The lost art of magnificence

JEFFERSON CHASE

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, where wealth accumulates and its possessors decline to flaunt it

During the last twenty years our millionaires in the upper brackets have somehow lost their glamour.

Where are the colorful millionaires of yesteryear, the beef barons with their diamond studs, the coal oil Johnnies who gave dinners at a thousand dollars a plate? And where is Mr. Wister's successful miner who swaggered into town from his claim, entered the best restaurant, pounded on the table and shouted, "Damn it! Bring me forty dollars worth of ham and eggs!" Where is the newly rich lady who wanted her diamond necklace set so that it would jingle? Where is the Manhattan of Mr. James Hazen Hyde, with its twenty thousand dollar costume balls, its coaching parties and its fin de siècle Four Hundred? Where is the metropolis of our piratical Jim Fiskes, our buccaneering Goulds, our Magnificent Morgans, our rapacious IJarrimans? Where, in fact, is the city of Stanford White or even the town of Otto Kahn, at the début of whose daughter Yvette Guilbert and Caruso performed and sang for the benefit of the massed undergraduate bodies of Yale, Harvard and Princeton, conveyed for that purpose to Sherry's in special cars?

Our Titans seem to have lost the knack of magnificence. Their predecessors moved in an atmosphere of magnums of champagne and Havana cigars, while the new crop of millionaires take a glass of acidophilous milk for luncheon and employ trainers to keep them physically fit. Instead of flaunting off to Europe with their mistresses in luxurious steam yachts, they teach in Sunday Schools and are conspicuous for their marital felicity.

No longer are nude chorus girls an indispensable feature of a banker's banquet. No longer do coach horns toot melodiously in front of the old Fifth Avenue mansions. Instead of all that our magnates now seclude their wealth, like a guilty secret, in the fastnesses of Long Island or on the distant shores of Florida. No longer can you spot a millionaire a block away by the amazing grandeur of his garments. Instead, he dresses as inconspicuously as a bank clerk or an insurance salesman. Instead of putting his fortune on his wife's back, he invests it in philanthropic foundations or campaign contributions. And when he does spend it on himself, he does so no longer in the spirit of setting up drinks for the house, but hurries off and spends it in Paris, London, or the Riviera, where the natives ask no questions.

The reason for their shrinking from the spotlight (photographic publicity was once considered a very material part of American success) is obvious to the meanest intelligence. The mutter from the slums and farms, the Congressional dude-baiting, have frightened our magnificos until they have been forced to seek protective coloration. The pose of Jeffersonian simplicity is coming back, as it originated, in the form of a defense-mechanism against popular envy, and displeasure against economic privilege. With Soviet Russia and the breadlines as a background, our millionaires feel as uneasy in their splendor as does a man wearing a silk hat on the Bowery.

This is doubly unfortunate, for the only way in which excessive wealth can be made economically justifiable is by excessive expenditure. From the point of view of its redistribution, the endowment of philanthropic institutions and the refusal to indulge in the personal enjoyment of their wealth is the worst possible use which our magnates could make of their money. The construction of Rockefeller Center, for instance, as a means of redressing the balance, was useless. Far more to the point would have been banquets of larks' tongues, or gladiatorial combats in Central Park. Thus at least the lagging luxury trades would have benefited, without causing fresh competition in the real estate market.

Yet the Rockefellers' action was politically right, for popular nerves could scarcely have stood the strain of witnessing a modern Lueullus disporting himself in time of depression. Even Henry Ford, with all his vast popularity, has had to soft-pedal the purchase of works of art since Wall Street shot the works. For, historically speaking, whenever any class of private citizen has assumed conspicuous magnificence, its opulence has proved to be the final "hearty breakfast" which is the privilege of the condemned.

No caste, no class, however large or small, has ever been permitted to glory and drink deep with impunity. The essential lethal chamber which ends such periods of privileged magnificence is occasionally forgotten by luckless aristocracies, and so you get your guillotines, firing squads and isles of exile. Yet the very mob which lynches the magnificos craves magnificence, and demands of the nation what it refuses to the individual.

That is what America needs to realize, that men do not live by corned-beef and cabbage or by suburban trains alone. They crave color, splendor, pomp and ceremony. I hey like to know that the caviar and limousines are there, in addition to the taxi and the armchair lunch. They simply don't want these luxuries to be the other fellow's exclusive privilege. So the rich man and the wealthy classes have been looted in every civilization. Mere wealth is not enough to protect an individual, as even Messrs. Capone and Insull have discovered. For a time, we let them put on their personal show and then we suddenly get tired of it. Result: Atlanta or extradition from the ends of the earth.

