The Arena. Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891

PLUTOCRACY AND SNOBBERY IN NEW YORK,

Let us imagine that a foreigner has entered a New York ball-room for the first time, and let us make that foreigner not merely an Englishman, but an Englishman of title. He would soon be charmed by the women who beamed on every side of him. Their refinement of manner would be obvious, though in some cases they might shock him by a shrillness and nasal harshness when speaking, while in other cases both their tone and accent might repel him through extreme affectation of “elegance.” But for the most part he would pronounce these women bright, cultivated, and often remarkably handsome. They would not require to be amused or even entertained after the manner of his own countrywomen; they would appear before him amply capable of yielding rather than exacting diversion, and often through the mediums of nimble wit, engaging humor, or an audacity at once daring and picturesque. But after a little more time our titled stranger would begin to perceive that behind all this feminine sparkle and freshness, lurked a positive transport of humility. He would discover that he had swiftly become with these fashionable ladies an object of idolatry, and that all the single ones were thrilled with the idea of marrying him, while all the married ones felt pierced by the sad realization that destiny had disqualified them for so golden a bit of luck. He would find himself assailed by questions about his precise English rank and standing. Had he any other title besides the one by which he was currently known? How long ago was it since his family had been elevated to the peerage? Did he personally know the Queen or the Prince of Wales? Was his mother “Lady” anybody before she married his father? Did he own several places in the country, and if so, what was the name of each?

The men would naturally be less inquisitive; but then the men all would have their Burke or DeBrett to consult at their clubs, and could “look him up” there as if he had been an unfamiliar word in the dictionary. And these male followers of fashion would, for the most part, distress and perplex him. He would be confronted with a mournful fact in our social life: the men who “go out” are nearly all silly striplings who, on reaching a sensible age, discreetly remain at home.

He would soon begin to perceive that New York society is a blending of the ludicrous and pathetic. The really charming women have two terrible faults, one which their fathers, husbands, and brothers have taught them, and one which they have apparently contracted without extraneous aid. The first is their worship of wealth, their devout genuflection before it as the sole choicest gift which fate can bestow, and the second is their merciless and metallic snobbery. They have made a god of caste, and in a country where, of all other cults, that of caste is the most preposterous. The men (the real grown-up men, who may hate the big balls, but are nevertheless a great deal in the movement as regards other gay pastimes) watch them with quiet approbation. Many a New York husband is quite willing that his wife shall cut her own grandmother if that relative be not “desirable.” The men have not time to preen their social plumes quite so strenuously; they are too busy in money-getting, and of a sort which nearly always concerns the hazard of the Wall Street die. And yet quite a number of the men are arrant snobs, refusing to associate with, often even to notice, others whose dollars count fewer than their own. This form of plutocratic self-adulation is relatively modern. It is called by some people a very inferior state of things to that which existed in “the good old Knickerbocker days.” But the truth is, odious though the millionnaire’s ascendancy may be at present, that of the Knickerbocker was once hardly less so. Vulgar, brassy, and intolerable the “I’m-better-than-you” strut and swagger of plutocracy surely is; but in the smug, pert provincialism of those former New York autocrats who defined as “family” their descent of two or three generations from raw Dutch immigrants, there was very little comfort indeed. The present writer has seen something of this element; in the decade from 1865 to 1875 it was still extremely active. Society was then governed by the Knickerbocker, as it is now governed by the plutocrat, and in either instance the rule has been wholly deplorable. Indeed, for one cogent reason, if no other, poor New York stands to-day as the least fortunate of all great cities. Her society, from the time she ceased to admit herself a village up to the date at which these lines are written, has never been even faintly worthy of the name. A few years ago the “old residents,” with their ridiculous claims to pedigree, had everything their own way. A New York drawing-room was, in those days, parochial as a Boston or Philadelphia tea-party. There were modish metropolitan details, it is true, but the petty reign of the immigrant Hollanders’ descendants would have put to shame the laborious freaks and foibles of a tiny German principality. Now, having changed all that, and having forced the Knickerbockers from their old places of vantage, the plutocrats reign supreme. To a mind capable of being saddened by human materialism, pretension, braggadocio, it is all very much the same sort of affair. Our republic should be ashamed of an aristocracy founded on either money or birth, and that thousands of its citizens are not only unashamed of such systems, but really glory in them, is merely another proof of how this country has broken almost every democratic promise which she once made to the Old World.

