CHAPTER VIITHE MADE-OVER WHITE HOUSE
Wefind plutocracy’s follies in full swing not alone in the great cities, East and West, where the money-caste must have outward signs of superiority to bolster up its pretensions, but in our national capital as well—in what ought to be the high-set citadel of democratic dignity.
Few Americans have any adequate idea of the system of etiquette which has grown up there. The other day a newly appointed high officer of the Government said:
“My daughter went to lunch with the daughter of Secretary —— yesterday. She did not come home until long after she was expected, and her mother asked her what was the matter.
“‘Oh,’ she explained, ‘Secretary ——’s daughter was there, and none of us could go until she left, and we thought she never would go.’ AndI find that precedent is carried out in the strictest possible way all through Washington society in all its sets, down to the very children.”
If there are any persons in official life in Washington who do not attach importance to precedence, do not resent being seated out of rank at table, or being in all other ways given their exact official amount of deference, those persons keep extremely quiet. In Washington one ceases to be surprised at hearing men of national reputation complaining fiercely because they have been subjected to some trivial slight in this matter of precedence. It irritates a Cabinet officer to be put a shade out of his rank just as much as it irritates a Congressman from nowhere or a Government clerk.
Precedence is killing Washington as a place of residence for sensible people. It is destroying its chief charm. If one thinks of going there to live it is because he expects to meet in the easy circumstance of social intercourse those who are interesting or amusing or curious. That sort of social intercourse is becoming practically impossible. No one giving any sort of entertainment, however informal, dares to arrange his or her guests according to congeniality. The same people must alwaysbe put next each other. The same man must take the same woman in to dinner. The same youth must dance with the same girl. And as official life expands the blight of precedence spreads.
It is difficult for an outsider to listen without laughing or showing irritation as the Washingtonians discuss precedence and relate incidents of national and international catastrophes almost brought about by violation of it. But as some of the persons who most strenuously insist upon it are otherwise high above the human average, it would be well, before utterly condemning the Washingtonians, to reflect whether the craze for precedence is not a universal human weakness, latent—happily latent—in most of us because it has no chance to show itself.
There is a certain officer who, in the official lists, is called Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds. In fact he is “Lord Great Chamberlain” to the President. Perhaps there was once a Lord Great Chamberlain who was merely Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds at the lower end of Pennsylvania avenue. But that was a long time ago.
For many years the Major of Engineers assignedto that title with the rank and pay of Colonel has been actually the chief officer of the President’s court, the manager of what might be called his public household. Whenever the President entertains on a grand scale he is obviously in command, directing the ceremonials, superintending the evolutions of his staff of dancing and small-talk army men, overseeing the assiduities of the court retinue of servants. When a new ambassador or other eminent personage, domestic or foreign, arrives, he is the functionary who puts on a gorgeous uniform, drives in state in the President’s carriage to the visitor’s lodgings, escorts him to the President, introduces him, takes him away and escorts him back to his lodgings. Also, he in large measure directs the expenditures from the White House privy purse.
The Constitution and the Statute Book make no provision for a Lord Great Chamberlain. But constitutions and institutions are vastly different. Part of the President’s time is given to matters contained or supposed to be contained in the written laws, the larger part to matters set down in the unwritten laws and nowhere else. When we broke away from Europe and European political andsocial ideas, we did not get rid of those customs for high executive officers which had been established among us by royal colonial governors, although they were simple compared with the growing dimensions of our present-day ceremonial.
Thus the unwritten laws say that the President must have a court like a king or other royal reigning person. It must be disguised and modified, but it must be “the real thing” in its essence. A court involves a place to hold it, officers to conduct it, an etiquette to guide it, and money to keep it going. The written laws provide for a Presidential residence—they permit the President to sit rent-free. That provision readily stretches to cover a place to hold the court.
Again, the written laws permit the President to detach certain public officers for rather indefinite purposes. There you have a Lord Great Chamberlain and a Lord High Steward, and so forth, provided with comparative ease.
As for etiquette, that part of the unwritten law need not be reconciled to written law, because etiquette costs nothing but headaches and heart-burnings—and the only reason for attempting to reconcile written law and unwritten is, of course, thematter of money expense. Finally, the written laws provide, or can be stretched to provide, the money for all the bigger items of court expenses—furnishings and repairs and alterations, linen, china, flowers, cooks, scullions, butlers, coachmen, footmen, door-openers and door-closers, card-carriers, light, heat, everything except what is eaten and drunk. As yet no way has been found to stretch the written law or the good nature of Congress to cover the court appetite. It must be appeased out of the President’s salary.
The most important, though by no means the most expensive, item in the court budget charged against the public, is the Lord Great Chamberlain who conducts the court and executes, either directly or indirectly, all that pertains to the social side of life at the White House. He is always an officer of engineers. He must be a person of knowledge, of tact, of good appearance.
