This is a brief brush-off of the social parvenus who scrambled up as Society scrammed out—through death and Democratic administration.
Faded and forgotten are the days and nights when Washington was ablaze with social brilliance and the gossip behind the fans reflected the sturdy foibles and feuds and infidelities of a class in superior strata of lineage, wealth and those graces which cannot be acquired with sudden fortune.
Society is always the shadow of one luminous, scintillant, predominant woman, such as Mrs. Potter Palmer was in Chicago and the dowager Vanderbilt remained until senility denatured her in New York. In Washington that woman, even though she seldom entertains or permits herself to be entertained, must be the wife of the President. She need not be a Dolly Madison. She can be a recluse, a Quaker like Mrs. Herbert Hoover; a New England villager, like Grace Coolidge; a grande dame like Mrs. Benjamin Harrison or an Ohio hick like Mrs. Warren Harding. But she is the undisputed ex officio queen bee of the social life of the capital. She sets its tempo, she elevates with a nod and she extirpates with a frown.
Few Presidents’ wives would have won social preference had their husbands not squirmed through the labyrinthian catacombs with that miraculous luck which makes one man what they say any American boy can become. But once he takes that oath, his lady assumes a crown. Whether she chooses to wear it or not, she can and must exercise its power over her realm, Society.
And Society withstood the hostesses of gentlemen, soldiers, backwoodsmen, a sheriff, a tailor, a school-teacher, a rail-splitter and a Buchanan. But it could not survive Eleanor Roosevelt.
Here came a woman of blood and millions, married to an equally high-bred, landed manor squire, perhaps the most charming and dynamic and handsome of all our Presidents. And the first tap of her flat heels across the White House threshold led off the funeral march of Society in the capital.
It is unnecessary to review her attitude and behavior; no First Lady was ever so unendingly publicized. That she became invested with certain homely and all-wooly virtues by the worship of millions is precisely why she choked the last breath out of social tradition with her Negro friends, her boondoggling, sweaty indigents, her professional Socialists, her dedicated slum-house guardians of gutter garbage, and her antics as the militant apostle of democracy and equality. The bedrock of Society is inequality, the existence and recognition of an aristocracy.
Whether it is good or not for fundamental Americanism, it was as lethal to the remnants of a baronial stratum in Washington as the Emancipation Proclamation was below the Mason and Dixon line.
No female in American history had ever been so despised in the drawing-rooms and so venerated in the kitchens and furnished rooms. But that hatred within the walls of the elegant was not enough to sustain even a social underground. A few dauntless matrons held out. They tried to continue executing the motions from memory, but they perished on the inglorious field of futility. They were the last. There were no wounded and no prisoners taken. A dynasty that had flourished for 150 years had been wiped out as were the Romanoffs.