Older races than ours have discovered the answer to the problem of giving the people a circus in addition to the bread which is embodied in the wise Roman formula for popular government. The Great Pyramid and the Colosseum, Christophe's challenge to the white race flinging its masonry skyward at La Ferrière, the Alhambra and the Taj Mahal. Versailles of the Grand Monarque and Islamboul of the Grand Turk, the Winter Palace at Peking, the Siegesallee and the Champs-Élysées: all these are symbols of the urge toward magnificence which is bred into the human animal.

The old races know it well. The scarlet tunic of the British sentry, the wild clamor of drums and bugles of the French Army, Mussolini's blackshirted legions in review, the ominous ceremonies in the Red Square, tin* upflung arms and floodlights of a Hitler rally are all evidence of the "circus sense" which was Rome's greatest contribution to European statesmanship. Our American social planners do not yet realize what is going wrong with their neatly docketed projects: their kilowatt hours, their propitiatory subsistence homesteads, their Public Works enterprises for constructing sewers, bridges and municipal power plants.

Yet, night after night, Hollywood mints itself a fortune (and wins for its artists a loyalty compared to which Emperor-worship is a tame and tepid emotion) by displaying to shop-girls and shoe-clerks a panorama of show and splendor, in which even an East Side hall-bedroom has the dimensions of a ball-room and a pent-house contains acres of period-furnitured parlors the size of skating-rinks, while bath-rooms on the screen are as glorified as a Ziegfeld vintage Follies Girl. Week after week, the Roman Church fills its cathedrals to the aisles, to the accompaniment of light, color, sound and incense.

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Year in and year out, our Elks, Shriners, Knights Templar, Moose, Redmen, Legionnaires, and Tall Cedars parade in costumes which would arouse surprised gratification in West Africa, while Miss America is selected after ceremonies which make the inauguration of an American President seem about as formal as posting the baseball scores in a barbershop window.

And all the time our Government goes drably along, with its derby-hatted men in sleeve-garters, its khaki troops, its severely utilitarian posturing and its numbing absence of drama. The British have their Lord Mayor's Show and the Opening of Parliament. The French have their Garde Républicaine and their Napoleonic monuments. Italy, Germany and Russia know the trick and even the despised little governments which lie between us and the Equator can give us cards and trumps and still make their bid when it comes to political pageantry.

The way out for us is clear. Our millionaires, if they are wise, will refuse to engage in full-blooded personal ostentation for themselves but will insist that Hollywood take full control of the official ceremonial bureaus at Washington, with a free hand on costuming, lighting, color and sound effects. George Kaufman and Eugene O'Neill should be drafted to rewrite the Constitution, and the rules of the House, Senate and Supreme Court. Our magnates, if they wish to keep their heads on their shoulders, will not blow in their bonuses on champagne parties—although Julius Caesar got his start in politics by a wise practice of inviting the entire population of his home town to the antique equivalent of champagne suppers—but will insist that the Public Works Administration go easy on the sewers and garbage-disposal plants and build, instead, a block of Pyramids, a Great Wall along the Canadian frontier, or a seventy-acre mausoleum for Boies Penrose.

They will call in our best theatrical costumers, and will order them to design new uniforms for the Army, Navy, police and Diplomatic Corps. They will replace the White House with a Presidential Palace, which will be somewhat larger than the Kremlin, replete with long flights of marble stairs, and porticos, beneath which sentries will pace, and balconies for the trumpeters.

In short, if our upper bracketeers wish to keep their jobs they will realize that the Republic is worth a circus, and that the best way of continuing the discreet enjoyment of their unearned increment is not by endowing travelling fellowships or eradicating the hookworm, but by giving Dexter Fellowes of the circus, as well as the men who write the blurbs for Hollywood. a chance to "glorify" the Constitution.

For our people like a show, so long as they think they own the dramatic rights, and will pay gladly for it, if it is only a good one. Just now the American people are getting pretty bored with the current spectacle. It's impossible to take a motor trip to see the greatest deficit in history and there is nothing permanently picturesque about an acre of ploughed-under cotton or an N.R.A. padded payroll.

The people want bread, of course, and the New Deal is giving it to them, but the people also have an unregenerate craving for bigger and better pyramids, while the New Deal's best efforts in that direction have taken the somewhat prosaic form of dams in Tennessee. In short, the people want a show, as well as a run, for their money—even in Republican industrial Jeffersonian America—and the people have a habit of getting what they demand. whether it be bread or circuses. If our millionaires won't give it to them, the Government must—or else we won't have a government, or millionaires either, for very long.