June 17, 2007
Nixon’s Uniforms Posted by Fredric Smoler at 02:15 PM EST Josh Zeitz and John Steele Gordon are united in ridiculing Richard Nixon’s burst of enthusiasm for snazzier uniforms for the White House police. As Mr. Gordon remarked, Nixon had been “impressed with the uniforms worn by the presidential and royal guards who had greeted him on a European tour,” but “the entire nation collapsed as one in helpless mirth. The new uniforms soon disappeared, beginning with the hats, which were never seen again. If the United States is to have an imperial Presidency, it seems it will have to be clothed in workaday, republican garb.” I think this is absolutely right. The most vivid and deadly word used to mock those uniforms at the time was “Ruritanian,” which tells you something about what Americans didn’t like about Nixon’s new uniforms. Ruritania was originally an imaginary German state invented by Anthony Hope as the scene for the action in The Prisoner of Zenda, first published in 1894. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines Ruritanian as “of, relating to, or having the characteristics of an imaginary place of high romance,” which describes The Prisoner of Zenda very nicely but misses the reason the word was a devastating crack at President Nixon’s sartorial ambitions for the White House police. The fact is that over the decades the word changed its connotation, and another and I think more accurate Web dictionary defines Ruritanian as “of, relating to, or having the characteristics of a mythical place of high, typically comic-opera romance: ’designed Ruritanian uniforms for the honor guard.’” Ruritanian came to connote slightly goofy, jokey escapism and a kind of Eurotrashy pompousness and triviality. Old and fading powers clung to their plumes, punctilio, and protocol; we were, in one image of ourselves, brusque, direct, and possessed of the fact of power rather than the elaborate poses of the formerly powerful. To call Nixon’s new uniforms Ruritanian cruelly distinguished them from the stern dignity and lack of swank associated with an idealized vision of the Republic. This did not mean we were not imperial, it meant we were not comic-opera types. We could still be Roman, which meant very imperial indeed, but Romans in their great days scorned excessive pomp and were the more impressive for that fact. This points, I think, to a peculiarity of the United States, which is that while we are a society with significant economic inequality, we are in cultural terms a remarkably egalitarian society, and few of us are particularly enraptured by the symbols of traditional European social hierarchy. Shooting is in much of Europe a gentleman’s amusement, but in America it is a sport of both would-be gents and rednecks, with the latter more numerous. The same is true of fishing, and in most of the country, golf. In 1970 the American President had more or less unchallenged imperial power, which was not yet the subject of Schlesinger’s polemic but was not forgiven monarchical pretensions. President Bush, in some ways possessed of much more imperial power than Nixon ever had, comports himself as an imaginary plebeian, with a rustic accent and a frontier tone, and for four years he inspired considerable affection on the strength of this demeanor. He had gone to Andover and Yale, but few made much reference to those details. Nixon, painfully aware that he had gone to neither Andover nor Yale, was briefly seduced by wicked old Europe, falling for a vision that would never have caught Bush’s eye. One lesson is that while in 2007 it may or may not be useful to speak of an American empire, one has not settled the question by pointing to the absence of pith helmets.
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