America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Finally, August Belmont decided to pull out his heavy artillery. He appeared before several members of the committee and stated firmly that this year the Belmonts expected an invitation. The men replied that they were sorry, but that it was quite impossible. Belmont then allegedly told the committee members, “I think it’s not only possible, it’s also extremely probable. I have been investigating the accounts of you gentlemen on the Street. I can assure you that either I get an invitation to the Assembly this year, or else the day after the Assembly each of you will be a ruined man.”

  The Belmonts received their invitation, but the story of the means by which it had been procured got around. The following year, the Belmonts were also prominent guests at the Assembly. They were particularly prominent because nearly everyone else who had been invited stayed home. The Assembly was never held again.

  Thus did the Old Guard deal with climbers, not by battling them but simply by withdrawing from the arena. Of course the result would be that the climbers had the arena to themselves. But the Old Guard would never view this as weakness on their part, or as a signal of abdication or defeat. On the contrary, they saw it as a kind of victory of principles over sheer power. Was there any other gentlemanly or ladylike way to deal with social ruffians?

  Margaret Trevor Pardee grew up next door to August Belmont’s son, August Belmont, Jr. Her father’s big house took up half the block on Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street, and the Belmont house stood on the other half. “Mother told us that of course we were to be civil to the Belmonts,” she says, “but we were not to get involved with them.” The tiny nonagenarian with twinkly blue eyes and auburn hair (“I give it a little help from a bottle”) recalls a turn-of-the-century New York girlhood and upbringing quite different from that of her neighbors. “Goodness, I couldn’t tell you how many servants Mother had as opposed to the Belmonts,” she says. “They were hard to count, because we children were not permitted in the kitchen. This was not for a snobby reason. It was because we were told that we would be underfoot and in the way while the kitchen staff had important work to do. Of course, when Mother was out, we’d sometimes sneak in. But we didn’t count because we were taught that it wasn’t nice to talk about how many servants one had. It would be like boasting, and it was bad manners to boast.”

  The strictures of Margaret Trevor’s girlhood read a bit as though they were taken from a Renaissance manual for the training of a princess: You are to rule your kingdom, but to be served you must also know how to serve. “Everybody we knew was taught the same thing,” she says today. “We were taught never to ask a servant to do something you wouldn’t be perfectly willing and able to do yourself. You might never have to scrub a toilet, but it was important that you know how to do it. You might never have to change a tire on an automobile, but that didn’t mean you weren’t taught to do it properly. My children were taught the same things, and now their children are teaching their children.

  “Of course, a lot has changed. Mother started her day early, with her breakfast brought to her on a tray in bed. While she ate, she and the cook went over the day’s menus together. Then she read and answered her mail, and paid the bills that had come in that day. Then she rose and bathed, and went out visiting or shopping. My children and grandchildren can’t get that kind of service today, but I’m happy to say they still observe the rules that my mother laid down to me. Two of them were: Never leave your house until all the day’s bills have been paid; and, a lady isn’t a lady if her bed isn’t made by noon.”

  Like others in her circle, Margaret Trevor was raised by governesses and educated by private tutors until she was twelve years old. “The governesses were usually English, and very strict on manners. The chauffeurs were usually Scotsmen—don’t ask me why—and the maids were Irish. It sounds extravagant, I know, but in those days it wasn’t—it just wasn’t. There was a steady supply of Irish girls who were eager to get the work, who were clean and honest and loved children, and who would work for very little—seven days a week, with an hour off on Sunday to go to mass—just to have a roof over their heads. They didn’t act as though we were exploiting them—they felt we were helping them! In those days, every lady had a personal maid as well. Oh, my, it all seems so long ago!

  “But we children were never allowed to have a maid pick up after us the way”—she sniffs—“some people did. I’m thinking of the Belmonts. Oh, no, that was taboo. We had to keep our rooms tidy and make our own beds. Our clothes had to be all folded and put away at night before we went to bed. We ironed our own middy blouses—middy blouses were the big thing. Oh, I suppose it was all very rigid, very formulated, very comme il faut,” she says of the kind of girlhood that has been compared to the binding process that was used to form the Chinese lotus foot, “but we didn’t think so at the time. We lived the way everyone else we knew lived.”

