Love, Fiercely

by Jean Zimmerman

  TO A PRONOUNCED degree, the world of upper-class Americans in the Gilded Age was one of almost unrelenting travel, especially European travel. As early as 1872, the five-year-old Newton voyaged to Russia with his mother and infant brother, Graham, to meet his father, who had sailed there some weeks earlier on business. Newton recalled the putrid smell of the ship’s bilge, the mysterious glow of an oil lamp at the end of the passageway near his cabin, and the fact that he could watch the machinery of the ship from the comfort of a couch in front of a plate glass window.

  Three years later, Anson’s maiden sisters Olivia and Caroline—a not-often-separated pair of unmarried philanthropists to whom Newton would remain close over the course of his life—took the boy with his sisters Sarah and Helen to Italy. Anson was then riding with the hunt on the Campania near Rome. He commissioned a fox hunt scene in oils by the English-turned-Australian painter William Strutt. The monumentalist produced a work grand enough to suit the dimensions of a Stokes living room gallery wall.

  A fierce Anglophile who planned to retire in England, Anson intended to enroll his son at Eton. This proved to be a hard sell for Helen, who always preferred America. Helen won that battle. His parents wound up “civilizing” Newton by enrolling him not at Eton but the U.S. version of it, St. Paul’s preparatory school in Concord, New Hampshire. Newton would never complete a full school year at St. Paul’s. His chronic ailments—first mumps, then rheumatic fever, then erysipelas, a strep infection of the skin—had him back in the Murray Hill sick ward season after season. Though often sick, Newton was, paradoxically, not sickly. Tagged at St. Paul’s with the nickname “Chippie,” Newton gamely went in for the hazing that accompanied a typical prep school education, including getting pushed head-first into a crusty snow bank.

  After Newton’s fourth year at St. Paul’s, Helen decided that her son’s health was not being served by the New England climate. Newton would not immediately enter college, but instead attempt the Bermuda Cure. He spent the winter of 1886 at the exceedingly comfortable, spectacularly pink Princess Hotel, perched at the edge of the blue bathtub of Hamilton harbor. The hotel had been built three years before by Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria. Newton spent most of his time there sailing. He even managed to host a fancy-dress ball before returning home to take the entrance exams for Harvard, which he did only at the directive of his father.

  His health seemed to better itself in the cultivated warmth of Bermuda. Nonetheless, his parents decided that Newton should postpone his education for another year. “A trip ’round the world was therefore arranged,” he later recalled. Accompanied by two school friends, he sailed for Paris in October.

  This latest globe-trotting sojourn was filled with exotica. After stops at Vienna, Budapest and Odessa, the young men boarded a cattle ship to Constantinople, a city thronged with eunuchs in livery, veiled women, mosques and bazaars. They journeyed through the Holy Land with a caravan of a dozen horses, a cook and two well-trained servants, who traveled ahead so that upon arriving at a new site, the Americans would find tents set up, dinner waiting and beds turned down. They rode from Beirut to Damascus, from Jerusalem to Jaffa, from Cairo to the Pyramids. The Sphinx had not yet been fully unearthed; only its mammoth head was visible above the sand.

  These adventures came to an abrupt halt after a day of ibis shooting in the swamps near Heliopolis, on the outskirts of Cairo, when Newton developed chills. The caravan backtracked to the capital, where he was diagnosed with typhoid fever and confined to bed for three months. Return to America was out of the question. Anson, along with Newton’s brother Graham, sailed over to be with the invalid. Forever interested in only the best of everything, Anson arranged for Newton to be attended in his confinement by a woman who had been the head nurse under Florence Nightingale.

  Newton eventually enrolled at Harvard, a member of the class of 1891, but his college experience amounted to more of a social immersion than an intellectual one. He later characterized his academic career as “in no way remarkable.” “Toodles”—though he was also addressed by his old St. Paul’s nickname of Chippie—joined “a rather sporty table” in the dining room of Holyoke House. Newton worked reasonably hard, studying English, natural history and art, but found plenty of time for the Fencing Club, the Philosophical Society, the Hasty Pudding Club and billiards. He became fascinated by psychic phenomena, especially mental telepathy.

