Gold & Vermeil Foundations
From the White House to Hari Seldon
Vermeil Greco-Roman French Empire style table decoration of the Four Graces in the Oval Office last week
February 18, 2025
After writing my last Substack essay I kept thinking about the French vermeil tabletop tall ornament on the credenza behind President Trump’s Oval Office desk and its coordinating golden objects over the nearby fireplace. The easy story is he loves gold decor from gilded elevator doors to decorative items. But other stories about that tall antique thing behind his desk nagged at my brain. Where had I seen it before? Where had I seen greater excesses of interior gold decor? Why, truly, do people value gold? And, why has a science fiction character named Hari Seldon kept popping into my thoughts ever since Trump was elected in 2016?
First, I mentally retraced my steps the first time I visited the White House as a small child. A hot summer day public tour during the Nixon Administration. That’s where I first eyeballed a large amount of golden interior decor. The semi-basement Vermeil Room had shelves full of shiny gold table items from charger plates, eating utensils, and wine coolers to table sculptures. Then, upstairs to the State Dining Room decorated with a French oval mirror on the tabletop framed with vermeil filigree. Tall vermeil candlesticks on the table and fireplace, and a portion of Trump’s credenza vermeil “trophy.”
White House State Dining Room around the time of the Nixon Administration. This kind of formal metal tableware decor is make with multiple screw-on parts with interchangeable bases and tops of different sizes and types including special inserts for glass bowls to hold water for flowers, little dishes for small sweets, and cutwork bowls to display fresh fruit.
I’d already seen photos in books of European palaces and churches with golden walls and ornaments which made me think as I walked through the White House of the massive sunk costs for such displays of conspicuous wealth. Meant to impress exactly whom? My Puritan blood was glad the White House was not so heavily filled with gold things as Euro royal palaces but each gold thing at our Presidents’ home made me slightly uncomfortable.
My Mother bought me at the White House gift shop three booklets published by National Geographic. One had a portrait of every President with one page of text about him. Anothet with the same format for each First Lady. The third highlighted the new interior decor for the public rooms installed by Jackie Kennedy who loved French things. Like my Mom and her Mother, Jackie studied French in school and loved traveling there. For many years in grammar school I often studied those two books. That’s how I first learned USA history, French and American super high quality antique house furnishings, as well as ladies’ and gentlemen’s clothing from the first 200 years of the USA.
Illustration from 1962 National Geographic booklet on the White House
I learned about fine carpenters Duncan Phyfe and Chippendale. Different styles of chairs used by French kings and Napoleon, Presidents George Washington and Madison. The rising popularity of ancient Greek and Roman architectural and interior decor styles when our country was new. How the British Army set a fire and gutted the White House in the War of 1812. How Presidential families have embraced every new interior fashion from Victorian clutter to Aesthetic, Arts & Crafts, and 20th Century Modernism until Jackie Kennedy got major financial help from two Europhile and very wealthy Americans, Mr. Dupont of Winterthur and Bunny Mellon, to bring real French and American antiques back to the White House. Between the lines of the White House booklet was a crystal clear load of overt snark that Jackie with her Mellon and Dupont pals had a much higher class, old money taste than the re Eisenhowers, Trumans, Roosevelts, Hoovers, Coolidges, Hardings and Wilsons.
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In that booklet I first learned what vermeil is. It may look like a gold thing but it is really just silver covered in a thin layer of gold. The French by the late 1700s and early 1800s perfected a slightly safer way to use mercury to make gold adhere to silver. A process to make something expensive look much more expensive. A cheat. A deceit.
As I learned more world history I understood a French king who already had massive debts bankrupted his nation to send cash and armaments to the 13 Colonies to fight his old foe Britain. Need more collateral for more bank loans such as gold bars owned by a King Louis or Napoleon? Melt down your solid gold decorative items and replace each one with vermeil and no one from the public is the wiser.
That early 1960s White House decor book was dead silent about the fact the Spanish King Carls III during the American Revolution also supported the 13 Colonies sending his Navy and Army to help battle the British in Florida and around the Gulfo de Mexicoue as the French called it. He collected “donated” pesos from everyone in Nueva España right after he did a census to know how much coinage his minion bureaucrats needed to collect to keep their jobs including in far away California. He earmarked those silver and gold pesos to be given to George Washington, some coins only to be given if Washington won.
