What Would Mrs. Astor Do?: The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age

By Cecelia Tichi

This illustrated Gilded Age etiquette guide offers “proof that sliding around the naughty edges of society can be as informative as it is entertaining.” (Alida Becker, The New York Times Books Review)
 
Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age. Between 1870 and 1900, the United States’ population doubled, accompanied by an unparalleled industrial expansion and an explosion of wealth. America was the foremost nation of the world, and New York City was its beating heart. There, the richest and most influential—Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan, Edith Wharton, the Vanderbilts, Andrew Carnegie, and more—became icons, whose comings and goings were breathlessly reported in the papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. It was a time of abundance, but also bitter rivalries. The Old Money titans found themselves besieged by a vanguard of New Money interlopers eager to gain entrée into their world. Into this morass of money and desire stepped Caroline Astor.
 
An Old Money heiress of the first order, Mrs. Astor was convinced that she was uniquely qualified to uphold the manners and mores of 19th century America. “What would Mrs. Astor do?” became the question every social climber sought to answer. This work serves as a guide to manners as well as an insight to Mrs. Astor’s personal diary and address book. Ceceilia Tichi invites us on a beautifully illustrated tour of the Gilded Age, transporting readers to New York at its most fashionable.
 
“This was a society founded on exclusivity, with floods of tears from those who didn't receive an invitation to Mrs. Astor's annual ball.” — Anne de Courcy, The Wall Street Journal
 
“Presented with a breezy authority that keeps the pages turning.” —Publishers Weekly
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781479868544

Cecelia Tichi

A fresh start for every new book, and author Tichi's zest for America's Gilded Age and its boldface names draws this seasoned writer to a crime fiction series while uncorking the country's cocktail cultures on the printed page. Tichi digs deep into the Vanderbilt University research library to mine the late 1800-1900s history and customs of Society's "Four Hundred," its drinks, and the ways high-stakes crimes in its midst make for a gripping "Gilded" mystery series that rings true to the tumultuous era. The decades of America's industrial titans and "Queens" of Society have loomed large in Tichi's books for several years, and the titles track her recent projects:•Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us)•Jack London: A Writer's Fight for a Better America•What Would Mrs. Astor Do? A Complete Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age•Gilded Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from the Golden Age•Jazz Age Cocktails: History, Lore, and Recipes from the Roaring Twenties.•A Gilded Death (crime fiction)•Murder, Murder, Murder in Gilded Central Park (crime fiction)•A Fatal Gilded High Note (crime fiction)•A Deadly Gilded Free Fall (crime fiction)•A Fatal Gilded High Note (crime fiction)•A Gilded Drowning Pool (crime fiction)•Death in a Gilded Frame (crime fiction) Cecelia enjoys membership and posting in Facebook's The Gilded Age Society. You can read more about Cecelia by visiting her Wikipedia page at: https://bit.ly/Tichiwiki or her website: https://cecebooks.com.

Book preview

What Would Mrs. Astor Do?

What Would Mrs. Astor Do?

The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age

Cecelia Tichi

WASHINGTON MEWS BOOKS

An Imprint of

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

WASHINGTON MEWS BOOKS

An Imprint of

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

© 2018 by Cecelia Tichi

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

ISBN: 978-1-4798-2685-8

For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress.

New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Book designed and typeset by Charles B. Hames

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Also available as an ebook

To the young American, here or elsewhere, the paths to fortune are innumerable, and all open; there is invitation in the air and success in all his wide horizon.

—Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age, 1873

Contents

Splendors of the Gilded Age

Mrs. Astor Speaks

Millionaires’ Row

Fifth Avenue Mansions

Decoration of Houses

Servants and Their Duties

Convenience or Contraption

Electric Lighting

Elevators

Telephone

Competitive Consumption

Ladies’ Mile

Gentlemen’s Emporia

Tea Rooms and Luncheons

Best Dressed

The Hat Makes the Man

The Walking Stick: The Essential Gentleman’s Accessory

The Plume Trade, or, Decorating with Nature

Color Harmony

For All Occasions

Well Behaved

Ward McAllister, Autocrat of Conduct

How to Navigate a Public Encounter

Correspondence

Cards, Visits, and Calls

Parties and Balls

Parties

Balls

Gilded Age Cinderella

Seen but Not Heard

What They Read

Dinner Is Served

The Proper Place Setting

New York’s Elegant Restaurants

Delmonico’s

Sherry’s

The Lobster: From Prison Fare to Haute Cuisine

Enter Escoffier

A Black-Tie Dinner on Horseback

The Grain and the Grape

Mrs. Astor’s Annual Ball

The Social Set

To See and Be Seen

Peacock Alley

The Palm Court

Theater and Opera

Stage-Door Johnny

Central Park

Club Life

Newport

Slumming It: Entertainment on the Lower East Side

The Sporting Life

Boating

Polo

Bathing

Tennis

Archery and Croquet

Golf

Cycling

Getting There

Horse Power

Motor Cars

Private Rail Cars

Steamships

Yachts

Money Talks

Gospels of Wealth

Virtues of Free Enterprise

On Philanthropy

Wall Street

Top-Drawer Schools

For Girls

For Boys

Dollar Princesses

Newspaper Wars

The Whiff of Scandal

Divorce and Mrs. Astor

Inexcusable

Deadly Triangle: Nesbit, White, Thaw

On the Scene: Boldface Names in New York

Diamond Jim Brady (1856–1917)

Nellie Bly (1864–1922)

Jack London (1876–1916)

Lillian Russell (1860–1922)

Buffalo Bill (1846–1917)

Front-Page Girls

Muckrakers

Funerals

Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred

Acknowledgments

Selected Sources

Illustration Credits

About the Author

Splendors of the Gilded Age

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.

