American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  If Philadelphia First Families numbered fewer eccentrics than did Boston—Rittenhouse Square frowned on the idiosyncratic—Philadelphians were no less self-conscious and backward-looking. “To mention Walnut Street to an Old Philadelphian,” wrote George Wharton Pepper, who was one, “is to awaken memories of a departed glory. On bright Sundays, after church, there was always an informal parade of fashion on the south side of this thoroughfare. There the city’s Four Hundred could be seen to great advantage. They were the blended congregation of half a dozen mid-city churches. They made upon the onlooker an impression of urbanity, of social experience and of entire self-satisfaction. If, during church-time, they had confessed themselves miserable sinners, by the time they appeared on parade their restoration to divine favor was seemingly complete.”

  Woe to the family left out, especially the moneyed family who could not use poverty as the excuse for exclusion. A young Widener wrote a novel excoriating the snobs who had snubbed his mother for marrying across the tracks. A young Bullitt wrote a novel about the declining standards of the “Sacred Square.” The Square was unmoved.

  New York society was different—richer, brassier, more diverse, more volatile, less cohesive. And it was run by women.

  The New York elites were attuned to a dynamic economy and a fast-changing city. Manhattan was now the unchallenged hub of the nation’s finances, and itself challenged London as a center of world finance. The city was on the move. Arrivistes were crowding up against established wealth. Avenues were spearing far to the north in Manhattan, even into the Bronx. Looking north from Cortlandt Street and Maiden Lane in the early 1880s, one saw a forest of telegraph and telephone lines, a maze of shop signs, and a jumble of drays, streetcars, buggies, coaches, delivery wagons, all horse-drawn, in the streets. Walking up Fifth Avenue, one came upon the upthrust arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty—the great icon had not yet been put in place on Bedloe’s Island—and the fashionable temple, Emanu-El. Farther north, Broadway was called the Boulevard. But Society, entrenched in its enclave on lower Fifth Avenue, hardly looked past 42nd Street to the “wasteland” beyond.

  While this Society could boast of plenty of old families—Brevoorts, Fishes, Schermerhorns, Livingstons, Roosevelts, Rensselaers, and other “Knickerbockers”—new money and big money meant more in Manhattan than in any other metropolis in the East. Up to around the 1880s, said Ward McAllister, the deputy arbiter of New York society, “for one to be worth a million of dollars was. to be rated as a man of fortune, but now … New York’s ideas as to values, when fortune was named, leaped boldly up to ten millions, fifty millions, one hundred millions, and the necessities and luxuries followed suit. One was no longer content with a dinner of a dozen or more, to be served by a couple of servants. Fashion demanded that you be received in the hall of the house in which you were to dine, by from five to six servants, who, with the butler, were to serve the repast.... Soft strains of music were introduced between the courses, and in some houses gold replaced silver in the way of plate….”

  The center of action was the half-planned, half-mythical “Four Hundred,” an attempt by the old rich to orchestrate wealth, birth, and style into a coherent social system that soon succumbed to the pecking order of big money. Anointed by Mrs. William Astor—the Mrs. Astor, born Caroline Schermerhorn—and with access guarded by her powerful court chamberlain Ward McAllister, the actual membership was found to consist of a combination of old and new family wealth when McAllister gave it out to the New York Times. Spurred by acute status anxiety, the new rich struggled desperately to make the sacred list and the even more select “Patriarchs,” also monitored by Astor and McAllister. Bitter feuds broke out, as Fifth Avenue hostesses fought for their own status, even while conciliating factions among their guests.

  “I understand,” said a character in William Dean Howells’s A Traveler from Altruria, “that in America society is managed even more by women than it is in England.” Entirely, he was told. “We have no other leisure class.”