  And travel, always travel. Europe beckoned off and on throughout Newton’s college career. One summer he spent three months in Bavaria with his oldest friend, Graham Lusk, shooting the rapids on the Isar River, passing castles along the way and taking a walking tour into Switzerland.

  Perhaps, Anson suggested, Newton might buckle down and begin his career in the family business after college. Believing that his senior year might be his last gasp of freedom before being shackled to a desk job and real-world commitments, Newton resolved to spend it in Europe, with four months each in France and Germany. In the summer, he stayed with Frédéric Passy, the economist and a leader of the French Protestants, in a château in the forest of Marly that had been built as a hunting lodge by Louis XV. From the lodge’s rooftop terrace, Newton could see all the way to Versailles, a five-mile trek that he liked to make under the midnight moon.

  A rail trip to Spain introduced Stokes to the Alhambra, and to the revelation that architecture might be a worthy alternative to the banking life. Under the tutelage of the official architect in charge of the palace, he drew up plans for a miniature version on a twenty-five-square-foot lot. Newton followed up that episode with a trip on horseback from Granada to Gibraltar, stopping at country inns en route. In the spring he rented a room in Germany in the house of one Baron Göler von Ravensburg, a down-on-his-luck art professor and friend of the family whose baroness daughter was a lady in waiting at the royal court. Protocol required the young American to attend the frequent fancy-dress affairs and court balls as the escort of the young baroness.

  Newton still made time for coursework in Berlin, in literature and Greek art, and for experiments in hypnotism. A stint in the Hartz Mountains with a Lutheran clergyman and his wife allowed Newton to pay a call on a princess in a castle owned by a family “in both branches of which all of the sons are named Henry.” The visitor became friendly with Henry the 31st, who managed to procure for him a tiger-striped Great Dane Newton coveted from the kennels of Prince Bismarck. Newton named the dog Faust.

  J. Kennedy Tod & Co., the successor to Phelps, Stokes & Co., occupied the same premises at 45 Wall Street where the Phelps men had worked since the 1840s. By the time Newton Stokes stepped through the doors of the firm, it had become abundantly clear to him that finance was not his field. But he obediently cycled through the company’s departments under the tutelage of William Stewart Tod. Although just out of college, Newton already served as president of the Nevada Central Railroad, a tiny feeder of the Central Pacific Railroad in which his family had a controlling interest.

  Finally, he announced he would enter the architecture school at Columbia, beginning his studies in autumn 1893. He had already taken courses at Harvard in engineering and drawing, as well as the fine arts. The notion of architecture as a future career had been in the back of his mind at least since the Alhambra. Newton had been designing structures ever since he built Helen’s House, when he was sixteen, including, most recently, a competition judged by Charles Follen McKim. He clearly would disappoint his father by pursuing architecture as a vocation. A Stokes made a living working in business, alongside other Stokes men, with perhaps a few Phelps relations thrown in for good measure. Until this generation, members of the tribe simply did not leave the fold for other lines of work. Now Newton, along with his younger brothers, would take the leap into new endeavors. One, Graham, would become a political activist. Another, Anson, would become a clergyman. And the youngest, Harold, would be a journalist.

  In his quest for an architecture degree, Newton was declaring that he was certainly a Stokes, and
he might be a Phelps, but he was undeniably his own man.

  6. The Personal as the Political

  Beneath its staid, strictly regimented surface, political currents churned 1890s America like a pool in which some subaqueous plug has been pulled. It was the time of robber barons and great capitalists. John D. Rockefeller tightened his monopoly grip on the nation’s petroleum supply. Andrew Carnegie employed his hatchet man Henry Clay Frick in violent union-busting campaigns. But the dialectical tug of the progressive also began to make itself felt. New York City, with its crowded slums, its Boss Tweed political machinations, its mix of outrageous wealth and extreme poverty, was prime turf for the Age of Reform.

