Jonesses

‘Everybody else in the house knowed Mr. Jones,” she said, “and Peter was paid fifty dollars tu stay away, and had a place now with the Jonesses.”

Mr. Davenport, of the Davenport Hotel in Spokane, said to me a few days ago that he was strong for me although he was a Republican, that he would back me, and took me down to the billiard room, and they had a low bench, one of those things which cost so much, they are not as high as that, and as we were standing up in his billiard room he said, “Mr. Bullitt, I am for you because I am tired of so many Jonesses in the Senate and House so far; it is time we want somebody not smeared all over with Jones; and you just typify what I am for; and I am against Jones, because he typifies this idea of ‘Don’t do this’ or ‘Don’t do that.’”

Her own New York and Philadelphia relatives—the Schermerhorns, the Newbolds, the Pendletons, the Ledyards, Gallatins, Rhinelanders, and the Jonesses—eventually became close associates with the families of European aristocratic origin who had settled in New York—the Duers, the Livingstons, the Rutherfurds, the de Grasses, and the Van Rensselaers.

Continuously chasing the latest headlines in the Western press or research agenda, as the best educated of her children currently do, can only keep her forever panting and breathless in the futile bid to catch up with the Western Jonesses.