Kathryn Allamong Jacob
King of the Lobby
King of the Lobby is about power, politics, money, and lobbying in Washington in the Gilded Age. It is about delicious food, fine wines, and good conversation and how one suave New Yorker, Sam Ward, combined all three to create a new type of lobbying—social lobbying—and reigned as “Rex Vestiari” for a decade. Scion of an honorable old family, brother of unassailably upright Julia Ward Howe, best friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, mathematician, linguist, California ‘49er, spendthrift who squandered several fortunes, Sam Ward was one of the most amazing men of an era crowded with larger-than-life personalities.
After lecturing the house Ways and Means Committee on the hazards of lobbying and the importance of dining well, Sam Ward told a parable about a clever cook, the king of Spain, and a meal with an unusual ingredient. In this newspaper cartoon, he cooks up a pot of $1,000 pigs’ ears himself. (New York Daily Graphic, December 20, 1876.)
Editor: Erind Pajo
King of the Lobby
Kathryn Jacob King of the Lobby: The Life and Times of Sam Ward, Man-About-Washington in the Gilded Age The Johns Hopkins University Press 240 pages, 9 x 6 inches ISBN 978 0801893971
Get the book →May 7, 2010
20100507-kathryn-allamong-jacob-on-king-lobby-life-sam-ward-washington-gild-1-1
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Kathryn Allamong Jacob
Kathryn Jacob is currently curator of manuscripts at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. She earned her Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, and previously held positions at Johns Hopkins University, the U. S. Senate Historical Office, the National Archives, the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, and the American Jewish Historical Society. Jacob’s books include Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C., after the Civil War (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995) and Testament to Union: Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C. (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). She has been a commentator on the Arts and Entertainment Network’s America’s Castles, The Grand Tour, and America’s Mansions, Monuments, and Masterpieces. Jacob has also written for American Heritage and Smithsonian on, among others, the Lizzie Borden ax murders and physician Clelia Mosher and her sex survey of American women.
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