This is a personal diary with some political meaning. The other day I was searching for something by my great-grandfather, a minor figure in the early days of American forestry and later a paper industry executive. I googled his name and was surprised to find the following
letter from him published in 1962 in
Time magazine:
Sir:
The "Cosmos Commotion" [Jan. 19] is a good statement except for reference to the food served at the club--which is altogether unfair and uncalled for.
I have been a member of the Cosmos Club for 43 years and have always considered the fare there the best buy in Washington for the price.
Now, I bet you're wondering, "Kellogg, what can this letter from your great-grandfather be about?" This is what I asked myself. And I answered myself, Self, I bet you know. And so I found the article to which my great-grandfather was responding. Here's how it begins (and I know some of you can see this coming):
The essence of fellowship is sometimes blended with whiffs of politics and publicity, and when the fragrance of bigotry is added, the resulting aroma, as Washington's Cosmos Club discovered last week, can be quite embarrassing.
The Cosmos Club has been a Washington institution for 84 years, now occupies a formal grey limestone building on Massachusetts Avenue's embassy row with 52 bedrooms, three big dining rooms, an auditorium seating 300, a billiard room --and, some braggarts say, the capital's worst food. The club's members have included Presidents William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover, along with twelve Nobel and 20 Pulitzer prizewinners.
But last week the club's "infrangible fraternity" was fractured when its twelve-man admissions committee blackballed the first Negro ever brought up for membership: Carl T. Rowan, 36, the Kennedy Administration's Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs.
It's January 19, 1962. Two months from this date, Bob Dylan will release his first album. (Today, he releases his latest.) How did some members of the club respond to this refusal?
Hearing of Rowan's turndown, U.S. Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith, undergoing treatment for sinus at the U.S. Naval Hospital at Bethesda, Md., promptly phoned the White House, then sent a letter of resignation to the club; Galbraith thereby voided the application of President John Kennedy, whom he had sponsored. Also quitting were [Voice of American Commentator Raymond] Swing, Civil War Historian Bruce Catton, Assistant Secretary of State Harlan Cleveland, Author James P. Warburg and ABC News Analyst Howard K. Smith.
How did my great-grandfather respond? He wrote a snarky letter to Time complaining that they had maligned the food.
Now, what does this have to do with politics today? My great-grandfather was an old-fashioned Republican. He didn't think of himself as a racist. But he was the kind of elitist who, on the one hand, thought everybody made his (always "his") own way, and on the other hand, didn't see how the cards were stacked. He was the kind of guy who, during the 1930s, sent Christmas cards from his yacht bitching about the Roosevelt administration. (This is true.) He was the kind of guy who, faced with his own privilege and power and the exclusion of a great man like Carl Rowan, chose not to respond seriously or to take the high road and resign, but to trivialize the whole enterprise.
Sort of reminds me of this guy:
As heated as a press conference can get, President Bush often seeks an outlet for comic relief. And, today, his outlet was a seersucker suit.
"By the way, seersucker is coming back,'' the president said, tossing a joke at a seersucker-suited reporter from Texas who had poked fun of Bush's own attempt at humor with another seasoned reporter.
Bush and my great-grandfather are pretty different. There's not a thing I like about Bush, but I admire my great-grandfather's hard work and almost mythical account of himself. Unlike Bush, my great-grandfather was an atheist -- he wouldn't even let my grandfather get married in a church. And he did in fact make much of his own way, helping set the course of American forestry before there was such a thing. He was a figure of self-made myth, collosal ego, and not inconsiderable skill and good sense. And he believed in bootstraps just enough to make sure his only child didn't get a dime of his money, leaving it instead to institutions he hoped would name stuff after him. So he was a better man than Bush is. But like Bush, he believed in the indisputability of his own greatness and the naturalness of his own privilege, and the appropriateness of belittling other people when expiedient (and especially when he didn't want to confront something about himself). In this way, he was, like President Bush, an asshole.