IN THE YEARS AFTER THE Civil War, there was a reconstruction of sorts in the North just as there was, or was supposed to have been, in the South. The latter, in many places, had to rebuild itself from ashes and scorched farmland, and the task was as long as it was arduous. But in time, new homes and commercial establishments rose on land where the old ones had been razed by battle, new industries claimed their own ground, fields became fertile again with fruits and vegetables, and institutions and traditions were either renewed or substituted for those no longer viable.
Under pressure from the federal government, the South discovered a new basis, actually bases, for a healthy economy, one that would take the place of the society whose foundation had long been the forced labor of enslaved African-Americans. Not that the latter was eradicated; its presence, however, now became less pervasive, and as decade succeeded decade, African-Americans gradually began to assume more prominent positions in the South, as it enjoyed boom times such as it had never known in the days when cotton was king and plantations, more than cities, were centers of culture.
“In the economic renaissance of the South,” writes Harold Whitman Bradley, of a part of the country that was becoming unrecognizable from its former self,
lumber vied with iron and textiles for preeminence. . . . At the turn of the century, southern forest provided 40 per cent of the lumber in the nation. . . . Textiles were, more than any other industry, the symbol of the new South. . . . The mill owners recruited their labor force from the farms. Men and women accustomed to the insecurity of tenant farming flocked to the mill towns to work sixty hours a week . . .
The pay was terrible, but those who earned it had found a better life nonetheless, one not subject to the vagaries of nature and the receptiveness of soil to seed.
If the South reconstructed its society, the North, on the other hand, began the reconstruction of its high society. Especially in New York and Boston, where men in top hats and women in layered gowns and jewelry-by-the-pound began to populate the night again, stepping out of carriages and gliding through the murky, otherworldly glow of gaslight. They were on their way to parties and banquets and entertainment of the most elite nature—if not the most purposeful. At evening, they were dining in elegance with friends of similar social rank. During the daylight hours, they were dressing elegantly as they made themselves as visible as possible, with strolls through Central Park, ending their procession “with dinner at the [Hotel] Brunswick, its dining room festooned with whips, whiffletrees, and coach horns.”
The war was over. Life resumed as it was once known by the upper classes—or, as they were known to some, the “Swells.”
Calling cards were once more left on trays inside grand foyers; tea was served promptly at four; the utensils laid out for dinner were not just silver but, in many cases grand baroque, polished to a squint-inducing sheen by the kitchen help, slaves of the North. Private clubs admitted only the richest and most comically dignified of men to their precincts, and did not permit women at all. For these people, “the New York of the eighteen eighties was gracious and society a self-contained little island of brownstones that stretched from Washington Square to Central Park along Fifth and Madison Avenues.”
Stylish residences these were, but it was perpetual twilight within. Heavy curtains were almost always drawn, one flap over the other, not a sliver of sunshine visible. Rooms were overly furnished, overly decorated, overly somber, smelling at once sweet and musty. Paintings that could have been—and eventually would be—museum pieces hung on the walls in ridiculously scrolled golden frames. Thick carpeting covered floors and stairways and helped, with the curtains, to mute the unsavory sounds of humbler life outside.
The families who lived in these city homes often had a country place or two, and occasionally sailed to Paris for further variety in dwelling. The humble ones sometimes gathered at the docks to watch their betters board their ships, responding to the Swells with awe more than resentment. They waved and wished a bon voyage to people they didn’t know. The people in the first-class cabins, who did not wave back, were as much a separate species as a distinct class.
A DECADE OR SO AFTER the war ended, the reconstruction in the North gave way to the Gilded Age. The term was Mark Twain’s, from his book of the same title, his first, full-length work of fiction. For some reason, the Swells found the term acceptable, even though to Twain and his coauthor, Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age was a satire of its snobbish citizenry. But it is “a serious satirical book,” writes Fred Kaplan, one of two Kaplans who produced biographies of Twain.
From Justin Kaplan comes a description not of the book, but of the era.
The Gilded Age echoes the sounds of its times—the rustle of greenbacks and the hiss of steam, pigs grunting in the village mud, the clang of railroad iron and the boom of blasting charges, the quiet talk of men in committee rooms and bankers’ offices. Its raw materials are disaster, poverty, blighted hopes, bribery, hypocrisy, seduction, betrayal, blackmail, murder, and mob violence.
But the Swells were impervious to criticism; it always came from people beneath them and thus was just more of their clatter. Besides, what was there to criticize? Just as the South was climbing back to prosperity, so was the North leading the entire country in that direction.