  As she talks, Margaret Pardee’s voice is full of little trills and crescendos, punctuated with tremolos and staccato passages. It is a voice that seems to have been trained for the theatre, and it almost was, for Margaret Pardee at one point threatened to rebel against her aristocratic training in order to become, of all things, a show girl. “But wiser heads prevailed. As children, you see, our upbringing was very strict. From nine in the morning until one in the afternoon, my brothers and sisters and I had our lessons with our governesses. But then, for two whole hours we had freedom! Freedom. We’d put on our roller skates and skate up Fifth Avenue to Central Park, and down the Mall—our governesses tagging along, of course, a block behind us, not because the park was dangerous, but because it was comme il faut, you see. When I was twelve I was sent to a real school, and that was to Spence when it was still called Miss Spence’s Classes. Miss Spence’s school was on West Fifty-fifth Street then, and my brother went to the Browning School, which was also on West Fifty-fifth, just across the street. My brother and I would walk to Fifth Avenue, and there we’d pick up our friend Dickie Babcock, and walk north to Fifty-fifth. But there we’d have to part company, because Spence girls weren’t allowed to be seen walking down the street with boys. Oh, my! So the boys would walk down the north side of the street to Browning, and the girls would walk down the south side to Spence. In good weather, at recess time, we liked to go up on the roof, where there was a sort of playground. Across the street, the Browning boys would be up on their roof, and we would look at them from across the street. But we weren’t allowed to wave at each other. All we could do was look. Oh, my!

  “And, oh, my, there were all sorts of rules at school. We were only allowed to wear one simple ring, and one simple pin, no other jewelry, and no more than two hats at a time. You see, it was fashionable for women to change their hats several times a day—even in their own houses ladies wore hats—but at Spence we could only change hats once a day! And there was a rule that the hats must be ‘inconspicuous and not costly.’ We didn’t have uniforms, but I used to wish we did. Even though Spence girls weren’t supposed to wear expensive dresses either, some girls did. The Bishop girls! Oh, my, I remember how I envied their velvet dresses! Nowadays, I suppose you’d call the Bishops nouveaux riches, but we didn’t call them that, though the Bishop girls were considered rather fast. Money didn’t matter to people in those days the way it does today, or at least we never talked about it. What mattered was breeding, and whether we liked someone. And breeding didn’t just mean old family, or pedigree. It meant people who behaved in a well-bred way—who were nice, you see.

  “And my Spence graduation! It was held at the old Sherry’s at Forty-fourth and Fifth. We marched down the aisle to the strains of ‘Pomp and Circumstance.’ Oh, my, and Miss Clara Spence herself—a steely-eyed Scotswoman! Excellence, excellence—that was her credo! Better grades, better grades! ‘Come now, Miss Trevor’ she would say to me, ‘you can do better than that!’ At night, I used to stuff cotton around the cracks of my bedroom door so my father wouldn’t see how late I was staying up, studying. But I got good marks, and when I graduated I was one
of the top ten in my class. It was unusual for a girl to go to college in those days, but I begged my father to let me go to college. He turned thumbs down on that. College was for boys, not girls. It sounds unfair, I know, but there was a reason for it. In those days, if a girl went to college there was nothing she could do with her education except become a schoolteacher. And schoolteachers were not permitted to marry, and so that meant becoming a spinster. Every father wanted his daughter to marry, and to give him grandchildren. In those days there was always a good reason for everything.”

  A young woman of good family was not only expected to marry. She was expected to marry well. “This was drummed into us,” and so this Margaret Trevor did in 1917, when she married Dr. Irving Pardee, a prominent neurologist and himself a member of an old-line New York and New Jersey family. Margaret Pardee’s younger sister, Louise, married even better. Her first husband was J. Couper Lord, of the family that founded Lord & Taylor, who died. She married, next, Lewis Morris, a grandson of the Declaration of Independence signer. He also died. She then married, third, Henry Mellon of the Pittsburgh Mellons, who suffered a heart attack in Florida, became paralyzed, and eventually died. “So she managed to marry and bury three rich husbands,” Mrs. Pardee says with a sigh.

