American Experiment (171 page)

A big, thickset man with thinning sandy hair and reddish whiskers, Armour was a proudly “self-made” entrepreneur who did not pretend any interests except meat packing and moneymaking. Asked by a reporter, “You have made your pile; why not clear out?,” he said, “I do not love the money. What I do love is the getting of it.” He had no interest in art or music, and he was reputed to have read only one book in his life—
David Harum,
about the horse trader who liked to say, “Do unto others as they would like to do unto you, only do it fust.” Armour enjoined his associates to “stick to facts” and avoid theory. But he liked to moralize about the value of hard work and rugged competition.

Despite his rough speech and appearance, and his occasional early-morning visits to the stockyards, Armour moved among a select circle. All of his five brothers worked for him. He sent his sons to private schools and made a place for them in his business. He had a paternalistic way with his subordinates, rewarding them with $100 handouts on the spot when they
pleased him, bullying them when they did not. He had no stomach for labor unions and collective bargaining.

Even more select were the other notables on Prairie Avenue and environs: the millionaire merchant Marshall Field; his friend George M. Pullman, the sleeping car tycoon who lived in a palatial mansion down the street; the piano maker W. W. Kimball; and other meat packers, including Armour’s arch-rival, Gustavus Swift, another self-made man and a specialist in beef. Such men as these often lunched together at the “Millionaires’ Table” of the Chicago Club, or at the Palmer House, with its staircases of Carrara marble, its gigantic Egyptian chandelier over the reception desk, its “voluptuous Venetian mirrors” on the landings. Scattered around the North Side were other extraordinary edifices, with dining rooms sporting carved panels that portrayed rabbits, ducks, and prairie chickens; libraries of walnut and ebony set off with silver and curtained with raw silk lambrequins; music rooms with Gobelin tapestries and satinwood. In the sandstone mansion of Cyrus Hall McCormick, a fresco on the dining room ceiling pictured the emblem of the Legion of Honor, some sheaves of grain, and the McCormick reaper.

A thousand miles to the east, proper Bostonians liked to talk about the Chicago pork barons and their vulgar mansions, about the pork barons’ wives in their silk hair nets with bangles of gold and silver braid and their frantic social rounds that seemed little short of stampedes. Chicago liked to talk about the Brahmins, too. A favorite story told of the Chicago banking house that asked Lee, Higginson in Boston about a certain Mr. Smith, a young Bostonian who had applied for a job in the banking house. The man at Lee, Higginson could hardly contain his enthusiasm for the young man. Mr. Smith, he wrote the banker, was a descendant of Peabodys, Cabots and Lowells, Saltonstalls, Appletons, and even Winthrops. Back came a brief letter from the Chicago banker. There seemed to have been a mistake, he wrote: “We were not contemplating using Mr. Smith for breeding purposes.”

Bostonians called this story apocryphal, but they could not dispute the truth that lay behind it. As the old Brahmin elites faced intensifying economic competition from Chicago, New York, and myriad other centers, and as a flood of immigrants and outsiders overran Boston tenements and even Boston business offices, the Bostonians drew in among themselves economically, socially, culturally. What the new elites saw as an arrogant snobbishness, the old elites viewed as a discriminating exclusiveness. They retired into a bastion as many-walled as a feudal fortress. They tied their money up in trusts guarded by formidable attorneys. They sealed themselves off in organizations—the Massachusetts Society of Colonial Dames,
the Society of Mayflower Descendants, genealogic societies—that no parvenu could crash. They sent their sons to select private schools and then to Harvard. Surrounded and besieged in the city, they retired to social citadels in the country. One family—the Forbeses—owned a good-sized island off Martha’s Vineyard, all for themselves.

Above all, they protected their bloodlines through intermarriage. “In one Cabot family,” according to Cleveland Amory, “out of seven children who married, four married Higginsons. In a Jackson family of five, three married Cabots. In a Peabody family of four boys and two girls, two of the boys and a girl married Lawrences. In one family of Boston Shaws, there were eleven children. Nine married members of other Boston First Families, one died at the age of seven months, and the eleventh became a Catholic priest.” First Families had a penchant for marrying cousins, especially first cousins.

