America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  In 1909, Uncle Archie shot and killed an intruder at Merry Mills—a man who had a long local record as a wife beater. To memorialize his feat, Uncle Archie had a silver plaque sunk in the floor of his house, marking the spot, which was inscribed with the cryptic message “He Beat The Devil.” This was not long after Harry Thaw shot Stanford White, and the New York Post noted, “The latest prominent assassin has taken the precaution to have himself judged insane beforehand.” Uncle Archie, not amused, promptly sued the Post for libel. The lawsuit dragged on for nearly ten years, but, in the end, Uncle Archie won it, and he also won his battle to have himself declared sane in New York State.

  Chanler Chapman admired his uncle Archie for his spunk, and he also admired his uncle Bob, Robert Winthrop Chanler, another of the colorful orphans. Uncle Bob ran for, and was elected, sheriff of Dutchess County. On the job, Uncle Bob wore cowboy suits and ten-gallon hats, and he hired Richard Harding Davis as his deputy. After divorcing his first wife, Uncle Bob declared that he was going to marry the most beautiful girl in the world. He went to Paris and married an opera singer named Lina Cavalieri, who, if she was not the most beautiful girl in the world, was certainly one of the most calculating. After a week of marriage, Lina left Uncle Bob to live with a lover, whereupon it turned out that Uncle Bob had signed over his entire fortune to her. Asked by the press to comment on his brother’s plight, Uncle Archie—still in the midst of his sanity fight—delivered a much publicized quote: “Who’s loony now?”

  Uncle Bob, however, managed to get most of his money back. He returned to New York, bought three adjoining East Side brownstones, threw them together, and created what he called a House of Fantasy, filled with parrots and other tropical birds, where he held orgies. Invited to one of Uncle Bob’s parties, the young actress Ethel Barrymore said, “I entered his house one evening an innocent girl, and left the next morning an old woman.”

  But despite the vagaries of his various uncles, it was Chanler Chapman who was proud to lay claim to the title of the most eccentric man in America. He had embarked on this career early, at St. Paul’s, where his antics quickly earned him the nickname Charlie Chaplin. At St. Paul’s, among other things, he collected a $100 purse for throwing a clandestine prizefight in which he was knocked out. He would do anything on a bet—such as hurling himself into an icy pond. He charged 50 cents admission for a show in which he took a mouthful of kerosene, lit a match, held the match close to his mouth, and shot flames across the room. On the side, he dealt in firearms, selling the same Smith & Wesson .32 over and over again. It inevitably jammed after a few rounds, and so Chapman would buy it back from the purchaser at a reduced price. Entering Harvard in 1920, at the outset of Prohibition, he quickly set himself up as a bootlegger and was soon bringing in $300 to $400 a week selling liquor to students at Groton, St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, and other elite boarding schools in the area.

  When his uncle Archie returned to Barrytown, Chanler Chapman was one of the first to welcome him back into the family fold and to insist that the other relatives do likewise—and to politely pretend not to notice Uncle Archie’s new diet: ice cream and grass clippings. Uncle Archie had the back half of his Pierce Arrow limousine converted into a field kitchen, and he and his nephew went on many pleasant outings to New York City, where they enjoyed riding from one end of Manhattan to the other and back again, with ice cream stops along the way. Uncle Archie had passed out of his Napoleon phase and now declared that he was the reincarnation of Pompey and had plans to take over the world. He was already in control of New York City’s traffic system, an important first step. Whenever his chauffeur came to a red light and stopped, Uncle Archie would furiously rub his big emerald ring for several seconds. Then he would cry, “See? It turned green!”

  In the end, everyone in the family grew to love Uncle Archie. An aristocracy, after all, is tolerant of its oddballs.

  *“Retrospections” is a fragment of an autobiography that Chapman began in 1931. Most of it appears in John Jay Chapman and His Letters by M. A. DeWolfe Howe.

