The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

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 probably be 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 of the 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. What are we 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 several times 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 not actually increased over what they were thirty 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 the effect 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.