What Would Mrs. Astor Do?

The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age

Cecelia Tichi

• Publisher: Washington Mews Books/NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781479826858
• eBook ISBN: 9781479868544
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

A richly illustrated romp with America’s Gilded Age leisure class—and those angling to join it

Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age. Between 1870 and 1900, the United States’ population doubled, accompanied by an unparalleled industrial expansion, and an explosion of wealth unlike any the world had ever seen. America was the foremost nation of the world, and New York City was its beating heart. There, the richest and most influential—Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan, Edith Wharton, the Vanderbilts, Andrew Carnegie, and more—became icons, whose comings and goings were breathlessly reported in the papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. It was a time of abundance, but also bitter rivalries, in work and play. The Old Money titans found themselves besieged by a vanguard of New Money interlopers eager to gain entrée into their world of formal balls, debutante parties, opera boxes, sailing regattas, and summer gatherings at Newport. Into this morass of money and desire stepped Caroline Astor.

Mrs. Astor, an Old Money heiress of the first order, became convinced that she was uniquely qualified to uphold the manners and mores of Gilded Age America. Wherever she went, Mrs. Astor made her judgments, dictating proper behavior and demeanor, men’s and women’s codes of dress, acceptable patterns of speech and movements of the body, and what and when to eat and drink. The ladies and gentlemen of high society took note. “What would Mrs. Astor do?” became the question every social climber sought to answer. And an invitation to her annual ball was a golden ticket into the ranks of New York’s upper crust. This work serves as a guide to manners as well as an insight to Mrs. Astor’s personal diary and address book, showing everything from the perfect table setting to the array of outfits the elite wore at the time. Channeling the queen of the Gilded Age herself, Cecelia Tichi paints a portrait of New York’s social elite, from the schools to which they sent their children, to their lavish mansions and even their reactions to the political and personal scandals of the day.

Ceceilia Tichi invites us on a beautifully illustrated tour of the Gilded Age, transporting readers to New York at its most fashionable. A colorful tapestry of fun facts and true tales, What Would Mrs. Astor Do? presents a vivid portrait of this remarkable time of social metamorphosis, starring Caroline Astor, the ultimate gatekeeper.

Well Behaved

Ward McAllister, Autocrat of Conduct

The grand master of branding in Gilded Age New York, Samuel Ward McAllister (1827–1895), coined the term “the Four Hundred,” ever afterward representing Society at its most numerically exclusive. The Four Hundred marked those who were in and, by omission, those exiled to the social nether regions. Friends and foes alike created sobriquets for McAllister, from the heiress Elizabeth Lehr’s fond “Shepherd of the ‘Four Hundred’” to the Knickerbocker New Yorker Stuyvesant Fish’s dismissive “demagogue.” For certain, McAllister earned his reputation as the kingpin of New York—and Newport—Society of the late 1800s.

Figure 17. Ward McAllister

McAllister was the son of a hospitable but impecunious Savannah attorney—“Wardy” to his mother—who gave his family cool summers in Newport, Rhode Island, the summer destination of numerous southern families who, since the 1700s annually boarded vessels in Savannah or Charleston or Wilmington. Wealthy planters built fine summer homes, while others lodged at farmsteads, as did the McAllister family. Ward recalled boyhood summers flying kites and building bonfires at the seaside. And it was a godsend to escape the torrid southern heat. In those days, McAllister observed, Newport was “a Southern colony.”

Later, McAllister caromed from one region of the country to the other. As a young man, he ingratiated himself to a wealthy New York spinster aunt who left him a mere thousand dollars in her will (all of which he spent on evening dress for a ball given by Mrs. John C. Stevens, whose husband was the first commodore of the New York Yacht Club). Returning to Savannah, Ward studied law and, with his cousin Sam, sped to San Francisco in 1850 to join the senior McAllister’s new law office in the heady Gold Rush days of the California forty-niners. The legal work was lucrative, though San Francisco’s raucous, ribald “Barbary Coast” was repellent to a young man who already considered himself a connoisseur of fine things and claimed French ancestry and elite family ties. (His father’s favorite maxim was “Be sure, my boy, that you always invite nice people.”)

By 1852, McAllister had married the bashful, reclusive Sarah Taintor Gibbons, an heiress whose social connections and wealth furthered his goal of social distinction. Their European wedding journey, recounted in McAllister’s memoir, catalogues dinners and balls spent in the company of an array of aristocrats, government ministers, high-ranking military officers, and “young Italian swells.” Rome, he found, was “full of the crème de la crème of New York Society.” The wedding sojourn was also McAllister’s apprenticeship in fine foods and wines. The Bordeaux caves harbored a vintner’s perfection, and McAllister declared that in southern France he “learned how to give dinners” and in Germany gave “one to two dinners a week.”

