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 splendor which 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 hospitalities of 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 the scrubwoman 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 proportions of 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, all equal 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 conditions have 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?