And, surely, Bess Truman was not sent from above for the Restoration.
From the founding of the city until the recent demise of Evelyn Walsh McLean, who owned the Hope Diamond, Washington was celebrated for its intrigue, romance and scandal in high Society.
Eleanor “Cissie” Patterson and Mrs. McLean were the last of the city’s great hostesses. Mrs. Patterson retired from the tea-table wars when she became active in newspaper work. With her death, and that of Mrs. McLean, the Washington Society pages were taken over by the climbers.
One needs no long memory to remember when social leaders from everywhere converged on this city. Dupont Circle was Fifth Avenue refined and rarefied, the cream of established snobbery, wealth, officialdom and diplomacy.
Ambitious minglers from the Middle West, such as the Pullmans, the Leiters and others, bypassed New York’s fatuous 400 and came directly to Washington.
Social history there begins with beauteous Elizabeth Patterson, of Baltimore, who wed Napoleon’s younger brother. Its first tasty scandal was whispered in Jefferson’s time, about the French Ambassador who was reputed to have married his jailer’s daughter, who had saved him from the guillotine.
Early Washington Society was titillated by duels among high personages. The duel on the Hudson shore in which Alexander Hamilton was killed by Aaron Burr, in 1804, was talked about for years, until 1820, when a new gory sensation arose to take its place: the mortal wounding of Commodore Stephen Decatur in an arranged meeting of gentlemen across the District line in Maryland.
After a hundred years, Washington still talks about Peggy Eaton and President Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. But, today’s mundane morsels will make no interesting reading, leave no spice for the raconteur.
Society is on the wane everywhere. Taxes, Communist and New Deal propaganda, the high cost of living, make it virtually impossible to keep up huge menages. Now only rich labor leaders, black marketeers, gangsters and grafters can afford the expense.
There are a handful of rich dowagers like Mrs. Jay Borden Harriman and Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, but they are out of the running.