Mrs. Kennedy, like my Mother, my Grandmother and me, had all studied French and travelled extensively in France. Content Francophones until I decided to study German in high school as a teenage mini-rebellion. My overwhelmingly Scottish, Welsh and English Protestant blood relatives were not German or Spanish speakers nor were many on the other side of my family, my Irish-Catholic side, who have little WASP (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) backgrounds. I can easily understand why Mrs. Kennedy chose not to highlight in her new White House decor her husband’s Irish Catholic heritage. A heritage which until WW2 was seen in the USA as somewhat low class, a “scary” pile of “poor and drunk” new immigrants, many fleeing a mid-1800s Potato Famine which killed about 1/3rd of all Irish, and virtually all would gladly accept very low wages for any USA jobs. “No Irish need apply” was often seen in job advertisements of her and her husband’s youth in the New York and Boston areas.
Guess who is sitting here in what looks like a very well air conditioned palace with golden wastebaskets ready for every chair sitter.
Funny how some people cling to big and heavy gold things, from gangster-rappers with gold necklace medallions so big if swung they’d break things, the solid(?) gold Saudi royal Kleenex holders, or the gold plated apartment elevator doors of an admittedly OCD child of a New York builder whose father hid his German identity during and after WW1 by legally changing the family name from Trumpf to Trump to sound like more high class Englishmen instead old “scary” German immigrants. I chuckle every time I see the English/Scottish style aristocratic family crest of his golf resorts, a design embroidered on his jet’s white leather passenger seats. What would George Washington say about such public use of an aristocratic style emblem for any USA citizen?
A selection of golden Kleenex box covers in a Saudi royal family palace a few days ago. I have to ask does the entire Saudi royal family have sneezing allergy attacks daily?
When I saw this month the perfectly symmetrical Wes Anderson style lineup of gold and vermeil ornaments on the Oval Office fireplace mantel replacing a decades-long display of lush green plants I could just see admiring those golden things a French King Louis, Napoleon, or a gangster-rapper wearing many heavy gold chains and huge medallions. Or, someone with OCD who likes to play with toy soldiers, lining them up at attention. We all have our different ways to settle and calm our minds. Glad to see T-47’s Oval Office still showcases the matched book set of George Washington’s writings because both of them genuinely loved studying history. I expect like Trump’s Scottish Mother’s beloved Queen Elizabeth 2, Trump has been writing a daily diary which will be published after he leaves office. It will be huuuge! No holds barred. A bestseller. Perhaps one day placed on the Oval Office’s bookshelves.
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So, how exactly did the tall vermeil table decoration now on Trump’s credenza get to the White House? What historical meaning does it have for Trump, the historian? I scoured photos and stories online. It came as a 1956 bequest to the White House during the Eisenhower Administration from a Biddle wife who was an heiress in her own right to massive mining and tobacco fortunes: Margaret Adelaide Thompson [Schulze] Biddle. She tasted the life of being the wife of a longtime USA ambassador to many European countries before and during WW2, and thus become an important salon hostess to the highest levels of the European and American “talking class” who think they will run the world forever with the financial resources to buy any politician or bureaucrat.
She became a close pal while married to Ambassador Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle, Junior to the German-born Prince Bernard, the husband of the Netherlands’ Queen Juliana. Bernard officially founded the Bilderberg group as a super private gab-fest between Euro and American “leaders” in business, think tanks, and governments, overwhelmingly all private “investors.”
She helped her only child, a product of her first marriage before Biddle, to marry into the German Hohenlohe aristocratic family. Mrs. Biddle loved living in Paris with that daughter where she became a close friend of the exiled Duke and Duchess of Windsor as well as General Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower in London during WW2 while Mr. Biddle was U.S. ambassador to the exiled Low Countries, Free France and a few other Nazi-conquered Euro countries. She and Ike were chums again in Paris when Ike came to Paris to chase retreating Nazis, and also again with him post-WW2 joined by his wife, “Mamie” when Ike briefly rejoined the U.S. Army to help start NATO after his short stint as President of Columbia University and before becoming U.S. President. Being seen in newspapers wearing an Army uniform did wonders for his first Presidetaial campaign.
L to R: Miss Biddle, Mrs. Biddle, Duchess and Duke of Windsor, and a wife of a French government official watching QE2’s coronation on television at Mrs. Biddle’s Parisian home. In a second row is Mrs. Bruce, wife of the then US ambassador to France or Britain.
