America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But these Philadelphia Morrises are even prouder of another long family tradition, that of probity. In Philadelphia, it is important to remember, some things are more important than others. Even more significant than having ancestors who signed the Declaration of Independence is having ancestors who were on the board of directors of the Pennsylvania Railroad. From the very beginning, the Pennsylvania Railroad was run by Philadelphia’s upper class. The Pennsy’s presidents—Thomas A. Scott, George B. Roberts, Alexander J. Cassatt—were all picked out of the city’s aristocracy. Furthermore, during its great heyday the Pennsy was the best-run and the best railroad in the United States. The great scandals and outrages committed by other railroad men of the time—William H. Vanderbilt (“The public be damned!”), E. H. Harriman (who brought strikers into line by hiring thugs armed with machine guns), James J. Hill, and Jay Gould, not to mention the notorious California big four, Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins—that inevitably led to financial panics on Wall Street never touched the Pennsylvania. For years, the success of the Pennsy was proof that the upper class knew how to run things best.

  Nor was the Pennsy’s management ever stuffy or smug. On the contrary, the railroad was foresighted and ambitious. Until the presidency of A. J. Cassatt, for example, passengers from the West coming into New York had had to debark with their luggage on the Jersey shore and make the journey into Manhattan by ferry. Cassatt ordered two tunnels built under the Hudson River, four more under the East River, and the construction of that magnificent lost New York landmark, Pennsylvania Station. To be invited to join the Pennsy’s board of directors was the most coveted honor in the city. Over the years, the board was composed of Biddies, Ingersolls, Cadwaladers, and Robertses—and nearly always several Morrises.

  If the Philadelphia Morrises take a somewhat lofty view of their New York–New Jersey nonrelatives, the New York–New Jersey clan is perturbed not at all by this. “Our family was never interested in that city-society sort of thing,” says the aforementioned Benjamin P. Morris, Jr. “My grandfather used to call it ‘Sass-iety.’ We were country people. Grandfather Morris had a big farm in New Jersey, where I grew up. He also ran a gristmill and was a lay judge. For years, too, he had the title of wreck master, which meant he was in charge of salvaging all the shipwrecks along the Jersey coast. They even paid him for it.” While the Philadelphia Morrises enjoy being featured prominently on corporate and philanthropic letterheads and in the society pages, the New York–New Jersey Morrises have tended to take up less flashy endeavors. Just as many of the early descendants of the first Lewis Morris were lawyers and country judges, so are many of the family lawyers today. Now an octogenarian, Benjamin P. Morris, Jr., is retired—unfashionably—in a small town near the Gulf Coast of Texas (these Morrises like to be near the sea) and in Iowa, where his son, Benjamin P. Morris III, is a lawyer. His son, Benjamin P. Morris IV, is in law school. And as far as is known, no New York–New Jersey Morris has ever married a Philadelphia Morris, real or unreal, or wanted to.

  The Philadelphia Morrises, meanwhile, have proven to be a surprisingly cohesive family, and considering its size, there have been very few feuds. Alas, the same cannot be said for the New York–New Jersey clan, who, like the Livingstons, have been divided into two warring factions. It all happened more than a hundred years ago, and the issue, needless to say, was money. And it all started quite innocently with the death of Jacob Wolcott Morris’s wife. Jacob Wolcott was Benjamin P. Morris’s paternal grandfather, he of the big farm and gristmill and salvage contracts, and after his wife’s death Jacob Wolcott decided to marry again. This was fine with his four children, particularly when Jacob announced that he was settling a large piece of his property on each existing child, while keeping, of course, a goodly piece for himself.

  His new wife was the former Elizabeth Pearce, of a fine old Quaker family (the middle initial in all the Benjamins’ names stands for Pearce). But what no one expected was that Grandfather Jacob would then begin siring a whole new family of five more children. All would have been well if, by the time of Jacob Wolcott Morris’s own death, the land he had kept for himself had not increased enormously in value as the whole of Monmouth County—much of which Jacob owned—had been turning into a suburb of New York City. Thus the children of his second family found themselves far richer than the children of his first. There were hard feelings all around between the half brothers and half sisters. Soon none of them were speaking to each other.

