Bridges | An Appreciation of Alvey Adee

The Washington foreign affairs scene turned more eventful in the 1890s. The Republican Party platform of 1892 emphasized 'the manifest destiny of the republic'. Problems loomed, particularly in Latin America, where the United States was intent on maintaining the Monroe Doctrine with which the British government found itself in continuing disagreement. The boundary between British Guiana and Venezuela had been in dispute since the 1870s, and the British had refused an American offer to mediate. Adee pointed out to his superiors that the Colonial Office List of 1886 had made a 'silent addition' of 33,000 square miles to the 76,000 square miles claimed for British Guiana in the previous year's publication. The matter rankled, and came to a head in Washington after President Cleveland made Richard Olney his Secretary of State in June 1895. It had been Olney who as a strong-minded Attorney General the previous year had persuaded the President to use troops to break the Pullman strike in Chicago. Now, after a month at the State Department, he sent the British government a lecture and a warning, in the guise of a diplomatic note, over the boundary dispute. The note was Olney's, but the drafting was largely done by Adee. The British, wanting to protect their American flank while facing a growing crisis in South Africa, agreed in 1896 to arbitration.

Meanwhile Cuba, still under Spain, neared crisis. The American interest was great. Every American President from Jefferson to McKinley, with the exception of Lincoln, who was preoccupied with the Civil War, had wanted to obtain Cuba for the United States.³⁵ Adee was well versed in the Cuban problem from his years in Madrid, when the Cuban insurgency of the 1870s had led to the Virginius affair. The 1880s had been relatively quiet in Cuba, but in 1895 a new insurgency began. The Spanish captain-general in Cuba shocked North American public opinion by putting the population of disaffected provinces into concentration camps, where perhaps 200,000 died. Then came the publication of a private letter from the Spanish Minister in Washington, sharply critical of McKinley. The minister resigned. In February 1898, the US battleship Maine was blown up in Havana harbour. The United States declared war.

McKinley had made John Sherman his Secretary of State, and Sherman was old and half-senile. The Assistant Secretary was William R. Day, a judge with no experience in foreign affairs or politics. It was left to Adee to manage American diplomatic action. Adee had a cot placed in his office, and slept there many nights, sometimes deciphering incoming telegrams when the code clerk had gone home. His notes and instructions had the vital result of helping keep other governments neutral, as Washington prosecuted a short and victorious military campaign. The combination of the close-mouthed McKinley, the senile Sherman and the deaf Adee, led to the saying that 'The President says nothing, the Assistant Secretary hears nothing, and the Secretary of State knows nothing'.³⁶ But the fact was that Adee had played a major part in engineering victory. As noted earlier, the President is said to have called it, at least in private, 'Adee's War'.

After Sherman and Day both left the State Department, Adee became Secretary of State ad interim for two weeks in September 1898, after which John Hay became the new Secretary. Hay and Adee, friends since Madrid days, worked harmoniously together in the department for almost seven years, until Hay, who had been retained in office by McKinley's successor, Theodore Roosevelt, died in office in July 1905.

One of the great questions for American policy at century's end was that of an inter-oceanic canal. Adee's interest in the question can be dated to an 1871 dispatch he sent from Madrid. In 1880 he had purchased a book on a possible canal. In 1886 he had first worked on the problem in the State Department.³⁷ The problem had much to do with the United Kingdom. The Clayton-Bulwer Treaty of 1850 required joint action by the two governments on any inter-oceanic canal. In 1900, Secretary Hay and British Ambassador Pauncefote agreed on a new treaty which would permit the United States to build a canal alone, but would not permit the United States to fortify the canal. The US Senate refused to ratify the new treaty. In April 1901, Adee drafted for Hay a new treaty which he sent to the Secretary with a note saying he had endeavoured 'to reserve silently the right to fortify, to the end of preserving the canal from attack.... I have always thought that the greatest danger to the canal may lie in its attempted seizure or destruction by Central American insurgents'.³⁸ The new treaty based on Adee's draft was ratified in 1902.

Meanwhile, the United States was negotiating with Colombia a new treaty on construction of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama, then part of Colombia. The Colombians proposed to permit the United States the 'use' of a five-kilometre strip on either side of the canal. Adee insisted on the 'grant' of a wider five-mile strip on either side. In August 1903, the Colombian Senate rejected the treaty, which the US Senate had approved. At the beginning of November 1903, Panama declared independence, and the treaty which the United States quickly concluded with the new republic granted the United States in perpetuity the wider Canal Zone which Adee had pushed for. Later, President Roosevelt would boast that 'I took Panama'. That was the case; but the President's success was based to a considerable degree on Adee's quiet work.

