America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Ivy Lee had to teach John D. Rockefeller that “rich” and “responsibility” began with the same letter of the alphabet. Lee himself was born with the knowledge. Six feet tall, lean and erect and handsome, he bore himself with the courtliness and dignity of a southern gentleman, which, indeed, he was. A childhood accident had left him with a slight limp, which only managed to add to his kindly, decorous demeanor. Though he had started his career in the somewhat raffish world of newspaper reportage, his presence added a touch of unexpected class to that profession, and it was the kind of class that Lee owed both to his heritage and to his education.

  On his father’s side, the family could trace itself back to the first Richard Lee of the Lees of Virginia. On his mother’s side, he was descended from George Washington’s father and, beyond the Washingtons—admittedly with a slight genealogical hiccup*—to Margaret Butler, whose illustrious ancestors included nearly all the kings of Europe, including Charlemagne. Ivy Lee’s grandfather Zachary Lee had been a wealthy Georgia planter and gristmill owner, and Ivy Lee’s father, James Wideman Lee, had been privately educated at Bawsville Academy before the Civil War. But the family fortune was lost when General William Sherman put a torch to the Lee plantation and mill on his march to the sea, and so James W. Lee chose the best occupation that was open to a newly impoverished gentleman and became a Methodist Episcopal clergyman. Soon he was one of the most popular ministers in Atlanta.

  For his time, James Lee was an altogether remarkable man, and Ivy Lee grew up listening to his father’s sermons, which were about love, racial and religious tolerance, thrift, hard work, and moral duties. He was an early southern advocate of civil rights for blacks and for government programs that would improve the quality of black education in the postwar South. Following an anti-Semitic incident in St. Louis, the Reverend Lee preached a sermon that made national headlines: “METHODIST PASTOR LAUDS JEWISH RACE.” Later, he led a campaign to admit Jews, Catholics, and blacks into the YMCA and proposed a “Cathedral of Cooperation” in Atlanta that would welcome all faiths, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews. Ivy Lee’s mother was equally extraordinary. Born in the middle of the War Between the States, and growing up in the southern poverty that followed, she had no opportunity for any education whatsoever. Yet she taught herself to read and write, and became an eloquent public speaker, traveling widely about the United States lecturing at women’s clubs and church functions. Like her husband’s, her themes were tolerance, compassion, humanity, and duty. With their combined incomes, the Lees were able to send their firstborn son north to be educated at Princeton.

  At Princeton, Ivy Lee came under the influence of the university’s then president, James McCosh, a leading exponent of the Scots philosophy of common sense. According to McCosh, individualism, freedom from government interference, the rights to acquire and own property, and the right to amass wealth were basic tenets. Not long before Ivy Lee arrived at Princeton, President McCosh had written that “God has bestowed upon us certain powers and gifts which no one is at liberty to take from us or to interfere with. All attempts to deprive us of them is theft. Under the same head may be placed all purposes to deprive us of the right to earn property or to use it as we see fit.” Poverty, in McCosh’s view, was simply the result of laziness. Wealth resulted from hard work and thrift, and from hard work and thrift came civilization. Wealth was a kind of divine reward.

  By the early 1900s, however, this somewhat harsh and simplistic view required some sort of tempering. The era of the robber barons that had followed the Civil War had produced fortunes far more vast than any America had ever seen—fortunes that were patently out of all proportion with any intellectual, moral, or even business capacities on the part of the individual entrepreneurs who made them. While a handful of Americans had become enormously wealthy, the other side of the coin was displaying an alarming spread of urban slums, destitution, and disease. The gulf of disparity between the very rich and the very poor had become so yawningly wide that some sort of explanation seemed needed. Could it all be written off as the will of the Almighty? How did one reconcile the pursuit of wealth with the spread of social ills that seemed to accompany it? How, in short, could the obvious success of American capitalism be credibly advertised as being for the common good?