It is easy to sneer away statements like these. It is easy to laugh them off as “mere pessimism,” and to talk of persons with “green spectacles” and “disordered livers.” We have learned to know the glad ring of the optimist’s patriotic voice. If we all believed this voice, we should all believe that America is the ideal polity of the world. And one never so keenly realizes that this is not true as when he watches the creeds and character of society in New York. Of Londoners we are apt to assert that they grovel obsequiously before their prince, with his attendant throng of dukes, earls, and minor gentlemen. This may be fact, but it is very far from being the whole fact. In London there is a large class of ladies and gentlemen who form a localized and centralized body, and whose assemblages are haunts of intelligence, refinement, and good taste. In a certain sense these are “mixed,” but all noteworthy gatherings must be that, and the “smart” and “swagger” sets of every great European city are nowadays but a small, even a contemptible factor in its festivities.

Not long ago the present writer inquired of a well-known Englishman whether people of literary and artistic note were not always bidden to large and important London receptions. “In nearly all cases, yes,” he replied. “It has been the aim of my sister to invite, on such occasions, authors, artists, and actors of talent and distinction. They come, and are welcomed when they come.” He did not mention the name of his sister, knowing, doubtless, that I knew it. She was an English duchess, magnificently housed in London, a beauty, and a star of fashion.

