The Admiral and the Ambassador Read online

  McKinley also struggled to find a place for Hanna, who was not an easy man to fit in, given the reputation the Democrats had bestowed on him as a greedy string-puller. McKinley eventually appointed Ohio senator John Sherman—a nephew of General William Tecumseh Sherman—as his secretary of state, despite the aging senator’s clear onset of senility. Ohio’s governor then appointed Hanna to the vacated US senate seat. Bliss, as Porter had hoped and lobbied, was named secretary of the interior. And Porter, as rumored, was named the new ambassador to France.

  So the cabinet and the new administration slowly came together. Before any of it could become official, though, McKinley had to be sworn in as president.

  McKinley and his small entourage left his home in Canton around 7 PM on March 1 aboard a private train that consisted of a baggage car, a dining car, two Pullmans, and two private cars. The McKinleys traveled in car “No. 38,” a rolling piece of luxury with white oak plank walls and floor, a steel ceiling, two “palatial bedrooms” with a connecting bathroom, and, to fight off the chill, a roaring fireplace in the sitting room. The train arrived in Washington around eleven o’clock the next morning, and McKinley and his fellow travelers were ferried by carriage to the Ebbitt House hotel at the corner of F and Fourteenth Streets, where they were to spend the night before McKinley’s inauguration.

  The president-elect had barely settled in before he left again for a luncheon Cleveland was hosting at the White House, just a couple of blocks away. It was McKinley’s first visit as president-elect to his future home and office. Porter and several other political intimates of Cleveland and McKinley, as well as their wives, gathered at the table before the presidents, current and future, split off for a quiet, private conversation. No records detail what was said, but one imagines a discussion of the pressing matters facing the country, from the moribund economy to political pressure on the United States to intervene in Cuba, where insurrectionists were trying to overthrow their Spanish colonial overlords. Neither Cleveland nor McKinley wanted to involve the United States, but Cleveland was growing increasingly certain that war was on the horizon.

  The next morning, McKinley returned to the White House in a carriage accompanied by five other men, including his two official ushers, senators James S. Sherman of New York and John L. Mitchell of Wisconsin. The other three men were a detachment from the US Secret Service, a practice begun three years earlier by Cleveland, mindful that two of his predecessors, Lincoln and Garfield, had been killed on the job and that he himself had become a reviled political figure through the 1893 depression. Two agents rode alongside the carriage while the third sat in the cab with McKinley and scanned the crowd as the carriage rattled along the streets.

  At the White House, McKinley and his entourage had to wait a few minutes in the oval-shaped Blue Room as Cleveland signed some last-minute papers in a second-floor office. Around quarter after ten, Cleveland finally descended the stairs, slowed by his weight—some three hundred pounds—and a gouty foot swaddled in a cloth shoe, and hobbled into the Blue Room, using an umbrella as a cane. He greeted the man who was about to succeed him, and in a few minutes, the entourage slowly left the building, climbed into a carriage, and, in a clatter, arrived at the gate. Porter, at the cue, spurred his horse to start the procession down bunting-draped Pennsylvania Avenue to the white-domed Capitol, where members of Congress and the Supreme Court awaited. Supporters who had already begun gathering for the post-inaugural parade cheered and hollered and waved flags as the carriages passed, Porter prancing at the vanguard. McKinley beamed and waved, an excited display for the usually subdued politician, while Cleveland sat emotionless at his side.29

  William McKinley and his second vice president, former New York governor and Spanish-American War hero Theodore Roosevelt.

  Photo by Fred W. Meyer, courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-USZ62-91482

  McKinley and Cleveland alit at the Capitol and entered the senate chamber in the north wing, McKinley moving to a chair next to his already seated wife, who was dressed in royal blue velvet accented by a single rose at her breast. They watched McKinley’s running mate, Garret Hobart, take the oath as vice president. Then the chamber emptied to the East Portico, where Chief Justice Melville Fuller administered the oath of office to McKinley, their unamplified words whisked away by a brisk northwest wind. (Hanna, the kingmaker, unable to hear from his seat, left early.) Thousands thronged the yard and nearby streets, and some of the more energetic climbed leafless oaks for a better view. Turning to the crowd, the new president acknowledged their cheers, then delivered a brief speech about “prevailing business conditions entailing idleness upon willing labor and loss to useful enterprises” and called for resolution of labor strikes. He also vowed to shore up the value of the dollar and urged Congress to create a commission to revamp federal currency laws.

