Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [849]
Wealthy would-be socialites denounced this magisterial accounting with all the fervor of populists attacking railroad pools, and in a sense naming the Four Hundred was an attempt to create a Social Trust. But the ranks of the wealthy, augmented by millionaire arrivistes from around the nation, had swelled far beyond the bounds of Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. As in the larger economy, competitive forces proved too fierce to be contained by informal mechanisms that had worked for generations.
Mrs. Astor’s regime began to come unglued. Powerful rivals carped, mocked, and rejected her rule. Mrs. Burton Harrison, in 1895, said flat out: “I am an unbeliever in the body corporate which, for want of a better term has come to be popularly known as the Four Hundred of New York.” Fortunately another mechanism had evolved as a way to delineate a Society now clearly numbered in the thousands, not the hundreds.
Maurice M. Minton, an enterprising blueblood, had pointed the way by printing up his mother’s visiting list and merging it with another to form the Society-List and Club Register. In 1887 this example, and that of the recently introduced telephone directory, inspired Louis Keller to launch The Social Register. Keller, independently wealthy (though just barely), had his eye on more remunerative possibilities. With the support of friends at the Union and Calumet clubs, he assembled a list of nearly two thousand socially prominent names and printed it up as a handsome book with orange and black binding. To make it indispensable, he included addresses, telephone numbers, maiden names, wives’ names by previous marriages, clubs, colleges, places of summer residence, and names of yachts—everything one needed to keep up with old friends and screen potential new ones. (To get the lowdown on highbrow enemies, one could also turn, after 1885, to the pages of Town Topics, a Society scandal sheet that tattled about upcoming divorces and impending bankruptcies, using information secured from Fifth Avenue butlers and chambermaids. Fortunately one could forestall the display of dirty laundry by bribing the editor into discretion.)
With the advent of The Social Register, dictatorship gave way to an accommodating bureaucracy; now thousands could make the social grade. But with outspending one’s rivals the only definitive route to preeminence, a steady inflation in extravagance ensued as members of opposing cliques scrambled to convert Wall Street revenue into Fifth Avenue social standing. Dinner parties corkscrewed upward in lavishness—black pearls in oysters, cigars rolled in hundred-dollar bills, lackeys in knee breeches and powdered wigs. These glittering affairs attracted platoons of elegantly attired jewel thieves, whose takings were kept to a minimum by equally nattily dressed police detectives supplied by Inspector Byrnes, the same man whose Dead Line cordoned off Wall Street by day.
The Drive-Central Park-Four O’Clock, from Harper’s Weekly, May 19, 1883. Upper-class New Yorkers still regarded an afternoon drive in the park as an opportunity to see and be seen, but ascertaining who belonged to “society” was becoming increasingly difficult. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
TO THE OPERA HOUSE
The social wars raged as fiercely on the male side, though here the front line ran through the opera house. Old-guard families had undergirded their position by cornering the market on Academy of Music boxes. From these seemingly secure perches, Bayards and Beekmans, Cuttings and Schuylers, and a few properly patinaed former upstarts like August Belmont had peered down contentedly on tycoons in the seats below. When William H. Vanderbilt offered a whopping thirty thousand dollars for a box in 1880, the old set snubbed him as they had