WASHINGTON WIFE
By
Ellen Maury Slayden was the wife of James Luther Slayden, Texas delegate to the House of Representatives from 1897-1919. An inveterate diarist, the Virginia-born Mrs. Slayden kept a punctilions record of the social, political, and historical events of the two between the end of the Spanish-American War and the beginning of World War I of four presidents, dinners in the Washington Social Set, embassy parties, trips abroad, the suffrage movement, and the neuroses of a nation before, during and after war. Unfortunately, Mrs. Slayden is too much occupied with the manners of her time to probe the more universal depths. She emerges, for instance, from Wilson's inaugural address and comments: ""He was spick and span in very good clothes, the best I have seen in his family"". More a product than a critic, Mrs. Slayden's conclusions would better be left to the historian.