America's Secret Aristocracy (25 page)

For many years, the city of Washington published a slim edition of the
Social Register
. It was held in low esteem because it attempted to do the impossible: collect the names of socially acceptable Washington and official Washington, which are not necessarily the same thing, all in one volume. To Old Guard Washington, it made no sense at all to see a member of the old-line Claggett family listed in the same book as the ambassador of Angola, with the implication that the two families were on an equal footing. The problem was solved in 1930 by Mrs. Helen Ray Hagner with the publication of
The Social List of Washington
, known affectionately as The Green Book for its green felt cover, and which drew a sharp distinction between social and official Washington. Furthermore, The Green Book—and its carefully anonymous board of governors—had no hesitancy about dropping high government officials from its pages if, it felt, they didn't comport themselves properly. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas was dropped when, at the age of sixty-seven, he took a twenty-three-year-old woman as his fourth wife. Major General Harry H. Vaughan, an official in the Truman administration, disappeared from the Green Book's pages because, so it was rumored, “of the way his socks slop sometimes over his shoes.”

Mrs. Hagner devised a private set of symbols and notations that she used in her card file of potential listees. “BD,” for example, indicated Bad Drunk, and the initials “OF” appeared on Mr. Justice Douglas's card just before his banishment from the book, denoting Old Fool. The Green Book is run by Mrs. Hagner's granddaughter today, Mrs. Jean Shaw Murray, and though the list is now computerized, similar notations are still fed into the computer. And the identity of the book's board of governors, whose decisions as to who is in and who is out are final, is still a closely guarded secret. “They have to be anonymous,” Mrs. Murray says, only half-seriously. “Their lives would be in danger,” so coveted are Green Book listings.

Old Guard Washingtonians, who can be said to form the social core of The Green Book, cheerfully refer to themselves
as “the Cave Dwellers,” a term indigenous to Washington and an indication that these are families which have retired to a private, unseen, almost troglodyte existence in the city among their relatives and friends, far removed from the comings and goings of the city's more visible, if transient, political society. A Cave Dweller defines a member of those families who have lived in the capital for generations, and whose bloodlines are thoroughly woven into the fabric of Washington's social and economic history. Today's Cave Dwellers have ancestors who were also Cave Dwellers. “Oh, yes, they used to call us that even when I was young,” says Mrs. William S. Farr, a cheery woman in her eighties who has lived in Washington all her life and whose grandfather Francis Griffith Newlands founded what is still one of the city's most exclusive enclaves, the Chevy Chase Club.

Washington, as the nation's capital, is necessarily another of those special cities where a sense of place can seem to overpower, and delineate, the attitudes of its upper class. In New York, it is more significant for a Jay or a Livingston to be a
Jay
or a
Livingston
than to be a New Yorker. To the secret aristocracy of Washington, the key is to be
of Washington
. When Pierre L'Enfant began sketching his plans for the city in 1790, there was no particular reason for its being where it was. It was not a great seaport or the juncture of two major rivers. Congress had simply decided that there was where the capital would be. The early leaders of the city had to invent a reason and a meaning for it, and so they themselves became its raison d'être.

Washington's Old Guard has been accused of being peculiarly snobbish in contrast with the elite of other cities, and in a sense it is, due to the peculiar nature of the town. Like Hershey, Pennsylvania, Washington is a one-industry city, the industry being government. American government and politics being what they are, the people in positions of power are both transients and transplants from other places. They change from one election to the next, they are rarely interested in putting down roots, and they are too busy competing with one another to bother about catering to any establishment or trying to emulate its values. Just as transient and rootless as the political ins and outs are the families who run and staff the many foreign embassies and consulates in town, and the Cave Dwellers have come to regard all these people as social riffraff, not worth the trouble of befriending. In turn, the
people whom political and diplomatic Washington talks about, reads about, or even cares about are not the Cave Dwellers. Ignored, the Cave Dwellers sound both snobbish and xenophobic when they talk about “those people,” and they use their very anonymity as a badge of special superiority and prestige. It is a form of snobbery that would probably not be tolerated in any other city. But because it is Washington, the Cave Dwellers get away with it.

