Lords of Creation

by Frederick Lewis Allen

  The invasion of society by the new rich, thus fulsomely described by Clews in New York in the eighties, was and is a perpetual process, though the methods and the details differ from period to period. Naturally, social prestige cannot be precisely measured; yet if we apply to our ten financiers such criteria as are available, we get at least a suggestion of the rate of its growth. Most of these ten men, it will be recalled, had begun life in humble circumstances (and only one had had a college education). Nevertheless in 1905 all but one of them were listed in the New York Social Register. (Schiff was the sole absentee, and his absence was presumably due to the fact that he was a Jew, and the Jews constituted socially a group somewhat apart; the fashionable clubs were almost exclusively Gentile, and the Social Register was virtually a Gentile Register.)

  The nine men who were listed were recorded as belonging to an average of 9.4 clubs apiece. Though only two of them, Morgan and Vanderbilt, belonged to the Knickerbocker Club (the citadel of the patrician families), Stillman and Harriman joined these two in the membership of the almost equally fashionable Union Club; Baker joined these four in the membership of the Metropolitan Club (magnificent, but easier of access to new wealth); John D. Rockefeller, William Rockefeller, and Rogers, along with Morgan and Baker, were listed as members of the Union League Club (the stronghold of Republican respectability); seven of the group belonged to the New York Yacht Club. Morgan belonged to 19 clubs in all; Vanderbilt, to 15; Harriman, to 14. And on the opening night of the Metropolitan Opera season of 1905, the New York Times reporter, remarking correctly that this was “more of a social than a musical event,” noted the presence of Mr. and Mrs. Vanderbilt in Box 6, of Mr. and Mrs. Harriman in Box 1, of Mr. and Mrs. Baker in Box 10, and of Mr. Morgan in Box 35. Mr. and Mrs. Schiff were in attendance on a later evening of the same week.

  That was in 1905. By way of a footnote it may be added that although in that year only two of our ten financiers belonged to the Knickerbocker Club, in 1933 the sons or grandsons of six of them did. The following progress is characteristic: John D. Rockefeller, Union League Club; John D. Rockefeller, Jr., University Club; John D. Rockefeller, 3d, Knickerbocker Club. Thus is the American aristocracy recruited.

  Nor is the process new. Let us glance backward as well as forward. In 1905 Mrs. William Astor—or Mrs. Astor, as she was generally called, with regal brevity—was nearing the end of her long reign as the acknowledged leader and arbiter of society. If anybody represented entrenched social prestige, it was she. Yet Mrs. Astor was the grand-daughter-in-law of a German immigrant who, though he made twenty million dollars in fur-trading and real-estate, was scarcely able to read and write.

  Again, in the early years of the twentieth century, the Vanderbilts were the most glitteringly fashionable family in the United States. When Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was married to Miss Elsie French in 1901, the arrangements for their wedding were chronicled in the press almost as if it were a royal alliance. Yet not until 1883 had Mrs. Astor deigned to call upon Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt, thus bestowing social recognition upon the family. And William K. Vanderbilt was the grandson of a Staten Island yokel who began his career by rowing a little ferry-boat from Staten Island to Manhattan.

  No further reminder is needed of the fact that in a democracy like the United States, in which there are no hereditary titles to provide a semblance of stability, the upper class is highly fluid. As a matter of fact, not only is it highly fluid, but it is composed of a number of overlapping groups, themselves fluid and very vaguely defined. There are, for example, in any large American community, the old families, whose prestige is based principally upon their inherited position and inherited wealth (or what remains of it); they are usually the conservators of manners, and view with perennial dismay the rivalry of the new rich and the decay of the traditional standards of taste and conduct. Again, there are the leaders of fashion, whose preeminence is based upon wealth, style, and a zest for entertainment, with or without inherited position. There are the new rich, many of them zealously seeking admission to the fashionable class by imitating fashionable manners and customs and by entertaining on the grandest scale of all. There are the substantial citizens who lead in the support of all manner of good works. The interplay of these and other groups forms a social drama which repeats itself in every large community and in every generation: the old families losing their money or sinking into inertia or dissipation; the fashionable people in their turn joining the ranks of the old families or wasting their substance; the new rich joining the company of the fashionable, and so on. But always the influence of money is commanding.

