Informal Ambassadors

American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1945

Dana Cooper

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612778365
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

From 1865 to 1945, a number of prominent marriages united American heiresses and members of the British aristocracy. In Informal Ambassadors, author Dana Cooper examines the lives and marriages of the American-born, British-wed Lady Jennie Jerome Churchill, Mary Endicott Chamberlain, Vicereine Mary Leiter Curzon, Duchess Consuelo Vanderbilt Balsan, and Lady Nancy Astor. This cohort of women surprised their families - both British and American - by exhibiting an extraordinary degree of agency in a period that placed women solidly outside the boundaries of politics and diplomacy.

Without the formal title of diplomat or membership in Parliament, these women nonetheless exerted significant influence in the male-dominated arena of foreign affairs and international politics. As the wives of leading members of the British aristocracy, they had uncompromised and unlimited access to the eyes and ears of individuals at the highest level in Great Britain - the very decision makers who formulated and implemented foreign policy with their home country. Collectively and individually, these informal ambassadors worked to improve relations at the turn of the twentieth century, and by no coincidence, the United States and Great Britain began to view one another less as adversaries and more as allies.

Combining diplomatic history with gender and women's history, Informal Ambassadors demonstrates not only that could women act as transnational envoys at a time when they could not apply for State Department employment but that they influenced Anglo-American relations to a degree never before considered by historians.

CHAPTER ONE

Courting Transatlantic Marriages

Before the century is out, these clever and pretty women from New York will pull the strings in half the chanceries in Europe.

—BRITISH PRIME MINISTER LORD PALMERSTON

Before American women began marrying into the highest poli-social circles in Britain in the latter nineteenth century, a host of factors laid the groundwork to make such unions desirable for both parties; thus, the courtship of such marriages is rooted in historical events neither country could have ever predicted. Although many people and numerous books would have readers believe the trend of Anglo-American marriages simply sprang up overnight and later died out as quickly as it began, such is not the case. A number of factors within the United States and Great Britain during the mid- to late nineteenth century allowed an Anglo-American marital market to flourish. Many Britons viewed these American women as nothing more than socially hungry “Dollar Princesses,” as their mothers pursued British titles and social acceptance at any cost. From an American perspective, bankrupt dukes stole American girls from their democratic republic to restore British estates and castles financially with no concern for their tender, feminine American hearts. In either case, love allegedly played a limited role. Arriving in New York for her son’s wedding to May Goelet, the Dowager Duchess of Roxburghe explained: “Why, money isn’t everything to an Englishman. There are other considerations when he marries, for instance, fondness for the girl.”¹ Such perspectives exaggerate the motivations of the participating parties. Certainly economic incentives existed for both British and American persons involved in these marriages, but reducing the complexities of Anglo-American marriages down to mere dollar (or pound) signs causes one to overlook the many layers of historical dynamics at work.

Rather than analyzing Anglo-American marriages from a strictly British or American viewpoint, one must see transatlantic marriages as the interaction of several countries—including France—although Great Britain and the United States remain the central players. Until recently, scholars of American history had resisted placing the United States in a multinational context or viewing it as one nation among many. As professor of international history Jessica Gienow-Hecht has suggested, “the history of American culture—including high culture—must be resituated in the context of diplomatic history, transatlantic exchange, and international relations.”² Just as the United States searched for its own unique culture and social identity during this period, many affluent Americans found themselves torn between and Anglophobic and Anglophilic views of European high culture. Although proud of their democratic country, many wealthy Americans found it difficult to avoid replicating a European, or even British, cultural identity on American soil in expressing an appreciation for art, music, architecture, fashion, and etiquette. Consequently, the cultural interactions, and sometimes collisions, of the United States and Great Britain played a central role in Anglo-American marriages.

Dollar Diplomacy? Economics and Anglo-American Marriages

While culture functioned as a means both to divide and unite British aristocrats and American heiresses in their marriages, economics served as the principal factor in courtship. Significant changes in the economies of the United States and Great Britain allowed for previously mentioned economic incentives. By the mid-nineteenth century, Great Britain had entered a period of acute economic decline, which had serious implications for not only the country’s landed elite and aristocratic classes but also its political leadership. This relative collapse of the British economy coincided with the U.S. economy’s substantial expansion.³ Thus, each country looked to the other in the wake of a slow but steady changing of the economic guard on the world stage.