  25

  The Great Splurge

  In a sense, Mrs. Elizabeth Ellet was correct when, in 1867, she predicted that the new “fast people,” whose gaudy fortunes came directly or indirectly out of the profiteering that went on during and after the Civil War, would never be fully accepted by the old aristocracy and that “the really excellent will never mingle with them.” But there was more to it than that. It was not just that the old aristocracy adopted a snooty and superior attitude toward the newcomers. And it might have been more accurate if Mrs. Ellet had said that the Old Guard would never fully comprehend, or accept, the behavior and values of such later-arrived families as the Vanderbilts, Rockefellers, Goulds, Harrimans, Belmonts, and such. These “new rich” seemed to have standards and priorities that were totally at variance with those the Old Guard had always believed were appropriate to an American upper class. The newcomers seemed to have rewritten the gospel of wealth entirely.

  The Old Guard had always believed that Christian character was based essentially on the golden rule and that strength of character involved a willingness to pull one’s weight and an ability to handle situations, even when they involved getting one’s fingernails dirty. The New Guard, faced with nail-dirtying chores, believed in issuing orders to underlings. The Old Guard worshipped their ancestry and their families’ places in history and tradition. The New Guard seemed to worship only money and those who had it. The Old Guard had accepted, as an article of faith, that wealth was to be used to enjoy learning, travel, culture, animals and nature, family pleasures, and philanthropies. The New Guard seemed to use money for ostentation, self-promotion, and as a means of wielding power and control over others. In Chicago, John D. Rockefeller’s daughter, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, refused to learn her servants’ names as they came and went in her imperial household. The servants were not even permitted to speak to her, and all communications with the mistress of the house had to be directed, through a lengthy chain of protocol and command, to her private secretary. The Old Guard had faith in the superiority of conscience and breeding. The New Guard’s creed was superiority of position and possessions. The differences between the philosophies of the Old and New seemed so vast as to be irreconcilable. It was as though a whole new era, or Era, had come into being.

  The years between 1890 and 1930 in the United States might be called the Era of the Great Splurge, when newly rich Americans embarked upon a period of aggressive and competitive spending that the country had never seen before and may never see again. It was during this period that the sleepy seaport of Newport, Rhode Island, was transformed into one of the grandest and most pretentious summer resorts in the world. So in demand did waterfront properties become on this relatively small island that Newport today presents a strange spectacle indeed: Palaces and châteaux whose architecture would normally demand sweeping vistas and long approaches have been set down, cheek by jowl, on one-acre or half-acre plots and look, to at least one observer, like a collection of “very large hats on very small boys,” all in an assertive row down the length of Bellevue Avenue. In the Long Island beach resort of Southampton, where certain Old Guard families had long kept modest summer homes to escape the heat of Manhattan and where activities were seldom more socially ambitious than swimming, canoeing, and games of bicycle polo, the same thing happened. But in Southampton there was more elbow room, and so the new estates sprawled outward, surrounded by rolling lawns and gardens, and in the Era of the Great Splurge the bays and inlets of Southampton filled with ocean-worthy yachts. Into Southampton, furthermore, came a new wave of wealthy immigrants from as far away as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago. Closer to Manhattan, the private, guarded enclave of Tuxedo Park was created, with more estates and three man-made lakes: one for boating, one for fishing, and one for swimming. Tuxedo Park, according to the doctrine of the Great Splurge, was for autumn weekends, when the foliage of Rockland County was at its best.

  In all three
of these places, the local townsfolk were expected to supply a cadre of willing and obedient servants; local merchants were treated as private caterers; and the local police were used as a private security force. Since the Era of the Great Splurge lasted a full forty years and more, a whole generation of rich children was born and raised unaware that they might ever expect anything less.

  Meanwhile, the more conservative Old Guard families, who not only had had their money longer but who were also more experienced with the job of tending and nourishing their fortunes—as well as with the ordeal of losing them—found the Great Splurge phenomenon not merely distasteful. They found it incomprehensible and full of hidden warnings. “Watch out,” they cautioned their children, “for that sort of thing.”

