The Great American Saloon Series / The Mohonk Mountain
Brookhiser, Richard
THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES THE MOHONK MOUNTAIN HOUSE S outheast of the Catskills lie the Shawangunks, a clump of mountains—small and round as plump women—distinct enough to carry its own...
...Inside, the decor is High Country, which belle epoque opulence was never allowed to overwhelm...
...The bewhiskered worthies went there to hold conferences—of Friends of the Indian (and other Dependant Peoples...
...There is no bar, and you are not supposed to sneak bottles in with your luggage...
...others direct your attention to jacks-inthe-pulpit...
...The naturalist John Burroughs stands on a cliff edge, his long beard horizontal in the breeze (to few of us is it given to look so much like ourselves...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1989 39...
...They hang there because of a shared interest in serious endeavors...
...On the paths closest to the lake you are most struck by the gazebos—little wooden seats with conical wooden roofs...
...V or Mohonk was not just a resort in the woods...
...But a wine steward comes around at meals, a small and gracious concession to this century...
...There had been termites at work beforehand—Henry Adams, moaning and moping about how gross Washington had become, and how he wasn't running the place...
...When people got drunk and hard to manage, Mr...
...Dan Quayle has made no plans to visit that I know of—there is no downhill skiing, only cross-country—but Mohonk Mountain House is going strong all the same...
...The stars are still bright in the Shawangunks, and the efts are still red...
...D. Whipple, Bishop of Minnesota, wears what looks like a skullcap—are handsome...
...I have been invited up several afternoons to talk about politics, I hope intelligently...
...Ten years later, the guns went off...
...on International Arbitration...
...The most elaborate room, the Parlor, has its red velvet and chinoiserie, but there is enough open space so that you never feel suffocated, as you would have felt in the parlors of the people who first vacationed there...
...Stokes had already built a tavern on Lake Mohonk...
...Now one contemplates the ghosts of Mohonkery with wistfulness...
...But our portraits could never hang in the hallway to the dining room...
...So what do you do when you're not drinking...
...Beside it stands a grandfather clock, still ticking, presented to Albert Smiley, the surviving twin, and his wife on the occasion of the tenth Arbitration Conference, in 1904...
...The most conspicuous dead animal is a monstrous trout in the Lake Lounge, under whose glassy eye tea is served every afternoon at four...
...The lake shore, the cliff tops overlooking it, the slopes falling away into the countryside beyond, are sown with trails, from carriage roads as strenuous as Park Avenue to the maniacal rock-climbs of masochists...
...How many other hotels have so many wooden balusters on the staircases, or pictures of William Howard Taft and Rutherford B. Hayes in the hall to the dining room...
...There, in 1870, a pair of twin brothers opened a hotel by a lake on a mountaintop...
...Do we understand sufficiently what effect it had on the United States...
...Mohonk still takes things seriously...
...In the Parlor is an Indian bust...
...The attention to sight-lines shown in their placement makes Olmstead's Central Park look thoughtless...
...What about the moral elite...
...The best we can do is understand them, a little...
...Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review...
...It brought together three things he despised—prohibition, Protestants, and Anglo-Saxons—and put them at the service of a fourth bete noire, moral earnestness...
...We all know what World War I did to Europe...
...One of their first guests was Schuyler Colfax, vice president of the United States...
...But it isn't just the dead Presidents...
...But was the war, and the revulsion to it afterwards, the public break—the first step on the long, long road to William Sloane Coffin...
...Probably walk...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES THE MOHONK MOUNTAIN HOUSE S outheast of the Catskills lie the Shawangunks, a clump of mountains—small and round as plump women—distinct enough to carry its own name...
...But the sight most worth pondering is still the main house...
...A Mr...
...It has grown and changed over the years, in a haphazard way, into a pile of green wooden walls, stone walls, red roofs, turrets, balconies...
...There are also clergymen: Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Congregationalist...
...These are men and women who knew what the world needed, and were pretty sure of getting it...
...Three years after that, America's fervor was harnessed to the crusades to make the world safe for democracy...
...This is not a place for hunting trophies...
...Their pictures hang in a gallery of faces: Elihu Root, Henry Dawes, Andrew Carnegie...
...The Smileys, being Quakers, put a stop to all that, and maintained a dry house for many years...
...Some look out over Hudson River School panoramas, with hawks riding convenient air-columns...
...They all must, to some degree...
...Their noses are long and straight, their foreheads are high, their eyes look clear...
...In Theodore Dreiser's correspondence, there is a letter from H. L. Mencken, twitting him for "Mohonkery...
...The twins, who bore the untenable surname of Smiley, were not the first to appreciate the spot...
...There have been periods of self-confidence since, of course (we're in one now, more or less), but they were mass phenomena...
...for hospitality's sake, a rabbi and a Bahai...
...Stokes used to chain them to trees...
...Bishop Whipple, the caption beneath his photograph notes, was by Richard Brookhiser known to the Indians as "Straight Tongue...
...A few of them, beneath their odd accoutrements—H...
...You are not there to be aerobic, but to stop, and look...
...It is easy to see why Mencken, the Baltimore burgher who read Nietzsche in Cliff Notes as a lad and never recovered, would have disliked Mohonk...
...This is not a collection of people assembled because they could have been in the People magazine of 1899...
...Whenever you feel like stopping to take in the prospects, some Smiley was there before you, and left a seat...
...The thoroughness can seem odd, until you decide that it is edifying...
...The mementos are everywhere...
...I wonder how many guests appreciate the strangeness...
...Then move on, and look again...
...Several have names, scenic or historic, like Arthur's seat (as in Chester Alan...
...There are horses, and skates, and canoes, and rowboats available, but the best way to inspect the Smileys' domain is on foot...
...Another striking thing about those prewar pictures—there is no anxiety in them...
...Mohonk is now wet once again—barely...
Vol. 22 • June 1989 • No. 6
