Washington Goes to War by David Brinkley

Author:David Brinkley [Brinkley, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Yes, there were social gatherings staged not for the edification of society writers but for the ordinary pleasures of food, drink and conversation. For one, Senator Lister Hill of Alabama lived on 49th Street in the Spring Valley neighborhood and on summer evenings he liked to have small groups for dinner served on a back porch he called “the piazza” and overlooking a vegetable or Victory Garden. His wife, Henrietta, the classic southern woman dressed in crisp, stylish cottons, was all beauty and charm and soft, gentle speech and cast iron, offering no deference to any politician’s vanity. “I take care of the garden while Lister plays his political games.” After dinner on the porch, as Jonathan Daniels, one of the guests, described it, she did not ask but instructed the Majority Leader of the United States Senate, Alben Barkley of Kentucky, to stand and sing “Wagon Wheels.” He did. She then ordered him to tell the joke he had told a thousand times and Washington had laughed at for forty years and whose punchline had entered the language. Barkley told, yet again, about asking a Kentucky resident for his vote in the next election and reminding him that over the years he had done him numerous favors—got his brother a job in the post office, got his son out of jail and arranged a federal loan to save his farm. The voter responded, “Yes, but what have you done for me lately?”

At the White House, once the center around which Washington’s high society swirled and danced, but now withdrawn from the game, the Roosevelts seldom did more than invite small groups to quiet, informal family dinners, including far more social workers than socialites. Still, invitations to these small dinners were coveted, even though the Roosevelts’ housekeeper, Henrietta Nesbitt, probably served the worst food in the history of the White House, bringing snide remarks from the guests, once they were out the door, about the seemingly unvarying menu of turkey and candied yams, and even though at times the dinner table conversation could be awkward when Eleanor and Franklin began snapping at each other.

Early in the war, when the White House withdrew, the field was clear for the rich, the ambitious, the climbers, the embassies. They seized the moment, even with all its problems, and, indeed, in wartime the problems were awesome. There was, for example, the difficulty in finding servants. Men and women of modest skills now could make far more money in the war industries and at the same time escape being told at six o’clock that twenty people were arriving for dinner at eight. Hostesses traded heartbreaking stories of servants who advertised for jobs with the stipulation that they would not come for interviews; prospective employers must come to them. And servants were known to commit the high crime of simply disappearing without notice. The folklore after the war had it that this was the watershed in American history when if a new housekeeper did agree to come to work, her first announcement was “I don’t do windows.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.