If no one has any concern for the deprived or desperate childhoods of some, is there really any hope for America?
For the vast majority of white Americans the amount of wealth they might reasonably expect to accumulate over a lifetime still greatly outstrips the expectations of most people of color. Since 1963, when many could reasonably contemplate a well-paying job with only a high school education, increasingly numerous whites have become like so many blacks: underutilized at low-wage, dead-end jobs or worse, unemployed.
1790: Print after a painting of George Washington and his family by Edward Savage. Billy Lee, shown standing behind Martha Washington, was the long-time valet to Washington. He was the sole slave of Washington’s to be immediately freed upon his death because of his services throughout the American Revolutionary War. The remainder were to be gain freedom after their mistress's death. Wisely Martha Washington set them free immediately.
To enumerate every ill remaining unchanged since the historic March On Washington half a century ago remains a pretty sobering exercise. As noted already, some situations like the high incidence of Americans living in poverty, seemingly, have gotten much worse since Dr. Martin Luther King lamented, “The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”
During the War of 1812, when British troops set the Capital ablaze, First Lady Dolly Madison saved Gilbert Stuart’s famed portrait of George Washington with the help of a trusted house slave. Paul Jennings, 1799 – 1874, served as valet to President James Madison. Purchasing his freedom in 1845 Jennings published the first White House memoir by a staff member, in 1865, “A Colored Man's Reminiscences of James Madison”.
Living in Washington, D.C. from 1837, Jennings was assisted in his struggle to be made whole by Senator Daniel Webster . In the 1850's, Jennings traveled to Virginia, seeking his children, who had grown up on a plantation neighboring the Madison’s Montpelier with his late wife Fanny. With the commencement of the Civil War their three sons gallantly joined the Union cause.
It's easy to understand how many have come to despair of ever experiencing 'a more perfect union', since fifty long years after the march, and a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation, so much remains to be done to achieve ever elusive equality. Yet a great deal has changed, with many highly significant improvements accomplished since Dr. King delivered his soul-stirring 'I Have a Dream speech'. King’s eloquence thrilled an expectant throng of hundreds of thousands demonstrating for justice and jobs on the Washington mall. It’s been wonderful too, to see scores of folks return to the Capital to relive and renew an exultant moment of impactful activism.
1871: State dinner
1872: Members of the domestic staff during the administration of President Rutherford B. Hayes
But today, anyone wishing to fittingly commemorate the march, need not journey all the way to Washington. Far more conveniently, those seeking to easily understand just how much has transpired to allow us to hope on and to fight on for the United States' redemption, need only sojourn as far as the closest movie theater. Across the nation, Lee Daniels' The Butler, a highly entertaining morality photo-play, justifiably, is leading in box office receipts.
1888: State dinner
1903: State dinner
White House doorman-footman and presidential messinger, Samuel C. Jackson wrote of his 40 years of service for the June 1949 'Ebony Magazine'. Jackson points out changes to the newly renovated edifice to co-workers, Robert Goodloe, Thomas Johnson and John Broadley
It is an inspirational tale all about what it means to triumph over adversity, movingly outlining the career of a diligent black manservant who works at the White House during eight presidential administrations. Some have unfavorably compared ‘The Butler’ to Forest Gump, another old-fashioned block-buster that lyrically uses a broad arc of history to propel the lead character’s personal storyline of quiet grace.
Alonzo Fields supervises a stag dinner given by President Franklin Roosevelt
Alonzo Fields sees off President and Mrs. Truman
My friend designer Michael McCollum, for one, insists, “'The Butler’ hasn’t got either the magic of Forest Gump, or the soul of The Color Purple!” Most often, despite our different outlooks, I largely agree with Michael. But not now. Against a sweeping backdrop of momentous historical incidents, the mundane and modest life of the movie’s African American White House servant is thrown into dramatic relief.
Alonzo Fields lights the candles in the Family Dinning Room
White or black, older and, particularly anyone younger, who previously ever wondered about what the big deal is concerning President Obama’s election, seeing ‘The Butler’ should now have a better understanding of that historic election’s larger meaning. ‘The Butler’ relates the all-encompassing, often ugly historic narrative that made Barack Obama’s accomplishment seem so improbable, a context of toil and trouble that makes it exceptional even in retrospect!
