Close to Shore - Michael Capuzzo [48]
The presence of the First Family continued to titillate the social set. The President's daughter, Margaret Woodrow Wilson, had made her singing debut that week in Spring Lake, performing “My Old Kentucky Home.” Society was especially atwitter over the arrival of the first divorced First Lady. A plainspoken woman, Edith Galt Wilson was said to be offended by the palatial ostentation of Shadow Lawn, particularly the “seventeen complete sets of porch furniture, all different” and “staircases grand enough to fit an entire army abreast.”
As the First Family's every move was chronicled by the press that summer, Wilson became the first American president to achieve celebrity. Perhaps the most unsettling news was that forty-five miles north, in the tenements of New York City, twenty-four children in the past twenty-four hours had died of infantile paralysis. Spring Lake seemed, with its fresh and healthful sea breezes, the safest possible place.
Spring Lake was a haven designed for the wealthy to cavort amid the beauty of nature. The Reverend Alphonso A. Willits, the nineteenth-century “Apostle of Sunshine,” had inspired the affluent of New York and Philadelphia to build around the lake-by-the-sea an Arcadian village.
Two days after ex-President Taft's speech, Spring Lake unwound in breezy summer reverie. Men in high-collared Oxfords and women in corseted skirts and parasols took their fresh-air strolls by the sea, a leisurely cadence softly echoed in the wooden timbre of the boardwalk. Rowers crossed the town's namesake lake, while boys and girls marveled over the porcelain swans and porcelain chicks in porcelain nests that rested on its grassy shores. Live black swans were imported for aesthetic reasons but failed to thrive and were removed. Nature was a classically refined, orderly element in Spring Lake, yet men and women by the lake, as all along the shore, were experiencing the out-of-doors, for the first time, as a balm for the ills of the industrial cities.
The shore was an idyll for the inhabitants of America's largest cities, all of which except Chicago were on the East Coast—New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. “We are crowded and hustled and irritated to the point of physical desperation in our thoroughfares and markets, our tenements and tiny apartments, our shops and street cars,” The Craftsman magazine cried in 1907. “Give us more air and sun and ground under foot and we will give you fewer instances of unfortunate morality, knavery, greed and despair.”
James A. Garfield, while campaigning for President in 1880, had outlined the challenge for America's emerging leisure classes. “We may divide the whole struggle of the human race into two chapters,” he said. “First, the fight to get leisure; and then the second fight of civilization—what shall we do with our leisure when we get it.” The solution for hundreds of thousands was the beach. By 1885, a contemporary noted that the whole East Coast, from Mount Desert, Maine, to Cape May, New Jersey, “presents an almost continual chain of hotels and summer cottages.”
The back-to-nature impulse at the beach, however, did not extend to the bathing costumes. By the proper mores of Spring Lake, women's bodies were draped in dark wool, and men covered up in black, two-piece bathing costumes—mid-thigh trunks and a long, sleeveless jersey covering both groin and chest. The male chest in 1916 was a scandalous zone prohibited from public view. Not until the 1930s, freed by the new glamour of Hollywood, would the male torso be exposed in swimsuits. The California style of the 1930s also inspired the Technicolor explosion of swimming wear, but in 1916, the palate, on man at least, was limited to black. Almost a century later, in the first worldwide study of great white attacks— covering one hundred and seventy-nine cases—nine of ten human victims wore bathing suits