Such names as Claggett, Belin, Glover, Leiter, Beall, and Peter can all be found in history books about Washington and, in most cases, are in the Washington telephone book—as well as The Green Book—today. And these are just a sampling of the old families who can trace their lineage back to Robert Peter, the first mayor of Georgetown; to Bishop Thomas John Claggett, the first chaplain of the U.S. Senate; and to the glamorous Leiter sisters, who set the fashion and social tone of Washington in the 1800s.

Once upon a time, the Cave Dwellers played an important role in official Washington, in a day when blue bloods were in the White House and when the only embassies that counted were the British, the French, and “perhaps” the Spanish and the Italian. But no longer, in a time when, according to people like Mrs. Farr, Washington is just “too much come and go.” Today, Cave Dwellers may still be seen playing golf at the Chevy Chase Club, dining at the Metropolitan Club, and entertaining quietly—and assiduously without publicity—at their city mansions on and off Connecticut and Massachusetts avenues. But few Cave Dwellers will be spotted at power lunches, political cocktail parties, splashy charity balls, corporate fund-raisers, or diplomatic dinners. The Cave Dwellers leave that part of Washington life to others who have more recently arrived, who have come from distant places the Cave Dwellers would never consider visiting, and whose backgrounds are obscure. “We don't have the slightest interest in those who come and go,” says Mrs. Fontaine Bradley, whose husband is a descendant of Robert Peter. “I'm not really interested in getting to know them,” she says, “and I don't think they would be interested in getting to know us.”

There is, of course, some understandable nostalgia for the old order. “I don't know very much about politics these days,” says Mrs. Sidney Kent Legaré, who is called Minnie and who is not only old Washington but whose husband is
even older Charleston. “You see, Washington used to be like a family. The minute you came back to town after being away for the summer, you left cards at the White House, and the Chief Justices received on Wednesday, the embassies received on Sunday, and the Patton sisters—they were very much up in politics—received every Sunday. But the whole world has changed. Washington has become part of the world.” At least there is solace in the fact that, though the world may have changed, the Cave Dwellers remain, indestructible in their secret caves, and that all of them know exactly who the others are.

For a number of years, Minnie Legaré helped run the Dancing Class, which was not a dancing class at all but a series of exclusive white-tie dances held at Washington's Sulgrave Club. “It was a very small dance group that had nothing to do with politics,” she says. “Just the people in Washington and
some
people from the diplomatic corps, the attractive ones. Everyone wore their best jewels and best dresses, but we closed it in 1968 because we wanted to keep it as it had always been, and people didn't want to bother with white tie anymore.”

The people who don't want to bother with white tie are, of course, the new people. In the past twenty years, particularly, the diplomatic corps in the capital has expanded enormously, and the turnover in Congress has been noticeably heavy. In addition, there has been a new group of people—wealthy contractors, real estate developers, lawyers, doctors, and automobile dealers—that has come to Washington determined to rub shoulders, socially, with the city's political power brokers. This is easy to do, they have discovered. All one needs is a house on Foxhall Road, the name of a good caterer, and a willingness to give lots of parties. Starting with House members, who are notoriously invitation-prone, these hosts and hostesses can move on quickly to senators, cabinet members, Supreme Court justices, and important foreign ambassadors. Some of these social entrepreneurs have even made it into The Green Book (“the Yellow Pages,” says one Cave Dweller disparagingly). All of this activity has served only to further isolate the Cave Dweller families from the well-publicized whirl around them.

