Ellen Maury was born at Piedmont, the ancestral home in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1860. Piedmont, near the campus of the University of Virginia and now a part of the campus, was headquarters of the Maurys, one of America's famous families. The public is conscious of the contributions made by the Maury men to history and geography. Thomas Jefferson records in his memoirs that he was prepared to enter William and Mary College by the Rev. James Maury. Matthew Fontaine Maury's name is a byword, "pathfinder of the sea." But the public is perhaps not informed about the Maury women; surrounded by the culture and the youth of the University of Virginia, they were great record keepers and diarists, and among these Ellen is probably the most talented and assiduous of the lot, and it was this habit that served her well when she went to Washington.
Ellen Maury married James Luther Slayden on June 12, 1883. He was born in Mayfield, Kentucky, June 1, 1853. After his father's death in 1869, he moved with his mother to New Orleans. He was educated in the public schools, and attended Washington and Lee University at Lexington, Virginia. In 1876 he moved to San Antonio, Texas, to become a cotton broker and ranchman, and it was probably there that he met Ellen Maury, who was visiting her sister, Mrs. Jane [Lewis] Maury Maverick. In 1892 Slayden was elected to the state legislature, but did not seek re-election. His business career was brought to an end on August 21, 1896, when his firm of Slayden, Clarkson, and Robards, cotton brokers, went into bankruptcy due to the collapse of cotton prices in 1895. On the day following the assignment, August 22, 1896, he was nominated to stand for Congress from the San Antonio district, and was elected in November. This meant that he and Ellen went to Washington for the opening of Congress in March, 1897, and they returned each session for the following twenty-one years. Their experience in Washington was begun on the eve of the Spanish-American War and ended just at the close of World War I.
History will not record that James L. Slayden was a distinguished congressman. His career was honorable and his action intelligent, but no major legislation bears his name. He looked after the interests of his district in an acceptable manner, and often had the courage to cast unpopular votes. In his opposition to a reckless extension of pension benefits, Slayden said: "The Spanish-American War was not a great war. A large number of our troops took the hazard of watermelons in Georgia and Florida, and fought the malaria and mosquitoes, but very few Spanish. . . . The Spanish-American War yielded comparatively little in heroics, [but] paid the most marvelous dividends in politics and in magazine articles of any war in the history of the country."
Early in his career Slayden became interested in the peace movement, and he retained this interest to the end of his career. It finally cost him his seat in Congress. When he first went to Washington he was made a member of the Military Affairs Committee because of the heavy military installations in and around San Antonio. As his interest in the peace movement developed, his concern with military affairs declined, and he relinquished his place on the Military Affairs Committee. He was a delegate to the Hague Convention just prior to the outbreak of World War I. He was president of the American group of the Interparliamentary Peace Union which was devoted to settling international problems by talking instead of fighting. He was president of the American Peace Society and a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mark Goodwin, writing from Washington on Slayden's death in 1924, said his most distinctive service was in drafting an amendment to the naval appropriation bill of 1916 directing the President to invite the nations of Europe to a world-wide conference to provide for a reduction of armaments and the preparation of a code of international law. "The Slayden amendment became the basic idea in the drafting of the League of Nations and was frequently referred to in speeches by President Wilson as 'the mandate of Congress' which was made a part of the covenant."