Mrs. Astor Speaks

A man with a million dollars can be as happy nowadays as though he were rich.

—Ward McAllister

I know of no profession, art, or trade that women are working in today as taxing as being a leader of society.

—Alva Vanderbilt

To many New Yorkers Society had become not a recreation and enjoyment, but a profession.

—May Van Rensselaer

We Society women work until we drop down in harness.

—Mrs. Arthur Drexel

During the Gilded Age, it was said that a lady’s name should be publicized only thrice in her lifetime: at her birth, her marriage, and her death. Did the grande dame of Gilded Age Society thus betray her own principles when she opened the door to her Fifth Avenue mansion for An Interview with Mrs. Astor in the Delineator, a monthly magazine owned by the Butterick Company, producer of home-sewing patterns and solid advice for women of the middle class? A professed admirer of Mrs. Astor’s simplicity and charm and her many intellectual interests, her interlocutor, Miss Rebecca H. Insley, late of Europe and Indiana, extolled her idol’s wide range of thought and her independence of judgment, her graceful manner and choice diction. Mrs. Astor so cherishes her ideals, confided Miss Insley, that at the very word, her face lights up in a marvelous way. Throughout her reign, Mrs. Astor guided through example, gesture, a withering glance. In her interview, she spoke more plainly for the ages. The claimants to the succession vied for the distinction of giving the best entertainments, having the most beautiful clothes, the finest horses, the richest jewels—all weapons in the struggle for supremacy. The regnant summa of social power, however, indisputably belonged to Mrs. Astor.

Figure 1. Mrs. Astor

Mrs. Astor Speaks

Money represents with us energy and character: it is acquired by brains and untiring effort; it is kept intact only by the same means.

I have heard that our young women smoke and drink and do other terrible things. I know a great many of them and know them very well. I have known them since they were born, and I am quite sure there is not one in my circle who is a cigarette fiend or who drinks to excess.

Best of all, there is the American idea, demonstrated about us every day, that each man can bring happiness and comfort to himself and to those he loves if he will only set about it, and that educations, books, pictures, travel are well within his means.

Our young men enter seriously upon the business of taking care of their large financial interests, and they often take up individual business or profession in addition, going in for healthy sports only as a well-earned diversion.

Our young women are easily trained in domestic matters and taught to appreciate their responsibility to the poor. There are no such barriers between the very rich and the very poor as some newspapers would have the world believe.

When our girls marry, they take up the management of establishments in town and country, they rear large families of children and personally supervise their education at home during the critical early years. They are in love with their husbands and devoted to their interests.

I am not vain enough to think New York will not be able to get along very well without me. Many women will rise up to take my place. But I hope my influence will be felt in one thing, and that is in discountenancing the undignified methods employed by certain New York women to attract a following. They have given entertainments that belong under a circus tent.

I have never entertained a foreigner in my life unless he comes to me with a letter of introduction.

The best women in New York Society, those of the greatest influence and those who give it its true tone are almost unknown outside their own circle. Society newspaper notoriety is interesting to them as it is to me, as a study, a very amusing one, too, sometimes, as one gains so much information about certain women supposed to belong to us, but whom we never see and do not know even by sight.

We have too many politicians in America, where in England they have statesmen. Many of our senators and congressmen seem to base their title to public favor upon their uncouth manners and lack of refinement, upon the fact that they have discarded socks or once wore blue-jeans.

Many people seem to think I could have done a great deal in making New York Society as democratic as it is in London and open to anyone of intellectual attainments, as it is over there. But one can only do one’s best under the conditions.

We have to be more exclusive in New York because in America there is no authority in society, and Americans in general are not inclined to admit its possibility. Each woman is for herself and trying to outdo the others in mad display and mad extravagance, with little thought of any inimitable good or any ideal.

