HISTORY OF NEW YORK CITY’S UPPER CLASS & THE MAKING OF A METROPOLIS
Introduction The Upper Class Is a Foreign Country
L
ike many other historians, I quote the adage “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” to let audiences know that they should not expect the people we are discussing to think and feel in the same ways we do.1 That line is the first sentence of a novel L. P. Hartley wrote about the British upper class in 1953. It is the history of the upper class, Hartley was really saying, that is a foreign country. This book explores the foreign country that is the New York City upper class. A notable example of its customs and practices was the Bradley Martin costume ball of February 1897. Every year in New York City during the 1890s, dozens of upper-class families spent from $50,000 to $100,000 apiece throwing parties, receptions, and other entertainments, and a handful, including the Bradley Martins, laid out more than $150,000 (equal to $4.4 million today).2 For their 1897 gala, the Bradley Martins ordered so many orchids, lilies, violets, and other flowers to decorate the ballroom of the Waldorf Hotel, at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street, that greenhouses in New York City could not meet the demand and carloads of blossoms had to be brought in from elsewhere. Intended to replicate the glamour of the French royal court at Versailles, the ball was attended
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by more than eight hundred men and women from high society, most of them dressed as European royals, nobles, knights, and courtiers from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Bradley Martin went as Louis XV of France; his wife, Cornelia, went as Mary, Queen of Scots; John Jacob Astor IV, as Henry IV of France; and Ava Astor, as Marie Antoinette. However, because the affair happened during a severe industrial depression and because the Bradley Martins insouciantly declared that their lavish expenditures would aid the poor by invigorating the urban economy, a backlash occurred: newspapers condemned the ball; clergymen criticized it from their pulpits; and some of those who had been invited, such as Theodore Roosevelt, then president of the New York City Board of Police Commissioners, stayed away rather than court public censure. The Bradley Martins, who received death threats and had to hire bodyguards for protection, eventually left New York and moved to London.3 “What can explain,” asked the New York World, “the extraordinary attention attracted to the Bradley Martin ball and the excitement created by it not only in this country but across the ocean as well?” According to the World, “this foolish and costly fancy-dress ball” showed “that we have in this young country, this democratic-Republic, a firmly established aristocracy—one as exclusive and as intolerant and as extensive as any in Europe, with no basis except wealth and a generation or two away from a plebian parent or grandfather.” The outpouring of popular anger confirmed that many other Americans reviled the emergence of this new “tyranny of fashion, of wealth, of snobbery, and a recognized ‘society’ ” and the concomitant weakening of democratic and egalitarian values.4 Upper-class New Yorkers like the Bradley Martins tried hard to create a separate and exclusive world for themselves, but they kept being assailed by the forces of economic growth and democracy and compelled to alter course. Their relentless pursuit of privilege was what made them different, and it is why the life they created for themselves can be considered a “foreign country.” They had their own culture, their own practices, norms, and aspirations, and they were different not just from other New Yorkers but from other urban upper classes in other cities. Compared to other elites in the United States and Europe, upper-class New Yorkers have
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been more receptive to new people and ideas and much bolder in their quest for wealth, prestige, and power. An initial colonial upper class that modeled itself on European norms started to run headlong into American capitalism and democracy by the 1790s and then spent the next two centuries trying to figure out how to handle that whipsaw. In the process it became more complex and more malleable while at the same time working feverishly to preserve its exclusivity, especially from the middle class that began to gain in numbers and status in the mid-nineteenth century. The tension between the pressures of American economic dynamism and democratic culture, on the one hand, and the enticements of exclusivity and superiority, on the other, is the focal point of this book. What distinguished the New York upper class from the outset is that its members were comparatively dynamic, open, and aggressive (much like New York City) as opposed to the stuffy, family- and pedigree-oriented upper classes found elsewhere in America and Europe.5 Members of the New York City upper class behave like this not so much because they are civic-minded (though at times they are) but because they pursue wealth, prestige, and power; in other words, they seek personal gain. Throughout their history, their salient trait has been that they keep their eyes on the “main chance,” however it may present itself. And when they do strive for social pedigree, when they do comport themselves as if they were true aristocrats, they do so not