Social status sweepstakes tip: being an elbow-to-elbow pal of Wallis Simpson in the 1950s as a divorcee of Ambassador Biddle did not do much for her pecking order standing in tippy top European-American social circles but for among the impoverished old aristocracy and the nouveau riche. Having 1,575 pieces of French and English vermeil does not automatically get you an invite to dine with the kings and queens of England or the Low Countries such as the Netherlands. Her bequest to the White House of her silver gilt stuff encouraged Mamie Eisenhower to remodel into the Vermeil Room the White House’s former billiard, poker, and smoking room without, it is said, her husband Ike’s permission.
White House Vermeil Room decorated by Mamie Eisenhower. Ike installed the cozy and manly Wisconsin knotty wood paneling for a billiards/poker/smoking room. Note in lefthand photo lower shelf the pair of golden foliate ornaments today on the Oval Office fireplace mantel.
Mamie’s Vermeil Room
Ambassador Biddle divorced Margaret (his 2nd wife) to marry a younger lady, also named Margaret, who in a Canadian Army uniform worked in Eisenhower’s Supreme Command headquarters where Biddle had before WW2 ended put on a U.S. Army uniform to help with Operation Overlord planning and “Allied Contacts.” He did other interesting things with his new girlfriend after the war such as helping spirit out of Germany some very special folks. Officially, he met Margaret number 2 only after he stopped working for Ike while both wore Army uniforms during WW2. Guess why Ike let Mamie remodel his White House poker room to display the dumped Biddle wife’s vermeil? Maybe something to do with Ike’s longtime WW2 military driver and close aide Kay from the UK who might have been pals with Margaret #2? All chaste and innocent professional colleagues’ fun? Fodder for other wives’ nasty gossip?
That very formal mostly French and some English golden stuff likely encouraged Jackie Kennedy to “do better” than Mamie Eisenhower by remodeling every White House public room on the public ground and first floors. And, today it would not surprise me if Melania Trump seeing her husband’s clutter of challenge coins on his Oval Office credenza said, “Be better” (the motto of her First Lady official project) and suggested he display there one of the very best White House vermeil pieces. She does have exquisitely elegant taste. I like the 2nd floor Oval Room carpet she designed for her husband’s first Administration and the White House tennis court pavilion she helped to design. The carpet is very feminine and the sports building looks very French and built to last. Now there’s chatter the Trumps want to build a bigger White House ballroom. I wonder if they have in mind a glass enclosed orangery building to stuff a ballroom unobstrusively onto the White House grounds. A big space for use as both a ballroom and a winter garden.
It also would not surprise me if Trump picked that big vermeil piece for his credenza to signal some messages. First, he took away the cheap and tacky coin rack to make room for a big bronze Lincoln profile medallion, perhaps the actual bas relief used for the US pennies which he just announced he wants to stop being produced given they cost three times more to make than their value. How about a gold Lincoln $50 coin in honor of our 50 states? Or our nation’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026? One of the first announcements he made as #47 after spending a night in the White House was dealing some grand plans he has for celebrating July 4, 2026 starting on July 4, 2025.
Then, he added a World Cup soccer reproduction trophy next to Lincoln’s face given the USA will soon host that competition. Then, the antique vermeil piece which looks like a trophy, all in front of an Andrew Jackson statue and looked down on by a Jackson painted portrait. Huh... This is a man who adores giving White House visitors guided detailed talks about White House history and decorations. Mrs. Biddle and her vermeil…. From her Paris home… The Paris 2024 Summer Olympics whose gold medals are already flaking badly being so very cheaply and poorly made. Los Angeles will host the 2028 Summer Olympics. Ambassador Biddle was a direct descendent of Nicholas Biddle who lost a vicious currency war over the Second Bank of the United States against Andrew Jackson. Trump now therefore, I suspect, is thinking big about quality coinage, U.S Treasury not Federal Reserve dollars, and golden sports’ trophies as well as perhaps the next Bank of the United States.