And then there was the fabled “Boston woman.” Attired in sensible shoes and remarkable hats, often inherited, she spent her days in culture and good works, rushing from bookstore to church to symphony, from lecture to charity tea to indignation meeting. But she was not all this easily stereotyped, and she prided herself on her individuality. Most individualistic of all was Mrs. Jack Gardner, who publicly drank beer rather than tea, embraced Buddhism rather than Unitarianism, paraded down Tremont Street with a lion on a leash, told risqué stories in mixed company, had John Singer Sargent paint her in a costume that had all Boston talking, attired her coachman and two footmen in full livery—and left Boston an imported Florentine palace of pink marble with a fine art collection.

No wonder a Beacon Hill lady, questioned as to her disdain for travel, asked, “Why should I travel when I’m already here?” No wonder many a Boston man who did travel kept Boston time on his big Waltham watch. But the Boston elites that retreated into apartness did not descend into impotence. While they could no longer dominate Boston’s electoral politics—before the Civil War seven mayors of Boston had held Brahmin status—men like Charles Francis Adams, Jr., chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Railway Commissioners and moderator of Quincy town meetings, held important posts in state and local government. In business, according to F. C. Jaher, “Brahmins maintained a vigorous entrepreneurial role and continued to control an appreciable segment of the great individual and corporate wealth in Boston.” And the old Brahmin families—the Cabots, Higginsons, Lees, and the rest—maintained a firm grip on the city’s cultural and charitable organizations, such as the Boston Symphony, the Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Somerset Club, the
Massachusetts General Hospital, the Board of Overseers of Harvard, the
North American Review.
For many with old wealth, these and family demands took most of their waking hours.

Other elites along the Atlantic seaboard displayed the same solidarity and exclusiveness as the proper Bostonians, but with local variations. Philadelphia society had long since moved from the old Independence Hall-Second Bank area a few blocks west of the Delaware to the Rittenhouse Square region a few blocks east of the Schuylkill. In this square and the blocks around it the banking, merchant, railroad, iron, coal, and—later—oil families built their mansions, held their balls, retreated to their clubs (Rittenhouse and Philadelphia), attended their Episcopalian churches (St. Mark’s and the Church of the Holy Trinity), sponsored the arts (Academy of Music, Academy of the Fine Arts), discussed their Republican politics (Union League Club). Not only Biddies but Baldwins (locomotives), Disstons (steel and saws), Bromleys (textiles), Wideners (traction and utilities), Cramps (ships), and Elkinses (traction and oil) who lived in the square and its environs “definitely felt themselves to be different, aloof and apart, from the rapidly developing heterogeneity of the rest of American society,” according to E. Digby Baltzell. “Their wives and children lived in a money-insulated world of the great houses, private schools and fashionable churches surrounding the Square.” Possibly, reflected Baltzell, this “privatization” went back to Andrew Jackson’s triumph over Nicholas Biddle.

If Philadelphia First Families numbered fewer eccentrics than did Boston—Rittenhouse Square frowned on the idiosyncratic—Philadelphians were no less self-conscious and backward-looking. “To mention Walnut Street to an Old Philadelphian,” wrote George Wharton Pepper, who was one, “is to awaken memories of a departed glory. On bright Sundays, after church, there was always an informal parade of fashion on the south side of this thoroughfare. There the city’s Four Hundred could be seen to great advantage. They were the blended congregation of half a dozen mid-city churches. They made upon the onlooker an impression of urbanity, of social experience and of entire self-satisfaction. If, during church-time, they had confessed themselves miserable sinners, by the time they appeared on parade their restoration to divine favor was seemingly complete.”

Woe to the family left out, especially the moneyed family who could not use poverty as the excuse for exclusion. A young Widener wrote a novel excoriating the snobs who had snubbed his mother for marrying across the tracks. A young Bullitt wrote a novel about the declining standards of the “Sacred Square.” The Square was unmoved.

New York society was different—richer, brassier, more diverse, more volatile, less cohesive. And it was run by women.

The New York elites were attuned to a dynamic economy and a fast-changing city. Manhattan was now the unchallenged hub of the nation’s finances, and itself challenged London as a center of world finance. The city was on the move. Arrivistes were crowding up against established wealth. Avenues were spearing far to the north in Manhattan, even into the Bronx. Looking north from Cortlandt Street and Maiden Lane in the early 1880s, one saw a forest of telegraph and telephone lines, a maze of shop signs, and a jumble of drays, streetcars, buggies, coaches, delivery wagons, all horse-drawn, in the streets. Walking up Fifth Avenue, one came upon the upthrust arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty—the great icon had not yet been put in place on Bedloe’s Island—and the fashionable temple, Emanu-El. Farther north, Broadway was called the Boulevard. But Society, entrenched in its enclave on lower Fifth Avenue, hardly looked past 42nd Street to the “wasteland” beyond.