  Separately but concurrently, Newton and Edith embraced a culture of social idealism that disdained the excesses they saw among their peers. Dinner parties given by the heiress Mrs. Stuyvesant “Mamie” Fish symbolized the over-the-top nature of the age. Once she threw a party to honor her dog, who arrived sporting a $15,000 diamond collar. On another occasion, Mamie held a “plantation” ball complete with a “darky,” who entertained his audience by incongruously relating his experiences among New York’s demimonde.

  All this in a time when eleven million of the country’s twelve million families earned less than $1,200 per year, and the average American household scraped by on just $380. Three-quarters of New Yorkers lived in tenements.

  Rich and poor lived chock-a-block. The hungry crowded the sidewalks in front of Fifth Avenue mansions hoping for a glimpse of a tycoon leaving for a glamorous society function. The glorious new Grand Central Terminal neglected the Beaux-Arts ornaments on its eastern façade, since that was the side that faced the slums. In the shadow of wealth, most Manhattanites labored in poverty.

  Mark Twain coined the term “the Gilded Age,” playing off the classical Golden Age of Greece. “What is the chief end of man?” Twain asked. “To get rich. In what way? Dishonestly if we can, honestly if we must.”

  Yet the progressive spirit emerged as a value in the new modern period, spearheaded by some of the filthiest rich. Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie improved the lives of millions with his Carnegie libraries and other good works. And John D. Rockefeller, even as he was being attacked by muckraker Ida Tarbell, was donating more than $500 million to charity, slightly over half his net worth. J. P. Morgan, W. K. Kellogg and Theodore Roosevelt all left legacies as philanthropists. Some wealthy Americans believed passionately that riches entailed obligations, some wanted to create lasting institutions, and others sought to glorify their family name by linking it with outsize largesse.

  There were plenty of causes to go around. Progressivism encompassed a range of social, political, economic and moral reforms that stretched from the middle of the nineteenth though the early twentieth century. Reformers set out to fix the things they found unjust: greed, class warfare, poverty, racism. They called attention to corruption in the cities, to exploitation of child labor, to wage inequality for women. The government, under pressure to tackle these issues and others, cracked down on meatpacking plants and railroad industries and created antitrust laws. It established control over the banking system.

  Newton’s father could count himself among the Patriarchs, aristocrats whose roots went back to the earliest days of New York. His children, by extension, were of the same class, and so were their wives. Edith’s father and grandfather determinedly enlarged the family fortune. They could live how and where they chose. But alongside the time-honored values of elitism and snobbery another social ideal had taken hold, ready-made for New York City’s heady mix of cultures, its clash of mansions and tenements. And both the Minturns and the Stokeses committed themselves to that ideal.

  The Minturns had their celebrated abolitionists and progressive activists, like Aunt Josephine. Newton’s parents had long been part of the meliorist movement, a precursor to progressivism, which held that human beings can effect real change in the world. It constituted a foundation of what would become liberal democracy. Other members of the Stokes side of the family engaged in various types of social action, notably Newton’s aunts Olivia and Caroline, his father’s sisters, who dedicated their lives to creating educational opportunities for black Americans. They encouraged Newton’s visits to the Colored Orphan Asylum.He always retained a memory of the unvarnished Quaker plainness of the institution, founded by the Society of Friends to house homeless and destitute black children.

  As a teenager, Newton spent time splitting lumber in the uptown woodyard of the Charity Organization Society, Josephine Lowell’s creation. While engaged in his good deed, Newton met two men who had worked as trackwalkers, railroad employees assigned to check for broken and misaligned rails and debris. They asked Newton if he had ever worked on the railroad. He had, he said, which was technically true, since he had recently been installed by his father as paper president of the Nevada Central Railroad. Balancing the two roles was typical for Newton Stokes.

  From her Gramercy Park perch, Edith Minturn felt the ground shifting beneath her. At home, all was orderly and predictable. Older brother Bob had graduated from Harvard and embarked on a Wall Street career. The four girls lived at home, as did the baby of the family, Hugh.