A few members of old Washington families, to be sure, have tried to fight against this isolation and to adapt to the new order. One of these is thirty-four-year-old Martha Custis
Peter, who is a direct descendant of Martha Custis Washington as well as of Robert Peter. Miss Peter works as a paralegal, is involved in political activities, and does volunteer work for Common Cause, though she admits that her mother cannot understand her. “My mother keeps asking, ‘Why don't you do Junior League?'” she says. “This used to be such a small town. We would keep pretty much to our own circle and look at all the newcomers and sort of ask, ‘Who
are
they?' But Washington has become such a cosmopolitan city. I don't think we can afford to be as snobby these days.”

But Miss Peter is very much an exception to the Cave Dwellers' rule, and most are content with their isolation and with their “own sort.” “This is now a town where, if you've got the money, the clothes, and the jewels, you can make it socially,” says Mr. Clement E. Conger, the White House and State Department curator, who traces his own lineage back to William Ramsay, the founder of the town of Alexandria. “That didn't used to be so, but it is now.” The Congers do not choose to “make it” socially. Neither do Mr. and Mrs. Francis Girault Addison III. Mr. Addison, a banker, is a descendant of Colonel John Addison, who settled in Maryland in 1667. “We
choose
to be invisible,” says Mrs. Addison. “I'm a member of such groups as the Colonial Dames and the Junior League, of course. But there are many people here who live very privately, and they are the backbone of Washington. They are the docents at the galleries, the hospital volunteers, and the supporters of the symphony. They just don't want any notoriety, they don't want their names used.”

And so, invisible and impregnable, Washington's secret aristocracy sits back in its comfortably upholstered caves and watches—through a lorgnette, as it were—with bemusement as what passes for Washington “society” today comes and goes.

Other southern cities, such as Savannah, New Orleans, and Montgomery, also have their versions of Washington's Cave Dwellers, though their roots do not go quite as deep. Savannah, for example, was not settled until 1733, and Montgomery was not much more than an Indian trading post until 1817. New Orleans, on the other hand, can boast that its most famous drawing card, and still its principal preoccupation, Mardi Gras, was first organized in 1699. It also has a most unusual social history. In its early days, under French rule, the city suffered from an acute shortage of women. As a
result, if many old New Orleanians probe deeply enough into their family trees, they are likely to find female antecedents who were native American Indians. In 1721, the king of France, to remedy this situation, dispatched eighty-eight young women to New Orleans from Paris. These ladies, however, were all former inmates of French houses of correction. For the next several years, the king continued to send “correction girls” to the colony until, in 1728, came the first “casket girls.” The casket girls were of a better class, even though most of them came from French orphanages, and they earned their name because each girl carried with her a small “casket,” or
cassette
, of clothing and personal effects. The correction girls had come with nothing but the clothes on their back.

The first respectable women to arrive in New Orleans were so besieged with suitors that duels were fought over the prettiest ones, and—with the cooperation of the Ursuline nuns who had accompanied them as chaperones—some were chosen by lots cast by eager bachelors, and a few were even sold, just like slaves, at auction to the highest bidder. In the generations that followed, of course, during which the city became a more seemly and class-conscious place, a sharp distinction would be drawn between descendants of correction girls and descendants of the
filles à la cassette
. To be a descendant of a
fille à la cassette
was soon the equivalent of having an ancestor on the
Mayflower
. In fact, by the mid-twentieth century, a mathematically minded New Orleanian was able to calculate that, if each claim to descent from a casket girl was correct, each girl would have had to have given birth to a hundred and sixty-two children.

Moving even farther south, to St. Augustine, Florida, one encounters another puzzle and anomaly. St. Augustine is the oldest city in the United States—founded in 1565, half a century before Jamestown or Plymouth and more than a hundred years before New York. And yet no hereditary society of the First Families of St. Augustine, or even the First Families of Florida, exists. If any descendants of the founding families of St. Augustine exist, they have all moved elsewhere, pulled up their roots, and forgotten where those roots were.

*
Not composed of descendants of Minnesota pioneers but of colonists who settled the Colony of New Sweden on the Delaware River in 1638, in what is now the state of Pennsylvania.