Then came the election of 1918. World War I was near its end, and the politicians knew it. In the meantime strong opposition to Wilson had developed in Congress, and Wilson decided, or someone decided for him, to purge those who were opposing him. James L. Slayden was a victim of that purge. Since his ideas of peace for the future coincided with those of Wilson, it is difficult to see why Wilson executed him politically. The records do not reveal that Slayden actively opposed Wilson or the war effort. He did keep his head in the midst of war hysteria which was very strong at that time. The real explanation of Wilson's act may be wholly personal, related to the Texas clique that E. M. House took to Washington during the Wilson administration. It may be related to Ellen Maury Slayden's disdain for Wilson and something bordering on contempt for House and his Texas entourage in Washington. Ellen knew Woodrow Wilson when he was a student at the University of Virginia. She did not like him then, and she did not like him any better when he became President and moved to Washington where she had been holding court among the famous personages for many years. She thought him narrow-minded, too much of a Presbyterian, and too much of the schoolteacher. She though his attitude toward Mexico was entirely wrong. When his wife died, Ellen wagered a friend a five-pound box of candy that the President would marry before he left the White House, and she won. She almost wrecked Washington society by conducting a feminine war against Wilson's Cabinet when the Cabinet wives announced that they would return social calls from the wives of other Cabinet members, the Supreme Court judges, and senators, but could not be bothered with social obligations to members of the House of Representatives. The fact that she won this war may not have endeared her to the Wilson set.
Though evidence is lacking that Slayden failed to support the war effort, conditions with which he had to deal may explain why he refrained from war hysteria and clamor for revenge on the Central Powers. The first is that he had long been dedicated to peace. The second is that the German population is and has always been very heavy in the district. Such communities as New Braunfels and Fredricksburg are almost solely German. These people had always been Slayden's friends and supporters, and it was necessary for him to retain their support. It was not in his nature to seek revenge, and to clamor for it now would have ordinarily been political folly.
But the circumstances were by no means ordinary in the summer of 1918. The war fever was at its height, patriotism amounted to fanaticism; the Germans were not numerous enough to elect a congressman, and were too intimidated by the tyranny of war to do so if they could. So by merely holding his position, Slayden lost. The opposition—in this case led by the Texas contingent in Washington—chose Carlos Bee. His qualifications were perfect. He had been in the Texas Senate, had a shock of gray hair, was a good speaker, son of Bernard E. Bee, of an old and respected Texas family. More important than all this was the fact that his wife was the sister of Albert Sidney Burleson, Wilson's postmaster general, a member of the House-Gregory-Burleson clique from Austin.
The telegram was solicited not by Carlos Bee but by the supporters of Alva Pearl Barrett, but Bee was the beneficiary. The timing was perfect because Wilson had decided to make his purge of such members as Representative George Huddleston of Alabama, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, Senator Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia, and Representative Francis Lever of South Carolina. The fact that the telegram had to be solicited indicates that Slayden had not already been marked for political execution.
It is interesting to speculate as to whether Wilson himself dictated the answering telegram. Did he really want to get Slayden out of Congress or did he want to get Ellen Maury out of Washington? Did the presence of this little aristocrat who had a social arrogance equal to his intellectual arrogance make him uncomfortable? Did the fact that she knew him, and didn't like him, when he was winning second place in debate at Charlottesville have any influence? Who knows? The telegram reads:
THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON D.C.
JULY 24, 1918
YOUR LETTER RECEIVED THE ADMINISTRATION AS BETWEEN CANDIDATES EQUALLY LOYAL NEVER TAKES PART IN THE LIGHT OF MR. SLAYDEN'S RECORD NO ONE CAN CLAIM HE HAS GIVEN SUPPORT TO THE ADMINISTRATION.
WOODROW WILSON
On July 25, the day after the Wilson telegram, James L. Slayden published the following statement:
For Twenty-two years I have tried faithfully to represent the people of this district and of the whole country in the American Congress. . . . I was not one of those who sought to plunge the country into war while expecting to remain in the security of private life. However, the President of the United States has said, in a telegram to a local newspaper, that I have not supported his Administration. No matter how false the statements made to the President that procured this telegram, my continued candidacy for Congress, in view of it, will appear to put me in opposition to those charged with the prosecution of the war, at a time when every good American must support the country regardless of his personal fortunes. I therefore announce my withdrawal from the race for Congress.
