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May 21, 2020May 21, 2020

Speaking in silence

“All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances.” And it is not that far between sweet desserts and a cold stone.

*Kauffmann Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, also known as Seven Ages.*

May 20, 2020May 21, 2020

In December 1906 Mark Twain came to Washington to lobby for a new copyright bill. He appeared at the hearing of the Library of Congress with a white flannel suit that with his silvery hair made a stir. And he surely enjoyed his dramatic gesture of flinging off a long loose coat to make a debut of his trademark white suit. But many years ago in the winter 1867-1868 when Twain was a capital correspondent writing for various papers, he already made quite a few stirs in Washington and left an impression of a flamboyant young man on many. As the doorkeeper of the Senate, Twain insisted charging senators fifty cents admission and attempted to address the Senate floor and had to be stopped by the sergeant at arms. During his sojourn in DC Twain moved between boardinghouses. “Shabby furniture & shabby food – that is Washington” were his own words. On one occasion Twain devised an impromptu plot using a dog on the street to get a few dollars out of its owner to fill up the shortage he and his fellow journalists needed to buy alcohol. Writing was one means of making money for Twain; he had not enough confidence in himself as writer even after Huckleberry Finn was published. He had to forge his own way to make that Mark Twain he aspired to be.

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Henry Adams was a contemporary of Twain. He was well known for his nine-volume History of the United States. The Education of Henry Adams, his memoir, won the Pulitzer Prize and was placed by the Modern Library as the number one English-language nonfiction book of the 20th century. Adams never wrote to make money, and writing was an intellectual pursuit for him. In a collection of published letters of Clover, mostly to her father, Mrs. Henry Adams, who was from a prominent Bostonian family, very witty, and an accomplished amateur photographer, revealed in detail their charming life that was full of travels, receptions, excursions, elegant luncheons and dinners. Their home on Lafayette Square in Washington, “which has five rooms in the yard and will hold coachman and any servants we may wish” and “on second floor six bedrooms, two bathrooms, and new servants’ staircase – verandas between all three stories,” was the gathering place of America’s foremost intellectuals. Indeed, it seems proper to call them “rare birds in America’s Gilded Age.”

Both men of letters in the Gilded Age fell into a total despair in the end from disillusions of the age. Contrast between tremendous wealth for some and extreme poverty for many, social upheavals, influx of immigrants, and bad politics were ballooning as America gained rapid industrialization and materialistic advances prompted by a growing railroad industry. The problems were so severe that Adams questioned whether the ideal of democracy had failed. The Adams Memorial is history’s gift to us through a reflective historian. (Now, more than ever in history, does the nation need reflection.) However, it is Mark Twain, who grew up and worked as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, not Henry Adams, a descendant from two U.S. Presidents and a Harvard graduate, that embodies the American spirit.

The Gilded Age refers to an era in U.S. history from the 1870s to about 1900, following the American Civil War. The term was derived from the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published in 1873. It only came into use later in the 1920s and 1930s.

Stanford White and Augustus Saint-Gaudens were also quintessential men in the Gilded Age who collaborated to create many of the Beaux-Arts works that “gilded” New York and other American cities. White’s Washington Square Arch still stands today as NYC’s most celebrated monument.

May 17, 2020May 19, 2020