  The ultimate confrontation, as “ambitious hostesses alternately laid siege, launched frontal assaults, or conducted flanking maneuvers against the bastions of higher respectability,” occurred between Mrs. Astor, the acknowledged queen of the Four Hundred, and Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt. The Astors had looked down on the Vanderbilts as grandchildren of the self-styled “Commodore” Vanderbilt, who had been just a crude Staten Island ferryboat man, after all, and Mrs. Astor did not approve of railroad money. Vanderbilts in turn pointed to the Astors’ opium smuggling into Canton, and their defrauding of East Side slum dwellers and of Indians. The climax approached as the Vanderbilts, after outbuilding the Astors’ Newport “cottage,” Beechwood, with The Breakers, decided to erect a $2 million palace at Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street. To the opening of this town house Mrs. Vanderbilt invited 1,200 persons—but not Mrs. Astor. A calling card bearing the legend “Mrs. Astor” had never been deposited on the salver of 66 Fifth Avenue, said Mrs. Vanderbilt, and how could she invite a perfect stranger? Intermediaries intervened, open hostilities were avoided, and a footman in the blue livery of the House of Astor duly presented a visiting card to a domestic in the maroon livery of the House of Vanderbilt. Mrs. Astor and her daughter attended the ball, in which dazzling young socialites with electric-lighted stars on their foreheads waltzed with men in baronial costumes.

  If the Four Hundred felt beleaguered in their Fifth Avenue bastions, they could always retreat to mansions in Newport or the Berkshires or in the South or in Europe—or all of these—but here again the Vanderbilts seemed to gain the competitive edge, with their establishments in or near Asheville, North Carolina; Centerport, Long Island; Upper St. Regis Lake in the Adirondacks; and their endless yachting through the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. The Frederick W. Vanderbilts’ mansion in Hyde Park was perhaps the finest monument to the era. Built at a cost of over $2 million, in a time when a construction worker might earn a dollar a day, the mansion was erected on such an accelerated schedule that carpenters worked shoulder-to-shoulder. The result was an Italian Renaissance-style edifice, packed with art and furnishings from abroad, surrounded by superb grounds, trees, and with a view up and down the Hudson.

  Guests allowed into the family quarters marveled at the master’s corner bedroom, with its single bed and no direct access to his wife’s bedroom, and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s boudoir, a reproduction of a French queen’s bedroom of the Louis XV period. The headwall of the bed was covered with hand-embroidered silk; the heavily napped rug weighed over a ton; and Mrs. Vanderbilt’s bed was separated from the rest of the room by a marble rail, like those behind which French courtiers had presented their petitions to the queen in olden times. Thus was symbolized the ultimate separation of the queens of society from the long hierarchy that stretched below them.

  The class structures in other cities contrasted with that of New York and the other eastern metropolises. New Haven had lived for decades under a powerful patrician rule, which came to an end with the elevation of a long line of businessmen following the Civil War. The Richmond and Charleston elites were hardly altered in any fundamental way by the Civil War, while Springfield, Massachusetts, never developed an aristocratic leadership cohesive and powerful enough to hold back the young entrepreneurs.

  Chicago of course accepted the rule of the arrivistes more readily than did even New York. But if Chicago scoffed at Boston, New York ignored Chicago. Mrs. Astor, an incessant traveler, had never even been there. To its balls each Patriarch might invite five gentlemen, four ladies, and two “distinguished strangers” from Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, or Charleston, or from London or the Continent—but not from Chicago or, for that matter, from any other city west of the Alleghenies.

  The Middle Classes: A Woman’s Work

  She rose before dawn to dress in a high-collared, long-sleeved dress over flannel and muslin petticoats, bustle, and whalebone corset. After lighting the kerosene lamp in the kitchen and kindling the coals in the firebox, she
kneaded the bread dough left to rise overnight in a warm place by the iron range. From part of the dough she baked a basket of rolls before preparing the rest of the heavy meal middle-class Americans ate upon rising—steak, fried potatoes, hotcakes, and coffee roasted and ground at home. Soon her husband, imposing in his waistcoat and “burnsides,” would enter, followed by the children in sailor suits or frilly dresses, one child probably holding a baby brother or sister. After breakfast, she saw children and husband off to school and work, on horse-car or steam railroad.