  Nowhere had this drama been more exciting than in New York. Long before the days chronicled by Henry Clews, new wealth had migrated thither to exercise its social ambition. During the eighteen-nineties the aristocrats of that proud city, under the leadership of Mrs. Astor and her chief-of-staff, Ward McAllister, had attempted to circumscribe society and keep the invaders out of it. “Mrs. Astor,” to quote Frank Crowninshield, “had very little use for newcomers. Only old families, old names, old lace, old operas, and old traditions appealed to her.” To her, society was a sacred institution; and under her tutelage its rites were almost pontifical. Magnificent were the two-hour dinners, with eight or nine courses and five wines; the assemblies, the cotillions at Delmonico’s, the stately teas, the massive evening receptions; magnificent, though sometimes a little dull.

  But in attempting to keep society exclusive, Mrs. Astor only whetted the ambitions of prosperous men and women the country over. When Ward McAllister, finding that her ballroom would hold only four hundred people, remarked in 1892 that this did not greatly matter as there were only about four hundred people in society anyhow, the remark found its way into the newspapers; it promptly reverberated from coast to coast, and “The Four Hundred” became a national phrase. Stories of the conspicuous extravagance of the Bradley Martin ball in 1897 circulated everywhere, and although many good people regarded them with dismay or amusement, others lay awake wondering how admission to the Four Hundred might be achieved.

  The walls of exclusion, so carefully guarded, held with some success until 1901, but with the formation of the Steel Corporation the pressure upon them became too great. The beneficiaries of Morgan’s gigantic distribution of Steel stock arrived in the metropolis from Pittsburgh and points west; other beneficiaries of other distributions came with them or followed them; bankers and brokers grown rich through speculation in the bull market of those days built marble palaces in Fifth Avenue and sought admission to the circle of the elect. “The hordes waiting to be admitted to society, whether in New York, Newport, Long Island, Aiken, Tuxedo, or Lenox, were so numerous, so insistent, so rich, and, on the whole, so agreeable, that there was nothing to do but give up the struggle,” says Frank Crowninshield. “And from that time on the men and women who were seen in general society multiplied like germs in a bouillon culture.” The tempo of society was quickening, its tone was becoming gayer, its membership much larger and more heterogeneous. The new financial era was altering it in a thousand subtle ways.

  Not all of the multi-millionaires, of course, cared for social conquest. Of the ten men in our group, for example, John D. Rockefeller did not care for it; his strict Baptist soul was content in the role of substantial citizen. Morgan, though he loved to play the grand seigneur on two continents, disdained the game of fashion. Keene was most at home in the company of horsemen: his only club was the Rockaway Hunt, his horses raced brilliantly at Belmont Park and Saratoga, his son Foxhall was the best polo player in the country and a dare-devil automobile-racer. Nevertheless the association between the financial empire of Wall Street and the fashionable society of Fifth Avenue was complex and intimate. The swallow-tailed gentlemen in attendance at Mrs. Astor’s annual ball constituted a good-sized directory of directors. The C-spring barouches and electric victorias which rolled through the Park, the trotting horses which matched their form on the Speedway of a Sunday afternoon, the coaches-and-fo
ur which threaded the winding roads of Westchester, the champagne which flowed at an evening of tableaux vivants, the splendid luncheons at Sherry’s, the new racing cars which tore along the sands of Ormond Beach, the diamonds which glittered in the great horseshoe of the Metropolitan, were paid for in considerable part from the proceeds of corporate flotations and successful bull or bear campaigns on the Exchange.