With a luminously all-star cast, including Forest Whitaker, Jane Fonda, Oprah Winfrey, Robin Williams, John Cusack, Mariah Carey, Vanessa Redgrave, Clarence Williams, III, [Linc on "The Mod Squad"] and Lenny Kravtiz, ‘The Butler’ presents in the fictional Cecil Gaines a composite of at least two long-term members of the White House staff. Eugene Allen, and to a lesser degree, Alonzo Fields, provided the model of deference, tact and professionalism that inspired the movie.
What makes Mr. Allen’s story most moving is the extent of progress he witnessed. In the White House when he started work, whites were paid more than blacks for performing identical tasks. But before Allen died at 90, in 2010, he was not only able to vote for a black President, he was honored as an esteemed special guest at his inauguration.
As in Europe, the tradition in America was to employ male servants to perform the most ceremonial duties, such as answering the door and conducting guests to be received or serving meals. According to a 1913 report in the New York Times, the White House staff consisted of a housekeeper, a custodian, three butlers, four men cleaners, three housemaids, one of whom acted also as a lady’s maid, a cook and an assistant cook, two kitchen maids, six laundresses, four doormen, one footman and three chauffeurs. Omitted from this list are the ancillary posts of electrician, plumber, carpenter and seamstress. Mention of a single footman is interesting, inasmuch as the White House's doormen, liveried in dark blue, with silver buttons, in an ordinary great house, would also have been accorded the designation, footmen.
Harold Hancock, elevator operator
Forty-three years latter the Times' Bess Furman revealed how the staff had grown. The Eisenhowers started office with a maître d’hôtel, four butlers, a valet, one pantry man, six cooks, five doormen, only one laundress, six housemaids, seven operating engineers, five electricians and six carpenters.
For over 50 years the White House doorman, by 1977, Preston Bruce devised an angled table on which to organize place cards
December 27, 1961: Preston Bruce with his family, before the Kennedy's Blue Room Christmas tree
1977: Preston Bruce in the State Dinning Room
Supervising the White House staff throughout the 20th century, was the factotum called 'the chief usher'. In addition to the appointment of an assistant chief usher, occasionally other male servants, the butlers, doormen and footmen under him, were also referred to as ushers. Not until the Bush administration recruited Rear Admiral Stephen W. Rochon, was the complex job of chief White House usher held by an African American. Today, under the Obamas it is held by the first woman chief usher, Angela Reid.
In 2007 the Bush administration recruited Rear Admiral Stephen W. Rochon to serve as the the White House's first African American chief usher
2011: Angella Reid, pictured in front of the White House became the first woman to serve as chief usher overseeing day-to-day operations at the President's house. An hotel industry veteran, Ms. Reid was born in Jamaica.
At the turn of the last century, black or white, the staff ate meals together, segregated only by the status of their position. Since the preeminent places were held by men, there were separate meals for black and white upper servants, who dined on the president’s leftovers. Under President Taft two sittings were initiated for meals, based no longer on rank, but on race. Eleanor Roosevelt, in renovating the service quarters, provided for a large space where all the help could take their meals together.
A reticent man, Eugene Allen somehow survived Ertha Kitt telling the Johnsons just what she thought about poverty, too little provisions for youth programs and the war
Born in 1919, in Scottsville, Virginia, Eugene Allen first worked as a waiter at a Virginia resort and then at a Washington, D.C. country club. He came to the White House in 1952. After starting as a ‘pantry man’, primarily responsible for washing and storing dishes after large gatherings, Allen ultimately advanced to succeed to Alonzo Fields’ post as the White House maître d’hôtel. In this capacity he oversaw more than a dozen butlers, cooks and other workers supervising all the planning of the varied social functions hosted at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The length of Allen’s tenure even exceed that of his predecessors. Allen and his wife had one child, a son. Allen he retired as the chief butler in 1986.
The Regans had Eugene Allen and his wife to dinner with the German Chancellor
Alonzo Fields joined the presidential household during the administration of President Hoover. If his departure from White House service in 1953 happened rather quietly, Fields had arrived there under circumstances of far greater poignancy.
Alonzo Fields started life in 1900, in the small, all-Black community of Lyles Station, Indiana. His father, a grocer, led the town's colored brass band, instilling an early and pronounced musical influence on his son’s life. One of a tiny number of African Americans to then aspire to careers as a classical musician, in 1925 young Fields enrolled in Boston's prestigious New England Conservatory of Music. “He had a lovely voice,” recalls a relation, “ deep, rich, almost a baritone, but not quite." The success of contemporaries in Boston, like singer Roland Hays and pianist Justin Sandridge must have affected Fields’ decision to sing opera, to master and teach serious music.
