Massachusetts Avenue in the Gilded Age: Palaces & Privilege

By Mark N. Ozer

Welcome to Millionaire's Row, where the Gilded Age mansions and clubs of high society still exude a faded elegance. It was here that fiery Martha Wadsworth--avid sportswoman and social maven--and wealthy hostess Nellie Patterson mingled with the likes of famous inventor Alexander Graham Bell and miner-turned-millionaire Thomas Walsh. From the Union Station Plaza and Embassy Row to Dupont Circle and the Washington National Cathedral, author Mark N. Ozer examines the extant Beaux-Arts architecture of Massachusetts Avenue mansions and tells the tales of socialites and politicians who lived and played behind their grand façades.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Mar 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781614236436

Mark N. Ozer

Dr. Mark N. Ozer is a former professor of neurology at the Georgetown University Medical School and is currently a study group leader at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the American University. There he has lectured extensively on the history of most of the great cities of the world. He has translated this interest in a series of books on Washington, D.C. The first, entitled Washington, DC: Politics and Place, was followed by Massachusetts Avenue in the Gilded Age, published in 2010 by The History Press. Born in Boston, he is a graduate of Harvard College with honors in history. He remains active in the national capital�s history community, with active membership in the U.S. Capitol Historical Society, the Association of Oldest Inhabitants, the History Society of Washington, the History Club of the McLean Gardens Association and the Cosmos Club.

Book preview

corridor.

INTRODUCTION

Massachusetts Avenue is one of the most prominent of the avenues of the city designed by Peter L’Enfant in 1790. It was laid out to run northwestward from the area around the U.S. Capitol to the edge of the city. Eventually, its adjacent triangular and trapezoidal lots with multiple street exposures became the sites for grand mansions. However, much of the area still had not been paved on the eve of the Civil War. In 1860, the settled area was between the White House and the Capitol and around Lafayette Park south of Massachusetts Avenue. Not until the development that occurred following the 1870s did the western segment of this street become the site for the mansions that still make it one of the great streets of America today.

During the years from 1890 to 1930, American society was greatly influenced by l’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which produced an architecture that was rich, diversified and flamboyant. L’École des Beaux-Arts was established in 1819 during the Bourbon Restoration under Louis XVIII. It was a successor to a series of institutions originally established as l’Académie Royale d’Architecture by Colbert in 1671 under Louis XIV. Its focus was on the theoretical principles of design. These principles were in large part derived from canonical works from the ancient world and the Italian Renaissance. The proportions of the classical Orders (Tuscan, Doric, Ionian, Corinthian) were part of that tradition, along with axial symmetry. Starting with the 1880s, American attendance at l’École des Beaux-Arts was at its peak. During the American Renaissance, these young architects brought to life in the New World what they had imbibed in the Old.

The first generation of American architects trained in Beaux-Arts principles was among those called upon to design the Chicago Columbian Exposition White City in 1893. The grandeur of the aligned façades of the Court of Honor around the water basin and the use of axis and cross-axis techniques established neoclassicism as the motif of the City Beautiful in an effort to remedy the excesses of the Victorian era. The same persons were invited by Senator McMillan to provide a model for the renewal of Washington. Particularly after 1900, the recommendations of the McMillan Commission for classical architecture in Washington were embodied in the design of Union Station and the Federal Triangle. Such a style was also reflected in many of the great mansions of Massachusetts Avenue during the Gilded Age, which flourished in the winter season from December to Lent until World War I. That season quieted considerably in the 1920s, barring a few stalwarts, and finally succumbed during the Great Depression.

Chapter 1

THE GILDED AGE

The development of Massachusetts Avenue fused the grand scheme of a capital with the ambitions of many of the nation’s most affluent inhabitants. Fortunes were frequently being made overnight in the United States in the latter third of the nineteenth century. The turn of a pickaxe might uncover a vein of silver, gold or copper that could make an unlettered miner into a millionaire. The manufacture of steel, the mining of coal, the building of railroads and the expanding population without labor rights brought riches to many. The essential character of the times was of headlong exploitation of the continent and its frontier in the name of unfettered capitalism and the political corruption that accompanied it. This era of individual entrepreneurs was actually short-lived. Within a generation, the larger-scale and more impersonal corporation had become the characteristic fountain of wealth. Massachusetts Avenue was the result of a very short period in American history: 1865 to 1914.