But our New York brummagem “duchesses” of yesterday are less liberal in their condescensions. An attractive New York woman once said to me: “I told a man the other day that I was tired of meeting him incessantly at dinner, and that we met each other so often in this way as to make conversation a bore.” Could any remark have more pungently expressed the unhappy narrowness of New York reunions? How many times has the dainty Mr. Amsterdam or Mrs. Manhattan ever met men and women of literary or artistic gifts at a fashionable dinner in Fifth or Madison Avenue? How many times has he or she met any such person at a “patriarchs’ ball” or an “assembly?” Has he or she ever met an actor of note anywhere, except in two or three exceptional instances? True, men and women of intellectual fame shrink from contact with our noble Four Hundred. But that they should so shrink is in itself a scorching comment. They encounter patronage at such places, and getting patronage from one’s inferiors can never be a pleasant mode of passing one’s time. That delicate homage which is the due of mental merit they scarcely ever receive. Now and then you hear of a portrait-painter, who has made himself the rage of the town, being asked to dine and to sup. But he is seldom really held to be des nôtres, as the haughty elect ones would phrase it, and his popularity, based upon insolent patronage, often quickly crumbles. The solid devotion is all saved for the solid millionnaires. Frederick the Great, if I recall rightly, said that an army was like a snake, and moved on its stomach. Of New York society this might also be asserted, though with a meaning much more luxurious. To be a great leader is to be a great feeder. You must dispense terrapin, and canvas-back ducks, and rare brands of champagne, in lordly dining-halls, or your place is certain to be secondary. You may, if a man, have the manners of a Chesterfield and the wit of a Balzac; you may, if a woman, be beautiful as Mary Stuart and brilliant as DeStaël, and yet, powerless to “entertain,” you can fill no lofty pedestal. “Position” in New York means a corpulent purse whose strings work as flexibly as the dorsal muscles of a professional toady. And this kind of toady has an exquisite flair for your greatness and dignity the moment he becomes quite sure of your pecuniary willingness to back both. New York is at present the paradise of parvenus, and these occasionally commit grotesque mistakes in the distribution of civilities. Because you chose to “stay in” for a season or two, they will take for granted, if suddenly brought in contact with you, that you have never “been out” and could not go if you tried. Of course, to feel hurt by such cheap hauteur proves that you are in a manner worthy of it; but even though you are not in the least hurt, you cannot refrain from a thrill of annoyance that a country which has boasted in so loud-mouthed a way to Europe of having begun its national life by a wholesome scorn of all class distinction, should contain citizens cursed by a spirit of such tawdry pride. At least the aristocracies of other lands, vicious and reprehensible as they have always been, are yet an evil with a certain malign consistency for their support. Like those monarchies of which they have formed a piteous adjunct, they have always been the outgrowths of a perfectly natural ignorance. Though distinct clogs to civilization, their existence remains pathetically legitimate. Nuisances, they are still nuisances with a hereditary hold on history. Their chief modern claim for continuance is the fact that they were once authorized by that very “divine right” which is now the scorn and jest of philosophy, and that the communities which they still infest are yet unprepared for the shock of their extirpation. It is clear that they will one day be sloughed off like a mass of dead animal tissue, even if they are not amputated like a living limb that has grown hopelessly diseased. They are as surely doomed by the slow threat of evolution as is the failure to establish trial by jury in Russia. They are tolerated by progress for the simple reason that progress is not yet ready to destroy them. Hence are all imitations of their permitted and perpetuated folly in wofully bad taste. They are more; they are an insult, when practised in such a land as ours, to republican energies, motives, and ideals. Heaven knows, we are a country with sorry enough substantiality behind her vaunts. We call ourselves freemen, and our mines and factories are swarming with haggard slaves. We declare that to be President of the United States is the most honorable office a man can hold, and our elected candidates (except when they have the splendid self-abnegating courage of a Cleveland!) wade to Washington through a perfect bog of venal promises. We prate of our democratic institutions, and forget that free trade is one of the first proofs of a free people, and that protected industries are the feudalism of manufacture. We sneer at the corruption of a Jeffreys or a Marlborough in the past, and concede that bribery riots in our capital, and that the infernal political grist-mill in New York has to-day almost as much nefarious grinding to get through with annually as it had when Tweed and Sweeny stood the boss millers that fed its voracious maw. And after all, the abominations of New York’s politics are only a few degrees more repellent than the cruelties and pusillanimities of her self-styled patrician horde. The highest duty of rich people is to be charitable; in New York the rich people make for themselves two highest duties, to be fashionable and to be richer—if they can. Charity of a certain sort does exist among them, and it would be unfair to say that it is all of the pompous public sort. Much of it, indeed, is private, and when incomes, as in a few individual cases, reach enormous figures, the unpretentious donations are of no slight weight. But charity is a virtue that counts for nothing unless meekness, philanthropy, altruism, is each its acolyte. How can we expect that beings who busy themselves with affairs of such poignant importance as whether they shall give Jones a full nod or Brown a quarter of a nod when they next meet him; as whether the Moneypennys are really quite lancés enough for them to encounter the great Gilt-edges or no, at a prospective dinner-party; as whether the latest Parisian tidings about bonnets are really authentic or the contrary; as whether His Royal Highness has or has not actually appeared at one of his imperial mamma’s drawing-rooms in a Newmarket cutaway,—how, it is asked, can we expect that beings of this bent may properly heed those ghastly and incessant wants which are forever making of humanity the forlorn tragi-comedy it is? The yawp of socialism is excusably despised by plutocracy. Socialism is not merely a cry of pain; if it were only that its plaints might have proved more effectual. It is a cry of avarice, of jealousy, and very often of extreme laziness as well. Every socialistic theory that we have yet heard of is self-damning. Each real thinker, whether he be Crœsus or pauper, comprehends that to empower the executive with greater responsibility than it already possesses would mean to tempt national ruin, and that until mankind has become a race of angels the hideous problem of human suffering can never be solved by vesting private property-rights in the hands of public functionaries. But the note of anguish in that voice of desperation and revolt need not, for all this, be confused with its madder strains. The claim of poverty upon riches is to-day a tremendously ethical one. Help—and help wise, earnest, persistent—is the inflexible moral tax levied by life itself on all who have an overplus of wealth wherewith to relieve deserving misery. The occasional careless signing of a cheque, or even a visit now and then among the filthy slums of Bayard and Hester Streets, cannot cancel these mighty obligations. And there are better ways of schooling the soul to recognize the magnitude and insistence of such obligations than by organizing ultra-select dancing-classes at Sherry’s; giving “pink luncheons” to a bevy of simpering female snobs; uncorking eight-dollar bottles of Clos de Vougeot for a fastidious dinner company of men-about-town; squandering three thousand dollars on a Delmonico ball, or purchasing at vast prices the gowns and jewels of a deposed foreign empress. Yes, there are better ways. And for people who are solely pleasure-seekers to call themselves Christian is, from their own points of view, blasphemy unspeakable; since whatever we agnostics may say and believe about the alleged “divinity” of Christ, they hold that the Galilean was the son of God, and that in such miraculous character he spoke when saying: “Leave all and follow me.”

The American snob is a type at once the most anomalous and the most vulgar. Why he is anomalous need not be explained, but the essence of his vulgarity lies in his entire absence of a sanctioning background. It is not, when all is said, so strange a matter that anyone reared in an atmosphere of historic ceremonial and precedent should betray an inherent leaning toward shams and vanities. But if there is anything that we Americans, as a race, are forever volubly extolling, it is our immunity from all such drawbacks. And yet I will venture to state that in every large city of our land snobbery and plutocracy reign as twin evils, while in every small town, from Salem to some Pacific-slope settlement, the beginnings of the same social curse are manifest. Of course New York towers in bad eminence over the entire country. Abroad they are finding out the absurd shallowness of our professions. Nearly seven years ago an able literary man said to me in London: “I am wearied, here, by the necessity of continual aristocratic patronage. Especially true is this,” he added, “regarding all new dramatic productions. Lord This and Lady That are more thought of as potentially occupying stalls or boxes at a first performance than is the presence of the most sapient judges.” And then again, after a slight pause, he proceeded: “But I hear it is very much the same thing with you. I have often longed to go to America, just for the sake of that social emancipation which it has seemed to promise. But they tell me that in your big cities a good deal of the same humbug prevails.” I assured him that he was fatally right; but I did not proceed to say, as I might have done, that our “aristocracy” rarely patronizes first nights at theatres, holding most ladies, and gentlemen connected with the stage in a position somewhere between their scullions and their head footmen.