Briefly back in the Savannah in 1858, McAllister within a year had bought his own farm, known as “Bayside,” in Newport, which became its own story of the Gilded Age, but McAllister’s engineering of the New York social machine is a tale to tell. His proclamation of the Four Hundred echoes in the twenty-first century, but largely forgotten is another term he coined to refer to the pillars of Society: The Patriarchs. Establishing a beachhead in New York with the purchase of a rather modest house at 10 West Thirty-Sixth Street, the socially ambitious McAllister set to work with a scheme that harked to his pre–Civil War days. Originating in London and European cities, social dances called assemblies had flourished from the 1700s in colonial America well into the 1800s. The Philadelphia Assembly and the New York Dancing Assembly proceeded in tandem, while smaller assemblies gathered in Norfolk, Williamsburg, Richmond, and other southern locales. Particular dances won and lost favor, including the quadrille, mazurka, polka, and two-step, but assemblies were largely occasions for the elite of each city to gather, socialize, and reaffirm their own social positions.

The assemblies languished in the post–Civil War years, but the format of these gatherings intrigued McAllister, who in 1866–67 hosted cotillion suppers at Delmonico’s, where prominent women were seated at the head of the table and encouraged to confide their views about the fluctuating New York social scene. Such women, McAllister knew, had at their “finger’s ends the history of past, present, and future, . . . critical, scandalous, with keen and ready wit.” The former “Knickerbockerocracy” was tremulous before the onslaught of new wealth amassed from the railroads, from mining, manufacture, and finance. Old and new money were jostling for position.

With a reverential devotion to European aristocracy, McAllister would have empathized with the quest of the nouveau riche for improving their familial lineage. Tiffany wisely added a department for the “blazoning” of custom heraldry, wherein the customer could combine elements of ancient English coats of arms from the escutcheons of several dukes or lords. Half a shield here, a sword or lance there, winning colors, a Latin motto, and the order was placed. Concluded the socialite Elizabeth Lehr, “The results were decidedly original and quite unknown, but the owners were delighted.”

When McAllister came to the fore in 1872–73, his timing was exquisite. The flagrantly corrupt era of New York’s William Marcy (“Boss”) Tweed had finally closed with Tweed’s downfall in 1871–72. His notoriety had disgraced the city and made the Irish “Tweed” and his immigrant minions and victims appalling signifiers of New York. Tweed’s Tammany Hall was synonymous for greed, corruption, and a low-life prevalence of saloons and coarse amusements. New York’s most infamous figure was nationally represented in politically scathing cartoons.

Figure 18. “Boss” Tweed caricatured by Thomas Nast

In the wake of the scandal, Ward McAllister offered New York society a way to redeem itself with a new social framework of his own design: The Patriarchs. With a membership limited to twenty-five gentlemen identified by (and including) McAllister, the Patriarchs would redefine New York Society, representing the city’s cultural and social values at their irreproachable best. The twenty-five were bound by their honor to uphold the highest standards of rectitude in the city and beyond (and any financial ties to the Tweed era disregarded). The twenty-five names on the list, the summa of New York’s aristocracy, combined old and new money, the convergence itself McAllister’s signature achievement:

• John Jacob Astor
• Edwin A. Post
• William Astor
• A. Gracie King
• DeLancey Kane
• Lewis M. Rutherford
• Ward McAllister
• Robert G. Remsen
• George Henry Warren
• William C. Schermerhorn
• Eugene A. Livingston
• Francis R. Rives
• William Butler Duncan
• Maturin Livingston
• E. Templeton Snelling
• Alexander Van Rensselaer
• Lewis Colford Jones
• Walter Langdon
• John W. Hamersley
• F. G. D’Hauteville
• Benjamin S. Welles
• G. G. Goodhue
• Frederick Sheldon
• William R. Travers
• Royal Phelps

The genius of the Patriarchs (the twenty-five later expanded to fifty) was its self-policing and self-perpetuation. Members elected successors, and the membership functioned like a private company whose stock is held solely by owners. Should one Patriarch commit a misstep, his colleagues would let it be known among themselves that a transgression had occurred and take steps to rectify the problem by counseling their offending brother-in-wealth. For example, suppose a Patriarch were temporarily short of cash and rented his private box in the exclusive Golden Horse-shoe at the Metropolitan Opera House to “a family of rank outsiders . . . who weaken Society by sapping the vigor of its exclusiveness,” as Ralph Pulitzer noted in New York Society on Parade (1910). The owner of the box would be invited to have a word with a fellow Patriarch, perhaps at his club, and urged to cease and desist.

