The Olivia Letters: Being Some History of Washington City for Forty Years as Told by the Letters of a Newspaper CorrespondentBriggs, Emily Edson
History
The Olivia Letters: Being Some History of Washington City for Forty Years as Told by the Letters of a Newspaper Correspondent
Briggs, Emily Edson
United States -- Politics and government -- 1865-1933; Washington (D.C.) -- History
the struggling crowd of humanity as it passed by in single file.
With astonishment the writer learned by personal experience that Mrs.
Hayes has revived Mrs. Lincoln’s law as to the aristocracy of the
doors. Last Saturday for the first time at a public reception the
writer entered the White House. Seeing an immense crowd struggling to
go through one door, and kept back by the police, while at another in
close proximity only now and then a few were permitted to pass, upon
inquiry it was learned that a door was set apart for the privileged
few. As the hour was about to expire and it was found that if we
waited our “turn” with the crowd there would be no view of republican
royalty that day, at least, it was learned that a fat man in another
part of the mansion had the power to let even a common person slip
through the aristocratic door, and by means of that bribery which the
“minions of the press” know so well how to bestow, access was gained
the “presence” and a picture was hung on the walls of memory, to
last us as long as the soul floats down the great river of eternity.
In the same room the writer had gazed at a wonderful kaleidoscope.
Instead of bits of colored glass, it was men and women shifting about
in the hands of Time, beginning with the rare beauty and unstudied
grace of Harriet Lane as she stood by the side of President Buchanan,
followed by Mrs. Lincoln and her tinsel crown, succeeded by the
daughters of Andy Johnson, who said, “We are plain people from the
mountains of Tennessee; too much, we fear, is expected of us.” Then
Julia Dent Grant, who possesses the wonderful power of conciliating
all the distracting elements which help unite social and political
society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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