  One answer had been proposed a few years earlier by Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men of his day and one of the few new American millionaires who actually appeared to possess such a thing as a social conscience. Carnegie had given the matter of excessive riches serious thought. In 1889, in the North American Review, he had published an article titled, simply and honestly, “Wealth.” And out of this had evolved what came to be known as “the gospel of wealth.” Soberly and painstakingly, Carnegie had outlined what he felt to be the duties and responsibilities of the man of wealth, and how he felt that wealth must be used to ease the social ills of the world.

  The first duty of the man of wealth, Carnegie wrote, was

  to set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance; to provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him; and after doing so to consider all surplus revenues which came to him simply as trust funds, which he is called upon to administer, and strictly bound as a matter of duty to administer in the manner … best calculated to produce the most beneficial results for the community.

  Needless to say, very few of the new millionaires of the era were living their lives according to this gospel—though some were, and most of these, interestingly enough, were members of the newly rich American Jewish community, led by such eminent and conscientious men as the banker Jacob H. Schiff and the lawyer Louis Marshall. Schiff, for example, believed in the principle of tithing, and at least 10 percent of everything he made went somehow or other toward the public weal—to Jewish and non-Jewish causes alike. Schiff, furthermore, believed in the Talmudic doctrine that “Twice blessed is he who gives in secret,” and so most of his major benefactions were made anonymously. When his son-in-law, Felix Warburg, embarked on a project to build himself an elaborate mansion on Fifth Avenue, a display of extravagance if there ever was one, Schiff stopped speaking to him.

  But in the case of men like John D. Rockefeller and others who were busily erecting vast, showy mansions in Newport, on Long Island, in Bar Harbor and Palm Beach, there was a need by 1913—as Ivy Lee saw it—for the very rich to at least pay lip service to the gospel of wealth, if their gilded gates were not to be stormed by the hungry rabble. Following his graduation from Princeton, and a few years as a newspaperman, which taught him the importance of having “a good press,” Lee moved into the world of the rich, where, with his looks and manners, he seemed more than at home and where he offered his services as a polisher of seriously tarnished images. One after another, he became adviser on what he dubbed public relations to such men as George Westinghouse, Thomas Fortune Ryan, Charles Schwab, Walter Chrysler, Harry F. Guggenheim, Alton B. Parker, John W. Davis, Henry P. Davison, Dwight Morrow, Otto Kahn, Winthrop Aldrich, and the Rockefellers.

  In the process, to be sure, Ivy Lee himself would become a moderately rich man. Still, he remained true to the gospel. When universities, foundations, charities, or churches sought his services, he offered them for nothing.

  But he had discovered that there was money to be made in teaching new money how to behave like old money. And he was so successful at it that the general public would begin having trouble distinguishing which kind of money was which—a fact that would have the effect of driving the old money even deeper into its cave, licking its wounds, cringing at the thought of having names such as Rockefeller and Vanderbilt uttered in the same sentence as Livingston or Jay.

  *George Washington’s father, Augustine Washington, married twice. His first wife was a Butler. His second wife, the former Mary Ball, was the mother of George.

  21

  Comme Il Faut

  Considering the opulence of some of the private entertainments that had been put on in the
1880s and 1890s, it was not hard to see how Thorstein Veblen had come up with the term “conspicuous consumption.” In fact, by the time James L. Breeze gave his notorious “Jack Horner Pie” dinner for twelve gentlemen in honor of Diamond Jim Brady—conspicuous by virtue of its human party favors—the scale of that party seemed rather modest. In Washington, Mrs. George Westinghouse had already topped him. As a countermeasure to Caroline Astor’s New York Four Hundred, Mrs. Westinghouse decided to give a party for the capital’s One Hundred. Exactly one hundred guests were invited, and folded into the napkin of each guest as a party favor was a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill.

