stopping traditional Democrats from bolting the party for Wallace.

Before returning to Minnesota, where Humphrey would cast his ballot at a rural polling place near Waverly, Martin accomplished his final task for the campaign—writing three possible statements for election night, one if Humphrey won, another if he lost, and a third if the election were thrown into the House of Representatives. “The last was the hardest,” Martin recalled, as he pondered what Nixon and Wallace might do if no candidate won a clear-cut victory.

A few days earlier on the campaign plane, Martin had cornered Humphrey and said to him: “I want to say this before the election. Win lose or draw you’ve run a good campaign, an honorable campaign. You’ve said nothing you’ll ever regret, and this is important for you and the country. And you’ve kept the liberal cause alive.”

As voting results started to trickle in on Tuesday, November 5, Martin, watching the returns at the Leamington Hotel in Minneapolis, believed his candidate just might pull off the impossible when voting in New York and Michigan looked good for Humphrey (he went on to win both states). The vice president’s victory in Pennsylvania had Van Dyk believing that the Democrats could defeat Nixon. “But then it hung. And hung,” Martin recalled. “I think I went to bed around 3 or 4 a.m., with California, Illinois, and Ohio still out.” Nixon won all three of those states and squeaked into office, winning 43.4 percent of the popular vote to 42.7 for Humphrey and 13.5 percent for Wallace. The Republican candidate enjoyed a substantial triumph in the Electoral College, with 301 electoral votes to 191 for Humphrey and 46 for Wallace.

Although some Democrats believed that if the race had lasted another week Humphrey might have managed to pull off the upset, Martin disagreed. In his opinion, the vice president’s campaign reached its peak on Election Day and Humphrey would have lost votes in another week. “Where we needed the time was on the other end, at the start,” he said. The Republicans had their convention earlier than the Democrats, giving them a few weeks head start. The late August date had been set earlier, when Johnson was still a viable candidate, so the Democrats could celebrate the president’s sixtieth birthday on August 27. If the Chicago convention had not torn the party to pieces, Humphrey might well have been able to raise the money he needed—Martin claimed that $10 million in September would have swung the presidential election to the Democrats.

Humphrey’s spirited effort did make the 1968 presidential election far closer than anyone would have thought possible when the campaign began on Labor Day. Although frustrated and upset by the final outcome, Martin was not sorry he had spent so much of his time with the campaigns both Robert Kennedy and Humphrey. “I know I did everything I could in both,” he said. “Not enough; but all I could.”      

 

George Cottman: Indiana Historian

In the spring of 1905 in his Irvington, Indiana, home, a small-time printer and writer of numerous articles on Hoosier history for area newspapers set type for a new publication. This job was different from tasks the printer had performed in the past for paying customers because the periodical he printed on a Gordon press featured his name on the masthead as editor.

Although he later told an Indianapolis Star reporter that it had been “folly to undertake such a thing,” as he had insufficient funds to embark on such a financially risky venture, the periodical George S. Cottman started more than a hundred years ago—the Indiana Magazine of History—survives today as a quarterly magazine devoted to informing and instructing those interested in the nineteenth state’s past.

Cottman was born in Indianapolis on May 10, 1857, in a house at Market and Mississippi Streets, just a short distance from the Indiana Statehouse. His father, John, was a tailor by trade. In 1859, suffering an attack of gold fever, John traveled west by ox train to Colorado accompanied by some Indianapolis friends. John returned to Indianapolis a short time later with only enough gold to make three rings, one of which his son, George, had in his possession when he died. Shortly after returning from service as a quartermaster with the Nineteenth Regiment of Indiana Volunteers during the Civil War, John moved his family, including ten-year-old George, to a farm near present-day Beech Grove.

From 1873 until the early part of 1877, George learned the printing trade as an apprentice with the Indianapolis Sentinel. “I found,” he said of those days, “that a post-graduate course in a printing office, especially when supplemented by a good free public library, played no small part in widening my mental horizon.” Instead of a particular college or university, Cottman considered himself an alumnus of the Sentinel, the Indianapolis Public Library, and the Indiana State Library.

Forced to return to the family farm in Beech Grove because of his poor health, Cottman turned to a trade he found more conducive to his self-described “inborn wanderlust”—writing. At an early age he discovered that he possessed a knack for creating engaging compositions. Becoming a writer, he joked, offered to him “a pleasant substitute for work.”

