II. 1876, Empire, and Hollywood

1876, the third novel in Vidal's American Chronicle series, is once again narrated in the first person by Charlie Schuyler (now in his early sixties), who has returned to the United States after spending thirty years in Europe, first as a member of the diplomatic corps, then as the husband of an independently wealthy member of a noble family. His wife is now long dead, Charlie's money has run out, and his wealthy son-in-law's recent, unexpected departure from this world (followed by the discovery of his carefully concealed penury), has left him responsible once more for his accomplished daughter, Emma, whom he had thought well married and safely provided for. Charlie has continued to dabble in journalism over the years, has even published a book or two. So he and Emma come back to the United States in 1875 on a triple errand: Charlie will attempt to earn a sufficient amount from freelance writing for newspapers and magazines to support the two of them in decent style; Charlie will meanwhile do what he can to help New York Governor Samuel Tilden get himself elected president in the upcoming 1876 election (and to persuade Tilden to send Charlie right back to Paris as U.S. Ambassador to France); and Charlie will also see if he can find another, comparably well fixed husband for his daughter. In the course of covering both the presidential campaign and the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and in the course of marketing his daughter to financially qualified suitors, Charlie meets and profiles numerous luminaries of the period—Tilden, Republican Congressman and presidential aspirant James G. Blaine, Republican Senator and presidential aspirant Roscoe Conkling, Chester Alan Arthur (the customs collector of the port of New York), President U. S. Grant, journalist Charles Nordhoff, and Mark Twain among them—but the emphasis here is not, as it was in Burr and Lincoln, on the sayings and doings of these actual historical figures. Nor does Vidal's vision of these famous people conflict with the conventional understanding of them in the way that his vision of Lincoln and the Founding Fathers does. He presents the Grant administration as riddled with corruption, but this is a commonplace. He portrays Tilden as the legitimate winner of the 1876 election, who was defrauded of his rightful presidency by the Republican Party and the U.S. Supreme Court—but this is another commonplace. The emphasis in 1876 is on the imaginary characters, on Charlie and Emma and on the rich new husband they find for her, William Sanford.

In terms of historical chronology, Sanford made his first appearance in the American Chronicle in the pages of Lincoln, where he was seen as a wealthy young Union captain, an aide to General Irvin McDowell, who devoted his spare time to romancing Kate Chase, daughter of Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase. "I plan to leave the army the first of the year," Sanford tells Kate late in 1862. "We could go to France. There is a house there I've had my eye on since before the war. At St. Cloud, near Paris. We could have a wonderful life. I'd study music. You could be at court, if you wanted that."¹¹⁵

Kate doesn't take Sanford up on his offer. Instead she marries the equally wealthy, if somewhat drunken, senator from (formerly governor of) Rhode Island, William Sprague. Sanford moves on, then meets and marries another woman, who turns up in 1876 as the delightful Denise Sanford, another of the imaginary characters whose sayings and doings dominate the pages of this third novel in Vidal's series. Denise becomes pregnant, then dies in childbirth; the Sanfords' infant son Blaise is spared. Within weeks, Sanford has wooed and wed Emma. Within a year, she herself is dead in childbirth, leaving behind a daughter, Caroline de Traxler Sanford, the illegitimate great-granddaughter of Aaron Burr.

As the fourth novel in Vidal's series, Empire, opens, the year is 1898 and Caroline is twenty. She attends a luncheon party which also includes John Hay, Henry James, and Henry Adams. Hay and Adams are familiar to us from Lincoln, in which Hay functioned as one of Lincoln's two secretaries, and as an important point-of-view character, and in which Adams functioned as Hay's young friend, scion of the famous Adams family but determined to make it on his own as a journalist. Hay is about to be appointed Secretary of State by Republican President William McKinley, who has just led the nation to victory against Spain in the Spanish-American War. We learn that Caroline's father has just died and that she and her half-brother Blaise are quarrelling over the estate. In an effort to gain leverage over her brother, Caroline appropriates some valuable paintings from their family home, sells them, and uses the proceeds to buy a dying daily, the Washington Tribune, which she proceeds to transform into a journalistic success story. She does so, in no small part, by carefully following the lessons never spelled out but always implied by the successive triumphs of Blaise's employer, William Randolph Hearst. Thus, though Blaise works as Hearst's personal assistant, and though he lusts to own a paper in his own right, it is his half-sister who proves to be Hearst's more talented student.

