Ballrooms and the Gold Spoon Oration

When White House expenditures helped defeat a president.

I wrote this essay last July¹ when the president claimed the White House ballroom was being paid for by private money. Now Senator Chuck Grassley would like the taxpayers to pitch in $1 billion for it.²

Private money poses its own ethical issues, but nearly a year ago when this essay aired, what was on my mind was the Gold Spoon Oration, a speech given on the floor of Congress that targeted President Martin Van Buren for his opulence and spending at the public cost. The official title of the House floor speech was “The Regal Splendor of the President’s Palace,” and it was delivered by Charles Ogle (Whig-PA) over the course of three days starting on April 14, 1840. (Three days?! Without smartphones what else were people going to do?)

When I first wrote about Van Buren in my book Whistlestop, I described him this way:

To fix the incumbent Martin Van Buren in your mind, focus not on his height, for which he was given the nickname Little Van, but on his sideburns. Imagine two driver-side airbags fully deploying on either side of a man’s face. This was what Van Buren—or Sweet Sandy Whiskers, as they called him—looked like. You could probably have taken his sideburns in each fist and turned his head like a steering wheel. There is no figure in the presidential coloring book who looks more like the Wizard of Oz than Martin Van Buren.

What I later came to learn is that those sideburns were a sign of wealth and elite city status. (I learned this while re-familiarizing myself with Roscoe Conkling after watching Death by Lightning, the excellent four-part series on Garfield’s assassination. Conkling, also a New York pol like Van Buren, had crazy facial hair too).

Here’s a description of the speech from my book Whistlestop:

On April 14, 1840, the House of Representatives met to consider the Civil and Diplomatic Appropriations Bill. A portion of the bill concerned appropriations “for alterations and repairs of the President’s house and furniture, for purchasing trees, shrubs, and compost, and for superintendence of the grounds.” Charles Ogle, a Whig congressman from Pennsylvania, rose to speak against the provision. It was as if speech had been dammed up within him for some time. The appropriation brought forth the geyser. “Mr. Chairman, I consider this a very important item in the bill—not as to the amount, but as to the principles involved in it. I doubt much the policy of this Government in granting the Chief Magistrate emoluments or revenues of any kind, over and above the fixed salary paid to that officer out of the Treasury of the United States… No former Chief Magistrate ever acted upon the principle notoriously adopted by the present incumbent, of spending the money of the People with a lavish hand, and at the same time saving his own with sordid parsimony.” At this point, everyone in the gallery was pretty sure that the Whig congressman Ogle was going to go on a bit, slagging the incumbent for his gaudy ways. “Mr. Chairman I object to this appropriation on higher grounds. I resist the principle on which it is demanded as anti-democratic—as running counter in its tendency to the plain, simple, and frugal notions of our republican People. And I put it to you, sir, and to the free citizens of this country, whose servant the President is, to say whether, in addition to the large sum of one hundred thousand dollars which he is entitled to receive for a single term of four years, they are disposed to maintain—for his private accommodation—a royal establishment at the cost of the nation? Will they longer feel inclined to support their chief servant in a palace as splendid as that of the Caesars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion?”

This is but the start of the oration. It would go on for almost three days and is one of the most baroque and powerful negative attacks on an incumbent in campaign history. The title of the speech was “The Regal Splendor of the President’s Palace,” but it would come to be known as the Gold Spoon Oration. It won that name from a widely circulated story about the Whig congressman Landaff Watson Andrews of Kentucky. A dinner guest at the White House, he was said to have picked up a “golden spoon” and held it up to the Democratic President, saying, “Mr. Van Buren, if you will let me take this spoon to Kentucky and show it to my constituents, I will promise not to make use of any other argument against you—this will be enough.” Ogle accused Van Buren of being “a democratic peacock, in full court costume, strutting by the hour before golden-framed mirrors, nine feet high and four feet and a half wide… The soul of Martin Van Buren is so very, very, very diminutive, that it might find abundant space within the barrel of a milliner’s thimble to perform all the evolutions of the whirling pirouette avec chasse au suivant, according to the liberal gesticulations practiced by the most celebrated danseurs… Mere meadows are too common to gratify the refined taste of an exquisite with sweet sandy whiskers. He must have undulations, beautiful mounds, and other contrivances, to ravish his exalted and ethereal soul. Hence, the reformers have constructed a number of clever sized hills, every pair of which, it is said, was designed to resemble and assume the form of an Amazon’s bosom, with a miniature knoll or hillock on its apex, to denote the nipple.”

Ultimately Van Buren lost to William Henry Harrison who, despite considerable wealth, ran as a man of the people— the candidate of hard cider and the log cabin. In part, Whigs used the splendor of the office to weigh down Van Buren. The panic of 1837 didn’t help either.

1. It aired on CBS Evening News Plus (RIP).

2. Senate Republicans recently introduced a roughly $70 billion immigration funding package that includes $1 billion for the Secret Service to “harden” the White House complex with above-ground and below-ground security features for the new ballroom. While proponents argue the funds are a necessary response to the April 25 assassination attempt at the WHCA dinner, critics blast the move as a taxpayer-funded “bait-and-switch” for a project originally promised to be privately financed. One way to prove the $1 billion meets the need would be to make the case that the $1 billion is for additional security measures, post WHCA dinner, that were not already being considered to protect the most heavily protected human on the planet.