Azar, Mrs. Belmont’s tall, handsome Egyptian majordomo, was utterly dismayed, Bessie Lehr noticed, “as hundreds of women from New York, Boston, Chicago, every part of the country, swarmed into the house that had earned the reputation of being one of the most exclusive in Newport, and wandered in the gardens in groups of three and four. Women in shirtwaists, their jackets hanging over their arms, women carrying umbrellas and paper bags. Man-hating college women with screw-back hair and thin-lipped, determined faces; old country-women, red-cheeked and homely; giggling shopgirls. Azar had never seen such guests. What a contrast to the elegant garden parties of former years, the splendid entertainments that had been his greatest pride. It was too much for him!”140
And Alva’s twenty-five-year-old son, Harold, was downright embarrassed by the whole affair.
Alva cornered him.
“You must help me. I want you to come on the platform and introduce the speakers.”
As the youngest of her children, Harold had learned how to handle his mother. He simply walked away. As Bessie Lehr noted, “nothing would induce him to identify himself with this new departure of his mother’s mental activity.’141
Alva inveigled an appearance by Governor Pothier of Rhode Island. The governor began to get cold feet as his moment to address the delegates approached.
“How on earth shall I begin my speech?” he asked Alva.
“Only one way of course, ‘Voters and Future Voters,’ “she responded, and laid out for him a speech full of cries to battle.
When he rose to the podium, the governor lost his courage. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he began, reading the innocuous speech of a politician.142
When it was her turn, Alva held nothing back. Under the big tent on the lawn, standing on a platform in front of a VOTES FOR WOMEN banner, looking over her glasses perched on the tip of her nose, spurred on by Mamie Fish and Harry and Bessie Lehr in the front row, she began:
“Sisters, I ask you to put behind you these fallacies of the past; discard vain dreams, rely upon yourselves; have valiant aims, believing that your rights are the same as those of man. Encourage attainable possibilities. Believe that Motherhood should be no greater than Fatherhood, that the wife should not be the unpaid servant of the husband, but both must be equal.
“Women of this century, build your castles no longer in the azure skies of vanishing theories, but on earth, with wills of steel. Draw from your intellect and the wisdom of your observation the great lesson that each must stand alone. By what right do you forever cling to man? Is his road not hard enough without this? His promise to bear your burdens, made perhaps in all sincerity, he cannot keep.’143
These were the kind of people who would steal anything, Azar warned his mistress after the last suffragette had left Marble House, so it was not surprising to him that Mrs. Belmont’s suffrage banner—four white stars on a blue background—was missing.
Several weeks later, Alva was at one of her neighbors’ receptions. The footman announced the entrance of “Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt,” the president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Into the room walked a very large lady draped in a blue gown whose train of blue with four white stars immediately caught Alva’s eye.
“Why, it’s Harry Lehr!” she cried. “And you were the culprit who stole my banner!”144
Alva Belmont was to lead the Political Equality Division of the great Women’s Vote Parade down Fifth Avenue at sunset on May 4, 1912, from Fifty-ninth Street to the Washington Arch, a march of thousands of women.
“I’ve ordered a white pleated walking skirt and strong shoes,” Alva told her friend Mamie Fish.
“My dear Alva, you’ll never be able to do it. It must be all of three miles and you have scarcely walked a step in your life.”
“All the more reason why I should begin now. After all, my dear, I must have something to interest me in my old age. I shall walk the whole way.”145
And of course she did. “She looked as serene and unself-conscious as though she had been in her own drawing-room,” Bessie Lehr thought as she watched her friend heading the procession of brass bands, mounted police, and the thousands of white-clad women, regiment after regiment, who had flocked to New York City from all over the nation to take part, carrying banners that voiced their frustration: SINCE WE CAN BE EDUCATED LIKE MEN, WHY CANNOT WE HAVE A VOICE IN THE GOVERNMENT OF OUR LAND?; THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE RULES THE WORLD; WE PREPARE THE PEOPLE FOR THE NATION, WE WANT TO PREPARE THE NATION FOR THE PEOPLE; and the suffrage picket banner that was Alva Belmont’s favorite: FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE.
Later, Alva confessed to her daughter, Consuelo, how trying such a public exhibition had been for her, as the crowds had stared and ridiculed the belligerent women, reviling them as “female pests” and “loathsome dealers in clack.’146 Hers was not a popular cause. “The situation is dangerous,” the New York Times editorialized. “We often hear the remark nowadays that women will get the vote if they try hard enough and persistently, and it is true that they will get it, and play havoc with it for themselves and society, if the men are not firm and wise enough and, it may as well be said, masculine enough to prevent them. One does not need to be a profound student of biology to know that some women, a very small minority, have a natural inclination to usurp the social and civic functions of men.”147
“To a woman brought up as I was, it was a terrible ordeal!”148 But as Alva Belmont marched down Fifth Avenue, determined eyes straight ahead like a soldier, no one would have believed it.