Refrigerator cars became common on freight trains, carrying meat from stockyards in Chicago to consumers in the east and changing the eating patterns of a nation. Electric trolleys and street railways sped people through the great urban centers, soon followed by elevated railways and subways.
Automobiles powered by electricity and gasoline were built in the same year, 1892.
Between 1865 and 1908, the output of wheat in America increased 256 percent, corn 222 percent, coal 800 percent, and miles of railway track by 567 percent.
By the start of the twentieth century, the United States led the world in per capita income and the production of manufactured goods.
In 1901, the frustrated British journalist W. T. Stead would ask, “What is the secret of American success?” It was a plaint, however, more than a question, and he might have been speaking for the whole industrial world.
But under the industrial and agricultural gilding, as Twain and Warner pointed out, were statistics that were more appalling than impressive. These were numbers that told of poverty, hunger, malnutrition, greed, shoddy housing, degrading employment, rampant illness, and the stripping of rights from African-Americans, who had so recently been “freed.” It was the underbelly of the United States, as horrid in its own way as what Elliott had experienced in India.
To their credit, and as Elliott demonstrated, some of the upper classes felt a responsibility to improve the hardships that others faced. But only some of them. Further, that was only part of the story. In her adult years, Eleanor Roosevelt would write about the extremes of priority that her caste heeded. Some of her caste.
In that society you were kind to the poor, you did not neglect your philanthropic duties, you assisted the hospitals and did something for the needy. You accepted invitations to dine and to dance with the right people only, you lived where you would be in their midst. You thought seriously about your children’s education, you read the books that everybody read, you were familiar with good literature. In short, you conformed to the conventional pattern.
Observing her mother, though, Eleanor found someone quite different, a member of “that New York Society which thought itself all-important. Old Mr. Peter Marié, who gave choice parties and whose approval stamped young girls and young matrons a success, called my mother a queen, and bowed before her charm and beauty, and to her this was all important.” Anna was a much-envied young denizen of society, a member in good standing of democracy’s royalty. She did not neglect her philanthropic duties so much as dismiss them as the burden of others.
In terms of her appearance, however, Eleanor could not help but agree with the consensus. Her mother was “one of the most beautiful women I have ever seen.” In the “season” of 1881–82, when the public eye first focused on Anna, she was “acclaimed as one of society’s most glamorous women.” David McCullough describes her as “stunning, regal, with a magnificent figure and large, haunting blue eyes,” framed by hair that was golden more than blond.
In the early 1880s, Anna Rebecca Ludlow Hall’s life was the stuff of Henry James’s fiction: “polo and tennis matches, the evenings at the opera, the cotillions, the midnight suppers, the horse-shows, and everything else that was a fixture in society.” For exercise, she enjoyed a weekly dancing class and a gentle jog of three miles with friends for afternoon tea at a favorite restaurant. Anna might have been inserted into almost any of James’s novels—a secondary character, granted, but a perfect fit.
She and her friends were among those who “set the fashion in dress and manners,” according to Joseph Lash, “and the anxious ones knocked at their doors. Anna’s graceful beauty and charming manners were everywhere [the subject of adulation]. ‘Fair, frail and fragile, and therefore a good illustration of beauty in American women,’ a society columnist rhapsodized. . . . ‘The proud set of the head on the shoulders was the distinctive look of the Halls,’ recalled Mrs. Lucius Wilmerding, whose mother was a close friend of Anna.”
But all was not as it seemed for the stunning Ms. Hall. She would soon discover “that she lacked the stamina—and probably the enthusiasm—for such a dizzying whirl” of activity as her fellow Swells felt mandatory. Despite her practiced smile and hard-learned manners, there seemed at times to be something about Anna that was amiss, something not quite in keeping with the other young lovelies of Swelldom. It would eventually show itself in the desperation brought on by her relationship with Elliott Roosevelt.
BY VIRTUE OF LINEAGE, IF lineage may be called a “virtue,” the Hall family was among the so-called “Four Hundred.” Supposedly, although not in fact, this was the number of people who could fit with comfort and dance gracefully in the ballroom of Mrs. William B. Astor Jr. The actual number, someone once pointlessly calculated, was a precise 297, meaning that one poor soul either sat alone in a corner or waltzed by himself.
Regardless, to be invited to one of Mrs. Astor’s galas was a form of anointment, the tap of a sword upon the shoulder of those who knelt at the altar of the beau monde. Anna was so tapped, and when it came time for her to be “presented”—which is to say, for a gala to be held to celebrate her “coming out” as a blue-blooded debutante, now officially an object of affection for suitors of similar stock—she seemed eager to bask in the attention.