Alonzo Fields, the six-foot-two-inch tall tenor who became the White House's first black chief butler
Initially, during the height of the ‘Negro Renaissance’ this seemed to be a fine plan. Everything was going wonderfully at the beginning. Dr. Samuel Stratton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, engaged Fields both as his butler and acted as his patron. “I confess I didn't relish the thought of being a house servant,’ Fields would write, but it was pointed out that, “if I ever did reach the heights as a concert singer, these [social] conventions he was teaching me would give me a background of good breeding.” Alas, his stardom and success as a singer were not to be.
Marriage, a stepdaughter, the onset of the calamitous Great Depression and Dr. Stratton’s untimely death, in 1931 were to all converge as a tragic blow. Without a job and Stratton’s sponsorship, Fields was forced to discontinue his rigorous education as an operatic tenor.
Alonzo Fields prepares for tea in the Red Room
Going to work at the White House, through the intercession of Mrs. Herbert Hoover, was originally only meant to be a temporary stratagem. Not long before her death in 1934, Hollywood actress Marie Dressler attested to Fields' good looks. Famed especially for her memorable role as a world-weary, one-time beauty in Dinner at Eight, she'd been much taken, after only a brief encounter with Alonzo Fields. Dressler, who left a sizable fortune to her own black servants, was a brilliantly assured comedienne. Years afterward Fields still recalled how, while a guest at the Executive Mansion, the movie star had remarked about how she found him so handsome that he should act in pictures. This was hardly the first time that charm figured in a servant’s steady employment and helps to explain Mrs. Hoover's motivation to recruit Fields for the presidential staff.
Stills of Hollywood actress Marie Dressler with Jean Harlow from "Dinner at Eight". Miss Dressler approved
Accordingly, upon learning of her friend Stratton's death, First Lady Lou Hoover had been quick to inquire about his imposingly tall and attractive young butler. 'Fields' had attended her so amiably during a visit to the university administrator’s well-run house. At the White House, his very first year presented Fields an immediate lifetime highlight. He was able to sing in the East Room in 1932 at the servants’ Christmas party.
Eugene Allen in his daytime white coat worn in summer
Though finding his duties a compelling and rewarding challenge, Alonzo Fields still must have meant to leave soon, once the time was right. But after serving under the Hoovers, he’d then met and admired President and Mrs. Roosevelt. That his respect for the Roosevelts was mutual, is indicated by his rapid promotion. Not long after the Roosevelts' arrival he became the first African American chief butler in White House history.
Following his father's funereal, with Eugene Allen in attendance, John F. Kennedy, Jr. celebrates his third birthday
Ever since F. D. R.’s stint as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, both as an economy, and as a gesture of helpfulness, Eleanor Roosevelt had made a point of exclusively and unfashionably engaging black servants. Customarily black household help were paid much lower wages than their white counterparts. Few love a bargain as much as the rich. Yet outside of the South, in lavish establishments like the Astors’, Vanderbilts’, or Drexels’, more costly white servants, who were mostly Irish and other European immigrants, where hired for the greater cachet they conveyed.
The State Dinning Room ready for action, under Presidents Taft and Nixon
At their Newport ‘cottage’, “Sherwood Lodge”, for instance, southerners Mr. and Mrs. Pembroke Jones, always engaged black help. Proficient at expertly preparing ‘down-home’ delicacies, their cook indeed, was by far more widely renowned than the French chefs of the area’s most deluxe households. But more typically, nearby at the “Breakers”, Anderson Cooper’s great grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt, kept only white servants, with the sole exception of their laundresses. Living and working in a sequestered laundry building on the grounds, never seen by family or guests, these black women were responsible for the most arduous job there was associated with running an exacting and elite household. The luxury of fresh linen damask bed sheets daily, new napkins nearly a yard-square for dinners, for each person at each meal, and three changes of what one wore, every day, for everyone in the household, including servants, was not easily achieved.
Eugene Allen with his assembled force, ready for duty in the Kennedys' private dinning room
Even at the president’s house the dramatic disparity in the pay of black and white workers performing similar chores persisted until the 1970’s. Partly to foster greater harmony by eliminating this stark juxtaposition, the Roosevelts filled all but the most senior staff supervisory posts of the chief usher, chef and housekeeper of their household with African Americans.