  When prices sagged in Wall Street (wrote Edith Wharton in 1905 in The House of Mirth) “even fortunes supposed to be independent of the market either betrayed a secret dependence on it, or suffered from a sympathetic affection: fashion sulked in its country houses, or came to town incognito; general entertainments were discountenanced.” When prices rose, society was buoyant. For example, the 20-point leap in Union Pacific stock which followed Harriman’s raising of the dividend in the summer of 1906 caused intense excitement in Bellevue Avenue, Newport; every trader of note in the Newport set at least made his summer expenses, according to the gossip-monger of Town Topics; and although a tennis tournament was then in progress, “I noticed that from ten o’clock on Friday morning until the market closed none of the big operators went near the Casino.”

  For the sons of the fortunate, the path of least resistance led to a financial career. For example, of the 55 members of the Porcellian and A.D. clubs (the two most fashionable clubs at Harvard) in the classes of 1904, 1905, and 1906, no less than 25 were engaged in finance a few years after graduation, 2 more had been engaged in finance but had left it, and another 2 were in closely allied occupations. The social connections of well-groomed young men could be turned to good account in a banking or brokerage house. The chief ambition of most young Americans was to make money, and the best chance to make it on a large scale was to have a part in the handling of great capital funds.

  And so it happened that while new men and new money from outside New York were constantly invading metropolitan society, this society was also determining in large degree the social atmosphere of Wall Street. If the market place was full of buccaneers insensitive to the public interest, it was also full of very agreeable men who after the day’s work was over would ride uptown and change and go splendidly to a dinner for forty or fifty at the Gerrys’ or the Goelets’ or the Ogden Millses’ or the John Jacob Astors’. And sometimes they were the same men.

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  The American aristocracy was still a little unsure of itself. It was developing a social pattern, but still somewhat self-consciously, and with a frequent glance toward Europe—and especially toward England—to assure itself that the pattern was suitable. To entertain a visiting count or duchess from across the water was to score several points in the social game; to arrange a marriage between one’s daughter and a foreign nobleman was to score a grand slam. Ever since Jennie Jerome, the daughter of a New York broker, had married Lord Randolph Churchill in the seventies, there had been an epidemic of international marriages. Gustavus Myers has estimated that by 1909 over five hundred American women had become the wives of titled foreigners and that the sum of about two hundred and twenty million dollars had gone abroad with them. William K. Vanderbilt’s daughter Consuelo married the Duke of Marlborough in 1895, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s daughter Gladys married Count Lâszló Széchényi in 1908, George J. Gould’s daughter Vivien married Lord Decies in 1911—but the list would be interminable. English butlers opened the doors of the massive houses along Fifth Avenue; American gentlemen of fashion purchased English clothes, and their wives, Parisian clothes; the country life of the very affluent followed a fundamentally English pattern, with large week-end gatherings, hunting, shooting, and a plentiful supply of horses. And it was not simply spontaneous preference which determined such choices, but also a sense that they were correct because they bore the foreign cachet.

  Yet if there was a trace of a national inferiority complex in the attitude of American society toward Europe, the complex was much more striking in the attitude of American millionaires toward European art. To be a patron of art was the correct thing for a successful banker or promoter or speculator. Among our ten leading financiers, three—Morgan, Baker, and Stillman—were notable collectors, and Schiff could almost be classed as one. Against the crimson velvet walls of the dining room of the house in Paris which Stillman occupied during the closing years of his life hung Rembrandts and Titians; over the library table hung an early Italian Holy Family; and in the private picture gallery were other masterpieces of assured merit, many of which his friend Mary Cassatt had helped him to select. Baker collected Chinese jade. Morgan’s treasures of art were of enormous variety and value: he was one of the great collectors of all time. Yet it is curious to note how generally these and other millionaires regarded art as something outside the current of the American life of their time.