  Between her graduation from Miss Spence’s and her marriage to Dr. Pardee, however, Margaret Trevor was required to fulfill another social obligation to her class—the proscribed ritual of becoming a debutante—in the 1912–1913 New York winter social season. There were the balls, parties, luncheons, and thés dansants at which she was officially presented to her parents’ friends as their social peer. She herself was presented to society at a tea dance for several hundred people held at her parents’ Madison Avenue house.

  “I loved to sing, and I loved to dance,” she says. “My father used to sleep with his bedroom door ajar, and my sister Louise and I used to tiptoe past his door when we came in at night, so he wouldn’t know how late we’d been out. Oh, my, but he was strict with us! Not with himself, of course—he had French blood, and loved a good time. But with us he was so straitlaced! My mother was much more laissez-faire. She didn’t care how late we danced, because she knew that we wouldn’t do anything wrong. There were some dances that were frowned upon. The turkey trot and the bunny hug, for instance. We didn’t do those dances. The tango was a problem. Some people thought it was very elegant and beautiful. Other people thought it was downright naughty. I loved to dance the tango! And the Yale Prom—that was the party of the entire season. Everyone went up to New Haven and stayed at the Taft Hotel. The prom started on Saturday night, and by Sunday afternoon people were still dancing! The next year, they were still dancing on Monday, and it became a thing to see how long the dance could last! It went on all day Monday, and Monday night, and then all day Tuesday, and Tuesday night! People were still dancing on Wednesday! It became something of a scandal, and all the newspapers wrote it up, and the Yale authorities issued a statement to the press that such a thing would never be permitted to happen again! Oh, my, but how I loved it!”

  Currently, Margaret Trevor Pardee is in the process of sorting out the family papers in order to prepare a scrapbook of family memorabilia for each of her grandchildren. Old newspaper clippings, diaries, journals, and family bibles—plus one fat scrapbook of clippings from her own debutante year—are being sorted through, arranged, and filed in appropriate folders. Into each grandchild’s scrapbook will go copies of the interwoven family trees of the Schieffelins, Pardees, and Trevors, and her own genealogy, which wanders backward through eighteen generations of Trevors, Stewarts, Lispenards, Roosevelts, Barclays, Bownes, more Barclays, more Stewarts, back to the turn of the fifteenth century—showing her direct linear descent from Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.

  What is it that she hopes to transmit to her grandchildren, and on to their grandchildren after that, through the medium of these family-memory books? “Pride,” she says. “The things I was taught. Poise and pride. Pride of our place in American history. The things that knit a family together. We were always very proud of being Americans, you see. Even though a Schieffelin ancestor fought on the side of the British in the Revolution, he was part of American history.

  “I suppose that was one of the troubles with the first August Belmont. He was a foreigner. He didn’t understand America, and he didn’t understand New York. Our ways were foreign to him. He had no background, no roots to fall back on. He thought he could buy it all with money, but you just can’t. He had plenty of money, but he had no pride.”

  20

  The Gospel of Wealth

  In Margaret Pardee’s scrapbooks, files, and collections of family-related newspaper clippings, there are occasional items which indicate that life for privileged early-twentieth-century New Yorkers was not entirely one of ease and comfort and night-and-day-long dancing. There were certain vicissitudes as well. Automobiles, for example, were still something of a novelty, and automobile accidents made headlines on the front pages of the New York papers. Since motorcars were still affordable only to the wealthy, the accidents usually involved a prominent citizen.

  Such an occurrence involved Margaret Trevor Pardee’s great-aunt, Mrs. Hamilton Fish, who, with a friend, Miss Emily Van Amringe, was being driven down Riverside Drive in Mrs. Fish’s landaulet when their car struck a Fifth Avenue southbound motor stage at 101st Street. In this accident, the omnibus was not damaged, but the landaulet lost a wheel, and the ladies were thrown against the windscreen that separated the driver from his passengers. The chauffeur, Henry McEwen, was unhurt, but the ladies were taken to St. Luke’s Hospital for treatment of cuts and bruises. To a policeman who came to the scene, Mrs. Fish commented, “If anybody is to be hurt by these accidents, I wish the chauffeur would suffer once in a while.” The New York Sun agreed with her.