Figure 19. At the Patriarch Ball

McAllister’s efforts at social engineering culminated with one crucial masterstroke: he invited Caroline Astor to become a special adviser to the Patriarchs. The rest, so to speak, is history, as Mrs. Astor launched her unprecedented reign over Gilded Age Society, an era of unprecedented opulence. She attended the exclusive annual Patriarch Ball and soon adopted Ward McAllister as her chamberlain.

The idea of the Four Hundred notables widely took hold when McAllister quipped to a Tribune reporter on March 25, 1888, “Why, there are only about 400 people in fashionable New York Society. If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease. See the point?” McAllister coyly refused to list the Four Hundred until Mrs. Astor’s ball of February 1, 1892, when he produced a listing of just over three hundred names, claiming that others were abroad. One doyenne of Old New York, May Rensselaer, recalled McAllister as “the czar whose dictates were law to Society” but who wisely asserted his “power behind the throne of social preeminence.” “He sought for some one worthy of his counsel and direction,” she continued, “and found her in Mrs. William Astor, a woman of gracious manner and unquestioned standing.” One critic demurred, calling their public partnership “a traffic in social positions.”

McAllister outlived his reputation as the arbiter of manners and mores of Gilded Age Society. A few remembered him as the deservedly successful arbiter elegantiarum of his era, as Maud Howe Elliott phrased in Latinate tribute. In time, however, his mannerisms lent themselves to satire (sentences ending with the studied pseudo-British nonchalance of “dontchersee?” or “dontcherknow?”), and his publication in 1890 of his late-career memoir, Society as I Have Found It, infuriated the very Society he had shaped, cultivated, and served. The memoir struck the Four Hundred as an egregious breach of confidentiality or, worse, a how-to manual for social climbers. Society did not care to see itself reflected in such a faulty mirror, and McAllister’s book had exposed him as an exalted Gilded Age butler. By this time, he and Mrs. Astor had long parted ways; there was no need for her to cancel her dinner party to attend his funeral on February 5, 1895.

How to Navigate a Public Encounter

The ladies and gentlemen who braved Gilded Age Gotham’s streets and avenues braced for sensory overload. The sidewalks around their homes on Madison Square or Fifth Avenue might be peaceful at certain points of the day, but elsewhere the city was a hive of construction and commerce. Odors of acrid coal smoke, drizzling soot, and the screech of the El trains as they stopped and started along Sixth Avenue assaulted the ears, eyes, and nostrils. Roadways rang with voices, clanging bells, and hooves scraping and clattering on the pavement. Cabmen called out, “Take you all around—see everything—for a dollar,” while teams of heavy draft horses pulled wagonloads of cargo from milk to coal, beer to bricks. (In 1900, New York City averaged just under five hundred horses per square mile.)

From the 1890s on, motorcars mixed with horse-drawn vehicles, their noisy engines spewing fumes, their Klaxons blaring warnings to all. The mayoral campaign of 1903 highlighted the myriad nuisances. The new Fusion Party, which sought to oust the corrupt Tammany political machine from office, promised to repair “asphalt pavements found in very poor order,” to remove snow from the streets in a timely fashion, to rid the streets of rubbish, and to attend to “the vexatious problems of street traffic.” Danger lurked around every corner, the Herald reported, citing the threats of loitering “roughs” and “loafers” and alarming readers with accounts of smashed carriages and runaway horses. At every curb, mounds of ripe horse manure awaited the misstep of the custom-fitted boot or shoe.

Figure 20. Fifth Avenue between Forty-Fifth and Forty-Seventh Streets, 1905

The rules and regulations for conduct on the street were set by this urban reality, and gender played its part, with gentlemen cast as protectors and ladies as damsels in need of assistance. This was no simple reprise of the legend of Sir Walter Raleigh sparing Queen Elizabeth from the mud puddle by gallantly spreading his cloak over the turbid pool. Such chivalric lineage was doubtless pleasing, but milady on the sidewalks of the Gilded Age was in need of help l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Splendors of the Gilded Age
• Mrs. Astor Speaks
• Millionaires’ Row
• Convenience or Contraption
• Competitive Consumption
• Best Dressed
• Well Behaved
• Dinner Is Served
• The Social Set
• The Sporting Life
• Getting There
• Money Talks
• The Whiff of Scandal
• On the Scene: Boldface Names in New York
• Muckrakers
• Funerals
• Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Sources
• Illustration Credits
• About the Author