Ma Dean: We Always Treated Servants Well

Democratic presidential front-runner Howard Dean may have grown up on tony Park Avenue and summered with the swells at East Hampton's then-whites-only Maidstone Club, but his mother, Andree Maitland Dean, insists her son's roots are practically working class.

"Howard didn't have the least bit of a glamorous upbringing," Ma Dean told the New York Times last week. "When I was growing up, we didn't even treat the servants like servants."

Sitting in her humble multimillion-dollar Upper East Side digs, Mrs. Dean told the Times that every time she had a baby, she'd be forced to convert the dining room into a bedroom for the newborn. In fact, space was so tight there was barely enough room for baby Howard's live-in nurse.

"I don't think we could even keep up with the Bushes," she sniffed.

Her man-of-the-people son agreed, telling the paper, "I am not in the least bit embarrassed about how I grew up. But, now, it wasn't quite as opulent as everybody might think."

Maybe so.

Then again, as the Times notes, Dean's folks could afford to give their populist-Democrat son "nearly $1 million in cash gifts over the last two decades, including a single gift of $200,000 in the early 1980s."

And what about that membership in the Maidstone?

Dean insisted that just because his parents belonged to a club that excluded blacks and Jews, it didn't mean they were actually racist. Although, truth be told, from time to time the occasional racial epithet did slip out.

"Yes, there was sort of this casual racism, in terms of the racist expressions that were used by that generation," he told the Times. "But in all, I think my family was pretty open-minded about different kinds of people."

Editor's note:
Own a piece of authentic Ronald Reagan history – click here now!

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
2004 Elections