James L. Slayden
[It was the supporters of a third candidate, A. P. Barrett, who sent the telegram. Ironically, he was defeated by Carlos Bee. The decision lay in the hands of the German voters to whom Slayden's strength went. In the election of 1920 Slayden attempted a comeback. Both Bee and Slayden were defeated by Harry M. Wurzbach, a Republican.]
It was March 3, 1919, that the Slaydens caught the train to Texas, knowing that a long political career had ended. There seems little doubt that he had been a casualty of the crossfire of politics. The harried Wilson had been guilty of an injustice. According to Mark Goodwin, Slayden "always thought that Mr. Wilson regretted having sent the telegram."
If James L. Slayden escapes the oblivion that shrouds most congressmen, it will be because of the diminutive Ellen—less than five feet tall—who had been his companion throughout his long service in Washington. As a Maury she had membership in one of the distinguished American families, a family that has spread the name Maury all over the country. The Maurys were related to the Lewises, of Lewis and Clark fame. The Langhorne sisters, the Gibson girls, were cousins, and that includes Lady Astor. Ellen Maury's sister, Jane, married Albert Maverick, of another famous family. Jane was the mother of the late Maury Maverick, who went to Congress from Slayden's San Antonio district.
Since the Slaydens had no children, Ellen was free to write for newspapers and magazines, to serve as secretary to her husband, and to exercise her sophisticated charms on Washington society.
We have her word for it that she never attended a real school a day in her life but that she was highly literate from wide reading and good remembering none could doubt. Her early notebooks were studded with quotations from the best writers. She contributed to Century, to the New York papers, and was the first society editor of the San Antonio Express.
Never until she went to Washington had she had a real outlet for her born talent, that of a reporter with all the social graces, a keen hard intelligence, and apparently a complete awareness of the drama going on around her. Her background was perfect for the role she was to play in a great triangle from the Maury homestead of Piedmont in Virginia to the Maverick clan in Texas to the Capitol in Washington, where all the political and social forces of the nation met to engage in the great game of strut and compromise which is the art of government in a democracy. She was enough of a democrat to be acceptable in Texas, enough of an aristocrat to please the Virginians; and a combination of personal charm, wit, and design made her much sought after in Washington. There was just enough snob in her to make her intriguing and a little challenging in all three places. What she had above all else—and she was fully conscious that she had it—was social acceptance. She quickly mastered the Washington protocol, and the family legend tells that she taught many newcomers to Washington about napery, silver, calling procedure, and who sat next to whom at dinner. It is doubtful that she was ever caught in a social error.
It must be remembered that when she went to Washington women were supposed to be seen more than heard. She played this role as best she could, considering her nature and talents. She never intruded herself in front of J., but she built a background for him that would make any politician proud. The men—and perhaps the women too—had to go by him to get to her, and they did. It is a family story that they reached Washington with about $50, but even so she converted a rather dreary rented apartment into a place of charm and elegance. Her household effects, now distributed among the Mavericks and the Maurys, from Virginia to Texas, are distinctive, the brasses, the silver, the samovars, the braziers, and the furniture. Some of her comments on the coldness and lack of charm in the great houses of Washington indicate her desire to put some personality into these impersonal places.
Ellen Maury Slayden was all feminine, and she wanted other women to be feminine too. As a social arbiter, she was uncompromising. She could not endure the hackneyed social phrases. The formal speech of the Victorian age was breaking down, and she did not like what was taking its place. The stock reply of "just fine" in response to the common inquiry of "How are you?" she would not endure among her nieces. "Don't say that," she would plead.
"What should I say, Aunt Ellen?"
"Say 'Very well, thank you.'"
One niece recalls a trip on the San Antonio trolley. A young lady sitting beside Ellen began to make her toilet—in public. She combed her hair, touched up her lips, and powdered her face. Aunt Ellen looked at her appraisingly. "Young lady," she said coolly, "you forgot something."
"What did I forget?" asked the puzzled girl.
"You haven't brushed your teeth."
