Prejudices
Charles Macomb Flandrau
Paperback
(RareBooksClub.com, June 26, 2012)
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ...as being, at the worst, a kind of dazzling den of vice, and, at the best, a resort where semiidiotic families possessing great wealth may, with impunity, concoct grotesque and vulgar--and ever more vulgar--diversions for all the rest of our completely moral, intellectual, high-minded and desirable population to sneer at. Around the mythical Newport of editors and reporters has grown a tradition and a stock of phrases that the country at large eagerly swallows whole. I don't suppose there is a paragrapher in any state of the Union who could possibly grind out four lines about Newport without employing the words "monkey dinner," although there has never been such a thing as a monkey dinner at Newport (whatever a monkey dinner may be), and nobody who lives and entertains here in summer has the slightest idea of what the thing means. Originally, no doubt, the fiction of a reportorial mind, it has become, through repetition and the course of time, as much of an established fact to the nation as the Washington monument or the Civil War. The country in general believes, I am sure, that a dinner party here is merely a euphonious term for a debauch--but, of course, you know as well as I do that a Newport dinner resembles precisely a similar festivity everywhere else in the world where there is great wealth and the strange state of mind known as "fashion."-Here there is sometimes--often, perhaps,--rather too much pomp and circumstance, more servants and American beauties and jewels than the particular occasion justifies. In Europe I have dined at great embassies in the company of famous and important personages, with far less fuss, feathers and war paint than I have been accustomed to during the past month, when I would dine, for...