  Although Schiff is said to have given commissions to living artists, and Harriman—a marked exception—insisted that everything in his huge country house at Arden, even to the tapestries and the marble bas-relief over the principal fireplace, should be of American workmanship, nevertheless the overwhelming preponderance of works of art collected by the millionaires of this period were Old Masters which, as Lewis Mumford remarks in The Golden Day, “had been on the market a long time, which had reached par, and could be certified by trusty advisers like the famous critic and appraiser, Mr. Bernard Berenson.

  “This hunting for pictures, statues, tapestries, clothes, pieces of furniture, for the epidermis and entrails of palaces and cottages and churches,” continues Mr. Mumford, “satisfied the two capital impulses of the Gilded Age: it gave full play to the acquisitive instinct, and, with the possible rise and fall in prices in even time-established securities, it had not a little of the cruder excitement of gambling in the stock market or in real estate. At the same time, it satisfied a starved desire for beauty and raised the pursuer an estimable step or two in the social scale.… The essential character of all these culture seekers was that their heart lay in one age, and their life in another. They were empty of the creative impulse themselves, and unwilling to nurture this impulse in the products of their own time. At best, they were connoisseurs, who could appreciate a good thing, if it were not too near: at worst, they were ragpickers and scavengers in the middens of earlier cultures. They wanted an outlet for their money: collection furnished it. They wanted beauty; they could appreciate it in the past, or in what was remote in space, the Orient or the Near East. They wanted, finally, to cover up the bleakness of their American heritage; and they did that, not by cultivating more intensely what they had, in fertile contact with present and past, but by looting from Europe the finished objects which they lacked.”

  The motives to which Mr. Mumford refers were not, of course, always conscious and deliberate. There is no question of the sincerity of the passion for beauty in men like Morgan and Stillman, whatever one may say of the motives which animated a man like Gates, who collected Corots yet was never seen by his secretary reading any book but David Harum.

  The point is that the conception of art as a living thing which might flower out of the life about one and express the meaning and the beauty of that life, just as the great paintings of the Renaissance flowered out of the life of fifteenth-century Florence, would have been strange to these men, if not unintelligible. The life about them was crude, the scene about them was ugly—and had been made uglier by the industrial operations of men like themselves; there was no American art worth their attention; they turned to the art of the past and of Europe just as naturally as the patrons of the Metropolitan Opera turned to European operas and European singers, as the patrons of orchestral music turned to European composers and conductors, as American architects built railroad stations in the guise of Roman baths, and American country houses in the guise of French chateaux, English manor-houses, or Italian villas. What else was there to do? The foreign products were better. Therefore one bought them; or if this were not practicable, one had them imitated. Not yet was there in the Metropolitan Museum any American Wing. Financially
the country had come of age; culturally it was still all too conscious of its awkward youth, and the attitude of the millionaires helped to keep it so.

  It was natural for the men of an age of imperial finance to bring back trophies won abroad by their dollars, just as the emperors of an earlier time had brought back trophies won by the sword. It was natural for acquisitive men to think of beauty in terms of purchase and investment. When Yerkes, the Chicago traction magnate, died, his canvas by Troyon, “Coming from the Market,” had already appreciated forty thousand dollars in value since its purchase, according to the newspapers. This was a fact which any speculator could appreciate; perhaps there was something in art after all! At any rate, dozens of financiers were following the example of Morgan and Frick and Baker and Stillman—with Joseph Duveen as their broker and Berenson as their investment counselor. Almost as stimulating to self-assurance as an English valet or a stable of thoroughbreds or an imported Mercedes, was a genuine undisputed European masterpiece in the drawing room.

  In Anna Robeson Burr’s life of James Stillman there is a fleeting reference to Henry Clay Frick which hints at the cultural status of the new-made American millionaire during this lusty period. She reports that Frick was once seen “in his palace, seated on a Renaissance throne under a baldacchino, and holding in his little hand a copy of the Saturday Evening Post.”