  Large sums of newly acquired money were tossed about in even more outlandish ways. There was, for instance, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish’s infamous “Monkey Dinner,” at which guests were invited to meet a visiting guest of honor billed as Prince del Drago. Prince del Drago turned out to be a monkey attired in full evening dress that scrambled about the tabletops hissing and grimacing at the guests. Public hilarity at Mrs. Fish’s great “joke” was somewhat muted. Animals suddenly became popular honorees at formal dinners, and there was a “dogs’ dinner,” at which every guest was required to bring a canine pet, appropriately costumed and bejeweled. This fad came to its silliest climax with Mr. C.K.G. Billings—a gasworks heir from Chicago—who came to storm New York society with a “Horseback Dinner” in 1903. Here is how Albert Stevens Crockett recalls that memorable evening in Peacocks on Parade:

  The choicest mounts from Billings’ stable were taken to Sherry’s rear entrance and carried by elevators upstairs to the big ballroom on the fourth floor, which had been completely disguised as a woodland garden, with trees and shrubs apparently growing, and the floor sodded. In the centre was a great manger, where the blue-bloods of the equine world were hitched, their part being to stand and contentedly chew sweet hay. Overhead, an effect of clear blue sky had been achieved, with twinkling stars and a harvest moon, and real birds twittered in the shrubbery. Waiters were dressed as grooms, in scarlet coats and white breeches. Over each horse was slung a table, securely anchored to the animal’s flanks, and from its shoulders dangled two saddlebags, stuffed with ice-buckets of champagne. The guests came in riding costume. Each mounted the charger assigned to him, and in his saddle ate a bewildering array of courses, cooled with sips through long, nippled rubber tubes that led to the champagne bottles in the saddlebags.

  Coming-out parties, which before the Civil War had always been sedate, quiet, and unpublicized affairs attended only by family and close friends, became occasions for the lavish display of wealth and nothing more. In New York, George Jay Gould spent $200,000 in 1909 on the debut of his daughter Marjory. (“How does the American press find out the costs of these parties?” a visiting British journalist mused. The answer: Their hosts cheerfully supplied them.) The flowers alone at the Gould gala included 5,500 lilies of the valley, 1,500 white roses, and “every American beauty rose in the East.”

  At Sherry’s again, Mrs. W. Watt Sherman gave a party for her daughter Mildred where a huge swan floated on an artificial lake among 1,300 guests and where, when the debutante took her bow, the swan exploded, scattering 10,000 pink roses into the air. Less successful was the “Butterfly Ball” given by the James Pauls of Philadelphia for their daughter Mary. For this affair, some 10,000 exotic live butterflies had been imported from Brazil and collected in a decorative bag suspended from the center of the ballroom ceiling. As the debutante curtsied to her peers, the bag was to burst open, releasing the butterflies to fly prettily about the party. Unfortunately, in those days before air-conditioning, the heat at the ballroom ceiling rose to surpass even that of the Amazonian jungle, and when the bag was opened, out tumbled 10,000 butterfly corpses.

  In Newport, the Norman de R. Whitehouses hired the U.S. Navy for the coming-out party of their daughter Alice. While the guests danced under the stars, warships moored offshore played their searchlights on the partygoers. On Long Island, the banker Otto Kahn, in his pre–Ivy Lee days of big spending, paid the tenor Enrico Caruso ten thousand dollars to sing two songs for his daughter’s party. (In his post–Ivy Lee period, Kahn would be persuaded to dip into his ample pocketbook for civic and cultural events instead, and when New York’s Metropolitan Opera Company was in financial straits, Kahn simply bought the opera to keep it going.)

  All this party giving, of course, had been without redeeming social value and could be excused only with the often trotted out, but rather lame, claim that it provided “needed employment” for caterers, waiters, florists, musicians, and the like. A particularly sorry result of one of these affairs had occurred in the case of Mr. and Mrs. Bradley Martin, who, on their social voyage from the hinterlands of Troy, New York, to Manhattan, had acquired an Englishy-sounding hyphen to their name and become known as Mr. and Mrs. Bradley-Martin. It was the era, also, of the great American title search, when newly rich American mothers packed their nubile daughters off to Europe in hopes of trading an heiress’s expectations for a European title or even a coronet, thereby achieving instant aristocracy. (Unfortunately, it wouldn’t work the other way around; if an American male married a duchess, his wife became an ordinary Mrs.) The Bradley-Martins were celebrating their sixteen-year-old daughter’s recent marriage to Britain’s Lord Craven.