  Monday was always wash day: voluminous linen sheets, tablecloths, and napkins, yards of flannel or muslin petticoats, diapers, soaked in wooden tubs and then stretched across kitchen or backyard. “It was all the lifting that tired my back so,” one woman remarked—water had to be carried in from the pump, heated on the stove, carried to the washtub, and then emptied outside after each rinse. Petticoats, shirts, cuffs, and collars would be starched, while all else—even diapers—required ironing with a heavy iron reheated on the stove every half-hour or so. In summer, the kitchen would be sweltering; in winter, women risked chilblains while hanging freezing wet garments on the line outside.

  Housecleaning usually took a week in the summer and another in the fall. Each room in sequence was turned upside down, the horsehair and mahogany furniture moved aside, and the carpet lifted for a clean, a mend, a dye and then reinstallation. Mirrors, pictures, china, and bric-a-brac were scrubbed and polished, textured wallpaper and heavy ornate curtains brushed, soot cleaned out of fireplaces and lamps. Insects and vermin infested even wealthy homes as a result of inadequate drainage and outdoor privies.

  The sewing machine, by the 1870s essential equipment in every home, helped turn the chore of sewing into a housewife’s best chance for creativity. Many women took intense pride in the skill with which they remade old clothes, like “Hattie’s ‘opera cape’ made out of Warrie’s pink flannel baby cloak.” The family’s diverse activities stretched the housewife’s ingenuity—one woman made two-tone graduation dresses for her sisters and later found out that wearing them had been “life’s darkest hour” for the girls.

  She might have time during the day to browse through her copy of Harper’s Weekly, with its rich mixture of articles, stories, reviews, and George William Curtis’s editorial comment, or through the Atlantic or the Nation or Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. If she had been brought up on Godey’s Lady’s Book—“The Only Magazine with Lady Editors”—she might now be reading The Mother at Home. Or if she had been brought up on The Lady’s Own, “Devoted to the Advocacy of Working Females” and costing only three cents an issue, she might now be following one of the many suffragist organs. Her children might read Home Companion: A Monthly for Young People which, after going through many transformations, would become the Home Companion, “a journal suited to the entire family and read by all,” and later the Ladies’ Home Companion. In most of these journals she could scan a plenitude of mail-order advertising, patent-medicine claims, and premium offers.

  Family members returned for a dinner of roast and Indian pudding, and then spent the evening hours together in the parlor, reading aloud or playing cards by lamplight. While the wife mended or embroidered, daughters played the piano or received gentlemen callers, always with the family or a chaperone present. At an early hour the family retired, the wife putting out the milk can and the husband banking the fire and barring the shutters.

  Many middle-class housewives hired live-in “help,” usually young women from small rural towns or newly arrived immigrants from Ireland, Sweden, or the Deep South. Housewives often proved exacting mistresses, grumbling audibly about newcomers’ slow adjustment to service—“She seemed to have all the faults, and none of the virtues of help”—and vigilantly alert for signs of stealing or shirking. The maid, the complaints went, used “the weapon of degraded races pretty freely—Deceit,” or “She is a slouch Poor white trash.” Friction between mistress and servant masqueraded as “the servant problem” and made some women decide to “do their own work”—which often meant, in fact, supervising a cleaning woman several days a week.

  To find guidance through the crises, large and small, of domestic life, most middle-class women read manuals of housekeeping or “domestic science,” such as The Mother at Home, with recipes and tips on hygiene, physiology, nutrition, how to decorate, or how to get along with domestics. Educator Catharine Beecher explained how to have “Economical, Healthful, Beautiful and Christian homes.” These guides, which poured forth from publishers in the latter half of the century, were especially important to a mobile society in which many women lost the benefit of their mothers’ and grandmothers’ knowledge. They also set higher standards of cleanliness, household skills, and child-rearing, standards that often consumed as much time as was gained from the new labor-saving devices.