Unfortunately, Cottman experienced difficulty in finding anyone willing to publish his early manuscripts. One of his souvenirs from his time as a struggling writer consisted of a scrapbook he kept filled with rejection slips reflecting editors’ various styles. Cottman even went so far as to journey to New York City, reasoning that the direct application of his self-described “magnetic personality” would thaw the hearts of cold-hearted editors. The attempt failed; the would-be writer had to find employment in a small print shop in order to earn enough money his return to Indiana.  

Fortunately for Cottman, it was also during this time that he began to have better luck with Indianapolis editors than he had ever had with what he called the “haughty publishers of the effete East.” As a freelance writer, he contributed articles to the Indiana Farmer, the Indianapolis Journal, the Indianapolis News, and the Indianapolis Press. In writing for local newspapers, he found that there was always a ready market for historical articles. “As a newspaper space filler ever in search of good copy,” he said, “I found that few special topics offered a richer mine than does history with its veins of romance, adventure, human interest stories, or what you will.”

Cottman was determined to publish his own history magazine. He trimmed expenses eliminated these expenses by writing most of the material that appeared in the magazine and printing it himself. Each potential subscriber received a “Prospectus” that had been prepared by Cottman and which included the editor’s code for his new venture: “The publication will be strictly what it purports to be at the start—a  magazine devoted to the preservation and collating of matter that is of real value to the historical student. There will be no space given to advertising ‘write-ups,’ and no cheap padding. Of matter within its legitimate field there is an abundance, and outside of this field it will make no bid for popular favor.”

Encouraged by the response to his Prospectus, Cottman launched his creation in the spring of 1905 as The Indiana Quarterly Magazine of History. He printed a thousand copies of this first number and charged one dollar a year for a subscription or thirty cents for a single copy. The first issue featured articles, most written by Cottman, on the “Father of Indiana History,” John Brown Dillon; the teaching of history in Hoosier elementary schools; and Indian towns in Marion County. Included also were a list of Indiana newspapers that were located in the state library and the journal, presumably edited by Cottman, of John Tipton, one of the commissioners appointed to select the site of the state capital.

At the end of the first year, the subscriber list for the IMH stood at approximately three hundred. The small circulation “barely paid expenses,” said Cottman. The editor noted that the magazine would have ceased publication if not for “the friendly aid of several wellwishers who added to their personal subscriptions a number of extra ones.” The hard work involved in managing the magazine, however, took its toll on Cottman’s health. It may have even contributed to his decision at the end of 1907 to move his family from Indiana to the Pacific Northwest. Cottman settled in the small town of Vaughn, Washington, in search, he said, of a “more congenial climate.”

During the two years that Cottman was in Washington, Christopher B. Coleman, then a member of the history department at Butler University and later director of the Indiana Historical Bureau and secretary of the Indiana Historical Society, took over as IMH editor. Before Cottman left, the magazine had received a shot in the arm from the Society, which had pledged an amount not to exceed $150 to ensure the publication’s continued existence.

By the summer of 1910 Cottman had returned to Indiana. When Coleman left the statein 1911 to pursue graduate work at Columbia University, Cottman once again took over as IMH editor. He continued in that post until 1913, when the responsibility for publishing the magazine was turned over to Indiana University’s history department. It was an amicable change. Cottman admitted to James A. Woodburn, chairman of the department, that he could not keep up with the rigors of publishing the magazine. The March 1913 IMH was the last issue under Cottman’s guiding hand.

Although Cottman had given up his editorship of the IMH, he did not give up his interest in the Hoosier state’s past. He wrote historical pageants for the 1916 Indiana centennial celebration and produced a history of the state that was widely used in schools. In 1919 he became director of the Jefferson County Historical Society and also served as curator at the James F. D. Lanier Mansion in Madison. Cottman formally retired in 1931, and he and his wife lived with their son in a home on a hilltop overlooking the Ohio River in Madison. Cottman died, at the age of eighty-four, on May 18, 1941.