  But then insult was added to injury, and irony was heaped upon irony by, of all things, Mother Nature. In the early 1900s, a series of severe Atlantic storms attacked the New Jersey coast, and much of what had been Jacob Morris’s land was swept out to sea. Originally, he had owned a large tract of farmland to the east of Ocean Avenue in Long Branch. Today, there is nothing east of Ocean Avenue but beach. All Jacob’s heirs suffered in that loss, but still the children of his second family came out better because their beachfront was still valuable. Now the Jersey Shore was becoming an increasingly popular summer resort, as it remains today.

  A final blow to the family fortune was dealt in 1910 by human folly or, more accurately, greed. Into the Morris family came a man whose name the family has blessedly forgotten and who is referred to today simply as the Promoter. The Promoter had a get-rich-quick—or get-richer-quick—scheme. A seventeenth-century Dutchwoman, it seemed, named Anneka Jans had owned a large piece of property in Lower Manhattan. By 1910, this property included all of the Wall Street area, the Trinity Church and its burial ground, and all of New York City’s Battery Park. But, said the Promoter, the title to this land was seriously clouded, and he believed that he could prove in court that the rightful owners of this real estate were the heirs of the first Lewis Morris. All the Promoter needed was money to press this case, and he was canvassing all the Morrises to chip in whatever they could to finance this legal claim. Obviously, the more each family member contributed to this cause, the larger would be his or her share of the valuable pie when it was finally cut up.

  Everybody—her children, her grandchildren, her nieces and nephews—begged Jacob Wolcott Morris’s widow not to get involved in this harebrained enterprise. But the temptation to end up owning a city park, a historic church with a landmark cemetery where Morris ancestors reposed in marble tombs of extravagant design, along with most of New York’s financial district, including the Stock Exchange, was just too much for Granny Morris. She turned over everything she owned to the Promoter.

  Does it need to be added that the case was thrown out of court and that the Promoter disappeared with every cent he had been able to collect, never to be heard from or seen again? Probably not.

  Today nearly all the family lands in New Jersey have passed out of Morris hands, and Morrisania is nothing more than a dishearteningly depressed section of the East Bronx, a haven for drug dealers and criminals where no respectable citizen would dare to venture after dark. But the Morrises also have their mementos of former grandeur. And, as a family that started out as men of the sea, privateers, and sugar merchants, the Morris mementos are appropriately nautical. The oldest lighthouse still in service in America was built in 1763 at Sandy Hook, on the northernmost tip of the New Jersey peninsula, and Benjamin Pearce Morris of Iowa and Texas owns the original key to it. Not long ago, Mr. Morris’s wife asked him, “Did your family own that lighthouse?” He gave her a look of aristocratic disbelief. “Hell’s bells, woman,” he replied. “We owned the whole damned state!”

  *By then, the Morrises had become connected through marriage to the Gouverneurs, another colonial first family that had grown rich in the West Indian trade.

  12

  Outsiders

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was common agreement among Americans of nearly every rank that the new republic needed an aristocracy. It deserved one. It was a part of the country’s logical and manifest destiny. After all, the country had had a clearly defined aristocracy sin
ce the earliest colonial days, and no one seemed the worse for it. The American Constitution might, in a technical sense, appear to rule out an upper class. But the fact was that every nation of any importance in the world had let its cream rise to the top. The impregnability of the British social system and the sophistication of the French were firmly based on the concept of class. And a new nation destined for greatness demanded its own standard-bearers and arbiters of taste. To admit to the lack of such a leadership—or, worse, to an inability to establish one—was like confessing that America would always be second-rate, or so it seemed.

  Furthermore, it seemed clear that the general populace not only wanted but also felt entitled to a class of people they could look up to, aspire to, gossip and speculate about, and try to copy in matters of fashion, speech, behavior, and interior decor. An upper class does not emerge by simply stepping forth and declaring itself such. It must have the support, admiration, respect—or at least interest—of all the classes beneath it in order to stay aloft. In America, the upper class seemed sturdily buttressed from beneath. Aristocracy seemed to have become democracy’s cry, the people’s choice as surely as if it had been settled at the ballot box.

