I’m not sure how it happened but last night I was surfing around the Internet and something piqued my interest which led me to go look for something else which led me to go down some rabbit hole and wind up reading this July 1988 Vanity Fair profile of Pamela Harriman. Related to this, I became aware of a 2004 book written by C. David Heymann called The Georgetown Ladies’ Social Club: Power, Passion, and Politics in the Nation’s Capital which profiled not only Harriman but also Katherine Graham, Evangeline Bruce, Lorraine Cooper, and Sally Quinn. I also found a 2004 CSPAN video of Heymann discussing this book.
There’s a lot of really important history involved in those links, and someday I hope to really try to unpack it, but there’s one thing I discovered that is almost exquisite. There’s just something uncanny about the fact that Pamela Harriman was originally Pamela Beryl Digby (from the aristocratic Digby family) and that is was the Santa Monica-based blogger Digby who coined the term “The Village” to refer to Harriman’s whole social milieu.
JESSE KORNBLUTH: You’ve reserved a special place in blog hell for “the Village,” a media establishment you’ve said functions largely as a megaphone for the government.
DIGBY: I’m the one who coined that phrase. During the Lewinsky scandal, Sally Quinn wrote in the Washington Post that her “town” had been besmirched by Clinton’s extramarital affair. The essence of the Village critique is this faux provincialism of wealthy politicians and multimillionaire celebrity pundits-and the ridiculous conceit that they stand for the values of “real Americans.”
Speaking of that infamous Washington Post piece by Sally Quinn, she wasn’t the only one who felt that way about the Clintons. She was just reporting what the Georgetown Ladies Social Club (aka The Village) felt about the matter.
“It’s much more personal here,” says pollster Geoff Garin. “This is an affront to their world. It affects the dignity of the place where they live and work. . . . Clinton’s behavior is unacceptable. If they did this at the local Elks Club hall in some other community it would be a big cause for concern.”
“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”
Of course, Harriman died in February 1997, more than eleven months before the Lewinsky Scandal broke in the news. She was blessed not to see her community trashed and besmirched.
But, since I’ve been talking about the Democratic Party taking a populist economic approach, it seems fitting to think about Harriman’s role as kingmaker for the Democrats. The mother of Winston Churchill’s grandson and economic populism don’t necessarily go together, and that could be a metaphor for problems that still bedevil us.
Harrimans followed in the great traditions of Jefferson, Madison, Van Buren, Jackson, Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Kennedy, and a much larger roster of the economic and social elite, for whom the two political parties were hobbies.
The resentment of the Georgetown Ladies Social Club was the same as the resentment that Richard Nixon bristled at. Nixon and Clinton had not gotten rich first nor had they followed the normal social mobility of becoming a military officer as did Eisenhower. They didn’t think much of Harry Truman the haberdasher either.
But that was before they had Sally Quinn who could put their esteemed opinions into print.
Truman was an active-duty officer veteran of the US Army.
But not a general and war hero. We are talking matters of social class here.
I have a grudging admiration for women like Harriman who marry for money, power, and privilege, but most are also first paramours to those they marry and others.
The Cushing sisters are others that come to mind.
Truman Capote mined his relationships with such women to create Holly Golightly but carefully obscured it by making Holly from the sticks and not born and bred to enter their society on the arm of a wealthy man. His later “Answered Prayers” outraged that set.
Katherine Graham was in a different league from those like Quinn because she was born into the money.
That kind of raises the question: could anyone besides FDR, one of them, have pulled off the New Deal? Or anything like it?
Only if you ignore the role of Congress and not the Village in getting policy into legislation. The Village does try to run Congress however. And has for some time, if the biographies of famous men are to be believed.
That’s Ralph Nader’s take, and while they may be some truth in that because the public at large cuts those born to wealth and privilege some slack, I tend to disagree. An advantage Eleanor and Franklin had was that they knew all the rules of the elites and therefore, were fully aware of when they broke them and for good reasons and had the confidence to tell the elites to “fuck off” (only more politely).
Those that don’t know “the rules” and ignorantly break them and don’t suck up to the elites, don’t fare well. The Carters, for example. Clinton didn’t have the cool or the wealth to behave like JFK. etc.
Seems they didn’t like Andrew Jackson much either.
Andy’s supporters did trash the WH. Then Jackson failed to show up at the inaugural ball to rub shoulders with DC elites. Also, his deceased wife had divorced her first husband (not quite legally before marrying Jackson — but was sorted out later). Divorce only became less rare in the second half of the 19th century among the elites.
Ah, gee. A little country exuberance gets out of hand. A President is really the big general guy, isn’t he. And pity the poor widower in the White House. And he got re-elected, thanks to Van Buren’s little War of 1812 veterans land grant program, which granted land to a bunch of non-veterans or veterans of questionable service or…you get the picture. Ms. Adams just couldn’t understand the promise of the West, now could she?
Most small library branches sorta skip this very fascinating period of US history as the lull between the American Revolution and the Civil War. A similar gap exists for the period between the Civil War and World War II. Which is why most Americans don’t know about the terror war that restored power to the Southern planters-become-capitalists in 1876.
And virtually nothing about the decimation of the native American population.
Most small library branches skip that too. Except in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, where the relocation of the Cherokee is local history and supported by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians’s outdoor drama Unto These Hills, written by Kermit Hunter, which has been performed nightly every summer since 1950 and provides summer stock acting opportunities.
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That is so precious!!! I love the bit about Halperin enjoying the respite from partisanship at these gatherings–where he and Ahmad Chalabi are the only guests who aren’t “known” to be paid-up members of the GOP!
No wait I missed Brazile. But still.
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At one point, figuring out networks like the Village, was as simple as reading the social announcements in the newspaper.
Someone really needs to write a book outlining the architecture of power in DC and how interactions take place over the political geography of politicians, lobbyists, influentials, journalists, and others who orchestrate the events and set the issues.
For Republicans, it used to be stuff like Grover Norquist’s Wednesday meeting and the C Street townhouse financed by The Family.
Would be good to expose the Democratic counterparts because those seem to be the places that good policies go to die.
Would be good to expose the Democratic counterparts because those seem to be the places that good policies go to die.
I presume you heard about what the guy who runs Democratic foreign policy, especially as it pertains to the Middle East, said this weekend?
Was that congratulating Netanyahu for reducing the casualties in Gaza? or some other incident? What did the policymaker say?
Dempsey: Israel went to ‘extraordinary length’ to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza.
IDF training US forces. What could go wrong?
This is the Oligarchs’ country.
They just let us squat here while we provide them with the necessary help.
When they get that automated factory stuff going, you won’t be able to squat. They’re supply siders.
Probably substantially so.
But Ed Muskie in tears –again! — over the entirely expected Reagan re-election? (VF article by Marie Brenner)
And C. David Heymann? About as unreliable and dishonest as an author can get.