Before his death, Cottman had confessed to having great satisfaction when he contemplated the shelves in his library devoted to the IMH’s many volumes. On those occasions the editor felt “a little glow of pride,” realizing that numerous students and scholars of Indiana history had been stimulated to write, research, and publish because of his creation. The magazine had done “better than I had dared to hope for,” Cottman said. “I am satisfied.”

 

Hoosier Warrior: Marine General David M. Shoup

Betio, part of the Tarawa Atoll, is a small, bird-shaped island along the equator in the central Pacific. Early in the morning on November 20, 1943, elements of the Second Marine Division boarded tracked landing vehicles and headed for Betio’s beaches to battle Japanese forces under the command of Rear Admiral Keiji Shibasaki. The Japanese commander had boasted to his approximately 4,800 troops that “a million men couldn’t take Tarawa in 100 years.”

It took the marines just seventy-six hours to capture the two-mile long island. They paid, however, a terrible price. For a time, it seemed as if the marines would be thrown back into the sea. War correspondent Robert Sherrod of Time magazine, who wrote a best-selling book about the fighting, said that it was the “only battle which I ever thought we were going to lose.”

As the marines struggled to maintain a foothold on Betio’s hot, deadly beaches, they were led by a barrel-chested, cigar-chomping, profane colonel from the aptly named town of Battle Ground, Indiana. David M. Shoup had originally formulated the attack plan for the American invasion force before being thrust into command due to the illness of another officer. Wounded as he desperately made his way ashore to establish a headquarters, Shoup rallied his sometimes-demoralized men and stubbornly held on to the fragile beachhead. For his determined leadership on Betio, Shoup received the Medal of Honor—one of four marines so honored for the battle and the only one who survived the fighting.

Born on December 30, 1904, Shoup, at the age of twelve, moved with his family from their home near Battle Ground to a farm outside of Covington. “I always felt I had more than my share of chores to do on the farm,” said Shoup, who helped to feed his struggling family by using his skills as a hunter. In an interview with the Indianapolis Star, Shoup’s mother, Mary, remembered that even as a child her son had shown a will to “get to the top in whatever he did.”

While in Covington Shoup met his future wife, Zola De Haven, at a Halloween party. “I saw a cute little girl sitting across the room and decided right there she was the girl I was going to marry,” said Shoup. “It took me 15 years to convince her.” (The two were finally married in September 1931.) Shoup later noted that a person could achieve much in life if he had “an angel for a mother and an angel for a wife.” During his days attending the local high school, he earned a reputation as an excellent student as well as athlete, playing on the basketball team and winning election as senior class president in 1921.

After graduating with honors from high school, Shoup received a partial scholarship to attend DePauw University, where he majored in mathematics and used his athletic talents on the college’s wrestling and football squads. Although his scholarship covered his tuition, Shoup had to work at a variety of jobs in order to help pay for his living expenses. He worked as a waiter and dishwasher and spent time in a cement factory and as principal of a school in Tab, Indiana. The scramble to make ends meet also led Shoup to enroll in the advanced Reserve Officer Training Corp program offered to upperclassmen at the university.

During his senior year of college, Shoup became a member of the ROTC’s Scabbard and Blade Honor Society. At the group’s annual meeting in New Orleans, representatives from the DePauw chapter heard a speech from JohnA. Lejeune, the commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. At the end of his talk, Lejeune encouraged the young men in attendance to inform honor graduates of their colleges to write him a personal letter if they were interested in obtaining a commission in the marines. Shoup heard about Lejeune’s offer and immediately sent off a letter taking advantage of the opportunity.

After graduating from DePauw in June 1926, Shoup found himself once again in dire financial circumstances. To help make ends meet, he served on active duty for two weeks with the Army Reserve Corps at Camp Knox in Kentucky. After his initial tour expired, he continued to apply for additional weeks of active duty “because I got good pay, more money than I ever saw in my life.” While at the army camp, he received a telegram from the marines to report for a physical examination in Chicago. Shoup passed the exam and eventually received a commission as a second lieutenant.

On August 25, 1926, Shoup reported for duty with sixteen other newly commissioned officers to the marine barracks in Philadelphia to receive their first assignments. Major Alley D. Rorex told Shoup he be playing with the marine football team. “Whereupon I made the first mistake I made in the Marine Corps,” Shoup recalled. “I said, ‘Sir, I didn’t come in the Marine Corps to play football.’ Major Rorex had Shoup stand at attention for what seemed like twenty minutes before responding, “From now on, the Marine Corps will tell you what to do, you’re not going to tell us what to do.”

