Book Review: The Imperial Season, by William Seale

Book Review: 'The Imperial Season,' by William Seale: In the1890s, U.S. plutocrats flocked to the Potomac, where they erected palaces imitating the great houses of Paris, London and Berlin - Fergus M. Bordewich, Wall Street Journal

In "The Imperial Season: America's Capital in the Time of the First Ambassadors, 1893-1918," William Seale takes us on an urban safari into Washington's first gilded age, from the 1890s to World War I, when "world power, if yet untested, presented a wholly new context for the United States," turning the poky, dusty city into an aspiring rival to the capitals of Europe. Mr. Seale's wise and witty exploration of an earlier era's intersection of power and pretension comes at an apt time, as surging wealth, breakneck gentrification and cultural renascence are today once again transforming the nation's capital.

The author's seemingly cryptic subtitle refers to the upgrading of foreign diplomatic offices to full embassies during this period, in keeping with the nation's rising importance. Drawn by Washington's new glamour, the nation's plutocrats flocked to the Potomac, where they erected Beaux-Arts palaces in imitation of the great houses of Paris, London and Berlin, creating a grand architectural stage upon which the capital's elites could act out their imperial dreams.

If one had money, manners and entrée to the best homes, life could be a magical whirl. "The exciting new freedoms were coming in, but they had not yet crowded out the graces of living," recalled one debutante decades later, remembering the dances, the "tableaux and lawn parties, beaux and flirtations—how deliciously daring we felt and, oh, how innocent we actually were!"

Glamorous though this world may have been, it was also saturated with snobbery and bigotry. One socialite censured a friend for introducing her daughter to a Jew "without permission." And during the prudish reign of Theodore Roosevelt's wife, Edith, any couple even remotely suspected of having an affair was warned by a military aide that if they did not straighten up they would be dropped from the White House "list." Mr. Seale observes with dry humor that the treatment of diplomats had changed since the 1820s, "when a Mediterranean emissary requested a concubine and was duly provided one at the expense of the American government."

The Imperial Season

By William Seale
(Smithsonian, 265 pages, $27.95)

Mr. Seale, whose earlier work includes a history of the White House, is especially acute in his account of Washington's physical reinvention. To create a cityscape commensurate with the nation's ambitions, architects resurrected Pierre L'Enfant's elegant plan, which had been largely ignored as the city grew higgledy-piggledy during the 19th century. Inspired in part by the Beaux-Arts extravaganza of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, they set out to adorn the city with grandiose civic architecture and spectacular landscaping.

Some creations were resoundingly successful, such as the Library of Congress's Jefferson Building, modeled on the Paris Opéra; Union Station, which its architect, Daniel Burnham, based on elements of the Arch of Constantine and the Baths of Caracalla, both in Rome; and the National Mall, which was converted from a forested strip alongside a fetid canal into the sweeping vista that exists today. Other schemes, fortunately, never came to fruition, including a colossal, colonnaded new residence for the president.

Mr. Seale populates his story with many larger-than-life characters, among them: the powerful House Speaker Joe Cannon of Illinois, who "always looked a little scruffy in his ready-made suits, chewing a saliva-soaked cigar" and who brought with him to Washington "the flavor of the soil and the tang of the farm"; Mark Hanna, the brain behind William McKinley's 1896 election, whose media-management techniques foreshadowed those of the modern age; and denizens of the pompous new American aristocracy, such as Minnie Townsend, who held court from a copy of Versailles's Petit Trianon, and the rough-hewn Colorado mining magnate Tom Walsh, who established himself in a "huge, round-cornered box" festooned with colored marble, gold leaf and silk wall hangings.

Among these princes of the republican court, Mr. Seale's favorites are clearly the obscure Alvey Adee, a deaf, lip-reading, cycling zealot who served as the State Department's arbiter of protocol and liaison to the diplomatic glitterati; and the celebrity journalist John Hay, a pole star of high society who served as secretary of state to both McKinley and Roosevelt. Of Hay, Mr. Seale slyly writes: "Perhaps he might have joined the pantheon of American writers, but he was lazy by nature and, if offered a choice between any two of life's cushions, would always select the softest."

Although "The Imperial Season" is primarily a social history, Mr. Seale does capture pivotal political moments. A notable example is his taut account of McKinley's reluctant decision to go to war with Spain in 1898. The war-averse McKinley, who had seen plenty of bloodshed in the Civil War and didn't want to see more, held out for diplomacy as long as he could, even as his picture was publicly spat upon and "the cry for war seemed universal." In the middle of the night, Mr. Seale writes, the president summoned Speaker Cannon to the White House, and there, standing on the threshold of the library, declared: "Cannon, I must have money to get ready for war. I am doing everything possible to prevent war, but it must come, and we are not prepared. Who knows where this war will lead us?"

It is a moment that stands out, as do others in this finely crafted book, illuminating not only the past but also, if indirectly, our own time, when imperial responsibilities and anxieties still loom large and when power and pretension once again combine to make Washington the center of a restless gilded age.

Mr. Bordewich is the author of "Washington: The Making of the American Capital" and, most recently, "America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union."