Perhaps no one was more attentive to her than the poet Robert Browning, who once asked permission to “sit and gaze” as her portrait was being painted. That’s all—he just wanted a chair, just a look, although a long one. He hadn’t the skill to create a portrait of her himself; he wanted only to be in the same room and stare into her face as she sat in repose for someone who did have the skill.
It is possible that the result of Browning’s immersion was his own version of Anna Hall’s portrait, verbal rather than visual. She seems to have contributed greatly to one of his most romantic poems, “A Pretty Woman”:
X.
Why, with beauty, needs there money be,
Love with liking?
Crush the fly-king
In his gauze, because no honey bee?
XI.
May not liking be so simple-sweet,
If love grew there
’Twould under there
All that breaks the cheek to dimples sweet?
XII.
Is the creature too imperfect?
Would you mend it?
And so end it?
Since not all addition perfects aye?
XIII.
Or is it of its kind, perhaps,
Just perfection
Whence, rejection—
Of a grace not to its mind, perhaps.
ANNA WAS THE OLDEST OF four Hall girls and two brothers and was set apart from them not just by age but by temperament. The girls were said to be “slightly but attractively mad”—all except Anna, more properly described as “prim and cool.” She could be friendly on occasion, standoffish on more occasions. She was eager for a husband, perhaps more so than for love, but, as was the way with young ladies of her class, showed a veneer of indifference in the company of men. It was, after all, unseemly for one to appear too eager. To Browning, for example, she feigned a total indifference.
It could be difficult for people to make up their minds about Anna Hall, but her daughter would not be among them. As a child, Eleanor was firm in her view of Anna’s loveliness, and would never change her mind. She would, however, expand her mind, developing a less flattering view of her mother’s character, and her sometimes ruthless behavior toward her only daughter.
Elliott would, in time, become equally unyielding. So moved was he by her appearance that he would reveal his feelings in an attempt at a short story; like his safari memoir, it was never published. But it has found a place in the family archives. Its grimness is stunning and inexplicable for a man on the eve of courtship.
Elliott created a beautiful Manhattan society belle named Sophie Vedder. She is living overseas in the tale but clearly patterned after Anna. As the story begins, Sophie believes she has “so many friends, so many good and lovable qualities.” An apparently courageous sort, she claims she does not fear death; she will have Strauss waltzes played at her funeral. “My life has been a gamble. I have lived for pleasure only. I have never done anything I disliked when I could possibly avoid it. . . . I hoped against hope that something would turn up and pull me through.”
But nothing ever does. And, once achieved, the pleasure for which Sophie lives turns out to be not as pleasurable as she had always believed it would be. She has never married, having dismissed one suitor as the “same colorless thing” he had always been, and rejecting another, a wealthy man who could have saved her from poverty, as a “little fat figure of fun.” Eventually, Elliott’s protagonist is driven to talk to herself in the most horrid of circumstances. “Poor Sophie,” she says aloud, a couple of hours after dismissing the fat little rich man and therefore consigning herself to poverty, “what a frivolous, useless thing you are.” She is standing in front of a mirror as she speaks, which will be the final act of her life, for, as she commiserates with herself, her finger pulls the trigger of a gun with the barrel pushed into her head.
It is fiction, though. Only fiction.
ANNA’S PARENTS WERE AS HIGHLY stratified as their daughters, members of the “Hudson River gentry.” As such, they raised their girls “in a household that demanded discipline and viewed playfulness as an affront to God”—a household, according to Theodore’s biographer Nathan Miller, “out of a gothic novel,” through which “religious fanaticism” spread like mildew in a damp basement.
Had Elliott ever tried his hand at a gothic novel, Anna’s father, Valentine, would have been perfect for the paterfamilias. A man who believed his family owed its status to the Almighty, he further insisted that the family was in turn indebted to him. Religion, in its strictest forms, was an important part of Hall life. As was appearance, which Valentine somehow determined would make Anna and her sisters worthy of divine attention. The old man devised an exercise for them. “In the country,” wrote Eleanor in her autobiography, “they walked several times a day from the manse to the main road with a stick across their backs in the crook of their elbows to improve their carriage. [The girls’ father] was a severe judge of what they read and wrote and how they expressed themselves, and held them to the highest standards of conduct.” The result, or at least one of them, was not just a rigid posture, but “a certain rigidity in conforming to a conventional pattern, which had been put before them as the only proper existence for a lady.” Other than this, and her religious training, Anna took lessons in etiquette—nothing else. No intellectual passions were ever stirred in her; she developed no outside interests. There are not even any indications that she became as familiar with the Bible as Valentine had wished.
Taken all together, the young woman’s upbringing made for someone who looked like a work of art and conversed like a shopgirl.