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

Abstract

All the Great Prizes: The Life of John Hay from 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 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 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. …