As we all knew, Senator Hoar had no money for “champagne and terrapin.” He had sacrificed his law practice to public service, “getting a little poorer year by year.” As a matter of fact he had no interest in making money. I never saw him more irritated than after taking a difficult case for which he was to get a fee of twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand dollars.
“Earning money is hateful to me,” he said. “Never in all my life before have I undertaken a thing I did not want to do simply for money. Some things I like to do, believe that I can do better than I could do anything else. I never was such a donkey before. There are so many things I long to do; one of them is to learn Italian well enough to read Dante and Boccaccio and Ariosto in the original; and I want to commit Homer to memory. I would like to have my head _packed with Greek_.”
The Senator’s Sunday morning talks were rich with anecdotes of New England types. He had his antipathies—Margaret Fuller Ossoli was one of them. He used to tell the story of an old Concord doctor who was called up in the night by a quavering voice outside his window asking, “Doctor, how much camphire can a body drink without its killing ’em?” “Who drunk it?” he asked. “Margaret Fuller.” “A peck,” snapped the doctor, shutting his window with a bang.
Dr. Mary Walker, who in her rather shabby man’s attire was a familiar figure in those days, was a particular abomination. She made him “creepy,” he said. Simply to mention her, I found, would dry up his talk. But the mention of Jonathan Edwards’ name, although he particularly detested him, always loosened his tongue. “He was an inhuman cuss,” he said one morning. “There is a true story of his riding through Northampton with a slave boy whom he had just bought tied to a cord and trotting behind the horse. ‘Is thee doing as thee would be done by?’ a woman of his faith called him, and Edwards said, ‘I’ll answer you some other time.’”
Senator Hoar rather enjoyed calling a man whose acts he disliked by hard names. Indeed he very much enjoyed salty words generally, and one morning ably defended them: “‘Dammit’ is a useful word. It eases one’s feelings.” He also put up a strong argument for “whoppers.” “They are,” he contended, “a valuable weapon with the impertinent and the imbecile.” There was much boyish mischief in him. He greatly admired our wholesome big-hearted Elizabeth, daughter of the house, her common sense and her gaiety, and loved to pinch her plump arm. He did it in the presence of us all and in spite of Mrs. Hoar’s reproaches. “Do you know, Elizabeth,” he said one evening as he followed us up the stairs from the dining room, “that it has taken nineteen hundred years of Christian civilization to produce a man who does not pinch a girl’s pretty ankle when she is going upstairs ahead of him?”
In July, 1898, after Congress had adjourned Senator Hoar made up a party for a trip through the Berkshire Hills and I had the good fortune to be asked to join it. I had heard him talk much of his walking trips there in Harvard days with his favorite classmate, Francis Child: “as great a man at seventeen when he entered college,” he said, “as when he died—a real genius.” From the moment our little caravan left his home at Worcester the trip was like champagne to him. Trees, graveyards, epitaphs, views, the homes of the honored in this day and past days kept him busy. There was the Sheffield elm which we must stop to measure, the grave of Mumbet with the inscription his favorite Catharine Sedgwick had written for it; there was the best view of the Sleeping Napoleon on Cedar Mountain—this for me. Then we must spend the night at a certain inn on Mount Washington to give Elizabeth plenty of time to look up family graves and records. Her father had been born on Mount Washington, which was one of many reasons why the Senator admired her. He went with her to look up the graves and, returning late, said, “If we had not feared you would wait supper we would have stayed and been buried there.”
I have certainly never known anyone for whom life at seventy was more joyous and full. He hated weakness, as well as everything that impaired his dignity, his self-reliance. He was a true untouchable and would fall into a rage if friend or stranger offered to assist him. “Unhand me,” he thundered at a street car conductor who one day seized his arm to help him up the steps, and his wrath lasted until he had told us about the indignity at the dinner table. On this Berkshire trip a little accident happened to him which caused an explosion of the same nature. We were at an inn in the mountains, and after dinner had gone on to the lawn. The Senator was sitting on a rustic bench which gave way, turned him on his back, feet in the air. We all ran to assist him but were stopped in our tracks by a stentorian voice which roared, “I decline to be assisted.”
But this was the Senator on a vacation, the Senator of our Sunday morning’s breakfast. Take him when public affairs were in a serious tangle, and he was glum, unapproachable. He suffered deeply over the trend to imperialism after the Spanish-American War. To save Cuba from the maladministration of Spain, to watch over her until she had learned to govern herself seemed to him a noble expression of Americanism, but to annex lands on the other side of the globe for commercial purposes only, as he believed, was to be false to all our ideals. He had the early American conviction that minding one’s own business was even more important abroad than at home. He wanted no entangling alliances, and in those days following the treaty of Paris he feared as never before for the country. Certainly there were far fewer Sunday morning breakfast table talks. His greatest speech against the advancing imperialism was made in April of 1900. At the head of the printed copy of his speech distributed by the Senate he placed these sentences:
No right under the Constitution to hold Subject States. To every People belongs the right to establish its own government in its own way. The United States can not with honor buy the title of a dispossessed tyrant, or crush a Republic.
I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged with public service, of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments, ideals. And it was not long before I was saying to myself, as I had not for years, You are a part of this democratic system they are trying to make work. Is it not your business to use your profession to serve it? But how? That was clearly now my problem. I could not run away to a foreign land where I should be a mere spectator. Indeed, I was beginning to suspect that one great attraction of France was that there I had no responsibility as a citizen. I must give up Paris. Between Lincoln and the Spanish-American War I realized I was taking on a citizenship I had practically resigned.
The war had done something to _McClure’s_ as well as to me. In all its earlier years its ambition had been to be a wholesome, enlivening, informing companion for readers, to give fiction, poetry, science of wide popular appeal—an ambition which it must be admitted opened the pages occasionally to the cheap, though it rarely excluded the fine. An eager welcome was given new writers. Indeed it was always a great day in the office when we thought a “real one” had reached us. While it fostered new writers it held on to the best of the old. It had touched public matters only as they became popular matters. Thus, when the Spanish-American War came it was quickly recognized that it yielded more interesting material than any other subject. There was a great war number and there was a continuous flow of war articles. _McClure’s_ suddenly was a part of active, public life. Having tasted blood, it could no longer be content with being merely attractive, readable. It was a citizen and wanted to do a citizen’s part. It had a staff sympathetic with this new conception of the work. Mr. McClure had had in mind from the start the building of a permanent staff of good craftsmen, reporters on whom he could depend for a steady stream of contributions, as well as of editorial ideas. He wanted them versatile, flexible, as interested in the magazine as in themselves, capable of sinking themselves in a collective effort.
After I came in, the first to become such a permanent acquisition was Ray Stannard Baker. An article on the capture of John Wilkes Booth by Baker’s uncle, Colonel L. C. Baker, written from personal reminiscences and documents, was submitted by Baker, then on the staff of the Chicago _Record_. It was “the General’s” ideal of a _McClure’s_ article. Baker was urged to write more, and each piece emphasized the first impression. The year after his first appearance in the magazine, May, 1897, he joined the staff and became a regular contributing editor.
Baker was an admirable craftsman, as well as a capital team worker. He had curiosity, appreciation, a respect for facts. You could not ruffle or antagonize him. He took the sudden calls to go here when he was going there, with equanimity; he enjoyed the unconventional intimacies of the crowd, the gaiety and excitement of belonging to what was more and more obviously a success. He was the least talkative of us all, observant rather than garrulous, the best listener in the group, save Mr. Phillips. He had a joyous laugh which was more revealing of his healthy inner self than anything else about him.