But Ellen was not all Victorian. She believed in woman suffrage but was irked by the bad manners and bad dress of the professional suffragettes. She did not favor prohibition, not because she was from the beer town of San Antonio but probably because she was from Virginia where they know how to drink wine and hold hard liquor. Though she was very fond of Mrs. Bryan, her strictures on Bryan's grape-juice functions in Washington and her description of the contempt of the imported European caterers for the stuff they had to serve is a masterly job of reporting, with the reporter's preference showing.
What the public did not know about this little woman who knew everybody who was anybody is that she was a combination of Dr. Boswell and Samuel Pepys. For twenty-two years she kept cases on Washington official society, relieved now and then by some comedy or pathos from Texas or Virginia. While she was being gracious to a senator or congressman, a diplomat or scholar, she was appraising him with feminine realism. When she went home from some reception or dinner, she wrote down in her notebook what went on there. In some instances she did not wait to go home, but made her notes on the menu cards or programs. The notebooks were filled, and the stock of them grew to formidable proportions by the time she left Washington in 1919. She seems to have had no idea of writing a book, until she returned to San Antonio at the age of fifty-nine.
She had seven more years to live, but the lingering illness that brought her death took about two of these. She must have transmitted her notes into the book during the five years from 1919 to 1924. She did a chapter for each of the twenty-two years she was in Washington, and brought the story to a dramatic close with the scene on the train bringing the Slaydens home.
It is remarkable that her manuscript had to wait nearly half a century for a publisher. She did not have time to seek a publisher, and on her death she left the manuscript to Maury Maverick. Maury was just beginning a tempestuous career as an attorney and politician, and his life was too exciting for him to undertake marketing a memoir by a woman. There is evidence that he sent it to one magazine publisher, but it was the wrong one. In fact, many publishers might have shied away from it at the time. For one thing, her comments on people still living might have caused unpleasantness. For another, the people—and the publishers—were a little tired of what went on between 1898 and 1918. The Republican years had been relieved of unutterable dullness only by the antics of Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson brought some hope, but his domestic program was blasted by a world catastrophe. The frenzy of war and the ecstasy of victory—sardonically recorded here—were followed by disillusionment that was at its height when Ellen Slayden finished her story, when the world she knew was falling down in the days of bootlegging, walkathons, and flagpole sittings, when women were flappers instead of ladies, and men were exhibiting their egos in silk shirts. It was an era of bad taste and bad manners, to be ended by the stock market crash of 1929. During the depression following the crash, no one wanted to publish a book and few wanted to read one. It is significant that when this manuscript was brought to light in 1961, it was accepted by the first publisher to examine it. The editors at Harper & Row have cut some of the more trivial material from the original manuscript, and in a few instances they have inserted entries from Ellen Slayden's original, hand-written notebooks—anecdotes which she evidently felt would be indiscreet to publish in her time.
Readers of the journal need not, should not, expect to find their current political opinions confirmed or all their social views supported by this daughter of a Virginian and wife of a Kentuckian residing in Washington, Virginia and Texas in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The historic value of her narrative is that it reveals an age as seen by a woman of awareness, sensitivity and amazing candor. When she gets through with Theodore Roosevelt or William Howard Taft or Woodrow Wilson or "Colonel" E. M. House or Porfirio Díaz, and many others of that day, there is no doubt as to her opinion of them. She may not leave them great, but she leaves them, every one, quite human.
Washington Wife is among the best contemporaneous records of the period between the Spanish-American War—which announced that the United States was a world power—and World War I, which defined the duties and fixed the cost of holding first place. Ellen Slayden not only recorded the social life of Washington, Texas and Virginia, but she took note of almost every historical event of importance in the nation. Though her touch was light, her observations were intelligent, and always personal. Five books have portrayed this period, or a part of it, and all are indeed notable. They are The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, The Letters of Archibald Butt, Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen, Our Times by Mark Sullivan, and 42 Years in the White House by Ike Hoover. Washington Wife belongs with this group, but in this distinguished company it is unique. It is the only account written by a woman, it is the only view of national and world affairs that gives the feminine point of view, the only one that deals to any extent with the feminine contingent in the national capital.