  The famous 1906 murder of the architect Stanford White by Harry K. Thaw of Pittsburgh was a case of old money versus new. Ostensibly, Thaw’s motive for shooting White that summer evening at Madison Square Garden was Thaw’s discovery of an earlier dalliance between White and Thaw’s wife, a former show girl named Evelyn Nesbit. But there was more to it than that, and Thaw had hated White long before Thaw and Miss Nesbit ever met.

  The Whites were an aristocratic family with roots both in Old New York and Old New England. The first American White arrived in Massachusetts in 1632 with John Hooker’s Puritan congregation. He had a large farm in Cambridge on what is now the site of Harvard’s Houghton Library, but because of theological disputes with Boston’s theocracy, he sold his farm and, with a small band of others and 160 head of cattle, moved down the Connecticut River to found the city of Hartford. Whites had gone on to produce generations of Episcopalian, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist clergymen—though one apostate White cleric converted to Catholicism—who founded other New England towns as well as Whitestone, New York, and Newark, New Jersey. It would doubtless have pleased the aesthetic Stanford White to know that New York’s graceful Bronx-Whitestone Bridge was named for his ancestors.

  Stanford White’s grandfather Richard Mansfield White was a successful New York shipping merchant in the clipper trade and repaid the city by founding the first Episcopal Sunday schools in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. Meanwhile, on his mother’s side, Stanford White was descended from the plantation aristocracy of the Old South in Charleston, South Carolina.

  Harry Thaw’s father, by contrast, personified the nineteenth-century robber baron. William Thaw had started out as a teenager, on horseback, riding through the Ohio River valley making collections for the Bank of the United States, a job that required both ruthlessness and muscle. In 1877, a bloody strike on the Pennsylvania Railroad, in which scores of men were killed and which federal troops had to be called in to quell, had driven the railroad’s stock down to a fraction of its value. Thereupon, William Thaw snapped up all the stock he could, using, it was alleged though never proven, “borrowed” money from his employer to make his purchases. The result was that William Thaw was able to leave his son Harry forty million dollars in Pennsylvania Railroad stocks and bonds. The enmity between Thaw and White began when White succeeded in putting the snobbish, upstart Thaw in his place—albeit playfully, as a kind of practical joke.

  It all started in 1901 when young Thaw, moving to New York and intent on taking the city by storm, invited a number of his wealthy bachelor friends to a dinner in one of the private dining rooms at Sherry’s. For entertainment, Thaw had asked an actress named Frances Belmont—no kin to August—from the cast of Floradora to round up some of the prettier girls from the chorus line and bring them to the party. Miss Belmont agreed, because the girls would be handsomely paid for their services.

  The night before the party, however, Frances Belmont happened to walk into Sherry’s main dining room on the arm of an escort, and there she spotted Thaw seated at a table with some of his society friends. She greeted him cheerfully, but Thaw snubbed her and refused to introduce her to the others at the table. Furious, Frances went backstage the next night and told the Floradora girls that the Thaw party was off. She and her chorus girls were not to be treated as mere playthings. Instead, as compensation, her friend Stanford White, who was a real gentleman, had invited the entire Floradora cast to his elegant digs—a private apartment at the top of the old Madison Square Garden, which he had designed—after the show. And so, while Thaw and his bachelors waited until the wee hours at Sherry’s for the entertainment to arrive, the Floradora cast danced, sang, ate caviar, drank champagne, and got quite drunk at Stanford White’s.

  The next morning, Town Topics had the story: “Floradora beauties sing for their supper in White’s studio, while Thaw’s orchestra fiddles to an empty room at Sherry’s.” It made Harry Thaw look like a social-climbing fool, and Thaw would settle the score five years later with a pistol.

  During the sensational murder trial, at which Harry Thaw’s mother tried to bribe everyone connected with the prosecution (witnesses, the prosecutor, jurors, and even the trial judge himself) in order to obtain an acquittal for her son, the pay-’em-off psychology of the Great Splurge era was never more effectively displayed. In the end, Thaw was acquitted, though he was ordered remanded to a hospital for the criminally insane.