Although in the past the commercial and financial interests of the North had received favors from the federal government in the form of protective tariffs, during the Civil War, after the defection of the South, these interests were in the position of a pampered only child. Congress bestowed lavish railroad subsidies, new and higher tariffs and favorable banking acts. Indeed, the doubling of railroad mileage had contributed to the Northern victory. The economic supremacy of the North had been guaranteed by the military victory in 1865, but it was doubly ensured by the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by the Radical Republicans in the process of Reconstruction. That amendment included a provision forbidding any state from denying any person life, liberty or property, without due process of law. Designed to prevent the Southern states from denying rights to the newly freed slaves, the Fourteenth Amendment was used by the courts to protect the corporation, which it recognized as having the rights of a person. It served to prevent a state from undermining the power of the increasingly powerful corporations like the railroad companies.

The election, backed by businessmen, great financiers and speculators, of General Ulysses Grant to the presidency in 1868 and 1872 secured economic-political hegemony in alliance with the Republican Party. One of the tenets of that party was that government interference with economic natural laws impeded progress; thus, government regulation should be kept to a minimum. The Republican Party was in power for almost the entire period, with the exception of the two terms of Grover Cleveland. It had tremendous assets, which it used to maintain power throughout most of this era in support of unfettered capitalism. It appeared as the savior of the Union and could thus, by waving the bloody flag, equate party loyalty with national patriotism and charge the Democrats with having fought under the Confederate flag. The Republicans could also offer the voters a surplus of Civil War veterans, from Grant and Hayes to Garfield, Harrison and McKinley. In sharp contrast, the Democrats could offer only one Civil War veteran: General Winfield Scott Hancock. Moreover, the Republicans shared in the aura of the Great Emancipator, obscuring the acceptance of Emancipation by many only as a war measure.

Within this paradise ensured by calls to patriotism, private profits were sacred. The inheritance tax expired in 1870, and the income tax ended in 1872. Corporate or excess profits taxes did not exist. The bulk of government revenue was derived from customs duties and excise taxes on liquor and tobacco—all taxes on consumers. Businessmen could make money on an unprecedented scale by organizing corporations and selling stock to the public. The number of millionaires increased. By 1900, the Senate alone counted twenty-five millionaires; the other senators were likely to be well-paid agents of business.

In Washington, money rather than pedigree mattered. In addition, wealthy men were particularly attracted to Washington by the profits to be made in exploiting the opportunities offered by the expansion of the federal government after the Civil War. Washington couples were frequently middle-aged, with marriageable daughters seeking entry into a society not open elsewhere. Fun could frequently be made of their lack of manners and breeding. Their pretensions were satirized in Mark Twain’s 1873 novel The Gilded Age, in which he took on the role of social critic, decrying the debasement of the values of thrift and honesty in the rape of a continent and democracy.

The battle in Washington between the old and the new, between the values of the generation of the 1850s and that of the 1870s, was marked by geography: it was a battle between Antique Lafayette Square and the nouveau riche Massachusetts Avenue. The new mansions that lined Massachusetts Avenue were designed to be used for entertainment, typically with a grand entrance and a stairway leading to the piano nobile, complete with drawing rooms, a library, a conservatory and a ballroom. The houses provided a site for sumptuous banquets and other forms of conspicuous consumption that characterized the Gilded Age.

One example of such consumption was a reception held by Mrs. George Hearst (Phoebe Apperson Hearst), wife of a senator from California. The walls and mirrors were draped in rose-colored silk, and the mantels were decorated with poinsettia blossoms and lilies. In a doorway between the ballroom and the parlor, there was an umbrella covered with California moss sprayed over with carnations with a fringe of gilded cypress cones. Not to be outdone, her rival, Mrs. Leland Stanford, at a dinner for the wife of former President Grant had a centerpiece of an old gold satin scarf bordered with blue plush and embroidered with begonia leaves. Along the table were silver vases with roses and tall silver candelabra. The names of the guests were on cards painted with the flowers of California.

The city itself had been readied to receive these persons of wealth.

RECONSTRUCTION IN WASHINGTON

During the Civil War, Washington was both a seat of government and a seat of war. It was an important supply base for the Army of the Potomac. Cattle pens surrounded the uncompleted Washington Monument. Bread was baked in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. Most city streets were unpaved and became mud bogs in rainy weather. The few paved streets were destroyed by the army convoys. The sluggish Tiber Creek, filled with sewage and running by the Mall (now Constitution Avenue), brought recurrent epidemics of typhoid fever and malaria, including the death of young Willie Lincoln in the White House in February 1863.