Walter Prescott Webb, Austin, Texas
Ellen Maury married James Luther Slayden on June 12, 1883. He was born in Mayfield, Kentucky, June 1, 1853. After his father's death in 1869, he moved with his mother to New Orleans. He was educated in the public schools, and attended Washington and Lee University at Lexington, Virginia. In 1876 he moved to San Antonio, Texas, to become a cotton broker and ranchman, and it was probably there that he met Ellen Maury, who was visiting her sister, Mrs. Jane [Lewis] Maury Maverick. In 1892 Slayden was elected to the state legislature, but did not seek re-election. His business career was brought to an end on August 21, 1896, when his firm of Slayden, Clarkson, and Robards, cotton brokers, went into bankruptcy due to the collapse of cotton prices in 1895. On the day following the assignment, August 22, 1896, he was nominated to stand for Congress from the San Antonio district, and was elected in November. This meant that he and Ellen went to Washington for the opening of Congress in March, 1897, and they returned each session for the following twenty-one years. Their experience in Washington was begun on the eve of the Spanish-American War and ended just at the close of World War I.
History will not record that James L. Slayden was a distinguished congressman. His career was honorable and his action intelligent, but no major legislation bears his name. He looked after the interests of his district in an acceptable manner, and often had the courage to cast unpopular votes. In his opposition to a reckless extension of pension benefits, Slayden said: "The Spanish-American War was not a great war. A large number of our troops took the hazard of watermelons in Georgia and Florida, and fought the malaria and mosquitoes, but very few Spanish. . . . The Spanish-American War yielded comparatively little in heroics, [but] paid the most marvelous dividends in politics and in magazine articles of any war in the history of the country."
Early in his career Slayden became interested in the peace movement, and he retained this interest to the end of his career. It finally cost him his seat in Congress. When he first went to Washington he was made a member of the Military Affairs Committee because of the heavy military installations in and around San Antonio. As his interest in the peace movement developed, his concern with military affairs declined, and he relinquished his place on the Military Affairs Committee. He was a delegate to the Hague Convention just prior to the outbreak of World War I. He was president of the American group of the Interparliamentary Peace Union which was devoted to settling international problems by talking instead of fighting. He was president of the American Peace Society and a trustee of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Mark Goodwin, writing from Washington on Slayden's death in 1924, said his most distinctive service was in drafting an amendment to the naval appropriation bill of 1916 directing the President to invite the nations of Europe to a world-wide conference to provide for a reduction of armaments and the preparation of a code of international law. "The Slayden amendment became the basic idea in the drafting of the League of Nations and was frequently referred to in speeches by President Wilson as 'the mandate of Congress' which was made a part of the covenant."
Then came the election of 1918. World War I was near its end, and the politicians knew it. In the meantime strong opposition to Wilson had developed in Congress, and Wilson decided, or someone decided for him, to purge those who were opposing him. James L. Slayden was a victim of that purge. Since his ideas of peace for the future coincided with those of Wilson, it is difficult to see why Wilson executed him politically. The records do not reveal that Slayden actively opposed Wilson or the war effort. He did keep his head in the midst of war hysteria which was very strong at that time. The real explanation of Wilson's act may be wholly personal, related to the Texas clique that E. M. House took to Washington during the Wilson administration. It may be related to Ellen Maury Slayden's disdain for Wilson and something bordering on contempt for House and his Texas entourage in Washington. Ellen knew Woodrow Wilson when he was a student at the University of Virginia. She did not like him then, and she did not like him any better when he became President and moved to Washington where she had been holding court among the famous personages for many years. She thought him narrow-minded, too much of a Presbyterian, and too much of the schoolteacher. She though his attitude toward Mexico was entirely wrong. When his wife died, Ellen wagered a friend a five-pound box of candy that the President would marry before he left the White House, and she won. She almost wrecked Washington society by conducting a feminine war against Wilson's Cabinet when the Cabinet wives announced that they would return social calls from the wives of other Cabinet members, the Supreme Court judges, and senators, but could not be bothered with social obligations to members of the House of Representatives. The fact that she won this war may not have endeared her to the Wilson set.
