FOOLERY, FOPPERY, AND FINERY

America went to extraordinary lengths to throw off the rituals of monarchy. Why would we fall for royal trappings now?

- BY JAKE LUNDBERG

As president, George Washington received visitors once a week, for exactly half an hour. These “levees,” as they were called, were not loose occasions. Washington stood by the fireplace in a dining room cleared of its chairs. Dressed in a black velvet suit, hair powdered, hat in hand, he greeted guests with a formal bow. Handshakes, familiar and egalitarian, were prohibited. Conversation was sparse. The president, per Alexander Hamilton’s instructions, might talk “cursorily on indifferent subjects,” but nothing more. Then, after having been seen by the guests, he was to promptly “disappear.”

If little was said at Washington’s levees, much was said about them, beginning with the fact that the entire practice was imported from the royal courts of Europe. For Hamilton and others close to Washington, this was precisely the point. The public needed to appreciate the full “dignity of the office,” a goal best accomplished by setting a “high tone in the demeanour of the Executive.”

For those opposed to Washington’s administration, the tone was entirely too high. The president’s bows were aloof and stiff. The guests were sycophantic, exhibiting the “cringing servility” of courtiers. All of it reeked of royalty. After attending a levee in December 1790, Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania confessed to his diary the hope that Washington might just die. “If there is treason in the wish, I retract it,” he wrote. But if the president “were in Heaven,” he continued, “we would not then have him brought forward as the constant cover to every unconstitutional and irrepublican act.”