06:57

[Music – Ain’t She Sweet by Piccadilly Revels Band, Album Charleston – Great Stars Of the 20s]

Section 2 – History & Historiography

[Music Fade Out]

07:10

There are so many wedding announcements in the air.  Louise Van Alen and Prince Alexis Mdivani will be in the married this May 1931 in Newport, Rhode Island.  Their engagement while celebrated in the press is not so well received by her mother and brothers.  In March, tennis sensation Frank Shields announces his engagement to “Billy” Rebecca Tenney right after his appointment on the US Davis Cup team.  His future brother-in-law is surely happy, not so sure about the father-in-law who now serves as Frank’s boss at the bank.

07:43

Then there is Huntington Hartford.  His sudden elopement will be kept a secret for a bit, first from his mother then by his mother.  For him, this decision was an act of rebellion and an assertion of independence from Henrietta’s overly controlling and smothering ways.

At Harvard especially, Huntington is often criticized for some of his more outlandish purchases.  For old money, it is preferred that wealth be hidden by less ostentatious displays.  However Henrietta and Hartford are both the sorts that want to buy bigger and better. 

08:18

One year he will have a 12 cylinder Cadillac and the next a Jaguar.  While other students would have to scrape and clean the family yacht or sailboat before being allowed to use it, Huntington without any prior experience buys the biggest and best. No allowances to save up, no hardwork, no delays in gratification, nope.  Even among the elites, Huntington is considered the epitome of a silver spoon kid.

08:43

Take that Daimler two-seater.  It is a sleek roadster.  Now I cannot determine by only a 3 word description which Daimler company it might hail from the British company or the German. In 1890, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach founded the Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft to first manufacture engines then quickly the whole vehicle.  Meanwhile Gottlieb Daimler also licenses out the Daimler name to several other companies around the world in a short period of time, and hence part of my confusion.

09:14

After Daimler passes away in 1900, Maybach would design the first of the Mercedes series in 1902.  Due to the German economic crisis following World War I, the German Daimler merges with Benz & Cie legally in May 1924 and completely including all physical production in June 1926.  The joint company would be referred as Daimler-Benz AG with the factories being called Mercedes-Benz.  Mercedes-Benz will later merge with Chrysler in 1998.

09:46

Parallel in Great Britan, the Daimler Company Limited is founded in 1896 by HJ Lawson, who paid to lease the name by Gottlieb Daimler, and by 1902 this Daimler is awarded the Royal Warrant becoming the car for British royalty until 1950s when it is replaced by Rolls Royce.  In the 1960s, Daimler is sold to Jaguar and continues until 2010.  Jaguar began as a motorcycle sidecar company in 1922.  The first Jaguar car the sports saloon appears in September 1935.  After more British mergers in the 1960s, Jaguar is bought by Ford in 1990 and buys Land Rover in 2000.  In 2007, the Indian motor company Tata Group purchases Jaguar, Daimler, and Land Rover. 

10:34

By 2005, only a few Daimlers are in production.  As of 2009, the trademark for Daimler in the United States is lost.  Despite multiple intentions and professed interests, there are no current productions.  Though there remain active accounts, they are marked as “non-trading.”

10:51

Now the later reference in Huntington Hartford’s biography Squandered Fortune mentions the Daimler, a Cadillac, and a Jaguar.  But the dates are not listed nor further model identification.  But if you look up 1930s Daimlers, they are a thing of beauty both German and British variations.  Huntington was enough of a wannabe gearhead he would have had the fastest and sportiest.

Remember his father Edward Hartford broke away from the family A&P Grocery Store fortune and established himself as an engineer and designer on several automobile parts and patents including the first shock absorber.  Owning a Daimler definitely would be in Huntington’s wheelhouse.

11:29

However owning and flaunting such a luxury at a young age is not considered acceptable to the old money of Harvard.  It’s a bit ironic that he is ridiculed as “being silver spoon” amongst the silver spoons.  The phrase “silver spoon” first appears in English in the 1719 translation of Don Quixote.  The phrase there is derived from a Spanish proverb but with a different meaning.  In 1721, the phrase reappears in a book of Scottish proverbs.  Both literary phrases refer to “not every man is born with a silver spoon in his mouth.”  The phrase is one of many expressions around the world that have similar connotations like “born into a gold cradle” in Spanish and Portuguese and “gold spoon” in Swedish and Finnish.  In 1840, US President Martin Van Buren is criticized for his luxurious lifestyle referenced as a gold spoon.

12:19

There’s another similar analogy I want to point out.  The “gilded cage” is a reference to the section of the Turkish Ottoman harem which would house the young princes and sons of the sultans.  Within the rigidity of the system, the sultan’s wives or concubines would only be allowed to have 1 son to whom she would devote her life to helping him survive to adulthood and prepare for governorship and potentially sultan.  Daughters might be multiple, but upon giving birth to a male the woman was then his solely devoted mother, especially trying to protect him from the silk cord, meaning death of rivals by strangulation. 

12:56

However the male potential heir was not allowed to mate.  Ottoman hierarchy is not based on primogeniture the firstborn son common in many cultures but on open succession, meaning the oldest and/or fittest male in the family rules – uncle, brother, cousin, nephew,… would succeed unlike the more strictly paternal first born son of first born son pattern.  This also meant with every new ascension a blood bath would occur, where the new sultan would kill all rival males – uncles, cousins, brothers,….  Oh who’s kidding – brothers and more likely half-brothers, as any uncles and cousins would have been killed long before by the previous sultan.

13:36

Later in the Seventeenth Century, to detour the practice of fratricide, a new policy began sons by the age 8 were sent to live in in the harem section called the kafes, essentially the cage – a gold or gilded cage.  At the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, relative to the structures surrounding it is a very small two room building with pretty lattice screens serving as de facto bars and imprisonment.  Silks and luxury inside, with a window peeking into the enclave of the harem.  All rest of the harem is strictly females and eunuchs.  The sons would grow up confined until the sultan dies, and then only the replacement is freed to rule.

14:18

Thus it feels more poignant when Huntington is accused of living like the Shah of Persia, another Middle Eastern empire.  Despite all the wealth and expensive toys in his life, he feels extremely trapped and limited.

More ironically, his offended classmates should have seen the interiors of the indoor glass gymnasium at his Newport Seaverge cottage, where his mother hosted an Oxford – Cambridge – Harvard – Yale tennis party for him.  The glass enclosed gymnasium contains a large swimming pool, indoor tennis court, and extravagantly conceived lounging room.  Tiger skins spread over divans and on the floor before a huge fireplace.   but those are not from hunting trophies like the young adventurer might have dreamed.

15:01

Instead of enhancing the Oriental and luxurious exotic themes, Henrietta maybe should have reconsidered the fresco painting of the infamous Egyptian Cleopatra vamping on a barge with Mark Antony.  Henrietta was fiercely trying to keep those she deemed as sirens away from her precious son. 

Maybe the siren’s call was one of freedom and liberty as much as lures of sex and love.

A cage no matter how large or by what material will always be suffocating in the end.  Attempts at escape are inevitable.