Though evidence is lacking that Slayden failed to support the war effort, conditions with which he had to deal may explain why he refrained from war hysteria and clamor for revenge on the Central Powers. The first is that he had long been dedicated to peace. The second is that the German population is and has always been very heavy in the district. Such communities as New Braunfels and Fredricksburg are almost solely German. These people had always been Slayden's friends and supporters, and it was necessary for him to retain their support. It was not in his nature to seek revenge, and to clamor for it now would have ordinarily been political folly.
But the circumstances were by no means ordinary in the summer of 1918. The war fever was at its height, patriotism amounted to fanaticism; the Germans were not numerous enough to elect a congressman, and were too intimidated by the tyranny of war to do so if they could. So by merely holding his position, Slayden lost. The opposition—in this case led by the Texas contingent in Washington—chose Carlos Bee. His qualifications were perfect. He had been in the Texas Senate, had a shock of gray hair, was a good speaker, son of Bernard E. Bee, of an old and respected Texas family. More important than all this was the fact that his wife was the sister of Albert Sidney Burleson, Wilson's postmaster general, a member of the House-Gregory-Burleson clique from Austin.
The telegram was solicited not by Carlos Bee but by the supporters of Alva Pearl Barrett, but Bee was the beneficiary. The timing was perfect because Wilson had decided to make his purge of such members as Representative George Huddleston of Alabama, Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, Senator Thomas W. Hardwick of Georgia, and Representative Francis Lever of South Carolina. The fact that the telegram had to be solicited indicates that Slayden had not already been marked for political execution.
It is interesting to speculate as to whether Wilson himself dictated the answering telegram. Did he really want to get Slayden out of Congress or did he want to get Ellen Maury out of Washington? Did the presence of this little aristocrat who had a social arrogance equal to his intellectual arrogance make him uncomfortable? Did the fact that she knew him, and didn't like him, when he was winning second place in debate at Charlottesville have any influence? Who knows? The telegram reads:
THE WHITE HOUSE WASHINGTON D.C.
JULY 24, 1918
YOUR LETTER RECEIVED THE ADMINISTRATION AS BETWEEN CANDIDATES EQUALLY LOYAL NEVER TAKES PART IN THE LIGHT OF MR. SLAYDEN'S RECORD NO ONE CAN CLAIM HE HAS GIVEN SUPPORT TO THE ADMINISTRATION.
WOODROW WILSON
On July 25, the day after the Wilson telegram, James L. Slayden published the following statement:
For Twenty-two years I have tried faithfully to represent the people of this district and of the whole country in the American Congress. . . . I was not one of those who sought to plunge the country into war while expecting to remain in the security of private life. However, the President of the United States has said, in a telegram to a local newspaper, that I have not supported his Administration. No matter how false the statements made to the President that procured this telegram, my continued candidacy for Congress, in view of it, will appear to put me in opposition to those charged with the prosecution of the war, at a time when every good American must support the country regardless of his personal fortunes. I therefore announce my withdrawal from the race for Congress.
James L. Slayden
[It was the supporters of a third candidate, A. P. Barrett, who sent the telegram. Ironically, he was defeated by Carlos Bee. The decision lay in the hands of the German voters to whom Slayden's strength went. In the election of 1920 Slayden attempted a comeback. Both Bee and Slayden were defeated by Harry M. Wurzbach, a Republican.]