  Mothers also lightened their burdens by training daughters of the house from an early age in the skills of home management. One woman wrote proudly that her daughter, just turned three, “sweeps and dusts and bakes and enjoys it very much.” At four, the little girl sewed a patchwork quilt for her dolls. All too often a young girl would have to leave school prematurely in order to take over management of the house—to substitute for a sick mother or to enable the family to concentrate all its resources on a son’s education. “Mother explained very regretfully, that she couldn’t afford the lessons which would be needed to train me for a (music) teacher,” one woman wrote. “She explained that she wanted David to have as much education as possible, so that if ever she, or father, couldn’t take care of us adequately he’d be able to help.” Much might depend on a daughter’s ability to hold the home together.

  One subject a mother did not discuss with her daughter was sex. Canons of modesty and purity kept some women from completely undressing throughout their adult lives and convinced others that sexuality was for men alone. Clergymen and politicians claimed that corresponding to the male sex drive was women’s maternal instinct, a chaste tenderness never to be “tainted” with sex. “The full force of sexual desire is seldom known to a virtuous woman,” announced one male authority.

  At the same time, women’s fashions were tending to maximize femaleness and limit freedom. “The poetry of dependence,” feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton called the combination of romance and restriction. The corset, a contraption of whalebone and steel tightly bound in back with laces in order to create a curvaceous form, was de rigueur, even for little girls, for almost a century. “It is no rare thing,” wrote one English visitor, “to meet ladies so tightly laced that they cannot lean back in a chair or sofa; if they did so, they would suffocate.” The tighter a woman’s waist, the more ladylike she was, as hinted by her frequent swoons and headaches.

  Young women and men entered marriage with little understanding of each other’s sexual needs. Marriage often came as a shock to young brides who had only known their suitors through the formality of chaperoned courtship. “How many young hearts have revealed the fact,” wrote Catharine Beecher after a tour, “that what they had been trained to imagine the highest earthly felicity, was but the beginning of care, and disappointment, and sorrow, and often led to the extremity of mental and physical suffering.” “I am nearly wrecked and ruined by … nightly intercourse,” one woman wrote. “This and nothing else was the cause of my miscarriage ... he went to work like a man a-mowing, and instead of a pleasure as it might have been, it was most intense torture….” Thinking their wives “unaccommodating and capricious,” some men fled the house to visit prostitutes. And women turned to one another to find the intimacy and warmth they missed in marriage, developing a network of lifetime friends who exchanged diaries, sewed one another’s trousseaux, supervised one another’s pregnancies and childbirths, vacationed together, and shared chores, skills, and life’s major events.

  The fear of unending pregnancies and prolonged motherhood may have contributed more than any crusading clergyman or insensitive husband to the female av
ersion toward sex. “Confinement” indoors during and after pregnancy, lack of fresh air and exercise, and the physiological effects of the viselike corset often made childbirth all but unbearable. The intensifying shift to a money economy made smaller families more desirable, especially in the urban middle-class home where children’s labor was less needed, and women were beginning to realize that by regulating their—and thereby, their husbands’—sexuality, they could augment their power within the family and also enjoy the autonomy that an endless parade of bawling infants denied them. The result of these developments was fewer, and healthier, babies.

  Contraception was another unmentionable. After the passage of the “Comstock” law in 1873, it was illegal to advertise or distribute birth control material—“obscene literature and articles of immoral use”—through the mail. Male withdrawal, the most common method of birth control, was discreetly discouraged by male doctors as being unhealthy to the husband; the rhythm method, though popular, was ineffective due to ignorance of the female fertility cycle. Abortion was a last resort, often induced by patent medicines.

  Defying all these obstacles, many women did enjoy happy sex lives. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote in 1883, “Walt Whitman seems to understand everything in nature but woman. In ‘There is a Woman Waiting for me,’ he speaks as if the female must be forced to the creative act, apparently ignorant of the great natural fact that a healthy woman has as much passion as a man, that she needs nothing stronger than the law of attraction to draw her to the male.” Love and sex preoccupied young girls. “For such a person that I could so love, I would brave all—anything, I would give myself up soul and body,” wrote Harriet Burton at age fifteen, with the passionate intensity that would characterize her later speeches for suffrage.