New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [306]
Not that America was a stranger to class. Boston, Philadelphia and other fine cities, including New York, were trying to establish a more permanent order by compiling Social Registers. In New York, the ancient Dutch landowners and old English merchants with their boxes at the Academy of Music had known how to be snobbish. When Mr. A. T. Stewart, the store owner, had made his fortune and built a mansion on Fifth, they didn’t think he was a gentleman, and ignored him so cruelly that he left in despair.
But New York had a particular problem: it had become the big attraction.
With its banks, and its transatlantic connections, it was so much the money center of the continent that every big interest needed to have an office there. Copper and silver magnates, railroad owners, oilmen like Rockefeller from Pittsburgh, steel magnates like Carnegie, and coal barons like Frick, from the Midwest and the South and even California, they were all flocking to New York. Their fortunes were staggering, and they could do anything they wanted.
Yet surely, Mrs. Astor and her mentor argued, money alone was not enough. Old New York had always been about money, but it was not without grace. Money had to be directed, tamed, civilized. And who was to do that, if not the old guard? At the apex of society, therefore, there needed to be a cadre of the best people, the old money crowd, who would let in the new-money families slowly, one by one, after a period of exclusion during which they must show themselves worthy. McAllister set the opening barrier at three generations. In short, it was what the English House of Lords had been doing for centuries.
Exceptions could be made. The Vanderbilts were new, and the old Commodore, who had a fouler mouth than a bargee, never gave a damn about society. But the next generation was very rich, and very determined, and even before they’d got a duke in the family, they’d been let in. One had to be practical.
Yet who was to select this inner circle? Ward McAllister already led a committee of the region’s greatest gentlemen that decided who was eligible to attend the yearly Patriarchs’ Ball. Once he had Mrs. Astor beside him, she became the queen of the event and gave the list her regal stamp. And how many guests should there be? It varied, but not more than four hundred. That, McAllister declared, was the total number of people in the great metropolis who would not feel or look awkward in a ballroom. If one considered the thousands of people in New York who were well accustomed to dances, and who had probably been to as many grand resorts as McAllister, this last claim might have seemed a little specialized. But it pleased Mr. McAllister, and so four hundred it was.
It had to be said that Mrs. Astor’s lists were quite remarkable for their consistency. There were the newer families of massive wealth, of course, from the Astors themselves to the most recent Vanderbilts. There were the solid old-money families of Otis, Havemeyer and Morgan, and eighteenth-century gentry like Rutherfurd and Jay. But sprinkled all over the list were great names, still rich, and going back to the region’s seventeenth-century beginnings: Van Rensselaer, Stuyvesant, Winthrop, Livingston, Beekman, Roosevelt. If Mrs. Astor wanted to keep the quiet wealth of old New York as the example of how things should be done, then you’d have to acknowledge she’d pulled it off.
When Rose met her future husband William, the first thing she had discovered, even before his heaven-sent second name, was that the old-money Masters were on Mrs. Astor’s list. And when after her marriage, old Mrs. Astor had taken her up, Rose became a willing acolyte. Many an afternoon she had sat at her feet, to learn the finer points of social etiquette.
Only one of these rules had caused her any difficulty.
“Mrs. Astor says,” she’d told