Your host in the White House

JEFFERSON CHASE

A Washingtonian picks a few flaws in the manner in which our Presidents extend their hospitality

The question of the ceremonial proper to Republican Government has never been faced at Washington. There are those who think that the President should always be metaphorically preceded by acolytes with roman candles, sirens and steam calliopes. The other school contends that it is a breach of Democratic tradition for a President to wear a dress suit or be seen to enter a Pullman. Between those who would gladly worship at a Presidential Court and those who would brand elemental dignity as a sign of democratic degeneracy, the middle course has never been determined.

The underlying theory is that simplicity is the appropriate keynote to our official functions, much as sancta simplicitas is to our diplomacy. The glitter and trappings of effete European monarchies and Oriental potentates—to wax Congressional—are not for our rugged Chief Executives. The human hunger for color and ceremonial has to vent itself in the glories of the Shriners and of those Tall Cedars of Lebanon of whom Harding was a member. There is not a humble Negro lodge-brother who could not give our Government cards and aces and beat it every time on dignified ceremonial. The Knights of Pythias alone could stage a more impressive show than does the wealthiest government in the world, and even the American Legion can produce uniforms which would turn a Bolivian Major-General green with envy.

The most notable defect in American political showmanship is the Government's failure to give the public a good show for the money. When the King and Queen open the British Parliament or when the French bury a Field Marshal, when Signor Mussolini makes a speech or the Soviet Public Prosecutor stages a treason trial, the lust of the humble and drab masses for form, color and ceremony is fully fed. Here we are turned away to the lodges and the motion pictures for what should be the daily bread of intelligent government.

Any Hollywood director could put on a better show at Washington than any of our last ten Presidents.

In the first place, the apparatus of official entertainment is defective. There are only two buildings in Washington even slightly suitable for public functions. The first is the White House, a fine example of Southern colonial architecture, with an atmosphere of

intimacy and informality which is no more suited to large receptions and dinners than a tennis court is to a Yale-Harvard football game. It has no ante-rooms worth mentioning and there is no provision for a dignified approach to the President. Although the man who mistook the New Year's reception for a bread-line was mistaken, his mistake is a natural one when it is considered that about two thousand people attend the average White House reception, and between six or seven thousand .the New Year's reception. Coils of guests undulate through the bowels of the Executive Mansion, curl up the basement stairs, through the hall, the dining room, and the Red Room—suddenly to find themselves thrust before the President like a soul before its Maker on the Day of Judgment—and thence through the East Room into the outer darkness.

For the Secretary of State, the Pan-American Building—that happy marriage of colonial and Hispanic architecture—offers a more flexible social spring-board. There, too, the difficulty lies in the lack of ante-rooms. The guests are herded on the ground floor and then shuffle up the marble stairway, four abreast, until, at the very top, they come suddenly upon the Secretary and his spouse, and are then thrust into a large and attractive room, packed solid with people who have no obvious means of escape.

In both places the Marine Band blares away and the guests bear it patiently. In the White House you get ice-water if you can find a clean glass and can snatch a moment at the nickel-plated station-restaurant water-cooler on the side-board as you meander through the dining room.

There are few chairs available in either place and things being as they are, no champagne. The general attitude at the White House is that you are lucky enough to have received an invitation and that you are there to pay tribute to the Executive rather than to enjoy an invitation to his house. The technique is not that of hospitality, but that of the Stock Yards, and it is only too obvious that the whole thing is being done with a view to shaking hands with the greatest possible number of people in the shortest possible time.

Moreover, the personnel which manages these things presents handicaps from the start. Since Archy Butt, the President has employed no military aide with a creative social sense. Much of the genial atmosphere of the Roosevelt and Taft Administrations was due to Butt's unique ability to organize and unobstrusively to handle large social functions. The present military aide, Colonel Campbell Blackshear Hodges, is a Louisianan, an aging bachelor, former military attache in Spain and from 1926 to 1929, commandant of cadets at West Point. He is a distinguished soldier but he lacks the Butt touch. The President's naval aide, Captain Train, is a suave and courteous officer, who lacks both the power and the inclination to try to run the White House. Mrs. Hoover has a social secretary, of course, formerly Miss Randolph and now Miss Hall, hut the latter is not in a position to do more than attend to the minutiae of White House etiquette.