Over the next several years, Shoup served in a variety of duties with the Marine Corps, including as part of an expeditionary force sent by the U.S. government to protect American lives during a revolution in China in 1926–27, working with the Civilian Conservation Corps in the United States during the Great Depression, and serving onboard the battleship USS Maryland.

When Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor, the American naval base in the Hawaiian Islands, on December 7, 1941, Shoup, then a major, was stationed with other members of the First Marine Brigade in Iceland. President Franklin Roosevelt had sent American forces to Iceland in the fall to relieve British troops, who were needed for the fighting in North Africa, and to protect the vital North Atlantic shipping routes. With America’s entry into World War II, Shoup left Iceland for the Pacific to fight the Japanese, serving as operations and training officer for the Second Marine Division stationed in Wellington, New Zealand, in late 1942.

Promoted to lieutenant colonel, Shoup saw action as an observer with the First Marine Division at Guadalcanal and with the army’s Forty-third Infantry Division at Rendova, New Georgia, where he earned his first Purple Heart after being wounded in the leg. Back with the Second Marine Division at its McKays Crossing Camp outside of Wellington, the thirty-eight-year-old Shoup earned a reputation as “the most formidable poker player” in the division, according to fellow marine J. Frederick Haley. Shoup became a familiar figure to the men of the division, who appreciated his ability to listen to their suggestions and his colorful, often profane, language. His leadership ability would be tested to the utmost on Betio.

The ferocity of the fighting on Betio still staggers the imagination. Flying over the battlefield in his Vought OS2U Kingfisher observation plane, Lieutenant Commander Robert A. McPherson could make out “the tiny men, their rifles held over their heads, slowly wading beachward. I wanted to cry.” A marine struggling ashore remembered the water around him colored “red or pink with a churning mass of spouting geysers; bodies were floating on the surface everywhere I looked; here a man moving along was no longer seen.” Private N. M. Baird never forgot the sight of bullets pouring at him “like a sheet of rain,” with Japanese fire “knocking out boats left and right.”

Such horrific scenes caused some marines to refuse to leave the safety of whatever cover they could find. A frustrated major bitterly complained to Shoup that his men refused to follow him for an attack on the island’s airfield. “You’ve got to say, ‘Who will follow me?’ And if only ten follow you,” Shoup said, “that’s the best you can do, but it’s better than nothing.” Trying to get word of the dicey situation on Betio to his commanders onboard the USS Maryland,  Shoup sent Lieutenant Colonel Evans F. Carlson with a message on what supplies were needed. “You tell the general and the admiral that we’re going to stick and fight it out,” Shoup told Carlson. 

Later, Shoup sent a message to General Julian Smith that read: “Casualties: many. Percentage dead: not known. Combat efficiency: we are winning.” The ultimate American victory came after approximately seventy-six hours of desperate fighting. It was a battle, one war correspondent observed, won “by sheer courage—when the Marines had nothing else to fall back on, they had courage.”

After his determined leadership at Betio, Shoup continued to serve with the Second Marine Division in operations in the Marianas on Saipan and Tinian islands. Shoup returned to the United States in October 1944, where he served in the Marine Corps headquarters. Shoup continued to rise in the Marine Corps hierarchy, receiving promotion to major general in 1955 and nominated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower as commandant of the Marine Corps on August 12, 1959. “This is the first pot I ever won without having a hand in the game,” a surprised Shoup told a reporter.

Two years after he retired from the service in December 1963, Shoup spoke out against the growing American involvement in Vietnam. He told students at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, California, that Southeast Asia, as related to the safety and freedom of the United States, was not “worth the life or limb of a single American.” He later cowrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly magazine criticizing the growth of militarism in America.

Shoup died on January 13, 1983, and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. His opposition to the Vietnam War may have puzzled, and angered, some of his friends in the military, but it reflected his experience of the true cost of war he had seen on the beaches of Betio. On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle, he had returned to the island to help dedicate a memorial. Shoup ended his speech with a prayer that read: “Please God, may our ships of state sail on and on in a world forever at peace.”

 

 

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.