Mark Twain’s satirical novel The Gilded Age, published in 1873, gave name to an era of American history marked by a remarkably rapid industrial expansion, the amassing of great wealth, and soaring national confidence. Spanning the period from the post-Reconstruction era and the rise of Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt to a sobering twentieth-century pivot from Gilded Age glamor to Progressive Era reforms, these thirty years saw the nation’s population soar from about thirty-eight million in 1870 to over seventy-five million in 1900. (At the turn of the century, the population of New York City alone reached one and a half million.) Across three million square miles of continental territory, the country was transformed from a land of small farms and artisanal workplaces to vast industrial zones, urban arenas of art and culture, and seasonal seaside resorts punctuated with mansion “cottages.” Gilded Age America became the world’s preeminent and richest industrial nation, and New York City was its epicenter.
Leading figures of the Gilded Age were household names, their comings and goings bannered in newspapers owned by the rival press lords: Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal fought a bitter circulation war to captivate an awed public. The famed captains of industry included the father and son “Commodore” Cornelius and William K. Vanderbilt, the steel king Andrew Carnegie, and the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. Wall Street’s John Pierpont Morgan became synonymous with high finance and Thomas Alva Edison with electricity. The galaxy of the industrial ultrarich included the copper mogul James Clark, the coke baron Henry Clay Frick, the railroaders Collis P. Huntington and Edwin H. Harriman, and numerous others.
As the sources of the wealth of these men imply, they tapped coal and iron ore, timber and petroleum, copper and precious metals to manufacture a dizzying range of products from steel rails to sterling tableware. Merchant princes, together with shippers and manufacturers, sent consumer goods to and from coastal ports, along the “highways” of rivers, and increasingly on the railroads that spanned over ninety thousand miles of track by 1880. The completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in spring 1869 heralded the establishment of the Union Pacific, Central Pacific, the New York Central, the Santa Fe, and a host of other rail lines that would vein the continent. By 1890, US production exceeded the combined economies of Germany, Britain, and France. With no income tax in the US, personal wealth soared to unprecedented heights. Opulence was the order of the day.
Though hailed as an era of abundance, the late 1800s Gilded Age was marked by intense business and political rivalries. Social rivalries also seethed beneath the gilded surfaces. Not surprisingly, the generations prior to the Gilded Age produced a class of wealthy Americans whose social preeminence was guaranteed by their lineage. Or so they assumed. They were horrified by the new-money parvenus who thought their fortunes earned them entrée into late-1800s Society—its formal balls, its debutante parties, its opera boxes, its sailing regattas, its summer gatherings at Newport. To an extent, old money successfully manned its social barricades against the onslaught of newcomers, as if these barbarians (“rough, illiterate, vulgar creatures,” as one etiquette manual put it) were storming the gates.
Old money could somewhat secure its threatened status by marriage, a strategy dating back centuries in Europe and elsewhere. One celebrated wedding in 1854—of the twenty-four-year-old Caroline Webster Schermerhorn to William Backhouse Astor Jr.—highlights the consolidation of two such families. Their nuptials joined a young woman whose family traced its roots to the Revolutionary era and a young man whose grandfather was John Jacob Astor (1763–1848). Her forebears became wealthy from shipping, his from the fur trade.
Caroline Astor became the acknowledged social arbiter of the Gilded Age when a pedigreed, pudgy, and pompous courtier of sorts named Ward McAllister endeared himself to her. He persuaded Mrs. Astor that she, and she alone, was uniquely qualified to uphold the manners and mores of Gilded Age America. Mrs. Astor, known as the “mystic Rose,” was doubtless also keenly conscious of the vast influence of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, whose long reign demanded that an American of similar influence and stature rise up to challenge it. This power was hers to claim, and claim it she did.
Masked by graciousness, Mrs. Astor’s steely disposition was the armor she wore as social doyenne of the premier city of the premier nation of the world. Caroline Astor did not invent the notion of proper etiquette. Prior to her marriage, the young Caroline Schermerhorn would have absorbed the proper standards of conduct appropriate to her class. Now, the question “What would Mrs. Astor do?” became an urgent matter for anyone aspiring to rise in the strict social hierarchy over which she presided. From dawn to the wee hours, indoors or out, whatever the season, Mrs. Astor dictated proper behavior and demeanor, men’s and women’s codes of dress, acceptable patterns of speech and movements of the body, and what and when to eat and drink. No item of etiquette was too trivial for her adjudication, from the elements of penmanship to the appropriate costume for a game of croquet to the proper slicing of fruit. Regarded with the weight of scripture, Mrs. Astor’s dictates prompted the publication of a spate of etiquette guides offering nervous readers their keys to initiation into the charmed social circles of the Gilded Age.