  It was arcane stuff, but the speech got to the crux of the driving domestic issues: the health of the economy and the stability of the currency. McKinley also spoke of governmental austerity in times of economic distress and his desire to rein in federal spending, about business trusts, and about the need to end the lynching of blacks at the hands of whites, a scourge, particularly in the South. He defended the nation’s spirit of free thought and speech, free public schools, and fair elections. He invoked the plight of farmers and wage earners during the depression years and underscored the need for improved control over immigration because “grave peril to the Republic would be a citizenship too ignorant to understand or too vicious to appreciate the great value and beneficence of our institutions and laws.” And he spoke against those who would slip into the country—he seemed to have anarchists in mind—to oppose its free-market impulses. Citing the growing power of the US Navy, McKinley called for a strengthening of the merchant marine to improve foreign trade. Yet he also sided with international neutrality. “We want no wars of conquest; we must avoid the temptation of territorial aggression,” McKinley said. “War should never be entered upon until every agency of peace has failed; peace is preferable to war in almost every contingency.” McKinley didn’t mention Cuba, but it was clear that was the potential imbroglio he had in mind.30

  After a brief lunch inside the Capitol—corned beef for the new president—Cleveland and McKinley emerged back out onto the East Portico. Each wore a dark overcoat and a silk top hat, and they walked with linked arms, a show of solidarity, or perhaps a nod to Cleveland’s pained gait from his gout-swelled foot. They made for an odd-looking couple. Cleveland stood nearly six feet tall and offered an over-large grandfatherly presence with a ruddy, thick-jowled face and a drooping gray-flecked mustache. McKinley was four inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter—portly in his own right but spry-looking next to the walrus-like Cleveland. McKinley was cleanshaven, his face pale and his hairline receding beneath the top hat. He had the solemn bearing of a small-town parson, except for the thick cigar from which he took the occasional deep drag, a rare public indulgence for a man who valued his high sense of morality and clean living.31

  The two men, still under watch by the Secret Service detachment, moved to a waiting carriage. The horses stepped briskly to Pennsylvania Avenue then westward to the White House, the parade following along. Porter had come up with the idea that the new president’s carriage should be escorted by the sons or grandsons of former presidents Grant, Hays, Garfield, Arthur, and Harrison. So the young men, on horseback, flanked the presidential carriage. Cheers and applause rolled out from a crowd pressed ten deep on each side along the mile-and-a-half parade route, a crowd the police had worked hard to ensure did not include pickpockets and other scammers (photos of known thieves and con men had been passed out to police officers).32 McKinley’s carriage turned in at the White House, where the new president went to his seat of honor in the viewing stand. He remained standing, though, and at a signal, the parade resumed for the official review. McKinley applauded Porter as the Civil War hero and fundraiser pranced p
ast on his horse. Porter dismounted a few blocks beyond the White House to take his seat at the grand marshal’s viewing stand, and for the next couple of hours he watched and applauded as military battalions and other parading groups marched past.

  That evening, Porter and his wife, Sophie, joined the McKinleys for the inaugural ball at the ornate Pension Office building, where the menu included raw oysters on ice, lobster salad, Smithfield ham, boned turkey, game patties, and varieties of ice cream and cakes. It was a festive and boisterous gathering, a crowd full of self-congratulations but also of confidence.

