A Biased Look at Presidential Manners

Lucy Webb Hayes was a popular hostess in Washington D.C. ; “Mrs. Hayes, on one of her tours with her husband, was asked if she did not get tired of seeing so many people and going so much, and she replied: ‘Oh, no; I never get tired of having a good time.’”—  Laura Carter Holloway

Mr. and Mrs. Hayes’ Manners

There are among Americans two types of good manners. They are not indeed confined to Americans, for Tennyson describes them well enough in his “Walking to the Mail:”

Kind nature is the best; those manners next 

Which fit us like a nature second hand; 

Which are indeed the manners of the great.

There is a certain refined and high bred polish, acquired by many Americans from foreign travel; and acquired more easily, I suspect, by them than any northern race. Such a manner, when combined with a kind heart, is a charming thing to see; it would be a good thing to have in the White House. But better still it is to have manners that are the gift of “kind nature;” that grow from the soil of a simple and genial spirit, cultivated by home and books and daily intelligent companionship, rather than by travel and conventional society. 

One whose manners are of this type may go any where and appear at ease anywhere; while the most graceful manners of the conventional type have certain limitations of their own, may sometimes be so placed as to be very ill at ease. Thus I noticed that, when the Emperor and Empress of Brazil were here, some persons of great social experience were quite perplexed to know how to treat them, they being such very plain and independent Imperial Majesties, traveling incognito in a Republic, whereas those who had never been presented at Court found no difficulty in treating them as they would any other pair of intelligent foreign visitors. 

No matter what may be the follies of our travelers, nothing has ever shaken my conviction that American manners of the best type are the best in the world, because they are the nearest to “kind nature,” it is such manners as these we ought to see, and I think do actually see, just now, in the occupants of the White House. It may be thought presumptuous in a man holding somewhat radical convictions to say it, yet I not only think that the foundation of nature’s manners is best laid in conscience, but that some form of the religious sentiment is almost essential for the truest polish and grace. 

One of the best descriptions known to man of thoroughly beautiful manners is to be found in Clarence King's story of “Cut-off Copple’s,” where he describes a lonely widow in the Sierra Nevada, keeping a wayside house of entertainment for rough miners, and remaining there among utterly alien scenes, that she might fulfill a pledge to her dying husband that his debts should be paid. ”O that unquenchable Christian fire,” says King after his brief sketch of her, “how pure the gold of its result! It needs no practical elegance, no social greatness for its success; only the warm human heart, and out of it shall come a sacred calm and gentleness, such as no power, no wealth, no culture, may ever hope to win. No words of mine would outline the beauty of that plain, weary, old woman, the sad sweet patience of those gray eyes, or the spirit of overflowing goodness which cheered and enlivened the half hour we spent there.”

 And I think that something of this grace of conscientiousness and unpretending religious feeling without narrowness in bigotry, may be found at the White House also. And something of this gratifying impression of sincere and noble qualities is left behind, I think, wherever our new President and wife are known. – Col. Higginson in the Woman's Journal, 1877

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