As hostess, Mrs. Astor enforced her edicts with a velvet fist. “Her scepter she held firmly, absolutely, and charmingly,” one socialite remarked. At key moments, nonetheless, the doyenne of Society yielded to social pressure. Old money and new pressed against each other like tectonic plates until 1883, when the rich upstart Alva Vanderbilt (Mrs. William K.) announced plans for an elaborate dress ball at her Fifth Avenue mansion. Snubbed once too often by Mrs. Astor, Alva omitted the Astors from her invitation list. The Astors’ daughter Caroline Astor, however, looked forward to the Vanderbilt ball, and for Caroline’s sake, Mrs. Astor summoned her carriage, drove to the Vanderbilt mansion, and left her calling card, whereupon an invitation was issued. The ice was broken, though the “mystic Rose” ruled supreme for another quarter century.
Seasonal features of Mrs. Astor’s reign were the dinner parties that functioned as her auditions for candidates bidding to enter the elite “Four Hundred,” the number of guests who could be accommodated comfortably in the ballroom of her Fifth Avenue mansion. An invitation to Mrs. Astor’s annual ball meant a passport into Society for any given year. The regular cohort of old-money friends and family was a staple of the invitation list, but apprehension darkened the outer rings of the social world, where new-money aspirants feared being dropped in favor those deemed more worthy with each succeeding year. Such rituals and hierarchies were imitated, if not replicated, throughout the nation in cities large and small, but Mrs. Astor’s New York ruled the social epicenter of the Gilded Age.
Lurking just beneath the glittering surface, however, society was roiled with political, economic, and demographic struggles. Mark Twain acknowledged the era’s “shameful” dimensions and pointed to political corruption, especially the New York political demimonde headed by William Marcy “Boss” Tweed, grafter extraordinaire, whose name betokened corruption on a grand scale. His headquarters at Tammany Hall operated as a center of bribes, kickbacks, rigged contracts, and extortion amounting at minimum to $25 million in New York City alone (about $600 million today). The industrial chieftains, for their part, relied heavily on the labor of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the UK, eastern Europe, and elsewhere. All too often the laborers’ workplaces were lethal and their wages woefully substandard. Their families’ living conditions were disease ridden and squalid. Their children toiled for long hours in factories. (Jacob Riis’s 1890 best seller How the Other Half Lives exposed these conditions in both words and photographs.) Labor strife also marked the period, with unionized workers’ strikes sometimes turning violent. A coast-to-coast rail strike of 1877 was compared to a war. In addition, Gilded Age America endured two lengthy economic depressions, first in the 1870s and again in the 1890s. Investigative journalists, dubbed “muckrakers” by President Roosevelt, published lurid exposés of business crime and corruption. Throughout the era, concern grew that these and other problems were putting the nation at risk of civil fracture. Social movements were organized, and in the 1910s, America’s Gilded Age gave way to the reformist zeal of the Progressive Era.
What Would Mrs. Astor Do? draws readers into an era of the American past that may initially strike the modern eye and ear as unfamiliar. Immersed in the manners and mores of Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred, readers can imagine themselves to be New Yorkers of a bygone era, one that survives today in the world of ostentatious wealth, gilded mansions, private jets, and well-choreographed glimpses into “the lives of the rich and famous.” It may appear that Mrs. Astor’s dicta represented a huge expansion of a tightly—and arbitrarily—structured view of acceptable behavior. If so, let us recall that the social code of the Gilded Age, like those before it, took hold in a turbulent period in American history. Having only recently endured bloody Civil War and Reconstruction, the nation now experienced violent skirmishes in the territories of the West and the unprecedented arrival of multitudes with widely varied languages and cultural practices to its shores and burgeoning cities. Against this tide of uncertainty, to know what Mrs. Astor would do may have seemed like the reassuring bulwark separating civilization from anarchy.