London laughs and sneers at New York when she thinks of her at all, which is, on the whole, not very often. If London esteemed New York of greater importance than she does esteem her, the derisive laughter might be keener and hence more salutary. Imagine America separated by only a narrow channel from Europe, and imagine her to contain in her chief metropolis, as she does at present, the amazing contradictions and refutations of the democratic idea which are to be noted now. What food for English, French, and German sarcasm would our pigmy Four Hundred then become! In those remote realms they have already shrank aghast at the licentious tyrannies of our newspapers. England has freedom of the press, but she also has a law of libel which is not a cipher. Our law of libel is so horribly effete that the purest woman on our continent may to-morrow be vilely slandered, and yet obtain no adequate form of redress. This is what our extolled “liberty” has brought us—a despotism in its way as frightful as anything that Russia or the Orient can parallel. Is it remarkable that such relatively minor abuses as those of plutocracy and snobbery should torment us here in New York when bullets of journalistic scandal are whizzing about our ears every day of our lives, and those who get wounds have no healing remedy within their possible reach? Some one of our clever novelists might take a hint for the plot of a future tale from this melancholy state of things. He might write a kind of new Monte Cristo, and make his hero, riddled and stung by assaults of our unbridled press, find but a single means of vengeance. That means would be the starting of a great newspaper on his own account, and the triumphant cannonading of his foes through its columns. More influential New York editors would doubtless already have forced their way within the holy bounds of patrician circles, were it not that, in the first place editors are somewhat hard-worked persons, and that in the second place they are usually men of brains.

Marriage, among the New York snobs and plutocrats, ordinarily treats human affection as though it were a trifling optic malady to be cured by a few drops of corrective lotion. Daughters are trained by their mothers to leave no efforts untried, short of those absolutely immoral, in winning wealthy husbands. Usually the daughters are tractable enough. Rebellion is rare with them; why should it not be? Almost from infancy (unless when their parents have made fortunes with prodigious quickness) they are taught that matrimony is a mere hard bargain, to be driven shrewdly and in a spirit of the coolest mercantile craft. Sometimes they do really rebel, however, mastered by pure nature, in one of those tiresome moods where she shows the insolence of defying bloodless convention. Yet nearly always capitulation follows. And then what follows later on? Perhaps heart-broken resignation, perhaps masked adultery, perhaps the degradation of public divorce. But usually it is no worse than a silent disgusted slavery, for the American woman is notoriously cold in all sense of passion, and when reared to respect “society” she is a snob to the core. Some commentators aver that it is the climate which makes her so pulseless and prudent. This is possible. But one deeply familiar with the glacial theories of the fashionable New York mother might find an explanation no less frigid than comprehensive for all her traits of acquiescence and decorum. How many of these fashionable mothers ask more than a single question of the bridegrooms they desire for their daughters? That one question is simply: “What amount of money do you control?” But constantly this kind of interrogation is needless. A male “match” and “catch” finds that his income is known to the last dollar long before he has been graduated from the senior class at Columbia or Harvard. Society, like a genial feminine Briaræus, opens to him its myriad rosy and dimpled arms. He has only to let a certain selected pair of these clutch him tight, if he is rich enough to make his personality a luring prize. Often his morals are unsavory, but these prove no impediment. The great point with plutocracy and snobbery is to perpetuate themselves—to go on producing scions who will uphold for them future generations of selfishness and arrogance. One sees the same sort of procreative tendency in certain of our hardiest and coarsest weeds. Sometimes a gardener comes along, with hoe, spade, and a strong uprooting animus. In human life that kind of gardener goes by the ugly name of Revolution. But we are dealing with neither parables nor allegories. Those are for the modish clergymen of the select and exclusive churches, and are administered in the form of dainty little religious pills which these gentlemen have great art in knowing how to palatably sugar.

“SHOULD THE NATION OWN THE RAILWAYS?”