Millionaires’ Row

Fifth Avenue Mansions

Touring New York in the early 1890s, the French writer Paul Bourget was stunned by vast constructions that lined Fifth Avenue on the east side of Central Park, seeming in their grandeur to reproduce the palaces and chateaux of Europe. Mrs. Astor’s own mansion at 840 Fifth Avenue was modeled after a French Renaissance chateau and was joined by neighbors emulating the styles of the French Gothic, French Renaissance, French Renaissance Revival, and French Beaux-Arts styles, in addition to the Italian, Gothic and Oriental houses of the new millionaires. The architects Richard Morris Hunt, Charles McKim, and Stanford White, among others, were in high demand for their architectural sleight of hand, mixing and matching favored styles of the period in a way that nonetheless convinced clients of each one. Then, as now, the gaudy structures drew criticism as well as praise. The author Henry James (1843–1916) carped that Fifth Avenue’s mansions were exorbitant structures in garish florid majesty, while one contemporary critic of the era, the newspaper heir Ralph Pulitzer, decried the architectural scene for palatial plagiarisms (a cheeky potshot slung by the son of the newspaper mogul Joseph Pulitzer, whose mansion, designed by Stanford White, rose at East Seventy-Third Street, just off Fifth Avenue). While these Fifth Avenue mansions were the setting for parties, dinners, receptions, and balls that filled the New York social calendar, they were typically closed from the first of June to the first of October, when Society summered in Newport, Rhode Island, or Bar Harbor, Maine. During such periods, when members of the Four Hundred wanted to take a quick summer flying trip to the city, they took a suite at the St. Regis or other suitable hotel, aware that inside their mansions, the furniture was draped in muslin dustcovers, waiting to be plucked off by servants in advance of the return of the family for the autumn and the winter. Summertime sightseers hoping to glimpse an Astor or another of the Four Hundred were thus disappointed. Year-round, nonetheless, passersby could be awestruck by block after block of the phalanx of palaces.

Figure 2. Home of Mrs. Astor, 840 Fifth Avenue

Decoration of Houses

For those who lived on Fifth Avenue’s golden mile, the home’s grand exterior should be matched by an opulent interior. Mrs. Astor herself was insistent on the French note in her décors, noted Frank Crowninshield, the descendent of a Boston Brahmin family and member of the exclusive Union and Knickerbocker Clubs in New York. Best known as the founding editor of Vanity Fair magazine and a regular guest at the Astor home at 840 Fifth Avenue, he recalled Mrs. Astor’s small downstairs, Louis XV salon, and attending balls in her large ballroom—also Louis Quinze. He also enjoyed Sunday tea time at Mrs. Astor’s home, his cup sometimes filled by his hostess, if not her storied butler, Thomas, who also dispensed alcoholic libations for the occasion. Mrs. Astor collected teacups, gold-overlaid French Limoges and English china in boundless floral patterns.

A connoisseur of the arts, Crowninshield could closely observe the interior of the Astor home—the sculpted busts of Mrs. Astor’s forebears, the gold-ceilinged drawing room, the many gold-framed mirrors, the floors with their Oriental rugs or covered with leopard or tiger skins. As a dinner guest in the dining room, he perhaps noted the black marble walls hung with tapestries portraying hunting scenes. The great stone fireplace also drew everyone’s gaze, as did the polar-bear rugs over the marble floors. Numerous vases of American Beauty roses clustered on the mantel, and the chandelier was, of course, a

Reviews for What Would Mrs. Astor Do?

[briandrewz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I picked up this book. To be sure, I wanted something to delve into that described the world of the Gilded Age. But when I picked up this book, I didn't know if it would be a biography of Mrs. Astor or a "how to" kind of a book. It's definitely the latter.What we have here is a book which describes every possible aspect of high society Gilded Age New York. Details about what clothes you should wear, where you should spend your summer, how you should lay your table, what you should serve, how you should have a funeral, etc. Everything is here in almost mind-numbing detail. I wish the book had gone into greater depth. Sure, describe how you were supposed to plan a party, but then...talk about the party.This is for only the most hardcore of Gilded Age aficionados.

[queenofheartsreview · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

To say that I love Cecelia Tichi’s "What Would Mrs. Astor Do?" is simply an understatement! What first drew me to this book was its design which is ornate and splendid, something reminiscent of a bygone era like the Gilded Age. The book jacket, represented in the image above, is faded crimson with golden swirls and designs. If one is to peel away the jacket, one is met with a regal cover design with a miniature portrait of the Mrs. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, the Gilded Age queen regnant of New York society. The design is something that must be acknowledged because it sets the tone for the rest of the book.Before sharing my thoughts about the book, I will talk briefly about the author. Cecelia Tichi, PhD, is an English professor at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. She obtained her MA from Johns Hopkins University and her PhD from the University of California, Davis. At Vanderbilt University, she teaches courses that focus on American literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published nine scholarly books that cover an array of different topics but has written extensively on the Gilded Age.When I first picked up "What Would Mrs. Astor Do?", I thought it was going to be a book on Gilded Age etiquette. Little did I realize that this book is so much more than that. In a light and humorous way, she recounts the lifestyles and social mores of Mrs. Caroline Astor’s exclusive milieu, “the Four Hundred.” Dr. Tichi covers everything from etiquette to fashion to social events to scandals that threatened the very bedrock of New York society. Alongside the many anecdotes and stories are gorgeous illustrations from that time period. Additionally, the author included a complete list of Mrs. Astor’s “Four Hundred” at the back of the book which is a nice touch.For a researcher like myself, this book is a treasure trove of information. Dr. Tichi writes in a delightful and engaging way, bringing the stories of these long-dead figures to life. This is bewitching and a must-have for anyone who is doing research on Mrs. Astor, her “Four Hundred,” and the Gilded Age.Reviewed by the Queen of Hearts Review!