so much because they believe in a true aristocracy but because it helps legitimate and thus strengthen their pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. In the process, they help to shape the distinctive character of their city, just as they are reciprocally shaped by it. Throughout its history the upper class has employed a number of strategies to distinguish itself from different social groups (including others of high status) and to build community and create meaning for its members. I concentrate on two particular categories, the “upper class” and “economic elites.” The upper class consists of individuals who are tied together by family, friendship, and business bonds; are self-conscious in their possession of prestigious goods; and lead a distinctive way of life. The economic elite comprises people who make key economic decisions and those who
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provide support for the decision makers and who are connected by their pursuit of wealth and income.6 In New York City, both the upper class and economic elites formed communities and possessed their own values, practices, and aspirations. The two groups interacted in complicated ways: sometimes they overlapped, cooperated, and shared; sometimes they separated and clashed.7 At heart, the mode of classification employed in this book involves a cultural phenomenon because it hinges on the judgments and perceptions of contemporary elites and nonelites. Even after New York City began growing in the nineteenth century, there would be no American equivalent to publications like Debrett’s Peerage and Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage, and Knightage that order and rank the hierarchies of titled European families with precision and authority. Assessments of the bona fides of American elites are inherently subjective, and nowhere is that more true than in demographically complex and economically vibrant New York City, where upper-class people long have been preoccupied with differentiating themselves and defining their prerogatives. Rapid economic growth first began to enlarge and enrich New York City’s upper class in the 1820s. The expansion of the urban economy gave enormous weight to business success and the accumulation of wealth, elevating uncouth newcomers like John Jacob Astor, who defied the association between high status and the titled nobility that was made by the established upper class, and dividing the upper class into separate economic and social factions. As more people from the middle and working classes began to make their fortunes, the upper class countered this blurring of class boundaries and social credentials by reasserting its traditional moral and political leadership, making use of the Civil War crisis to classify workers and immigrants as dangerous threats to the social order. The national and city economies kept booming after the Civil War. The upper class of New York City was at the peak of its wealth and prestige in the late nineteenth century and tried to foster a social world that valued exclusivity and refinement, yet centrifugal forces unleashed by the powerful urban economy destabilized it and thwarted its attempts to mark and preserve its boundaries.
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From the corporate headquarters complex that started taking shape in lower Manhattan in the late nineteenth century and then dramatically expanded throughout the twentieth century arose a corporate elite of business executives, bankers, brokers, lawyers, and others. They were an economic elite that ultimately became a rising new upper class. Corporate elites owed their wealth and status to their training in college and graduate school and to their careers, and their ideas about work, education, and hierarchy conflicted sharply with those of the social elites. By the 1940s, looking to distance themselves from the Gilded Age upper class, corporate elites had formed their own communities and way of life. In the 1970s corporate executives and others solidified their beliefs into an antielitist ideology that they applied against the social elites, using the memory of the Gilded Age upper class to highlight their own more democratic values. They had an unusual, hybridized relationship with the middle class. Able to adopt a middle-class outlook as their basic identity now that the European aristocracy had lost most of its previous allure, corporate elites became adept at moving back and forth between upper- and middleclass orbits and at championing both professional achievement and social justice. They were being public-spirited when they espoused egalitarian principles and reviled past haughtiness and bigotry, when they sought to redress the shortfall of African Americans and other minorities in prominent universities and businesses, and when they advocated meritocracy that rewarded individual achievement and ability as measured through fair competition, but they championed those ideals then as they do so now largely because being civic-minded and democratic helped legitimate and therefore bolster the pursuit of privilege. The strain that city elites have long experienced juggling American economic vibrancy and democratic culture has been camouflaged rather than resolved. This book covers the New York upper class from the 1750s to the present. This long history brings into greater relief shifts in the history of the urban economy that the upper class both drove and benefited from, including the rise of New York City as the dominant metropolis in North America in the first half of the nineteenth century, the emergence of Wall Street as a corporate complex and an international financial center
