Another staycation site we visited was Anderson House. We first noticed the place during one of the Embassy Open Days they do in DC. We had wanted to see a bunch of embassies but turns out the lines for all of them were quite long and as we were wandering around we saw a sign for the Society of the Cincinnati and their free museum. We considered going in but were worried that something as serious and pretentious sounding as “Society of the Cincinnati” might be some weird right-wing dark money operation so we wanted to do some research before diving in. After doing that research it seems fine? Clubs like this are always going to be weird but this one seems relatively benign.

The headquarters of the Society of the Cincinnati is now in the former house of Larz and Isabel Anderson. These were two rich people that got married. Man tell you what to be rich in the gilded age. There was a period of time, well-evidenced in DC and also the Met, when you could just bop around Europe and buy up large chunks of all the cultural history there. For the people offended on behalf of Europe, don’t worry, they did this in Asia too apparently, the house has tons of Buddha statues scattered all over the place in niches or in the back yard. The tour guide leading us around mentioned that the Andersons weren’t even religious particularly, “if they saw something they liked they just bought it.” I think The Great Gatsby is supposed to be about how this is all terrible and I suppose for most of the world it was but oh to be gilded in the gilded age.

The two big focuses of the house are Larz Anderson’s diplomatic career and his love of the Society of the Cincinnati. The only two uses the house ever saw were as the personal residence of the Andersons and then has headquarters of the Society. The house incorporates various bits of Society of the Cincinnati symbols in like the plaster work and the like, and after the Andersons died they left it to the Society to use as their headquarters. The single most interesting thing I learned on the tour is that the city of Cincinnati is named after the Society, and not directly after Cincinnatus as I would have assumed. On the tour they talk up the history of the Society a bit, but they’re not exactly trying to get you to join, because you can’t, sorry (not sorry).

As for Larz’s diplomatic career, again, man, to be rich. I guess he was really passionate about diplomacy, no knocking him there, but his storied diplomatic career around which he built is personality was like 8 years total? Very much a hobby. According to Wikipedia, he dropped out of law school, but since his dad had connections to the U.S. minister to the Court of St. James Robert Todd Lincoln he got a job over there as first secretary (this was his first job!) for three years and then went over to Rome to be the chargé d’affaires! Then he went on hiatus for like 15 years and then he is Minister to Belgium and then Ambassador to Japan for a whopping one day, later styling himself as “the first American to rise all the way through the diplomatic ranks from the lowest position to the highest.” Rich people never change. But since he was such a big fan of diplomacy once he built himself a nice big fancy house he let the State Department use it all the time to host fancy parties and the like so that was nice of him.

It is a very fancy house, and very gilded age in that I noticed there was a bunch of trompe-l’œil all over the place (see first pic). There was also fancy stuff all over the place, like 400 year-old tapestries and big ole paintings and a table that I thought was pretty neat which is pictured below. I think it was picked up by Isabel Anderson when she was doing the grand tour and features a tabletop made of tons of different bits of granite. Apparently the usefulness of this table is you bought it abroad and then when you came back to build your house you could use it to show your architects/builders which marble you wanted in various bits of the house. To be fair the house had some very nice floors (the whole staycation was a series of very nice floors), but I liked the table because it was like the day before at the Building Museum that I saw the different granite samples and so this was the same thing a century apart and that is neat I thought.

Anywho that was the Anderson House and the Society of the Cincinnati. Their temporary display while we were there was about the history of diplomacy in the house (all those nice parties the State Department threw there) which intrigued me and my super amazing wife suitably, and the house was certainly very pretty to look at. And since the tour was free, it was definitely worth the price.