Bessie and Harry Lehr watched from the Hotel St. Regis. Harry nodded: “The dear old Warrior has got something to fight for at last.”149
7
BILTMORE
1895–1933
1
“They say, sweet Lamb,” Mrs. Fish wrote to her friend Harry Lehr, who was staying in Europe, suffering from a nervous breakdown, “that you have lost your mind. If you have, come back to New York for I can assure you that the loss won’t interfere with your popularity. You know quite well that you won’t need any mind to go with the people in our set”1
Mamie Fish and Harry Lehr had sensed it coming: the mindless flight of the idle rich from the boredom of their lives by spending ever greater sums of money in the pursuit of ever new amusements. At the same time, rapid economic expansion was creating new manufacturing, banking, railroad, oil, and mining millionaires, each trying to make his mark and break into society by increasingly lavish expenditures.
A newspaper reporter who had written that the millionaires of Newport “devoted themselves to pleasure regardless of expense” was corrected by one of the Four Hundred who explained that what they really did was “to devote themselves to expense regardless of pleasure”2 “It is doubtful,” another member of the Four Hundred complained, “whether there are more useless and empty ways of spending money in the world than can be found at Newport.”3 Bessie Lehr remembered Mrs. Pembroke Jones telling her “that she always set aside $300,000 at the beginning of every Newport season for entertaining. Some hostesses must have spent even more. A single ball could cost $100,000, even $200,000. No one considered money except for what it could buy.”4
Mamie Fish was right; society had gone mad.
At a millionaire’s dinner party in the ballroom at Sherry’s all the guests ate on horseback, the horses’ hooves covered with rubber pads to protect the floors. One hostess hid a perfect black pearl in each of the oysters served to her guests, and a host handed out cigarettes rolled in $100 bills. Another party featured a pile of sand in the middle of the table, and toy shovels at the guests’ seats; upon command, the guests dug into the sand, searching for buried gems. A millionaire thought nothing of buying a $15,000 diamond dog collar, a pair of opera glasses encrusted with diamonds and sapphires for $75,000, a bed inlaid with ivory and ebony and gold for $200,000, a necklace for his true love for $500,000.5
In 1895, a visitor from France, viewing the two-mile stretch of Fifth Avenue that faced Central Park—Million
aires’ Row as it was called (thirty years before, this part of the city had been nothing but flimsy wooden shacks and scrub growth)—was dumbfounded. “It is too evident that money cannot have much value here. There is too much of it. The interminable succession of luxurious mansions which line Fifth Avenue proclaim its mad abundance. No shops, unless of articles of luxury—a few dressmakers, a few picture dealers…only independent dwellings each one of which, including the ground on which it stands, implies a revenue which one dares not calculate. The absence of unity in this architecture is a sufficient reminder that this is the country of the individual will, as the absence of gardens and trees around these sumptuous residences proves the newness of all this wealth and of the city. This avenue has visibly been willed and created by sheer force of millions, in a fever of land speculation, which has not left an inch of ground unoccupied”6 To the Frenchman, the mediocre taste of the rich was suffocating. “On the floors of halls which are too high there are too many precious Persian and Oriental rugs. There are too many tapestries, too many paintings on the walls of the drawing rooms. The guest-chambers have too many bibelots, too much rare furniture, and on the lunch or dinner table there are too many flowers, too many plants, too much crystal, too much silver”7
It was the height of the Gilded Age.
Before the Civil War, there were fewer than a dozen millionaires in the United States. In 1892, the New York Tribune published a list of 4,047 millionaires, over 100 of them having fortunes that exceeded $10 million. It was estimated that 9 percent of the nation’s families controlled 71 percent of the national wealth. As the self-indulgent old rich and new rich flaunted their wealth, paying on average $300,000 a year to maintain their city mansions and Newport cottages, $50,000 to keep their yachts afloat, and $12,000 each time they wanted to give a little party, hundreds of thousands of immigrants were jammed into tenements not far from the fabulous Millionaires’ Row. Thousands of child laborers worked in sweatshops for $161 a year. Common laborers made $2 to $3 a day, with the average worker earning $495 a year. Two thirds of the nation’s families had incomes of less than $900; only one family in twenty had an income of more than $3,000.8 By now it was clear that hard work and determination alone were not enough to rise from poverty, to eliminate the overcrowding, filth, and malnutrition from their lives. The days of taking a periauger and building a fortune were a distant fantasy. The realization was coming that these people were imprisoned by circumstance. A spirit of discontent was growing. Change was in the air.
