Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [46]
Independence Day
The New Essex and Sussex, a grand hotel opened in 1914 with colossal white entrance columns that faced the Atlantic Ocean, spread out to occupy an entire seaside block of Spring Lake, forty-five miles up the coast from Beach Haven. Old Glory fluttered high from four turrets above the soaring portico. In the first week of July 1916, uniformed porters attended the parade of chauffeured Pierce Arrows arriving from New York, Texas, the South, and the Midwest to join the summer colony. The sea with its high gull calls and soothing motion seemed a lovely complement to the hotel. By setting and architecture, the New Essex and Sussex had announced itself a capital of the new American empire, an enclave of wealth and power in a bright and optimistic new century. And this, in fact, it was.
Later that summer, President Woodrow Wilson and Mrs. Edith Galt Wilson, the newlywed First Lady, arrived to inhabit the summer White House in nearby Long Branch. The President was joined on the shore for the summer by his daughters, his Cabinet, and the entire White House staff, which occupied the top floor of the Asbury Park Trust, a small five-story bank building in nearby Asbury Park. Philosophically opposed to campaigning from the White House—“the people's house,” he called it—Wilson campaigned for the November election from the front porch of Shadow Lawn, the grandiose Victorian mansion the president insisted upon renting in Long Branch, refusing free lodging from a wealthy benefactor. He ran the country from an office in the bank building, where he transacted the business of the presidency, including press conferences.
The gentlemen of the press were assigned a room in the bank, from which they dispatched wires datelined Asbury Park, Long Branch, or Spring Lake. The Asbury Park Evening Press claimed to be chronicling “the most important year in the history of the nation, perhaps of the world, for many decades.” Mindful that the President would be mulling the Great War and the election, the Philadelphia Bulletin was likewise impressed. “New Jersey will have cause this summer to feel more important than ever, for its name will be blazoned all over the world daily, and that without allusion to its mosquitoes . . . [New Jersey's] shore resorts are more or less famous throughout the civilized world, as it stands now, but this summer will be the ‘red letter year,' for President Wilson has . . . decided to establish his summer capital at . . . Shadow Lawn.”
The President's arrival signaled that the New Essex and Sussex Hotel would become the center of the nation's social life. On Saturday, July 1, New Jersey Governor James F. Fielder, a Wilson Progressive who succeeded Wilson when he went to the White House, launched the social season by hosting the Governor's Ball in the grand ballroom of the “E & S,” as it was fondly known. The “glittering throng” sent the newspapers into paroxysms of nostalgia over the Gilded Age when presidents Ulysses S. Grant and then James A. Garfield established New Jersey's “Gold Coast” as the summer capital; when the British actress Lillie Langtry, one of the most beautiful women in the world, frequented the coast as a respite from touring with She Stoops to Conquer or As You Like It; and when singer and actress Lillian Russell was escorted by the flamboyant and enormous gustatorial tycoon James Buchanan “Diamond Jim” Brady.
Three days after the Governor's Ball, as if to affirm the return of distant glory, a gleaming roadster cruised along the seacoast, turned off Ocean Drive at the New Essex and Sussex, and disgorged William Howard Taft, the ex-President of the United States, all 332 pounds of him. Taft had been only the third American President to ride in an automobile, and thus he was known to make a small ceremony of disembarking, standing regally in the backseat of the open roadster for the photographers, his great girth wrapped in a dark suit crossed at the chest by a gold chain, walrus mustache drooping in the middle distance between enormous jowls and