Theodore Roosevelt owed much to Alvey Adee. Aside from Panama, for example, one writer has found that Roosevelt was led in good part to seek a peaceful solution to the Russo-Japanese War, which he achieved in the Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, because of the information, official and personal, which Adee submitted to him.³⁹ Roosevelt was proud of his personal achievements, but he did once give some minor credit to the Second Assistant Secretary, saying:

I write four or five telegrams every day and old Adee does that for me. I never see them unless there is something of special importance. But I am always sending a congratulation, or a felicitation, or a message of condolence or sympathy to somebody in a palace somewhere or other, and old Adee does that for me. Why, there isn't a kitten born in a palace anywhere on earth that I don't have to write a letter of congratulation on to the peripatetic Tomcat that might have been its sire, and old Adee does that for me!⁴⁰

Perhaps Adee's finest hour came at the time of the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900. The foreign legations in Beijing were besieged, and the whole question of China's future as a country was in doubt. On 3 July, when it remained uncertain whether the legations could be saved from a massacre, and when it seemed likely that the military forces of the powers would carry out a grand division of China, Secretary Hay sent a circular note to the powers making clear that the policy of the United States was to 'preserve Chinese territorial and administrative entity' while safeguarding the open-door principle for trade with China. It was a bold note, which at the same time stopped short, in the term 'administrative entity', of guaranteeing American support for a continuance of Chinese imperial government. The term was Adee's clever invention. Adee was not Hay's only senior adviser during the 1900 China crisis. William Woodville Rockhill, who had served as Secretary of Legation in China and as chargé d'affaires in Korea (and who is probably the only American diplomat to have served as an officer of the French Foreign Legion, and to have walked across Tibet), had been responsible for America's open-door policy, first enunciated in American notes of September and November 1899.

But on 19 July 1900, with the American Minister to China, Edwin Conger, still incommunicado in his besieged legation, Rockhill was named Special Commissioner for China and quickly left for Shanghai. On 3 August, Secretary Hay suddenly left Washington for his country house in New Hampshire, suffering, the press reported, from 'nervous exhaustion'.⁴¹ David J. Hill, the Assistant Secretary, was out of town. This left Adee in charge. As he had done during the Spanish-American War, Adee began to spend nights on a cot in the department. Late in the evening of 20 August he was still in the department when a telegram arrived in cipher from China. Adee personally deciphered it. It was from Conger, reporting that the siege of the legations had been lifted. Adee now had to cable Conger, whose judgment he may not have entirely trusted, that during the time Conger had been out of touch Rockhill had been named Commissioner and was now on his way to Beijing. Who would take precedence? Adee instructed Conger to 'confer fully with him and together make recommendations as to action now and future'.⁴² Whatever Conger may have thought of this arrangement, he stayed in place until five years later, when Rockhill replaced him as Minister to China.

Adee's main problem in dealing with the powers during these weeks was with Germany, which had designs on Chinese territory. He found that America had somewhat similar views to those of Russia, and played on this as best he could.⁴³ On 18 September came what Adee described to Hay as 'a bomb in the allied camp',⁴⁴ when the German Kaiser took matters into his own hands and said that the perpetrators of the crimes committed in Beijing against international law should be brought to judgment. The Kaiser had spoken foolishly, and like the proposal to bring Somali 'war criminals' before international justice in the 1990s, it came to nothing. Adee kept Secretary Hay currently informed of his actions, and when Hay finally returned to Washington on 30 September, after almost two months away, he expressed his thorough agreement with all the actions taken in his absence.⁴⁵

After Hay's death in 1905, Elihu Root, a former Secretary of War, became Secretary of State. Adee, acknowledged as a permanent fixture, remained Second Assistant Secretary. Huntington Wilson, a veteran of service in Japan, became Third Assistant Secretary. Wilson admired Adee, a 'veritable encyclopedia of precedent and of all the past business of the Department ... a valuable restraining and conservative influence'.⁴⁶ But Wilson thought that the department's organization was antiquated, and he persuaded Root to begin reorganizing the department on a regional basis. At the same time, Adee's eventual successor, Wilbur J. Carr, then chief of the Consular Bureau, was urging personnel reform. In 1905 President Roosevelt signed an executive order placing both diplomatic and consular positions below the rank of Ambassador or Minister on a career basis, with entrance to be through competitive examination and promotions on the basis of merit.