  The press both chronicled and endorsed the upperclass concept. At times, the newspapers of the day seemed to devote more space to the comings and goings and entertainments of the elite than to congressional decisions in Washington. And the fact that this sort of reporting sold papers was proof of the popularity of the theme. To be sure, there were a few spoilsports like Thomas Jefferson, who kept inveighing against the “aristocracy of wealth” and the “aristocracy of family.” When, in a competition among architects for the design of the first White House, the prize was awarded to James Hoban, an Irishman, Jefferson was critical not only of the cost ($400,000) but also of the regal scale of the executive mansion. (“Big enough,” Jefferson sniffed, “for two emperors, one Pope, and the Grand Lama.”) Of course sour grapes could not be ruled out here; Jefferson had submitted his own White House design and came out in second place in the competition. Meanwhile, the general public seemed not to mind at all that Mr. Hoban’s “design” was merely an abject copy of the duke of Leinster’s palace in Dublin.

  The women’s fashion and self-help magazines of the period had become obsessed with propriety, with what was “proper” and “correct” and comme il faut. On the “model” country house (“which can be built for $2000 to $2500 anywhere in America”), one journal noted, “the second floor extends over the front porch, a thing, perhaps, undesirable if your house must face north, or if in a very cold section, but quite proper when well constructed, in moderate climates.” On “The Art of Street Dressing,” a fashion expert named Isabel A. Mallon wrote, “I think it may be said that the woman who walks may not wear a silk gown. It is quite proper for her in the depths of winter to have a velvet, velveteen, or corduroy frock trimmed with fur in which she may walk, but the silk frock is essentially dedicated to the carriage.” Etiquette books, carefully delineating the differences in behavior between ladies and gentlemen and hoi polloi, abounded. When traveling alone, one of these texts cautioned, “ladies should avoid saying anything to women in showy attire, with painted faces, and white kid gloves … you will derive no pleasure from making acquaintance with females who are evidently coarse and vulgar, even if you know that they are rich.” As for the opposite sex, one manual of the early 1800s observed, “It is not quite comme il faut for gentlemen to blow their noses with their fingers, especially in the street.”

  There were times when Americans’ preoccupations with social propriety were misinterpreted, particularly by outsiders. Mrs. Douglas Cruger, for example, a New York Van Rensselaer, had brought home with her from Europe a number of statues of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses and installed them in her house on Fourteenth Street—a rather daring decorative touch for the nineteenth century, since the figures were either semidraped or not draped at all. When Mrs. Cruger announced her plans to have a dinner party to show off her new acquisitions, a friend wondered whether New York was ready for such displays of nudity. So, on the night of the party, Mrs. Cruger playfully covered her statuary, putting smocks on the female figures, aprons on the males. Bemused, a visiting Englishman turned to another guest, John Van Buren, and commented on how extraordinarily “modest” Americans seemed to be. “Oh, modesty isn’t the word for it,” replied Van Buren, a noted wit. “Why, we’re so modest here that we tie curtains around the legs of our pianos.” Later, in an interview with the British press on his American visit, the Briton reported the piano-legs quip as sober fact—it had come, after all, from none other than the son of the president of the United States.

  The public, meanwhile, kept wanting to know more. It wanted to know who was who. It wanted the American aristocracy codified, listed; it wanted to have the families who were members of the aristocracy specifically sorted out from those who were not. Most of all it wanted the upper class ranked by degree. It wanted the equivalent of hereditary titles. But this, of course, was an impossible demand, since there were no fixed demarcations—an earl versus a duke or a viscount versus a baronet—to fall back on.

  At first, the easiest thing for the press to fall back on seemed to be romance, and the lives of the elite were given the quality of a fairy tale or of a nineteenth-century operetta. It was not uncommon, for example, for an important social event to be written up in verse, as was the case after a grand ball given by Mrs. William Douglas in New York in 1816:

  And, pray, who were there? is the question you’ll ask,

  To name the one-half would be no easy task.

  There were Bayards and Clarksons, Van Horns and Le Roys,

  All famous, you well know, for making a noise.