By 1860, two major developments acted as catalysts in changing the U.S. economy. First, the growing industrial economy quickly replaced the agrarian one. Second, the American Civil War, as Walter LaFeber asserts, “marked the transference of power from planters to industrialists and financiers.”⁴ Four years of warfare on American soil allowed the relocation of political leadership and economic power from the South to the North, specifically to New York. A corresponding shift occurred in Congress. With the secession of thirteen southern states, many congressmen opposed to the governmental aid of corporate business no longer prevented Republican centralization from replacing Jacksonian democracy.⁵

The era of a close alliance between big business and government assistance began in earnest after the Civil War. In 1860, the United States had only 30,000 miles of railroad; by 1913, more than 259,000 miles of railroads connected people and markets across the country. In 1866, Standard Oil produced 1 million barrels of oil, and in the succeeding three decades it increased its production twentyfold. U.S. steel production jumped from 1.1 million tons in 1880 to 4.3 million in 1890. Textile exports to China rose 120 percent between 1887 and 1897.⁶ The gross national product tripled between 1865 and 1898. The recovering South also participated in this economic growth: Between 1870 and 1891, cotton production in the South doubled from 4.3 million to 9 million bales. In its first six months of production in 1871, one Birmingham, Alabama, plant produced more than 300,000 tons of steel.

In the two decades preceding the twentieth century, the population of the United States more than doubled, and the available labor force mirrored this growth. As a result, most company profits averaged more than 20 percent. During this same period, American imports decreased from 14 percent in 1869 to 5.9 percent in 1909. American exports began consistently exceeding imports by the end of the nineteenth century. Between 1860 and 1897, exports tripled to more than $1 billion, thus ending three hundred years of an American trade deficit. More important, agricultural goods comprised only two-thirds of all exports by 1900, down from nearly 85 percent in 1880. On the eve of the First World War, the United States contributed one-third of the world’s industrial production; not only had it made the transition from an agrarian society to an urban, industrial country, it had also replaced Great Britain as the “workshop of the world.”⁷

While technology and a large workforce played key roles in the Second Industrial Revolution (1871–1914), foreign investment was the critical factor in American economic expansion in this period. Between 1865 and 1914, private investment in American entrepreneurship exploded to reach between 18 and 20 percent, double the same measurement from the 1850s. In the 1880s, foreign investment totaled more than $3 billion, with British investment alone at $1.5 billion.⁸ In 1895, a State Department official concluded, based on “business reasons alone, we ought to cultivate friendly relations with Great Britain.”⁹ It is ironic, then, that many of the American men who made millions of dollars largely based on British investment later turned to British social circles when looking for suitable husbands for their daughters.

Such an incredible explosion for the U.S. economy resulted in great personal wealth for a number of individual Americans. By 1865, Philip Armour had benefited from an annual income of $2 million from meat processing. Other major businessmen included Andrew Carnegie, Cyrus McCormick, J. P. Morgan, and E. H. Harriman, all “architects of the Second Industrial Revolution.” In the 1840s, fewer than twenty Americans held net worths of $1 million; by the 1860s, several hundred people could lay claim to millionaire status, and several were multimillionaires.¹⁰ So many individuals had earned such incredible fortunes during the Gilded Age that the title “millionaire” was not as impressive in 1890 as it had been in 1860. Commenting on the increase in American millionaires, in the 1870s society leader Ward McAllister proclaimed, “A fortune of only a million is respectable poverty.”¹¹

As a growing number of men became captains of industry, a large portion of their income made its way to Great Britain through transatlantic marriages and dowry contracts. Depending on the socioeconomic class and status of a family, and especially the father, dowries varied greatly. In Anglo-American marriages, they were generally quite significant, hence the stereotype of bankrupt British dukes pursuing American heiresses based on their fathers’ wealth. These “fortune-hunters viewed daughters and granddaughters of robber barons, not unlike the way great capitalists looked upon their own enterprises,” as Frederic Copel Jaher argues, “as investment of time, energy and skill that would, if properly handled, yield maximum profits.”¹² Gustavus Myers estimated in 1909 that approximately five hundred American women had married titled foreigners and that the dowries attached to these transatlantic marriages resulted in a net loss of an estimated $220 million to the U.S. economy.¹³

For all the fortunes flowing into Great Britain from the United States, the nation’s economy did not improve; rather, it entered a period of significant decline related to economic instability across Europe and the increasing U.S. industrial power. Until the 1870s, land ownership in Britain equated to political, economic, and social power. As David Cannadine explains, “Land was wealth. … [L]and was status. … [A]nd land was power: over the locality, the country, and the nation.”¹⁴ Until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, land value continued to increase consistently as the quantity of landowners increased slightly. The “great depression” in Great Britain between 1873 and 1896 marked a drastic change in the incomes of aristocratic landowners across the country. General deflation resulted in a dramatic decrease in agricultural production and the overall value of land.¹⁵ As an example, the annual revenue from the Duke of Manchester’s estates plummeted from £95,000 to a deficit of £2,000.¹⁶ At the beginning of the nineteenth century, agriculture accounted for approximately one-third of the national income of Britain. Over the next century, while agricultural production increased in absolute terms, it decreased on a proportional level. By 1900, only 10 percent of the national economy derived from agriculture.¹⁷