  The Bradley-Martins’ 1897 winter ball, given at the height of a deep financial recession “as an impetus to trade,” was widely criticized by the press and public for its poor timing and poor taste. Even the host’s brother, Frederick Townsend Martin, complained that “the power of wealth” and “vulgarity” was “everywhere.” In the wake of this disaster, the Bradley-Martins found themselves so ostracized that they moved permanently to England. Similarly banished was James Hazen Hyde, whose $200,000 ball at Sherry’s—at which the restaurant was transformed into an exact replica of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles—resulted in an investigation of his Equitable Life Assurance Company of America that revealed some bookkeeping which was exceptionally imaginative, to say the least. Obviously, party giving that was no more than an end unto itself was coming under close public scrutiny.

  In 1901, two young debutantes-to-be seemed to have suddenly been struck with the uneasy notion that the round of private galas they would be facing in the coming year might be viewed less than charitably by people outside their own moneyed circle. In a sense, the two were a decade or so ahead of Ivy Lee with the idea that along with great wealth should go at least some sense of civic responsibility. The two young women were Miss Mary Harriman and Miss Nathalie Henderson. Miss Harriman had particularly good reasons for feeling apprehensive: Her father, Edward H. Harriman, was one of the most hated and feared railroad tycoons of his day. (When workers on one of his railroads had threatened to strike, Harriman sent in goons armed with machine guns who had orders to fire at will if any work stoppage occurred.) According to Miss Henderson’s later account, she and Miss Harriman had been driving down Riverside Drive in a snappy four-wheeled sulky behind Miss Harriman’s trotting horse, Gulnair, when Mary Harriman suddenly exclaimed—in the somewhat stilted language attributed to her by Miss Henderson—“There is an exceptionally large number of debutantes coming out our year. What can we do to make it a particularly good year, and to show that we recognize an obligation to the community besides having a good time?” Miss Harriman promptly answered her own question. She had read about the College Settlement House on Rivington Street, and said, “We will work for the benefit of the College Settlement.” The Junior League for the Promotion of Settlement Houses “for the benefit of the poor and the betterment of the city”—later abbreviated to the Junior League—was born.

  The College Settlement was an unusual choice for a beneficiary. Rivington Street was in the untidy heart of New York’s Lower East Side, and the settlement houses that had been established there were designed to “Americanize” the immigrants who were pouring into New York Harbor by the tens of thousands, most of them Jews fleeing from Eastern Europe. Originally, the settlement hous
es had been little more than delousing stations, but the young women seemed to have been determined to show that the Junior League was not afraid to get its fingernails dirty. That first year, the Misses Harriman and Henderson and several of their friends wrote and staged a little musical entertainment, put on at the house of another debutante, and raised about a thousand dollars for the College Settlement.

  Considering the fact that Miss Harriman’s father was said to be worth $200 million, it was perhaps a small sum and may have represented no more than the girls’ mad money. But the idea caught on and quickly spread—first to Boston and then, in rapid succession, to Brooklyn; Portland, Oregon; Baltimore; Philadelphia; and Chicago, as debutantes clamored to form Junior League chapters of their own. Today, there is hardly an American city of any size that does not have its Junior League chapter, and there are leagues in both Canada and Mexico. Across the countryside, roughly a hundred thousand Junior League volunteers manipulate puppets in school classrooms, restore historic houses, operate mobile museums, push book and art carts through hospital corridors, sing Christmas carols to shut-ins, plan children’s concerts and zoo trips, stage operettas and plays, produce educational films and organize educational television stations, teach arts, crafts, science and language courses, cheer the wounded and dying, and uplift the imprisoned. “We had made it amusing,” Nathalie Henderson wrote modestly, “and also chic to belong.”