  Harry Thaw himself, of course, may have been a victim of the Great Splurge philosophy of child rearing. His grandniece—or, technically, half grandniece, since William Thaw had five children by each of his two wives—was brought up during the tail end of the era, amid the same aura of careless unreality. She is Mrs. Virginia Thaw Wanamaker, a Southampton dowager, the widow of Rodman Wanamaker, who was the grandson of John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia dry-goods merchant. The elderly Mrs. Wanamaker confesses, “I was brought up to be almost helpless. As a young girl, I had no idea what things cost. One didn’t know the value of money or where it came from. We took everything for granted. We didn’t know how much the house cost, or what the cook was paid. My mother never knew how to cook, and it never occurred to her to go into the kitchen. She had a cook, a butler, a personal maid, a chauffeur—and we weren’t the only people to live that way. Most of the people we knew did. It was automatic for children to grow up in this kind of atmosphere, without realizing it was very special. Young people all have worries today, and more sense of values.”

  Some people recall the Great Splurge era with a kind of fond and wistful nostalgia. One of these is John Preston, a Southampton bachelor who was born there in 1921 and whose grandfather’s house was a copy of the Villa Medici. “We were very privileged characters,” he says of his childhood. “We were brought up to think that we were a part of a certain way of life, and that way of life was splendid. I think that was excellent. My parents spoiled me, but I think it’s awfully good when you’re young to be spoiled a little. No one ever spoils you after a certain age.”

  Others disagree. In the 1920s, when the era began escalating to a kind of climax, children of the newly rich were not merely pampered by their parents. They were largely ignored by them. Children were raised by hired surrogates, and when special problems arose, appropriate outside experts were engaged to solve them. If you had enough money, the theory seemed to be, no dilemma or vicissitude was so great that it could not be corrected for a price. The sky was literally the limit. In Southampton, children were given automobiles to drive at age ten or eleven, the only restriction being that they were not to drive these vehicles beyond the village limits. As the numbers of these unlicensed drivers grew, the Southampton police indulgently looked the other way. “The only time you got into trouble,” recalls one resident, “was in extreme cases—if your car hit someone, or a farmer’s cow.” Teenage drinking, during these Prohibition years, was not encouraged, but it was condoned. At the Canoe Place Inn, bootleg liquor was always available to customers of all ages, and so was illegal gambling. Boats dropped off their cases of liquor directly at the inn’s dock, and since the inn had powerful Tammany Hall connections, raids were rare; when they occurred, the inn was tipped off well in advance. At the local drugstore, overprivileged children were allowed to go behind
the counter and prepare their own ice cream concoctions, helping themselves to syrups, cherries, chopped walnuts, and whipped cream toppings. No wonder to people like John Preston it seemed like a magic kingdom—“Treasure Island,” he says.

  “It was as bad an upbringing as you could possibly get,” says Mr. Craig K.J. Mitchell, a New Yorker in his late sixties, who likes to describe himself as a “survivor” of this sort of childhood. Indeed, Mitchell calls himself a survivor so often that one might suppose he was talking about being at Auschwitz instead of growing up the victim of benign child abuse. His father, Charles E. Mitchell, was president of New York’s City Bank before its merger with First National, and his mother was the daughter of J. P. Rend, an Irishman who came to America, fought in the Civil War and rose to be a full colonel, and then went on to make a huge fortune in West Virginia mining. Thus the Mitchells are members of New York’s “Irishtocracy,” descendants of immigrants who left Ireland in the 1840s and 1850s following the Great Potato Famine and, by the turn of the century, had grown rich enough to “invade” Southampton in large numbers—families such as the Prestons, McDonnells, Murrays, Cuddihys, Jameses, O’Briens, and Cogswells.

  “My mother’s entire life was music,” Craig Mitchell says today. “She was supposed to be one of the finest amateur pianists in the country, and much as I adored her she had very little time for her children, which was typical of the times. She played piano from four to five hours a day, and when she played she was not to be disturbed. My father, of course, as head of the bank, was all business. He had virtually no time for us, and so my sister had a governess, and I had a governess, and we were brought down to the guests at teatime to say hello—and then packed out of sight. I was rotten spoiled—a lot of us were—rotten spoiled! I grew up totally undisciplined.”