  There were Livingstons, Lenoxes, Henrys and Hoffmans

  And Crugers and Carys and Barnwells and Bronsons

  Delanceys and Dyckmans and “little Devoe”

  Gouverneurs and Goelets and M. Peccio.…

  The doggerel continues in this vein for many, many more stanzas.

  If this sort of reporting did not satisfy readers’ curiosity about rank, a hint of mystery was injected. In New York, for example, much was written about the Upper Ten, but explaining who the Upper Ten actually were was quite another matter. Each reporter on the social scene had his or her favorite list of names, and so the actual composition of the Upper Ten remained glamorously elusive. At first, the criteria for membership seemed simple enough—family lineage, cultivation, tradition, manners. Money, it was pointed out, had nothing to do with it, because the Upper Ten certainly would have to include such families as the Brevoorts, who were Old New York, elegant, charming, cultivated—and totally impoverished. The notion that one could buy one’s way into the upper class was considered laughable.

  But soon these simple criteria for social acceptance would begin to crumble. The problem was that New York was simply growing too rapidly for the native-born to cling to their claims of social preeminence. Socially qualified—and moneyed—outsiders were arriving from everywhere: from Europe, from New England, from the South, from the Midwest and even the Far West. The social term for these outsiders was “bouncers”; they appeared to have bounced up from nowhere. One could chuckle about all these new-money bouncers, but it was impossible to ignore them. They were too conspicuous.

  As a result of these outside pressures, the patrician Old New York families who felt, with certain justification, that they had founded and built their city and left their indelible stamp upon it began quite uncharacteristically to draw their wagons into a circle and to exhibit the first signs of exclusivity. Exclusivity, of course, meant keeping other people out, but the trouble with exclusivity was that it could be mistaken for snobbishness, and snobbishness was not a proper upperclass trait. Exclusivity could also lead to a kind of creeping obsolescence, and obsolescence could lead to obscurity. The Old New York families were not quite ready for that. And so, from the circle of their wagons, the Old New Yorkers peered cauti
ously out at the surrounding new tribe of prancing bouncers to see whether possibly one or two of these might be considered candidates for tentative admission.

  A transition was taking place from an aristocracy of family to an aristocracy of family and wealth. The foresighted might have guessed that before too long an aristocracy would emerge based on money alone, but meanwhile, without anyone’s realizing it, a delicate compromise was being worked out between old money and new. It was a kind of quid pro quo arrangement. The newcomers would provide fresh wherewithal with which to do things, and the Old Guard would show the newcomers what things to do and how to do them. The formal coming-to-terms between old and new money was almost like the relationship between an Old World schoolmaster and his frisky schoolboy charges—between Mr. Chips and his “boys.” The youngsters might consider their schoolmaster ridiculously hidebound, stuffy, and quaint. But they nonetheless respected him for his wisdom, acknowledged his lofty standards, and loved him for his sweet and gentle ways.

  Dealing with the wealthy parvenu has always been a problem in any society, whether in nineteenth-century Manhattan or in twentieth-century Scarsdale, where the new neighbor on the street is regarded with curiosity and suspicion. Put another way, the wealthier the parvenu, the more quickly the problem must be solved. In England, the rich upstart is often handed a knighthood, on the theory that if he is given a gentleman’s title he will start behaving like one.

  But a title would have done little to gentrify John Jacob Astor. In appearance, Mr. Astor was far from attractive. Short and pudgy, with small hands and feet and wispy, sand-colored hair that grew out of his head in all directions, he usually seemed to be falling out of his clothes. His round little stomach had a way of popping the buttons off his shirts and vests and trouser tops, and he often looked in need of a bath. He was slightly walleyed, so when he fixed his gaze on you with his left eye, his right eye appeared to be focused somewhere beyond your left ear. His thick and guttural Low German accent was almost impossible to understand. He chewed tobacco and used any handy receptacle—a flowerpot or an empty teacup—as a spittoon. His schooling had been minimal. He could read and do simple sums, but his spelling was atrocious and his handwriting an illegible scrawl. He was also, by 1800, probably New York’s richest man.