Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [567]
Industrialists, for example, tended to be dependent upon but antagonistic to merchants. The latter demanded high prices for raw materials, paid low prices for the manufacturers’ products, offered credit on harsh terms, and promoted free trade. Culturally, moreover, genteel wholesalers had little in common with manufacturers, many of whom came from artisanal backgrounds and worked on a daily basis with grubby proletarians.
Respectable old clans like the Beekmans, Livingstons, Stuyvesants, DePeysters, and Schermerhorns, for their part, claimed that recently acquired wealth didn’t count for as much as riches that were properly patinaed, and that nouveaux like the Vanderbilts, Laws, and Stewarts did not belong in their category, much less their company. To help keep them out, hostesses like Mrs. James D. Roosevelt, Mrs. Hamilton Fish, Mrs. Henry Brevoort, and Mrs. William Schermerhorn—whose invitations still signified social acceptance—relied on Isaac Brown, the sexton of Grace Church who doubled as society’s majordomo. Brown screened their guest lists, using his formidable grasp of Knickerbocker bloodlines to sort social aspirants into “old family, good stock” or “new men.”
“Old stock” families wishing to wall themselves off from vulgar “new men” had other gatekeeping institutions besides Sexton Brown. The Society of St. Nicholas and the Union Club were joined by the New York Yacht Club (1844), whose cachet was assured in 1851 when John Cox Stevens took the yacht America to England and beat Britain’s best while Queen Victoria and Prince Albert looked on. Another newcomer, the Century Association (1847), was in theory open to talent and accomplishment in every field—“Artists, Literary Men, Scientists, Physicians, Officers of the Army and Navy, members of the Bench and Bar, Engineers, Clergymen, Representatives of the Press, Merchants and men of leisure.” In practice, by the mid-fifties, the bulk of the Century’s members were merchants, bankers, railroad executives, insurance officials, and leading lawyers and physicians. Some Centurions fancied their club the American equivalent of the august French Academy, but while gentleman authors like Lewis Gaylord Clark of the Knickerbocker set were indeed on board, on the whole the Century’s clubhouse tended more toward hearty masculinity than intellectual discourse.
Some of the rich even tried on the trappings of aristocracy, riffling through the pages of Gwilt Mapleson’s American Hand Book of Heraldry in search of noble forebears. There was a certain appropriateness in making lineage a prerequisite for status, as kinfolk had supplied the capital for many of the elite’s enterprises. Roughly seven of every ten New Yorkers whose wealth was assessed at over a hundred thousand dollars—men like Moses H. Grinnell, Robert B. Minturn, Samuel Shaw Howland, and Abiel Abbot Low—had inherited substantial fortunes and thus stood on the shoulders of their forebears.
On the other hand, most of those forebears weren’t New Yorkers. Forty-three percent of the top taxpayers in 1856 had been born in other parts of the United States (especially New England and upstate New York). And fully 25 percent had come from foreign countries (especially England, Ireland, and Germany), making the overseas contingent nearly as big as the fewer than one-third born in the metropolis. Manhattan had an old guard, but it had been swamped by outsiders. Requiring a civic ancestry might make sense for provincial Boston’s upper class, but in cosmopolitan New York it would exclude two-thirds of the rich, and the miffed might decide to form alternative, competing power centers.
Most old residents, therefore, accepted the newcomers in time. The Union Club blackballed A. T. Stewart—an Irishman, it was pointed out,