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in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the enlargement of its financial and services sectors starting in the 1980s. This long history also encompasses events that were crucial to the experiences and understanding of upper-class New Yorkers, such as their uneven responses to the demands for more equal treatment that people in the lower orders made in the wake of the American Revolution and their reactions to the tumultuous New York City draft riots of July 1863. The upper class is vital to the histories of New York City and the United States precisely because of the friction that many of its members have experienced with democratic culture and egalitarianism. Members of the upper class are not villains simply because their ambitions and ways of life are different from those of other Americans, but the foreign land they inhabit coexists uneasily with the rest of the United States. Unlike the extended time frame that this book adopts, most scholarly studies of the American upper class concentrate on the so-called Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.8 Historians are drawn to the Gilded Age because that is when the upper class was at the summit of its wealth and power and was unequivocal about flexing its muscle, with some of its members, like the guests at the Bradley Martin ball, even conceiving of themselves as a European-style aristocracy. The late nineteenth century was indeed significant and will be treated in depth here. However, these focused works of scholarship exclude important events and issues that occurred in other periods. Although there have been excellent studies of the upper class during the Gilded Age, their concentration on the era of maximum domination has led historians to discount the significance of the upper class’s relations with other social groups and to miss its responsiveness to economic and social shifts. Upper-class men and women unapologetically viewed themselves as indispensable leaders of their city and assumed that New York City would have fallen apart without them. Arrogance and hyperbole aside, is there any truth to these claims? Were upper-class New Yorkers social parasites and predatory capitalists, or did they accomplish things that made the city a significantly better place? The answer, obviously, is that they were both. It is a mixed bag, with the upper class acting as freeloaders and
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bloodsuckers in some ways and making positive contributions in other ways. Certainly, they could be snobbish and self-important, indulge in empty revelries, and exploit workers. Yet without them New York City would be a smaller and less remarkable place. They spawned business enterprises that sparked massive economic growth; inaugurated public works projects such as Central Park and the original subway that became emblematic of the city; founded cultural institutions such as Columbia University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library that helped elevate New York above the level of the great European metropolises; and provided skilled political leadership at vital moments such as the American Revolution, the Progressive Era, and after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Upper-class people, of course, are far from being the only New Yorkers who built this city, but their wealth and power afforded them an outsized role and disproportionate influence, and they used their resources to give decisive shape to the extraordinary city that New York has become. This book takes an essayistic approach, exploring a series of related topics and ideas analytically rather than providing encyclopedic coverage. It investigates particular decades as slices or layers of the overall history of New York City. This method is an exploratory device and a convenience; in typical essay fashion, the analysis roams freely in time and is not confined strictly to the decennial calendar. I scrutinize seven periods: the 1750s/1760s, the 1780s/1790s, the 1820s, the 1860s, the 1890s, the 1940s, and the 1970s. These seven times witnessed important changes in the city’s political economy that had a profound effect on the upper class and its relationship to New York City. In responding to these challenges, upperclass individuals made choices that revealed their priorities and reset their direction. I conclude the book by bringing the analysis into the present and speaking to how this history fits with contemporary developments. We begin with the 1750s/1760s, when New York City first became internationally important as a headquarters for the British military during the Seven Years’ War. Other wartime experiences—the Revolutionary War (1780s/1790s), the Civil War (1860s), and World War II (1940s)—also transformed the city’s political and economic affairs and