  America, after all, was a democracy, where everyone was entitled to equal treatment.

  Despite the aura of languor and complacency that seems to have hung around this era like a perfumed breeze, as the belle époque glided to its close and the twentieth century entered its teens, there were disquieting signs of social unrest in the country that were hard for even the most gently bred and carefully sheltered to ignore.

  The first of these warnings had appeared in 1899, with the publication of Wisconsinite Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, with its introduction of such phrases as “conspicuous consumption,” “conspicuous leisure,” and “the pecuniary standard of living.” Veblen was no Marxist or socialist, but his treatment of the leisure class was definitely impious and mocking. He placed clergymen, for example, in the servant class, pointing out that they put on elaborate uniforms in order to perform ritual duties to a superior master. He also—perhaps intentionally, or perhaps not—managed to misquote Shakespeare when he spoke of people who were “to the manor born.” What Hamlet actually said was, “.… though I am a native here and to the manner born.…” Hamlet was talking about aristocratic attitudes and deportment, but Veblen left the impression that the subject was rich people who lived in manor houses. This confusion over the meaning of the term has persisted ever since. In any case, Veblen’s book, which was widely read and discussed, left the distinct impression that the leisure class was frivolous and silly. Was the American aristocracy in danger of becoming a laughingstock and being ridiculed out of existence? Some people interpreted Veblen just that way.

  Fourteen years later, in 1913, the American rich found themselves under attack from several different directions at once, and there were ominous signs that the American public in general was growing less and less tolerant of the well-to-do. That year, the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution went into effect, empowering Congress to levy a graduated income tax on all incomes over three thousand dollars a year. This, it was proclaimed, would equal things out and require that the rich contribute a fuller share of their wealth to the public coffers—though the rich would soon devise loopholes and shelters against the tax laws that would leave most
of them just as wealthy as before. And, also in 1913, a Columbia University professor named Charles A. Beard published Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and pointed out that America’s founding fathers who drafted the Constitution in 1787 were all men of considerable property—colonial aristocrats. This fact, Beard suggested, had led to certain economic inequities in the years since then.

  These vaguely unsettling noises did not go unheard among the upper echelons of society in New York and elsewhere. The ideas had begun to take hold that, though some Americans were quite fortunate, there were many more who were less so; that though a privileged class had definitely evolved, there was another that was just as definitely underprivileged; that with great wealth there went proportionately great social responsibilities; and that there might be more important things to think about than the morality of the tango and the duration of the Yale Prom. Part of this sobering sense was inherited from the European concept of noblesse oblige and from the motto of the British monarch, Ich dien, “I serve.” But even more of it seems to have involved a very American capitalist sense of Protestant guilt.

  On the heels of Mr. Beard’s published thesis came the House Committee on Banking and Currency’s report on the “money trust,” a loosely organized but highly effective cabal of bankers and industrialists, led by J. P. Morgan, that controlled financial power in the United States. And, to bring home the notion of the enormous power held by the rich in a violent and frightening way, 1913 was also the year of the bloody strike called by the United Mine Workers at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, protesting the policies of the firm that was headed by John D. Rockefeller of Standard Oil. Twenty-seven strikers were killed, and Mr. Rockefeller, whose attitude up to that point had been one of simple arrogance, found it wise to enlist the services of one Ivy Ledbetter Lee, a pioneer in the new “science” of public relations. It was Mr. Lee who counseled Mr. Rockefeller to travel to Colorado and to personally address the striking miners, a gesture that had an immediately calming effect on the highly charged situation. It was also Mr. Lee’s suggestion that Rockefeller adopt the tactic of handing out shiny new dimes to bystanders wherever he went, helping to create the illusion that the ruthless oil tycoon was not a curmudgeonly despot at all but a kindly national Santa Claus of sorts. At the same time, Lee was helping Rockefeller lay the groundwork for the vast Rockefeller Foundation, which would become a major force in improving world health, world agriculture, and education. It is thanks to the foundation, rather than to any individual family member, that the Rockefellers today have been admitted, albeit begrudgingly, into the ranks of the American aristocracy—though to members of the Old Guard they will perhaps always be regarded as newcomers.