All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay from Lincoln to Roosevelt.

Walker, Kevin

All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay from Lincoln to Roosevelt. By John Taliaferro. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013. 673 pp.

It is not clear whether or not the young John Hay, an office secretary busy with envelopes and ink working for Abraham Lincoln, longed for any greater political future. Fortune, though, would open a way for his unique brand of quiet ambition. His career in the White House would span a stunning 66 years and 10 presidents; he was a witness to great transformations of American life, from the Civil War to the Gilded Age to the United States' emergence as a superpower. He was acquainted with such luminaries as Mark Twain and Henry Adams, and contributed his own insights on the times as the author of several novels and hundreds of poems. Yet he was also instrumental in shaping those times with two monumental foreign policy achievements: the treaty ending the Spanish-American War and the Open Door Policy on China, both major contributions to the United States' role in geopolitics. His various roles in civil service were perhaps more critical to American foreign policy than any president of his day.

John Taliaferro's new book, All the Great Prizes, is a lengthy but engaging record of the life and times of America's most illustrious civil servant. It is a beautifully researched account of the man, both professionally and personally, his formative experiences, and how his decisions shaped so much of modern America. Taliaferro describes the book as an attempt to "allow [Hay] to speak for himself, in order that the brilliance of his life, the example of his life, and, what is more, the sheer poignancy of his life might at last be considered in full" (13).

Hay might have lived out his life in obscurity working at his uncle's law firm in Illinois were it not for his early acquaintance with Abraham Lincoln. The newly elected president invited Hay into his "small nucleus" of secretaries, "living in close quarters baring every seam of their natures, as war and the affairs of the nation enveloped them, and they in turn endeavored to steer the nation's course" (p. 40). It was no doubt that closeness to Lincoln and a familiarity with his rhetorical power that enabled Hay to respond to the president's mail during the most intense days of the Civil War. Hay became a keen observer of the president's character--his dark melancholy, his poetic sense, and his devastating humor. But above all, Hay was a student of Lincoln's greatness. In Lincoln, he found a standard for all subsequent presidents, not to mention a view of the republic that served as Hay's political creed. Over Hay's public life, "Lincoln would always be watching" (p. 108).

Though Hay's ties to Lincoln opened every door in Washington, he always chose the State Department. He had many important experiences in European politics, which revealed his own country's uniqueness in the world. He was alarmed at the "declining authority of the Austrian aristocracy," where tension between cosmopolitan liberal democracy and the paranoid upper classes indicated a dark future for Europe. "Already he observed the desperation of monarchies and foresaw the volatility of rampant nationalism when backed by modern weaponry," Taliaferro writes. "[T]he more he saw of the Old World's way of governance, the more he appreciated his own country's methods" (p. 119). The possibility of an American century lay ahead.

Leaders of the new generation, men like Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt, were certainly up to that task. But their purposes were different from Hay's. While for Hay American exceptionalism was rooted in Lincolnian ideals, the new politicians saw it as a matter of Darwinian self-creation. All were students of Lincoln's greatness, but men of Hay's time were "witnesses and heirs to greatness," while the new lights "aspired to an ideal of greatness and heroism they knew only secondhand" (p. 261). As secretary of state, Hay could only see Roosevelt as "decidedly unpresidential," certain of his country's abilities, but unclear about what his country meant (p. 409). In turn, Roosevelt appreciated Hay, a legitimizing figurehead in his cabinet, but saw him as too much of a relic to follow his progressive "Strenuous Life" brand of greatness, especially in foreign policy.

Hay was responsible for negotiating the end of the Spanish-American conflict as secretary of state under William McKinley, arranging for the Spanish Empire to hand over Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines--an expansion of American power overseas that McKinley and Vice President Roosevelt supported, but for a whole different reason. Hay might have famously called it "a splendid little war," which was no doubt a small concession to Roosevelt's imperialism--but he hoped it would be concluded with "that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character" (p. 330). Though the immediate policies might be the same, Hay wanted Americans to know that the United States "was not like other countries," and that "America ought to set a better example, wielding its authority more decently and wisely," rather than being driven by Roosevelt's "inflated exceptionalism" (p. 331). Anything else was vulgar empire.

Hay's greatest success, both for himself and for his own principles, was the Open Door Policy, the masterpiece of diplomacy that convinced European superpowers to respect China's sovereignty and to let the Chinese trade freely without foreign occupation. It was an assertion of American power in the name of the national interest, both for the United States and for China. It proved Hay's claim that "not a chancery in Europe sees us as an interested rival in their schemes of acquisition. What is ours we shall hold; what is not ours we do not seek" (p. 361). The Open Door Policy could not prevent China's internal problems, as the Boxer Rebellion soon proved, and it fell to Hay to arrange the safe removal of American missionaries targeted in the upheaval. But in all, the Open Door Policy was a true display of the American character: it "dispelled charges of imperialism," while at the same time, it "prevented the dismemberment of China" (p. 365).

Taliaferro gives an especially thorough account of Hay's life, including his crippling health problems and lurid marital infidelities. Some readers might find this too detailed and bewildering, and at times disjointed; a student of Hay's diplomacy or character must sift through vast amounts of unrelated information to locate something useful. But more readers will find the book's extensive coverage reason to call it authoritative. The story is about John Hay but also about America in the moment of its maturity, torn between past and future, all of which was carefully observed by an extraordinary American who both lived in and helped to create it.

--Kevin Walker

Vanguard University