While this Society could boast of plenty of old families—Brevoorts, Fishes, Schermerhorns, Livingstons, Roosevelts, Rensselaers, and other “Knickerbockers”—new money and big money meant more in Manhattan than in any other metropolis in the East. Up to around the 1880s, said Ward McAllister, the deputy arbiter of New York society, “for one to be worth a million of dollars was. to be rated as a man of fortune, but now … New York’s ideas as to values, when fortune was named, leaped boldly up to ten millions, fifty millions, one hundred millions, and the necessities and luxuries followed suit. One was no longer content with a dinner of a dozen or more, to be served by a couple of servants. Fashion demanded that you be received in the hall of the house in which you were to dine, by from five to six servants, who, with the butler, were to serve the repast.... Soft strains of music were introduced between the courses, and in some houses gold replaced silver in the way of plate….”

The center of action was the half-planned, half-mythical “Four Hundred,” an attempt by the old rich to orchestrate wealth, birth, and style into a coherent social system that soon succumbed to the pecking order of big money. Anointed by Mrs. William Astor—
the
Mrs. Astor, born Caroline Schermerhorn—and with access guarded by her powerful court chamberlain Ward McAllister, the actual membership was found to consist of a combination of old and new family wealth when McAllister gave it out to the
New York Times.
Spurred by acute status anxiety, the new rich struggled desperately to make the sacred list and the even more select “Patriarchs,” also monitored by Astor and McAllister. Bitter feuds broke out, as Fifth
Avenue hostesses fought for their own status, even while conciliating factions among their guests.

“I understand,” said a character in William Dean Howells’s
A Traveler from Altruria,
“that in America society is managed even more by women than it is in England.” Entirely, he was told. “We have no other leisure class.”

The ultimate confrontation, as “ambitious hostesses alternately laid siege, launched frontal assaults, or conducted flanking maneuvers against the bastions of higher respectability,” occurred between Mrs. Astor, the acknowledged queen of the Four Hundred, and Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt. The Astors had looked down on the Vanderbilts as grandchildren of the self-styled “Commodore” Vanderbilt, who had been just a crude Staten Island ferryboat man, after all, and Mrs. Astor did not approve of railroad money. Vanderbilts in turn pointed to the Astors’ opium smuggling into Canton, and their defrauding of East Side slum dwellers and of Indians. The climax approached as the Vanderbilts, after outbuilding the Astors’ Newport “cottage,” Beechwood, with The Breakers, decided to erect a $2 million palace at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. To the opening of this town house Mrs. Vanderbilt invited 1,200 persons—but not Mrs. Astor. A calling card bearing the legend “Mrs. Astor” had never been deposited on the salver of 66 Fifth Avenue, said Mrs. Vanderbilt, and how could she invite a perfect stranger? Intermediaries intervened, open hostilities were avoided, and a footman in the blue livery of the House of Astor duly presented a visiting card to a domestic in the maroon livery of the House of Vanderbilt. Mrs. Astor and her daughter attended the ball, in which dazzling young socialites with electric-lighted stars on their foreheads waltzed with men in baronial costumes.

If the Four Hundred felt beleaguered in their Fifth Avenue bastions, they could always retreat to mansions in Newport or the Berkshires or in the South or in Europe—or all of these—but here again the Vanderbilts seemed to gain the competitive edge, with their establishments in or near Asheville, North Carolina; Centerport, Long Island; Upper St. Regis Lake in the Adirondacks; and their endless yachting through the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The Frederick W. Vanderbilts’ mansion in Hyde Park was perhaps the finest monument to the era. Built at a cost of over $2 million, in a time when a construction worker might earn a dollar a day, the mansion was erected on such an accelerated schedule that carpenters worked shoulder-to-shoulder. The result was an Italian Renaissance-style edifice, packed with art and furnishings from abroad, surrounded by superb grounds, trees, and with a view up and down the Hudson.