  On a larger stage, exciting developments were taking place. Locally, the push for the women’s vote was at least partly motivated by disgust over the patronage practices of Tammany Hall and machine politics. The idea was that women would somehow be more stalwart in the voting booth, less open to suasion than their male counterparts. It was not unheard of for monied women to rally around suffrage. Heiresses such as Florence “Daisy” Harriman, married to banker S. Borden Harriman, balanced the life of a socialite with work in the suffrage movement in the first decade of the twentieth century. Reformer Alva Vanderbilt Belmont of Newport served guests dinner on plates emblazoned “Votes for Women.”

  In the spring of 1894, suffragists from around New York descended on Albany to plead their case at the state’s constitutional convention. Edith and family joined them: a New York Times story cited her by name, along with her mother and sister, as one of the notable New Yorkers coming together “in favor of striking the word ‘male’ from the Constitution.”

  The suffragists served their petition at the secretary’s table, its half-million signatures tied in neat bundles with wide yellow ribbon. Nevertheless, the “Antis” won the day, with ninety-eight representatives at the convention voting against, and fifty-eight for, the suffrage amendment. The Albany suffrage campaign headquarters shut its doors the day after the vote. Edith, May and Susanna trailed back to the city, defeated but unbowed. New York lawmakers would not approve female suffrage until 1917. But the 1894 campaign effectively thrust the women’s vote to the forefront of the progressive movement, and the pro-suffrage petition of almost 600,000 names provided indelible proof of the popular belief in equality.

  Edith’s aunt Effie continued to inspire her protégée’s engagement with politics. The New York Consumers’ League, for example, had been founded in 1891 by Josephine Shaw Lowell. In fact, it would be difficult to find a progressive cause in the 1890s that didn’t have Aunt Josephine behind it. The Charity Organization Society was her brainchild—one of the premier philanthropic outfits of the day, it acted as an umbrella group for many forward-thinking concerns.

  The New York Consumers’ League became a model for similar leagues around the country, which ultimately assembled themselves into the still active National Consumers’ League. Edith served on the board of the organization, which used an early form of the economic boycott to force businesses to treat employees fairly, and put companies on a “white list” when they complied.

  The goals of the league were the very opposite of lofty. In fact, they skewed consciously toward the humble and mundane. One of its initiatives revolved around the simple measure of providing chairs for shopgirls. At stores such as Macy’s, B. Altman and Arnold, Constable, female clerks were kept on their feet some ten to sixteen hours each working day. But even such a basic propos
ition as a chair provoked an angry response. The idea, fulminated the merchants, was “socialistic.”

  Another project was stitched cotton underwear, made in dangerous sweatshops. It became the group’s pet crusade. Slowly, owners of garment companies complied with advocates’ demands, and just as slowly earned a place on the white list.

  Having consumers vote with their pocketbooks, a common idea today, represented a progressive innovation. Edith and her cohorts explained diplomatically that it was not a case of blackballing those houses which failed to measure up, just that the league’s well-to-do, thousand-plus members would let their principles guide their purchasing decisions. The group’s motto neatly summed it up: “To live means to buy, to buy means to have power, to have power means to have duties.”

  A later Consumers’ League project surveyed New York City’s candy industry, “from the little loft factory in the dirty side street turning out the cheapest grade of lollipop, to the large model daylight factory whose products are nationally advertised.” Using the leisure time of which many league activists enjoyed in generous supply, members engaged in the Gilded Age equivalent of sitdown strikes and the Internet flash mob, descending on the stores and refusing to budge until the owners agreed to comply with their demands.

  Many humble women’s clubs and organizations of this period grew up to become engines for change, from lowly local tea-and-literature groups to the mighty Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874. The dichotomy was clear, at least to the reformers of the late nineteenth century. The American male in his natural state had a corrupt influence on society. Women were pure, moderate and, in Edith’s case, fiercely devoted to cleaning up the economic and political messes left by men.