  There were many issues confronting McKinley and his supporters as they sought to direct the nation toward prosperity, with tariffs to protect the American businessman and workers, a gold standard to stabilize the currency, and the unbridled enthusiasm of the small town booster to make it all happen. If McKinley shared the enthusiasm, he was characteristically reserved about it. He greeted old friends and key supporters, thanked backers, and accepted congratulations and well wishes like a groom on his wedding day. For Ida, though, the promenade around the Pension Building atrium was too much, and she took ill partway through. The president, ever solicitous to his frail wife, hurriedly bade everyone a good evening, and the McKinleys left to a rousing round of applause. The party went on without them, both in the Pension Building and along the cobbled streets of the capital. By the time celebratory skyrockets lit up the night sky over the National Mall, the McKinleys were in bed at the White House.

  3

  McKinley, Grant, and an Ambassadorship

  A FEW DAYS AFTER THE inauguration, Porter returned with his wife to their Manhattan row house, a narrow four-story building at 277 Madison Avenue, on the southeast corner of East Fortieth Street. They had little time to rest, though. Porter began spreading word among his friends and business contacts that he was looking for someone to rent the house while the family was in France, and he began scouting around for a place to live in Paris. “I would like to get up in the vicinity of the Arc,” he wrote to his friend in Paris, General Winslow, seeking suggestions. “I would prefer a hotel to an apartment, but would rather have a fine commodious compartment than a hotel not so good or not so well located.” Porter had some trepidations, too, about the condition of the city itself, based on reports by friends. “They tell me dreadful tales about the odors and sickness that prevail in parts of Paris, caused by the decay of wood pavements, and some have said that the only healthy part of the city is where asphalt pavements exist. Won’t you turn this over in your mind when considering the best hotel in which to take up my temporary lodgings?”1

  Yet Porter had more pressing matters to contend with. In just six weeks, he would witness—and deliver the eulogy at—the dedication of Grant’s Tomb, which without his efforts would have been a much more modest monument to his old friend and former boss, the man largely credited with saving the Union three decades earlier. The new ambassador owed his position to McKinley, but he owed a much deeper debt to the earlier president who had plucked him from the ranks and carried him along to the national stage. Had it not been for Grant’s patronage, Porter’s life, and success, would have taken a much different cast.

  Grant had died of throat cancer on the morning of July 23, 1885, just days after finishing his memoirs, which would raise more than $450,000 for his widow and a significant slice for his publisher, Charles L. Webster and Co., co-owned by Grant’s friend Mark Twain. Grant had long resisted writing his memoirs, but his faith in others had recently cost him a fortune. Ferdinand Ward, a preacher’s son from Rochester, New York, had perfected the technique of taking new investors’ checks to make promised payoffs to earlier investors. (It would be years before another con man gave this ruse a name: a Ponzi scheme.) To make the scam work, Ward needed an aura of success and reliability. He drew in as a partner Ulysses S. Grant Jr., known as Buck, and eventually corralled the former president as well. The elder Grant invested nearly his entire fortune in what was touted as the gold-touch investment firm of Grant & Ward.

  Porter saw through the scheme and visited Grant’s home office in Manhattan, hoping to get his friend to question the returns he supposedly was earning on his money. He discovered Ward was with the president, and so deep was Grant’s faith in Ward that Porter went away, his warning never delivered.

  In 1884 the nation slid into recession, reducing the influx of new investors as a series of loans came due, and Grant & Ward collapsed in spectacular fashion. A bank closely connected with the firm, Maritime National Bank, also failed, and the scandal led to runs on other banks as well, threatening the foundations of Wall Street’s investment business. Ward was quickly arrested and eventually went to prison on fraud charges. Grant was left nearly destitute, with eighty dollars to his name, and another $130 in his wife’s name.

  Now broke and facing death, Grant wrote an article about his war experiences for the Century magazine, which offered to publish the former general’s memoirs. Twain intervened and persuaded Grant that he would make much more money if he let Twain’s publishing house handle The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant.2

  Another friend offered Grant and his family the use of a remote summer home in the Adirondacks, on the slope of Mount McGregor a few miles north of Saratoga Springs. The solitude was perfect for the dying man to finish his memoirs without distractions. As the end of Grant’s life neared, old friends made their way to his side, Porter among them, traveling by train from Manhattan. They spent most of the night talking and reminiscing with Grant. But Grant’s main focus was the writing, and he finished the memoirs just a few days before the throat cancer finally claimed him.3

  Grant had left instructions for his family to bury him in one of three locations: the United States Military Academy at West Point; Galena, Illinois, where he and his family lived in the years before the Civil War (Grant had worked in his father’s tannery business there); or New York City, a place where he felt welcome after leaving the White House. West Point was quickly eliminated because cemetery rules would have barred the eventual burial of his wife next to him. New York City, in a surprise to no one, won out over Illinois, even as local officials in Washington, DC, and Saint Louis launched last-minute arguments that they should host the former president’s grave.