Lord Great Chamberlain has ever been a distinguished office. It was never so distinguished as now. And, unless there is some sort of extraordinary convulsion and revulsion, it is destined to become almost eminent. For the White House has entered a new and dazzling period of social splendorwhich may presently make it as little different from the residence of a monarch as is the Elysée Palace, where lives the President of France’s imperial Democracy.
The newly evolved notion of the Presidential office is that it is the centre of political, intellectual and sociological authority and also of social honor. Not only must the democratic—or plutocratic—overlord, anointed with the new kind of divine oil, be the embodiment and exponent of the popular will; he must also be the source of honor, the recognizer of merit.
Does one sing well? Does one paint well? Does one write well? Does one lead in education or literature or law or sociology or finance or commerce or trade—or fashion? Is one in the forefront in any line of activity not definitely declared criminal? Then the President of the American people must entertain him, must take his hand in that hand which is a sort of composite of eighty million right hands of fellowship. The approving accents of that voice which is now conceived to be the composite of eighty million approving voices must tickle his ravished ears; he must, at the Presidential board, eat and drink the composite hospitalitiesof the eighty millions’ dinner or luncheon tables.
In a real plain-as-an-old-coat Democracy the President would be a business person only, keeping his official life and his social life separate and distinct. The one would be public, the other private. He would have no more to do privately with those with whom he is officially brought into contact than would the head of a big business with his assistants, employés and customers. Social life is in a democratic society altogether of and by the family; and theoretically the President’s wife and children, the wives and children of the other public officials, are left in private life when the man of the family takes office. Practically, however, they are all elected, and if the written law provides no honors for wife and children and other relatives of the successful candidate, unwritten law must be created to repair the grave, the intolerable omission.
Hence the elaborate, the complex, the awe-inspiring system of precedence. Every one from the President and his family and their remotest connection visiting Washington, down through all the branches of official life to grand-niece of thescrubwoman who sees to the basement steps of the smallest public building, has his or her exactly defined and jealously guarded station in the social hierarchy.
Naturally, the most interesting part of the imposing structure that descends tier on tier from the august and exalted Chief Magistrate, is the court—the President, his Cabinet (Cabinet “ministers,” to give them the fanciful title they love best), the ambassadors and ministers and staffs of the various embassies and legations, the families of all these, and this means the White House and the Lord Great Chamberlain—the White House, the stage; the Lord Great Chamberlain, the stage manager.
The White House was always inadequate—it would have been inadequate only for carrying out the purely democratic idea of the Presidential office, the idea set forth in the written laws. For the splendid, imperial, democratic concept of the plutocracy, the White House was ridiculous. Many a previous President and his wife, conscious of the social possibilities of the Presidential office, and yearning to develop them, have sighed over and moaned over and hinted about the petty proportionsof the “Executive Mansion.” But political timidity restrained them from insisting upon expansion and elaboration. Mr. Roosevelt, confident that the people understood and approved him, and full of enthusiasm for his exalted concept of a new Presidency to suit a new era of the republic, boldly ventured where other Presidents had shrunk back. He demanded adequate quarters for the imperial-democratic court. The result is a new White House, a fit theatre for plutocratic social activities, a fit field for the operations of an energetic and sympathetic Lord Great Chamberlain.
The present President entertains, not occasionally but constantly, not exclusively but as democratically as an emperor, not meagrely but lavishly, not a score of guests, but hundreds and thousands. He has a multitude of guests to lunch, a multitude to dine, a multitude to hear music or to take part in various kinds of “drawing-rooms” and levees, a multitude to stay the night under his roof—not a multitude all at one time, but a multitude in the aggregate. Rich and poor, snob and democrat, plutocrat and proletarian, black and white, American and foreigner, Maine woods guide, Western scout, fashionable and frowzy—all equally welcome, allequal at his court. Morgan and Jacob Riis, Countess de Castellane and Booker Washington, Wild Bill and Bishop Potter, Duse and Rough Rider Rob, Alfred Henry Lewis and a New York cotillon leader.
Not long ago when some one said in his hearing, “There’s no first-class hotel in Washington,” he replied, “You forget the White House.” He has made it indeed a national hotel, or rather a great national assembling place. And he is ever unsatisfied, ever reaching out for more “doers,” for more and more people of interest or importance. He wishes all people of mark to bask in the Presidential sunshine, to give him the benefit of their intellect or character, or whatever they may have that is worth seeing or hearing. For he wishes to receive as well as to give. And he is determined that his court shall be entirely and completely representative. The world has seen nothing like it in recent centuries; the Emperor of Germany, broad though his sympathies are, is a snob in comparison. For a parallel we must go back to the courts of the emperor-presidents of Rome, in the days when Rome thought itself a republic. And the exigencies of plutocratic politics and the new social conditionshave combined to attract the leaders of plutocracy’s fashion in plutocracy’s capitals, New York and Chicago, to favor Washington more and more each winter with their presence and their patronage.