In 1894 a commentator noted that “if our civilization is destroyed, as Macaulay predicted, it will not be by his barbarians from below. Our barbarians come from above. Our great money-makers have sprung in one generation into seats of power kings do not know. The forces and the wealth are new, and have been the opportunity of new men. Without restraints of culture, experience, the pride, or even the inherited caution of class or rank, these men, intoxicated, think they are the wave instead of the float, and that they have created the business which has created them. To them science is but a never-ending repertoire of investments stored up by nature for the syndicates, government but a fountain of franchises, the nations but customers in squads, and a million the unit of a new arithmetic of wealth written for them. They claim a power without control, exercised through forms which make it secret, anonymous, and perpetual. The possibilities of its gratification have been widening before them without interruption since they began, and even at a thousand millions they will feel no satiation and will see no place to stop”9
The millionaires of the Gilded Age, the captains of industry, the merchant princes, had once been all but deified as the great builders of the country. In the Progressive Era, which began in the final years of the century, the muckrakers dismissed them as avaricious robber barons. The mansions of the rich had once been viewed in awe as monuments to the greatness of a new nation. Now they were being condemned as socially inappropriate indulgences, the most visible example of the conspicuous waste of the idle rich. When Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt decided in the early 1890s to expand their Fifth Avenue mansion to cover an entire block, the outcry was intense. Vanderbilt was scolded by the press for spending so much on a private residence: “He has no business in a Republic to ‘flaunt’ his wealth so insolently. And surely it is only enlightened moral sense to maintain that the good a man incidentally does in spending a vast sum on his own self-gratification alone, ends in destruction and social dry-rot, ministering as it does to envy and the sense of social disproportion which is the very seed of revolution, and the growth of the horizontal cleavage between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’”10
Increasingly, the press was criticizing the lavish expenditure of the rich as something that was not democratic. “When we look upon the palaces planted in some of our mountain and seashore towns, the great lawns and gardens requiring the attendance of forty or fifty men, the four-in-hands whirling along the country roads, blowing horns to warn all humbler vehicles to clear the way, the great yachts with their crews awaiting the rare visits of their owners, we may not be able to formulate the grounds for our belief, but we do believe, or feel with an instinct that amounts to certainty, that all this is out of harmony with the spirit of American institutions, and that sooner or later one or the other must go.”11
Politicians jumped on the bandwagon. The Senate Committee on Education and Labor considered passing legislation putting a ceiling on how much a millionaire could spend on his residence. The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which passed Congress by an almost unanimous vote, was an outgrowth of the growing fear of the giant monopolies and trusts and their control over the necessities of life. Between 1873 and 1879, fourteen different income-tax bills had been introduced in Congress to help redistribute wealth, but it was not until 1894 that the first income tax since the Civil War was imposed, at 2 percent of all income exceeding $4,000. This was done despite Ward McAllister’s grave public warning that “our best people will be driven out of the country” and flee to Europe “where expenses of the necessaries and luxuries of life are not nearly so high as they are in this country”12 McAllister perhaps recognized such a tax as the opening wedge that would destroy society as he knew it, but as it turned out, the rich had no reason to flee to Europe; the next year the new tax was struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The chasm between a bloated plutocracy and the poor was widening, deepening, becoming more visible. The worst depression since the Civil War hit the nation in the early 1890s and precipitated a number of strikes: the bloody Homestead strike at the Carnegie steel mills in 1892, during which Pennsylvania sent in its militia; the Pullman strike in 1894, which led to the burning of hundreds of railroad cars in Chicago freight yards and necessitated the intervention of federal troops; thirteen hundred other strikes in 1894 alone. The long agricultural depression dragged on, hundreds of banks closed, the stock market broke, and businesses collapsed. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad Company, the Northern Pacific, the Union Pacific, and the Santa Fe railroads went into receivership. Unemployment in New York City exceeded 20 percent, thousands of jobless men swarmed in the cold winter streets of the city, and a band of the unemployed, Coxey’s Army, marched to Washington to seek, unsuccessfully, relief. Rumors of popular unrest, insurrection, revolution, class war, were abroad. The rich were haunted by nightmares of armies of the poor marching through the city, plundering. That pointed eight-foot-high wrought-iron fence that surrounded the Cornelius Vanderbilt mansion began to seem less ornamentation and more fortification.13
One winter morning in 1897 in his mansion in New York City, Bradley Martin, a wealthy descendant of an old New York family and one of the original members of the Four Hundred, had an idea about how to alleviate the plight of the poor. He turned to his wife.
“I think it would a good thing if we got up something; there seems to be a great deal of depression in trade; suppose we send out invitations for a concert?”
“And pray, what go
od will that do?” his wife asked him. “The money will only benefit foreigners. No, I’ve a far better idea; let us give a costume ball at so short notice that our guests won’t have time to get their dresses from Paris. That will give an impetus to trade that nothing else will.”14
The more the Bradley Martins thought about their idea, the more they liked it. Their old friend Ward McAllister had been right: A ball could solve all of society’s problems! Seamstresses, hairdressers, florists, musicians, wine dealers, waiters, chefs—they all would be kept busy. There would be work for everyone. Everyone would benefit from their ball. And what fun it would be! For the night, they would transform the ballroom of the Waldorf into a hall of Versailles and have all their friends come dressed in costumes of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as if for presentation at the court of Louis XV!
Invitations went out to the thousand people on the Bradley Martins’ visiting list. Mrs. Bradley Martin turned on her publicity machine to interest the newspapers in her good deed. And then the trouble began.
Newspapers in editorials, politicians on the soapbox, and preachers from the pulpit expressed their outrage at such a wanton display of wealth during a period of depression and despair. The ball the Bradley Martins were planning would be an example of Roman extravagance at its worst: feasting and dancing while thousands starved.
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