It was March 3, 1919, that the Slaydens caught the train to Texas, knowing that a long political career had ended. There seems little doubt that he had been a casualty of the crossfire of politics. The harried Wilson had been guilty of an injustice. According to Mark Goodwin, Slayden "always thought that Mr. Wilson regretted having sent the telegram."
If James L. Slayden escapes the oblivion that shrouds most congressmen, it will be because of the diminutive Ellen—less than five feet tall—who had been his companion throughout his long service in Washington. As a Maury she had membership in one of the distinguished American families, a family that has spread the name Maury all over the country. The Maurys were related to the Lewises, of Lewis and Clark fame. The Langhorne sisters, the Gibson girls, were cousins, and that includes Lady Astor. Ellen Maury's sister, Jane, married Albert Maverick, of another famous family. Jane was the mother of the late Maury Maverick, who went to Congress from Slayden's San Antonio district.
Since the Slaydens had no children, Ellen was free to write for newspapers and magazines, to serve as secretary to her husband, and to exercise her sophisticated charms on Washington society.
We have her word for it that she never attended a real school a day in her life but that she was highly literate from wide reading and good remembering none could doubt. Her early notebooks were studded with quotations from the best writers. She contributed to Century, to the New York papers, and was the first society editor of the San Antonio Express.
Never until she went to Washington had she had a real outlet for her born talent, that of a reporter with all the social graces, a keen hard intelligence, and apparently a complete awareness of the drama going on around her. Her background was perfect for the role she was to play in a great triangle from the Maury homestead of Piedmont in Virginia to the Maverick clan in Texas to the Capitol in Washington, where all the political and social forces of the nation met to engage in the great game of strut and compromise which is the art of government in a democracy. She was enough of a democrat to be acceptable in Texas, enough of an aristocrat to please the Virginians; and a combination of personal charm, wit, and design made her much sought after in Washington. There was just enough snob in her to make her intriguing and a little challenging in all three places. What she had above all else—and she was fully conscious that she had it—was social acceptance. She quickly mastered the Washington protocol, and the family legend tells that she taught many newcomers to Washington about napery, silver, calling procedure, and who sat next to whom at dinner. It is doubtful that she was ever caught in a social error.
It must be remembered that when she went to Washington women were supposed to be seen more than heard. She played this role as best she could, considering her nature and talents. She never intruded herself in front of J., but she built a background for him that would make any politician proud. The men—and perhaps the women too—had to go by him to get to her, and they did. It is a family story that they reached Washington with about $50, but even so she converted a rather dreary rented apartment into a place of charm and elegance. Her household effects, now distributed among the Mavericks and the Maurys, from Virginia to Texas, are distinctive, the brasses, the silver, the samovars, the braziers, and the furniture. Some of her comments on the coldness and lack of charm in the great houses of Washington indicate her desire to put some personality into these impersonal places.
Ellen Maury Slayden was all feminine, and she wanted other women to be feminine too. As a social arbiter, she was uncompromising. She could not endure the hackneyed social phrases. The formal speech of the Victorian age was breaking down, and she did not like what was taking its place. The stock reply of "just fine" in response to the common inquiry of "How are you?" she would not endure among her nieces. "Don't say that," she would plead.
"What should I say, Aunt Ellen?"
"Say 'Very well, thank you.'"
One niece recalls a trip on the San Antonio trolley. A young lady sitting beside Ellen began to make her toilet—in public. She combed her hair, touched up her lips, and powdered her face. Aunt Ellen looked at her appraisingly. "Young lady," she said coolly, "you forgot something."
"What did I forget?" asked the puzzled girl.
"You haven't brushed your teeth."
But Ellen was not all Victorian. She believed in woman suffrage but was irked by the bad manners and bad dress of the professional suffragettes. She did not favor prohibition, not because she was from the beer town of San Antonio but probably because she was from Virginia where they know how to drink wine and hold hard liquor. Though she was very fond of Mrs. Bryan, her strictures on Bryan's grape-juice functions in Washington and her description of the contempt of the imported European caterers for the stuff they had to serve is a masterly job of reporting, with the reporter's preference showing.