An idea of what working at the White House entailed, is given by a few in-house statistics. In 1939 alone, nearly 5,000 people came to a full meal there, another 9,311 took tea, and 14,056 were entertained at receptions, while 323 people were house guests of the first family.
Alonzo Fields stressed that President Harry Truman, whom he chose to stand beside him in his portrait, distinctly had treated him, not like a servant, but like a man. No doubt his interaction with Truman helped Fields to see the essential importance of his proficient service.
“As I always told the Negro servants and dining room help that worked for me,” Fields wrote, “Boys, remember that we are helping to make history. We have a small part, perhaps a menial part, but they can't do much here without us. They've got to eat, you know.”
Alonzo Fields at the center of a 1940's party during off-time with his colleagues and their friends
Retiring at last, in 1952 during the Eisenhower administration, Alonzo Fields, like so many talented African Americans, diverted by limited opportunity, never did complete his college education, or become a noted singer. Instead he moved to West Medford, Massachusetts, where his wife Edna was in and out of hospitals with thirteen operations over the next two decades. Following her death in 1973, from extensive notes he’d taken, Fields wrote memoirs recounting his White House adventures. My 21 Years in the White House was published in 1960. Characterized by a sense of tact and loyalty hard to imagine in our time of tell-all openness, Fields' account of his White House experience was hardly a best seller. But, as he told an interviewer, 'I have no regrets.' In 1980 Fields married Mayland McLaughlin. He died in 1994.
Eugene Allen waiting at table for the Carters and the Reagans
With a wealth of such vivid, everyday White House history to draw on and contrast with the evolving Civil Rights Movement, it’s no surprise that Lee Daniels' The Butler, has turned out to be so diverting. And still, such is the negative knee-jerk response to race in Hollywood, that the country’s most seminal history continues to be ignored and avoided. That’s why Lee Daniels had such a difficult time financing his project initially. It’s also why the movie was injuriously produced on the cheap.
Of course accomplishing greatness from little, delicious chitterlings from pig’s guts, high fashion style with an idea and a needle, typifies the black experience. ‘The Butler’s’ 41 producers and executive producers, its investors, [some of whom are anonymous], put up a total of $16 million in private equity. The remainder of the $30 million price tag was covered through $6 million in tax rebates, $6 million in foreign pre-sales and $2 million in gap financing. “It's a huge achievement,” boasted Harvey Weinstein Co. COO David Glasser, adding “This is not your typical independent movie. It's spectacular how fierce these investors were in their quest to get this movie made. Harvey and I love it when a group of unknown people come together like this.” Lee Daniels underscored these struggles for funding, stating of those who made his film possible, “They put their money on the table when the studios wouldn't. It's a story that's a movie within itself.”
The saddest part of that Lee Daniels’ effort would surely show something of the high costs, the unfortunate and unintended consequences of inadequate resources. In the ‘The Butler’ low funds mean that White House sets, sets meant to communicate the elegance and stateliness of one of the most iconic places in America, are pallid and impressionistic at best
L. B. J. working from bed, in 'The Butler' and...
For real!
But worse by far are the inexact liveries provided for butler Cecil Gaines and his colleagues by Ruth Carter. The Oscar-nominated costume designer whose credits include Amistad and Malcolm X, said of her task, "The challenge was to make sure we were accurate...There's nothing worse than a historical piece that's inaccurate." With Ms. Carter's interpretation of White House 'liveries', i.e. uniforms, so fundamentally wrong, it's impossible not to agree with her statement.
Gloves, white waistcoats, watch chains and an exposed abdomen? At the White House!...
Certainnly not under the Kennedys!
Firstly, as Emily Post outlined in her famous book of etiquette, which first appeared in 1922, “A butler never wears gloves…”
Is this what Ms. Carter and Lee Daniels had in mind?
Below the Mason-Dixon Line, white gloves for black male house slaves had been dictated as a precaution against notions of poor hygiene and a lack of fastidiousness among African Americans. Like slave labor, white gloves had been employed at the White House prior to the Civil War. But despised by black servants due to so slurring an implication, by the 1890's they’d been dispensed with. Carter and Daniels, doubtlessly familiar with the prominent role white gloves played in minstrel shows, have their White House butlers incorrectly gloved over succeeding decades throughout the movie.
Or was it this?
Surely Eugene Allen never failed to button his coat!