The show is run from the State Department, by the Division of International Conferences and Protocol, without continuity of policy or even of officers. The Chief of this Division, Ferdinand Lammot Belin, who occupies a position comparable to the Lord High Chamberlain of a European Court or to an Oriental Chief Eunuch, has been at his post only a few weeks. It is no reflection on the Foreign Service to admit that Mr. Belin's diplomatic training is scarcely calculated to qualify him exclusively for this peculiar post. A happily married man of fifty, he is a native of Scranton, Pennsylvania, a graduate of Yale (Sheffield), and has served in Peking, Constantinople, Paris and London, whence he was recently transferred to his present post. His assistant, Richard Southgate, is a member of one of the first families of Worcester, Massachusetts, a graduate of Harvard, and has seen service in Paris, Rome and Central America, as well as in the profession of banking. The State Department's ceremonial officer, the pleasant and dignified Charles Lee Cooke, is a former Washington patent lawyer, who has been official announcer at Departmental ceremonies for ten years. Mr. Cooke recently carried a photograph of President Hoover, in a gold frame, to the coronation of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, and had his pocket picked in the process.

It is obvious that such an organization must lack tradition and background, irrespective of the quality of its personnel. It contains no Ward McAllister, no Archy Butt. It is blocked at the start by official opposition. For example, no President or Secretary of State, from George Washington down, has had the nerve to authorize the preparation of a table of precedence. Always useful in any official society and indispensable in a diplomatic society, this simple precaution, which is part of the routine duty of every other foreign office in the world, has no official existence in Washington. Two years ago the State Department prepared such a table of precedence and was about to authorize it, when along came Dolly Gann, everybody ducked for the cyclone cellar, and the old Protocol Division was rebaptised as the Division of International Conferences to avert the social twister from Kansas.

In the second place, our diplomats are hampered by the lack of a uniform. We and the Soviet diplomats are indistinguishable, in that we must appear at all national and international functions, dressed as waiters. The late permanent Assistant Secretary of State, Alvey A. Adee, once went so far as to design a diplomatic uniform, with appropriate arrangements of gold-embroidered oak-leaves on the cuffs and collar to denote the various grades in the service, but it was laughed out of existence when a full-blooded one hundred per cent Undersecretary—they called them Counsellors then—approved it with the proviso that it should include a sprig of mistletoe on the coat tails.

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No country is so lacking as ours in consideration of its guests at public functions. Far too many people are invited to White House receptions. On New Year's Day the White House is open to the public, which is probably a wise concession to omnivorous publicity. If people wish to see the President on this occasion they probably deserve to be kept in line and to be moved along like sheep in the runway of an abattoir. When 6,500 people, as on January 1, 1931, insist on shaking hands with the President they ought to be made to suffer for it.

For the regular receptions, the receiving line idea is undignified and the invitations too numerous. It is a violation of good taste and an affront to the informal character of the White House to invite more people than can be treated hospitably at such affairs. The whole idea of the receiving line is parochial and slightly barbarous. It is Main Street; it smacks of the dancing class, the Methodist Church sociable, and the Wednesday Afternoon Discussion Club. Either the guests should be marshalled and the President make his appearance, walking around the reception room and talking to his guests in turn, or the guests should be publicly announced in the English fashion as they enter the room. To compel guests to stand in line and shake hands in turn with the host and hostess is too much like fire drill in a public school.

The answer to this problem is simple. Either enlarge the White House until it is a real Executive Palace or have more receptions with fewer guests. We should establish a Ceremonial Bureau (with archives, precedents and clerks), run jointly by the Army, the Navy and the State Department, under a permanent staff of social experts, with help from Hollywood. We should make greater use of military display. We should apply the principle of a seat for every guest and refreshments, if only sponge cake and lemonade, for all who wish them. We should design a good diplomatic uniform, with or without mistletoe, and should establish a routine for staging public funerals for all important officials. To cater to the masses, we should institute a civil decoration, to be known as the Order of America, with appropriate ribbons, medals and bands. And we might cultivate the exotic idea that for a government to be thoroughly popular it should put on a thoroughly good show.