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In high school I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundations Trilogy of science fiction books which introduced the character of Hari Seldon. Many famous tech people, including Trump’s new friend Elon Musk, cite that book series as favorites. Seldon lived on the capitol planet of a galactic civilization running the secret “Foundation.” He was a mathematician who worked with psycho-historians who together realized their civilization would fall soon but if they could predict how and when, and plan how to revive it, they might make its dark age 1,000 years long instead of 30,000. What they did not predict in their elite super smart hubris was the emergence of the “Mule,” a genetic freak like the sterile offspring of a donkey and horse. The Mule comes fast to political power and upset all the Foundation’s carefully crafted plans. The Mule was insanely smart and driven. He had ESP powers to be able to change peoples’ emotions. He made constant unpredictable moves to stay in power. The story line was like a chase movie: the “scary” Mule versus the “wise” Foundation. The Foundation thinkers thought of themselves as selfless, noble, and good puppet masters. Each side of the chase maneuvered to find, control, and destroy the other.
That story reminds me a lot of watching Mr. and Mrs. Trump coming down the elevator at their highrise home in Manhattan when he announced he was running for U.S. President. Someone totally unexpected. Unpredictable. Like Seldon’s Mule nemesis. Someone fighting the Foundation.
Asimov was a super fan of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes character as well as Gilbert & Sullivan light operas with their nonsense topsy turvy plots. He wrote annoted versions of all Sherlock stories and G&S operas. The freakishly smart character Sherlock was never outwitted but for by “The Woman” who battled a Germanic king/ex-lover. Sherlock was dictatorial, a drug addict, and often callously brutal to his side-kick Watson. G&S loved to laugh at and satirize many real-world potentates who thought of themselves as glorious poo-bahs. Shall we sing a chorus of the HMS Pinafore Admiral’s song about getting his political career started by “polishing up the handle on a big brass door” and then “Never going to sea.” Or the “Pirate King” song about who are the real pirates wearing suits in cities. Did Asimov want us to think Seldon & his Foundation, the Mule, or none of them is the hero? That no one is 100% admirable and none can truly predict or control the future.
Foundations. Those special legal “nonprofit” eternal entities with sweetheart legislated deals to avoid taxes and public scrutiny. Like Railroad Robber Baron Leland Stanford’s California legislature-approved Stanford trust for “educational” purposes to park his junk bond and Ponzi scheme profits from his first railroad company (which he and his partners deliberately bankrupted) until he could as an elected U.S. Senator to bribe - shamelessly! openly!! - his fellow legislators to get federal laws passed to paper over the international financial crimes he and his partners did to build the western side of the first Americas transcontinental railroad.
California Governor and later US Senator Leland Stanford’s business partner Judge Crocker’s Sacramento home ballroom which became an art gallery. A taste of the Gilded Age.
The Carnegie Endowment to shelter Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel monopoly money by building goody-two-shoes public libraries coast-to-coast (bribing his way through US Senators’ hometowns) and his Carnegie Institution for mostly academic studies. The Ford Foundation. Gates Foundation. Clinton Family Foundation. So fun to see Trump’s DOGE track all the federal and other dollars funneled to and through those “non-profit” foundations.
Filmed in a house near Liverpool, England during the bioweapon plandemic. Singer-songwriters are from Austria.
Chronic abuse by those who can collect a pile of cash, land and power and keep and grow it over many generations is a very old story. One of the most explosive ones involved the Roman Catholic Church which collected as a state religion between 1521 and 1821 about a third of all the best arable lands in Mexico until the locals got upset enough to force a “secularization” of its lands just about 200 years ago. All the Church could retain was land on which sit its churches, priests and nuns’ homes, and its schools. It just didn’t learn the earlier lessons Martin Luther, St. Francis, and so many others tried to teach the Vatican and its robed princes about rank corruption.
So, I watch the doings in Washington, D.C. and wonder what will happen next. Will the USA get a “More perfect union” in time to celebrate the 250th of our 1776 independence rejection of rule by intermarried Euro-royals, their shadow proxy wars, and their financial string pullers? Last week, Vice President Vance made some of them cry by just giving a short speech in Munich about how they can’t keep relying on the USA for their national defense nor should they censor free speech as, I would have said, the Spanish Inquisition did for about 300 years.
Reflecting on what Trump does next for his ever changing decor in his formal office and each morning’s news headlines this past week, I predict the USA will have fabulous gold medals for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics and a new circulating gold coin featuring Lincoln who kept our union together. Electroplated base metal or vermeil Or solid gold?
(See Vermeil Part 2)