In 1909 Philander Knox replaced Root as Secretary, and Huntington Wilson, who had been subordinate to Adee, was promoted above him to become Assistant Secretary. Wilson continued to push reorganization. A new high-level position was added, that of Counselor of the Department, and Alvey Adee now found himself the fourth- rather than third-ranking officer. Whether this worried Adee is not clear. It was taken for granted that he would continue to exercise a directing influence over all matters which concerned the department.⁴⁷

Adee was in any case always more of a single player than a manager. At times in his career he was called on to run the department, but what he was best at was dealing personally with ambassadors and ministers, and drafting or redrafting diplomatic notes and instructions which embodied his great knowledge and experience. Philander Knox is said to have called him in one day to ask if the United States should recognize the new government in China. Knox supposed Adee would bring volumes of data with him, but Adee came into the Secretary's office with an ear-trumpet and a brief memorandum listing some dates. He made a detailed presentation to Knox, citing precedents from Brazil, France and a number of other countries beginning in 1792. A stenographer took notes, and the somewhat incredulous Secretary later asked someone to check Adee's account—which turned out to be completely accurate.

Adee was a disciplined man, who, after presenting the facts in a case and his views and proposals for action, was content to leave the decision to his superior. He was not necessarily self-effacing. Over the years a number of articles in praise of Adee appeared in newspapers and magazines, and one suspects that some of them were based on interviews with their subject. Edward G. Lowry wrote in Harper's Weekly in 1911 that 'Adee the Remarkable' was 'the complete diplomatist ... as prized and permanent a possession of the Federal government as the Great Seal of State which his department is charged with keeping'.⁴⁸ The Nation described him in 1915 as 'The Anchor of the State Department ... an encyclopaedia of international relations and usages'.⁴⁹

Adee continued his European cycling trips, and these usually occasioned an article or two in the daily press. In 1908 he told the papers that in 14 annual trips he had ridden a total of 30,000 miles, at times doing 60 miles a day, and that he had worn out half a dozen bicycles; he thought that at 65 he was stronger than he had been a decade earlier. In 1912 the papers reported that Adee had had to change his travel plans; he had booked passage on the first eastbound voyage of the Titanic. In 1913, with the world pointed toward war, the Boston Evening Transcript said that Adee's departure for his cycling trip 'will do more to calm the fevered brows of jingoes looking for a fight than any other thing could possibly have done', since if there had been the slightest cloud on the horizon Adee would have postponed his trip.⁵⁰


Archduke Franz Ferdinand with his uncle, Kaiser Wilhelm II.

In the spring of 1914 Adee sailed as usual for Europe, this time to attend an international conference on Spitzbergen at Christiania (now Oslo). Adee had never attended conferences, probably because of his deafness, and it is not clear why he went to this one. On 17 July he wrote from Christiania to 'Dear Cousie'⁵¹ that there were no signs of the conference coming to a close and not much chance of it doing anything; but if he could get away by the first of August, he would take three weeks' leave 'and ride a little before sailing for home. My wheel and riding luggage are in Paris'. But the guns exploded in Europe that August, and instead of going riding Adee returned home, with difficulty, through Denmark and England, in companionship with an estimated 60,000 American tourists caught by the war in Europe. He never regained possession of his bicycle—and he never bought another, although cycling might have helped him maintain his strength and vigour.

For Alvey Adee was now in his seventies; and his influence was not what it had been. When Woodrow Wilson entered the White House in March 1913, he made William Jennings Bryan his Secretary of State and quickly announced the retention of two efficient servants of the government, General Leonard Wood as Army Chief of Staff and Alvey Adee as Second Assistant Secretary of State. Bryan was a poor Secretary, intent on applying the political spoils system in his new department and uninterested in learning about diplomacy. Both John Bassett Moore, the Counselor of the Department and an authority on international law, and Joseph W. Folk, the Solicitor of the Department, resigned their positions, and early in 1914 it was reported that Adee too was dissatisfied and might retire.⁵² In the end Adee remained, but in an administration where even Secretaries of State—Bryan was replaced by the more competent Robert Lansing in June 1915—came to have less influence than President Wilson's unofficial adviser on foreign affairs, Colonel Edward M. House. A study of Wilson's State Department found that 'by 1917, Adee had no policymaking function in the department and served essentially as the official diplomatic note writer'.⁵³

The war ended. In 1921 Warren Harding replaced Wilson in the White House, and made the eminent Charles Evans Hughes Secretary of State. The old Second Assistant Secretary kept coming to work, although he turned 80 in 1922. By 1924 Adee had to be helped to his desk, and in the early summer he went off to the New Jersey coast hoping to regain his health. It was too late. He came back to his office, but collapsed and died on 4 July 1924. As the press commented, he had realized his wish to die in harness

Unlike his colleague Wilbur Carr, who has rightly been called the father of the American Foreign Service, Alvey Adee left behind him no distinct memorial. He is little remembered today. But his country owes him very much, for all he did to advance America's international interests during the long decades he remained near, and in, positions of great influence and power.

Published in Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 10, No. 1 (March 1999). Republished by the kind permission of Frank Cass, London, and the author.