Caroline runs the Tribune alone for seven years, during which time she becomes pregnant by a young, married Congressman, James Burden Day, and quickly marries an impecunious cousin to provide her daughter Emma with an official father and herself with an official mate, sparing Day a scandal that might ruin his career, settling her husband's many troublesome debts, and never revealing, either to her husband or to her daughter, the identity of Emma's actual father. After she finally collects her inheritance, Caroline brings Blaise into her newspaper operation as co-publisher. She decides to invest in real estate in Georgetown, despite the fact that it is "still mostly Negro," because "here and there, eighteenth-century townhouses were being restored by the canny white rich. Caroline had taken two row houses and knocked them into one."¹¹⁶

It is not long, however, before Caroline is living only part time in Georgetown. By 1917, as Hollywood, the fifth novel in Vidal's series, opens, she is adopting a new identity, as silent film actress Emma Traxler, and a second part-time home, this one in Los Angeles. Blaise, meanwhile, has also married and produced children, the younger of whom, Peter Sanford, will follow his father into j ournalism, except that he will eschew the world of newspapers for the world of magazines, devoting his career to a journal of analysis and opinion called The American Idea. In the epilogue of The Golden Age, the sixth and final volume of Vidal's American Chronicle, it is the turn of the 21^st Century and the now elderly Peter Sanford is being interviewed, along with his friend Gore Vidal, at Vidal's home in Italy for a TV documentary. The producer-interviewer who is putting the documentary together is Aaron Burr ("A. B.") Decker, grandson of Caroline's daughter Emma and thus great-great-great-great-grandson of the original Aaron Burr, with whose story the series began.

The last three novels of the series focus more attention on the sayings and doings of the Sanford family, James Burden Day, and other imaginary figures, and comparatively less on the historical events and personages of the times in which they take place. The three are, in fact, all of a piece with respect to this issue. Fred Kaplan tells us that Vidal had originally planned for the first two of these three novels to be a single book:

[T]hrough much of 1985-86 he had worked on Manifest Destiny, the tentative title of the next novel in his American history series. When the manuscript became too long, he used much of it under the title Empire [...], published in June 1987 [...]. The remainder became the core of Empire's successor, Hollywood, which was published in February 1990.¹¹⁷

Harry Kloman suggests that Empire is overly "concerned with frivolities, name dropping, and gossipy historical deconstruction,"¹¹⁸ and Andrew Sullivan faults The Golden Age in very similar terms:

The characters in the novel—writers, senators, proprietors of political magazines and their countless relatives—are all so well-heeled that their conversation [...] amounts to little more than chatter. [...] At times the book reads like one of those interminable Vanity Fair pieces about cocktail parties in the 1950s given by society hostesses no one but a complete snob would give a hoot about.¹¹⁹

On the other hand, it must be acknowledged that all this frivolous chatter and gossipy name dropping is not entirely irrelevant to Vidal's purpose in the American Chronicle series. For a large part of that purpose is to make certain points about journalism—as a shaper of the historical record, as an influence on public opinion, and as a center of social power. Journalism is a prominent presence throughout the American Chronicle, as are individual journalists, both real ones like William Cullen Bryant, Henry Adams, and William Randolph Hearst and invented ones like Caroline, Blaise, and Peter Sanford. The sayings and doings of these journalists do have thematic significance, however frivolous they may seem at certain times and to certain readers. Indeed, it might be argued that their very frivolity and superficiality are meant to tell us something about journalists and journalism in the abstract.

Also, though the last three novels in the series do focus to a greater extent than the first three on the sayings and doings of imaginary journalists, they are by no means limited entirely to depictions of these journalists. The politicians who figured large between 1898 and 1954 are depicted also, and in ways that differ markedly from more conventional accounts of the period. Secretary of State John Hay, for example, minces no words in describing the frank racism and imperialism behind the foreign policy he recommends to President McKinley, when the latter seeks his guidance on the matter of the Philippines, newly "liberated" from Spain. "I have always thought," Vidal's Hay says,

"that it was the task of the Anglo-Saxon races, specifically England, now shrinking, and ourselves expanding, to civilize and to," Hay took a deep breath and played his best if most specious card, "Christianize the less developed races of the world. I know that England is counting on us to continue their historic role, and they believe, as I believe, that the two of us together can manage the world until Asia wakes up, long after we're gone, I pray, but with our help now, a different sort of Asia, a Christian Asia, civilized by us, and so a reflection of what was best in our race once history has seen fit to replace us."¹²⁰