The new White House, which is thus in a fair way to become the social centre of the republic, is in one sense the first step toward an entirely new Washington. In every street at all fit for Presidential purposes great houses are going up for the leisurely rich, and smaller but attractive houses for the leisurely well-to-do. It is obvious to the most casual observer that to-morrow will see a brilliant and numerous society seated at Washington, a society devoted to luxury and entertaining and revolving round the President, and dazzling and dominating the servants of the people. Of all the bribes, which is so seductive, so insidiously corrupting as the social bribe?
At the Congressional Library are exhibited models of the Washington the public administration purposes to build, has already begun to build. It will be a city of magnificent boulevards and parks and drives, and public buildings and national monuments. It will be probably the most splendid and most beautiful city in the world. It will probablybe the one great city on earth where all who are not servants and tradespeople think and talk chiefly politics, literature, art, science—when they are not talking gossip and envying each other’s rank or looks or clothes or establishments.
The made-over White House, astounding though it is as a sudden development, is but the crude inaugural of this Washington of to-morrow. But it is a beginning—a most audacious move on the part of one of the most audacious men who ever rose to first place in the republic. It is indeed audacious to be a democratic President with the ceremonial of a king—“a ceremonial more rigid than that of the court of the Czar,” according to the wife of one of the ambassadors.
The White House demand upon Congress for running expenses has leaped from the former twenty-five thousand dollars to sixty thousand dollars. As the President’s salary is just under a thousand dollars a week, and as he evidently believes the people expect the President to spend his salary upon the embellishment of the position, it appears that the new White House, the new court, is now on the average costing in the neighborhood of two thousand dollars a week, half from the pocket ofthe people, the other half from the President’s private pocket.
As the heavy expense is crowded into five months of the year—December to April, inclusive—the probabilities are that the new White House is costing during the season not far from three thousand dollars a week. This means that the new departure has certainly doubled, and perhaps trebled, the cost of the White House court, for most Presidents have contributed about half their salary toward holding court and have called on Congress for a supplementary appropriation of twenty-five thousand dollars a year.
A few years ago such imposing figures as these would have caused a great outcry. In every part of the land, in city as well as country, hands would have been thrown up, and “we, the people,” would have ejaculated: “Three thousand dollars a week! Mercy on us! The fellow must be crazy. Whatarewe coming to?”
But we think in large sums these days, and the establishments of our multi-millionaires have accustomed us to big expenditures for what were less than half a generation ago universally regarded as prodigalities. Scores of millionaires spend severaltimes two thousand dollars a week in “maintaining their dignity.” There were some faint, shamefaced mutterings in Congress against the alterations in the White House and the lively leap of the public share in the expenses. But these mutterings died away instead of growing stronger, and the project for raising the Presidential salary to one hundred thousand dollars a year has all but passed Congress.
In the competition of display, of “splurge,” shall “we, the people” be distanced by private persons? Is not “blowing it in” the great test of dignity and worth, the test established by our most “successful” citizens? Yet a few years and the President will be getting one hundred thousand dollars in salary and will think himself moderate in calling upon the nation for twice sixty thousand a year to be spent in maintaining the Presidential dignity. Less than that will seem shabby in the new Washington under the spell of the new concept of the Presidency as a social font. Simplicity and quiet as a measure of dignity will belong to the past. It still remains true, as when Burke said it, that “the public is poor.” True, the nation has riches, but only a few have wealth. True, wages have notactually increased over what they werethirty years ago. True, the incomes of the great mass of Americans are just about where they used to be; true, taxation is to them still a burden, and “making the ends meet” is still an anxious problem. But our plutocrats and the representatives of kings and other tax-eaters and people-plunderers must feel at home when they honor our White House with their presence.
There is not the slightest surface indication that the Lord Great Chamberlain will preside over a diminished office. Public business in the narrow, strictly legal, old-fashioned democratic sense has now for the first time wholly withdrawn from the White House and is seated in what is derisively and not inaptly called the “Executive Hen-coop”—a temporary office building near by. The White House has been definitely and apparently permanently transformed into a place devoted to that part of the Presidential office which is not recognized in written law and which has hitherto been kept in the background.
And so rapidly is the White House developing that no one need be astonished if it almost immediately becomes the social Mecca of the whole American people. Any one who has studied theeffect of social life upon political life, of social customs upon politics, will appreciate that that transformation might be of profound and far-reaching importance. It might be significant of a new kind of republic, of a fallen Democracy on this American continent. It might well mean that the dream of all aggressive, self-aggrandizing office-holders had at last been realized; that for the people-ruled public administration contemplated by the fathers and embodied in the Constitution had been substituted a real, a people-ruling government.
For, more powerful than any written laws, are the unwritten laws that bind men in the slowly, noiselessly forged chains of Habit.
And what a busy, big man the Lord Great Chamberlain would be then!
But he would still be called Superintendent of Public Buildings and Grounds, and the Most Puissant Over-lord of the Imperial Plutocracy would still be called President of the United States. And so nobody would in the least mind. If the waffle is named “Hot Waffle,” only a carping, croaking pessimist notes that it is stone cold.
Such are thesurfaceindications. But surface indications are not infallible; they have been known to be unimportant and wholly misleading.