What the public did not know about this little woman who knew everybody who was anybody is that she was a combination of Dr. Boswell and Samuel Pepys. For twenty-two years she kept cases on Washington official society, relieved now and then by some comedy or pathos from Texas or Virginia. While she was being gracious to a senator or congressman, a diplomat or scholar, she was appraising him with feminine realism. When she went home from some reception or dinner, she wrote down in her notebook what went on there. In some instances she did not wait to go home, but made her notes on the menu cards or programs. The notebooks were filled, and the stock of them grew to formidable proportions by the time she left Washington in 1919. She seems to have had no idea of writing a book, until she returned to San Antonio at the age of fifty-nine.
She had seven more years to live, but the lingering illness that brought her death took about two of these. She must have transmitted her notes into the book during the five years from 1919 to 1924. She did a chapter for each of the twenty-two years she was in Washington, and brought the story to a dramatic close with the scene on the train bringing the Slaydens home.
It is remarkable that her manuscript had to wait nearly half a century for a publisher. She did not have time to seek a publisher, and on her death she left the manuscript to Maury Maverick. Maury was just beginning a tempestuous career as an attorney and politician, and his life was too exciting for him to undertake marketing a memoir by a woman. There is evidence that he sent it to one magazine publisher, but it was the wrong one. In fact, many publishers might have shied away from it at the time. For one thing, her comments on people still living might have caused unpleasantness. For another, the people—and the publishers—were a little tired of what went on between 1898 and 1918. The Republican years had been relieved of unutterable dullness only by the antics of Theodore Roosevelt. Wilson brought some hope, but his domestic program was blasted by a world catastrophe. The frenzy of war and the ecstasy of victory—sardonically recorded here—were followed by disillusionment that was at its height when Ellen Slayden finished her story, when the world she knew was falling down in the days of bootlegging, walkathons, and flagpole sittings, when women were flappers instead of ladies, and men were exhibiting their egos in silk shirts. It was an era of bad taste and bad manners, to be ended by the stock market crash of 1929. During the depression following the crash, no one wanted to publish a book and few wanted to read one. It is significant that when this manuscript was brought to light in 1961, it was accepted by the first publisher to examine it. The editors at Harper & Row have cut some of the more trivial material from the original manuscript, and in a few instances they have inserted entries from Ellen Slayden's original, hand-written notebooks—anecdotes which she evidently felt would be indiscreet to publish in her time.
Readers of the journal need not, should not, expect to find their current political opinions confirmed or all their social views supported by this daughter of a Virginian and wife of a Kentuckian residing in Washington, Virginia and Texas in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The historic value of her narrative is that it reveals an age as seen by a woman of awareness, sensitivity and amazing candor. When she gets through with Theodore Roosevelt or William Howard Taft or Woodrow Wilson or "Colonel" E. M. House or Porfirio Díaz, and many others of that day, there is no doubt as to her opinion of them. She may not leave them great, but she leaves them, every one, quite human.
Washington Wife is among the best contemporaneous records of the period between the Spanish-American War—which announced that the United States was a world power—and World War I, which defined the duties and fixed the cost of holding first place. Ellen Slayden not only recorded the social life of Washington, Texas and Virginia, but she took note of almost every historical event of importance in the nation. Though her touch was light, her observations were intelligent, and always personal. Five books have portrayed this period, or a part of it, and all are indeed notable. They are The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, The Letters of Archibald Butt, Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen, Our Times by Mark Sullivan, and 42 Years in the White House by Ike Hoover. Washington Wife belongs with this group, but in this distinguished company it is unique. It is the only account written by a woman, it is the only view of national and world affairs that gives the feminine point of view, the only one that deals to any extent with the feminine contingent in the national capital.
Walter Prescott Webb, Austin, Texas