  Though the world had known Grant was ailing, his death still came as a shock. Grant’s White House years were defined by scandal and corruption, yet his role in leading the Union to military victory over the Confederate Army had sealed his place in the pantheon of American heroes—or at least the heroes of the North. So Grant would receive a hero’s send-off. After a funeral at the cabin, which Porter attended, the former president’s body was taken to Albany, where it lay in state for three days at the Capitol Building, drawing some eighty thousand mourners. It was then moved by train to Manhattan, where it lay in state again at City Hall as a massive line of the solemn shuffled past for a last glimpse. The plan was to place the body in a temporary crypt on a bluff in Manhattan’s Riverside Park overlooking the Hudson River while a larger, more appropriate monument was designed and built nearby, under direction of the Grant Monument Association.

  An estimated one million people watched the five-hour, seven-mile procession from City Hall up Broadway, past Central Park, and then finally to Riverside Park. It was the largest peacetime assemblage of military forces in the country’s century-long history. “Broadway moved like a river into which many tributaries flowed,” the New York Times said. People filled windows and balconies, stoops and roofs. Some climbed trees and utility poles, dangerously so, clinging to telegraph wires, and “the statues in the squares were black with climbers.” One man fell from a high perch in a tree onto some stones, broke his skull, and died.

  It was well after four o’clock when Grant finally reached his temporary tomb, heralded by bugles and steady drumming and, at a signal from a sailor running along the bluff’s edge with a flag, cannon salutes from a flotilla of naval ships at anchor in the Hudson River. The temporary tomb was
brick-faced and semicircular in shape, like an early version of a Quonset hut or a glassblower’s kiln. It backed up to a small rise that crested the bluff overlooking the Hudson. Recent torrential rains—more than eight inches in the previous week—had left the scattered trees looking fresh and the land washed clean, but enough time had passed that the ground was dry and firm.

  Words were spoken—unheard by all except those closest to the tomb—and tears were shed, then Grant’s body was sealed into place. A polished red-cedar box stood in front of the open vault, and the workers gently placed the coffin inside. They closed the cedar box and slipped it inside a riveted sheet-iron case, which in turn was bolted inside another thick steel case, and then locked behind a wrought-iron gate decorated with a large G. It was hard to imagine that someone would try to steal the body, but the planners were taking no chances. Hours later, police were still herding mourners in a fast-moving line past the monument for a glimpse through the closed iron gate. Elsewhere the streets teemed with people, the funeral having turned into a somber citywide party—a fitting tribute for a man known for his love of cigars and a good glass of whisky.

  At the time of the burial, the Grant Monument Association had received $37,000 in donations for the permanent tomb. Over the next few days, the amount jumped to nearly $70,000 as New Yorkers responded with a sense of patriotism and nostalgia for its larger-than-life link to the nation’s darkest hours. Then life went on; the campaign faltered. A year after Grant’s death, the fund for the permanent monument was stalled at $106,000, far short of the $500,000 needed to build the granite-and-marble mausoleum being designed by John H. Duncan. (He would later also design the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.) Duncan had a magisterial vision. The monument base was to be ninety feet on each side, with a seventy-foot-wide stairway on the south leading to an entrance sheltered by a portico held up by a double row of six tall, grooved columns. The heart of the building would be a squared room rising more than seventy feet above the ground, topped by a cornice and a parapet that held a pyramid-shaped cupola topping out at 150 feet. Inside the main room would be arches and a paneled dome ceiling, artworks depicting Grant’s life, and the tomb itself, sealed shut behind double bronze doors.