Part of this downturn stemmed from an increase in American economic rivalries and the production of competitively priced foodstuffs, but it also came from the “massive influx of cheap foreign goods from North and South America” combined with the growing significance of the “highly concentrated industrial economy.”¹⁸ Wheat prices in England decreased by 50 percent between 1870 and 1895, and the total acreage of grain production dwindled by two-thirds in the same period. As agricultural prices plummeted, peasants revolted not only in Britain but in continental Europe. Rent rolls, the fees paid by tenants to farm land owned by aristocrats, plunged by an astounding 30 to 50 percent.¹⁹ Landownership was no longer the safest or most secure means of wealth; therefore, the fundamental source and definition of European aristocratic political power no longer existed. As Charles George Milnes Gaskell surmised, “economically and politically, the patricians were no longer the lords of the earth.” Some aristocrats found their financial situation so unstable that many sold their property or rented out their estates.²⁰ The most valuable assets many British aristocrats had to sell were their titles—and more than a few Americans in this period were interested in purchasing such assets.

The British economic downturn resulted in radical changes in personal wealth and the country’s political control. Of the British millionaires who died between 1858 and 1879, four-fifths had been landowners. Among the same class, between 1880 and 1899 only a third of the deceased had owned land, and the number continued to drop after 1900. Before 1895, aristocrats held the majority of British cabinet positions, but after 1895, aristocrats rarely served as cabinet officials. Fearing that the British aristocracy might die out, the British Parliament created a number of new peerages; between 1901 and 1920, 159 were created. A new type of peer emerged. Of the new peerages, businessmen accounted for sixty-six. Roughly half described themselves as industrialists, and thirty-four worked as professionals (mostly lawyers), while only twenty-two peerages went to men of landed background.²¹ Before 1885, only 10 percent of the peerage had connections to commerce and industry, whereas after 1885 that number increased threefold.²² The traditional profile of a British peer had forever changed.

These radical changes meant that the profile of British political leadership underwent an equally thorough transformation. Although political families, family connections, and powerful family names still helped individual peers enter local and national politics, new faces and new backgrounds entered the House of Commons for the first time.²³ Such changes allowed people like Joseph Chamberlain, a manufacturer and mayor of Birmingham, to enter the House of Commons as a Liberal statesman. Although his entry into once closed circles marked a significant turning point in British politics, Chamberlain’s commoner standing often prevented his full immersion into elite aristocratic circles. Commenting to Lady Mary Elcho, Arthur Balfour remarked, “Joe, though we all love him dearly, somehow does not absolutely or completely mix, does not form a chemical combination with us.”²⁴ Nonetheless, Chamberlain’s presence opened the doors for others without aristocratic backgrounds to penetrate the halls of Parliament and set the stage for Nancy Astor, one significant American woman who entered British politics as a result of her transatlantic marriage.

American and British Societies Converge

The incredible growth in American industry and the economy overall resulted in a new generation of American wealth, as New York City became the home of new money.²⁵ These nouveau riche families—the Vanderbilts serve as a prime example—in the United States held the wealth to earn elite status economically but not socially, as “old money” families—the Astors, the DuPonts, the Rothschilds—resisted the intrusion into their tight-knit circle. The biggest difference between old money families and the nouveau riche was that people like the Vanderbilts had worked for their fortunes. Old money families enjoyed their position as members of the leisure class, as their wealth stemmed from real estate or some other means of revenue that did not require their daily labors. Thus, the old money families resented the apparent assumption of newly rich Americans that such fortunes automatically bought their way into the established social circles of Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, and especially New York City. The upper classes of these cities functioned regionally, while the elite social circles of New York City dictated the standards of houses, wealth, and entertainment for all socially affluent Americans. Succinctly stated, “What happened in New York mattered.”²⁶

The flood of new American fortunes tested the exclusivity of society as it existed in New York City under the leadership of two individuals, Ward McAllister and Caroline Astor, the latter better known as the Mrs. Astor. Originally from Savannah, Georgia, McAllister worked as an attorney in California before traveling widely across Europe. Upon his return to the United States, he married a wealthy American woman named Sarah Gibbons. Combining his social connections with his wife’s fortune, he became a member of New York society. Caroline Schmerhorn married William Backhouse Astor Jr., in 1853, and she went by “Mrs. Astor” for the rest of her life. Together McAllister and Mrs. Astor set out to draw a clear line around the old money and socially acceptable residents of New York City in an effort to differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche. Establishing an elite asso...