Lest there be any misunderstanding, Vidal's Hay also assures the president that he has mercantilist as well as racist and imperialist reasons for believing the United States should hold onto the Philippines. "The European powers are getting ready to divide up China," he tells McKinley. "We'll lose valuable markets if they do, but if we are entrenched nearby, in the Philippines, we could keep the sea lanes open to China, keep the Germans and the Russians and the Japanese from upsetting the world's balance of power."¹²¹

Hay's views are shared fully by the bellicose governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt, who is destined to become McKinley's second vice president a scant two years later, and, after McKinley's assassination only a few months into his second term, the youngest man ever to have assumed the American presidency up to that time. "Have you read Admiral Mahan on sea-power?" Vidal's Roosevelt demands of Blaise Sanford during an interview. "Published nine years ago. An eye-opener. I reviewed it in the Atlantic Monthly. We are fast friends. Without sea-power, no British empire. Without sea-power, no American empire, though we don't use the word 'empire' because the tender-minded can't bear it."¹²² Then the governor really gets going.

Roosevelt was now marching rapidly in a circle at the center of the room. He had been seized by a speech. As he spoke, he used all the tricks that he would have used and [sic] had Blaise been ten thousand people at Madison Square Garden. Arms rose and fell; the head was thrown back as if it were an exclamation mark; right fist struck left hand to mark the end of one perfected argument, and the beginning of the next. "The degeneracy of the Malay race is a fact. We start with that. We can do them only good. They can do themselves only harm. When the likes of Carnegie tells us that they are fighting for independence, I say any argument you make for the Filipino you could make for the Apache. Every word that could be said for Aguinaldo could be said for Sitting Bull. The Indians could not be civilized any more than the Filipinos can. They stand in the path of civilization."¹²³

"I speak now only of savages," Vidal's Roosevelt insists.

"When Mr. Seward acquired Alaska, did we ask for the consent of the Eskimos? We did not. When the Indian tribes went into rebellion in Florida, did Andrew Johnson offer them a citizenship for which they were not prepared? No, he offered them simple justice. Which is what we shall mete out to our little brown brothers in the Philippines. Justice and civilization will be theirs if they but seize the opportunity. We shall keep the islands! "¹²⁴

Later, after he has become president and asked Hay to stay on as Secretary of State, Vidal's Roosevelt defends the diplomatic and military chicanery by means of which he obtained the right of way through Panama to build a canal in that Central American country. "The point, John, is that we have done something useful for our country. Our fleets can go back and forth, quickly, between Atlantic and Pacific." Hay is perplexed. "You see a future so filled with war?" he asks the president. And Vidal's Roosevelt replies, "Yes, I do.[...] I also see our own mission, which is to lead where once England led, but on a world scale..."¹²⁵

Still later, when President Woodrow Wilson has led the United States into involvement in World War I, Vidal's Roosevelt shows up at the White House to offer to lead a volunteer division in France. While there, he takes the opportunity to offer the president some advice on his conduct of the war. He points out to the president that "the German-language press[...] has been, from the beginning, disloyal to this country. I would, as a military necessity, shut all those papers down." Wilson is taken somewhat aback. "Isn't this—arbitrary?" he asks Roosevelt. "Surely, they are guaranteed the same freedoms -" But Roosevelt cuts him off. "This is war, Mr. President. Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, shut down newspapers, and we'll have to do the same..." Nor is this all he recommends to the startled president. "Many would-be traitors— German sympathizers—pretend to be peace-lovers, to be—what's their phrase?—'conscientious objectors.' Well, I would treat them conscientiously! I would deny them the vote. If they are of military age and refuse to fight for their country, then they must forgo their citizenship."¹²⁶

Vidal's Wilson, for his part, a "professional historian, who preferred the British parliamentary system to the American executive system," is not at all averse to the idea of helping the British with just about anything they might want to undertake. Once he decides to intervene in World War I to aid the British, he follows Roosevelt's advice and harshly censors the press. But he finds to his sorrow that, even with his critics silenced, there is insufficient public support for his war. As a result, there are "too few volunteers." He has a solution, though: "We must conscript the young men. Draft them. Find a new word for draft, if necessary, but no matter what the word, there is so little time to do so much in." Accordingly, Vidal's Wilson wastes no time in making sure that "[c]onscription was[...] swift and absolute and under another name. On June 5, ten million men between twenty-one and thirty had been registered under the National Defense Act for 'selective service' in the armed services, which sounded rather better than, say, cannon fodder in France."¹²⁷