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altered how elites organized their lives. Two other decades (the 1820s and the 1970s) marked fundamental shifts in the urban economic base that had far-reaching effects on the upper class, with the 1820s representing the beginning of the city’s takeoff as a national metropolis and the 1970s encompassing its near bankruptcy during the fiscal crisis along with its transition to a finance and service economy. The Gilded Age, of course, was at its height during the 1890s. These seven periods were pivotal in the history of New York City and its upper class. Even so, there are others that could have been studied, particularly in the twentieth century. An example is the Progressive Era, with its business and social reforms and its leadership by upper-class New Yorkers such as Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Evans Hughes. However, the Gilded Age remains so central to both the historical study and popular understanding of the upper class of New York City that no book that dispenses with it can claim to control this subject matter, and I devote two chapters to it. The Great Depression and the New Deal make the 1930s a critical time in American history, but the reactions that businessmen and others had to the New Deal during the late 1930s and the 1940s decisively shaped the actions of corporate elites from that point forward, and this book accordingly concentrates on the 1940s. For the last half century, historians and other social scientists have been studying groups that previous scholars ignored or downplayed, including workers, immigrants, women, African Americans, and gays and lesbians. Although I write about a highly privileged population, I see this project as a sympathetic continuation of that body of work. I incorporate many of its substantive findings and conceptual schemes. Moreover, because of the tremendous social complexity of New York City, writing the history of any of its social groups, even one as rich and powerful as the upper class, necessarily involves taking the measure of its connections with other New Yorkers. Throughout its history, the population of the city has contained so many different types of people that no single group has ever constituted the majority. Everyone is in the numerical minority and is decisively affected by the actions of other people.
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In this book, I thus view the history of the upper class in terms of its relationships with other social groups. Upper-class New Yorkers interacted with a wide range of people and had the wherewithal to alter many lives for the better by stimulating the economy, founding major cultural institutions, and improving the condition of workers and immigrants. However, at the same time, upper-class New Yorkers also acted selfishly and myopically. Time and again, they used their distorted depictions of other groups to justify their own tastes and circumstances and to advance their own agenda. After the Civil War, upper-class individuals portrayed workers and immigrants as a social menace, and in the 1960s and 1970s, elites romanticized minorities as paradigms of social justice and authenticity. As I show, in this sense a history of the upper class contributes to our understanding of larger struggles over power and prestige in American history. The record of the upper class is conducive to a tragic view of American history, wherein the promise that this country has held for greater equality and democracy and for a higher standard of living for everyone has been repeatedly undermined by the antagonism that members of different groups harbor toward one another and by the narrowness of their social vision. I draw on the scholarship of the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to explore how members of the upper class created their communities, marked their boundaries, and interacted with other groups, especially members of the city’s lower social orders. In his work Pierre Bourdieu investigates social arenas in which struggles take place over access to and possession of specific resources or stakes: intellectual distinction, employment, housing, social class, prestige, and so forth. He is interested in the uses to which culture is put, the manner in which cultural categories are defined and defended, and the ways in which tastes originate and are mobilized as weapons in competitions for status. Borrowing his terminology from economics, Bourdieu calls the goods and resources that are up for grabs “capital” and identifies four main types: economic capital (wealth and income), social capital (valued relationships with others), cultural capital (knowledge of some sort), and symbolic capital (prestige and social honor). This analytical framework lets us make sense of the struggles of upper-class
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New Yorkers over wealth, prestige, and power and allows us to comprehend that their efforts to achieve distinction and legitimacy strengthened their pursuit of privilege. It helps us interpret the masses of letters, diaries, articles, and other textual materials of upper-class New Yorkers that have been deposited in archives and libraries and made available on the Web. I follow Bourdieu in viewing cultural tastes and social measures as tools that people wield in their efforts to possess these goods, with the definition and boundary marking of high-status categories (such as “upper class”) among the most precious stakes up for grabs.9 We start in the 1750s, when New York City was a lesser seaport and provincial capital in the British Empire and when its upper class consisted of royal officials, merchants, planters, and leading professionals.