Gains’ open coat during the day as he serves President Kennedy, and his white waistcoat, worn with a tailcoat for a state dinner, are equally erroneous. And what makes these errors all the more lamentable, is that the black waistcoat properly worn by a formally dressed butler, wouldn’t have affected the film budget.
Adamant and immutable, Emily Post’s dictates regarding butlers bears stating. At the time of her girlhood, in the 1870’s and 1880’s, men servants with whiskers, butlers dressed in their ‘dress suit’ during the day and gentlemen wearing black and white waistcoats interchangeably with evening clothes, had all been acceptable. Both at the White House and at many other elegant houses, rules about watch chains and mustaches, over the years, came to be relaxed.
Without a doubt, he never wore a white waistcoat, not while formally attired on duty at the White House
“In fashionable houses, the butler does not put on his dress suit until six o’clock. The butler’s evening dress differs from that of a gentleman in a few details only: he has no braid on his trousers, and the satin on his lapels (if any) is narrower, but the most distinctive difference is that a butler wears a black waistcoat and a white lawn tie, and a gentleman always wears a white waistcoat with a white tie, or a white waistcoat and a black tie with a dinner coat, but never the reverse.
Ca. 1908: A footman's and a butler's livery, with gloves! Oh my!
Unless he is an old-time colored servant in the South a butler who wears a “dress suit” in the daytime is either a hired waiter who has come in to serve a meal, or he has never been employed by persons of position; and it is unnecessary to add that none but vulgarians would employ a butler (or any other house servant) who wears a mustache! To have him open the door collarless and in shirt-sleeves is scarcely worse!
A mustache!
A butler never wears gloves, nor a flower in his buttonhole. He sometimes wears a very thin watch chain in the daytime but none at night. He never wears a scarf-pin, or any jewelry that is for ornament alone. His cuff-links should be as plain as possible, and his shirt studs white enamel ones that look like linen.”
Yet more gloves!
‘Can any of this really matter?’ one might ask. It primarily does because otherwise the movie is so very good. There were ways to get around constructing admittedly quite costly, more accurate White House sets. Getting the attire right, ought to have been child’s play. As it is these important details strike a false note as discordant as if music from the wrong time period had been added to the effecting score, much as in the off-putting The Great Gatsby.
As an historian, having found myself between college and graduate school working as a ‘house man’, an occupation combining the duties of butler, cook and char, the efficacy of illustrating big-H events through small-h lives seem refreshingly admirable. Highly isolated by wealth, position, and power, many a sovereign, president or magnate has had their closest brush with humanity through interaction with subordinates whom they rely upon. Since most of us figure among the subordinate class, certainly it's instructive to examine great figures and events from our point of view, too.
1986: Readied for a dinner on Park Avenue.
Today many African Americans seem to have succumbed to hopelessness, giving up on substandard schooling as pointless, as pointless as the attendant promise of sustaining and fulfilling employment for anyone willing to work hard. That’s a promise which too often seems an illusory lie. On the other hand, even when they, or family members, rely on social safeguards to get by, some whites repudiate affirmative action, unions, and public investment in education, health care, and affordable housing, as profligate 'special-interests' scams, utterly devoid of broad public benefit.
As to race relations, in some ways, they seem to have sunken to new depths. With the two elections of Barack Hussein Obama, for some whites one knows they are thinking; 'You all have a black President now. Won't you people ever be satisfied?'
More readily one still hears all sorts of confused takes on race and fairness. Many confuse the issue of cause for effect and effect for cause. How often has one heard poor diet and obesity, violent behavior and lawlessness, illogically decried as the cause of black poverty, as opposed to being seen as symptomatic of America's chronic joblessness?
Once women were deemed unworthy to wait at table
Many are quick to prescribe ‘American democracy’: justice, jobs and prosperity, as the sure cure of rebellion and terrorism in Iraq or Afghanistan. But why is it seemingly impossible for these same people to appreciate how this very remedy would prove equally effective in East New York, Chicago, New Orleans, Watts or Detroit?
Today's equal opportunity is welcome, but not onyx-set shirt studs
Black or white, rich or poor, young or old: seeing Lee Daniels' The Butler might not necessarily alter your world-view. What it is likely to do however, is to prompt thoughts about just how things got the way they are and how the world might be made better.
Excellent essay, Mr. Adams! Exceptionally thorough. It makes me not want to see the film, but learn more about the topic elsewhere.
Posted by: Russlaw | 09/03/2013 at 05:32 PM