2
Local Society
IN every town and small city of America an upper set of families
stands above the middle classes and towers over the underlying
population of clerks and wage workers. The members of this set
possess more than do others of whatever there is locally to possess;
they hold the keys to local decision; their names and faces are
often printed in the local paper; in fact, they own the newspaper
as well as the radio station; they also own the three important local
plants and most of the commercial properties along the main
street; they direct the banks. Mingling closely with one another,
they are quite conscious of the fact that they belong to the leading
class of the leading families.
All their sons and daughters go to college, often after private
schools; then they marry one another, or other boys and girls from
similar families in similar towns. After they are well married, they
come to possess, to occupy, to decide. The son of one of these old
families, to his father's chagrin and his grandfather's fury, is now
an executive in the local branch of a national corporation. The
leading family doctor has two sons, one of whom now takes up the
practice; the other—who is soon to marry the daughter of the second
largest factory—will probably be the next district attorney. So
it has traditionally been, and so it is today in the small towns of
America.
Class consciousness is not equally characteristic of all levels of
American society: it is most apparent in the upper class. Among
the underlying population everywhere in America there is much
confusion and blurring of the lines of demarcation, of the status value of clothing and houses, of the ways of money-making and
of money-spending. The people of the lower and middle classes
are of course differentiated by the values, things, and experiences
to which differing amounts of income lead, but often they are
aware neither of these values nor of their class bases.
Those of the upper strata, on the other hand, if only because
they are fewer in number, are able with much more ease to know
more about one another, to maintain among themselves a common
tradition, and thus to be conscious of their own land. They
have the money and the time required to uphold their common
standards. A propertied class, they are also a more or less distinct
set of people who, mingling with one another, form compact circles
with common claims to recognition as the leading families of
their cities.
Examining the small city, both the novelist and the sociologist
have felt most clearly the drama of the old and the new upper
classes. The struggle for status which they have observed going on
in these towns may be seen on a historic scale in the modern course
of the whole of Western Society; for centuries the parvenues and
snobs of new upper classes have stood in tension with the 'old
guard.' There are, of course, regional variations but across the
country the small-town rich are surprisingly standardized. In
these cities today, two types of upper classes prevail, one composed
of rentier and socially older families, the other of newer
families which, economically and socially, are of a more entrepreneurial
type. Members of these two top classes understand the
several distinctions between them, although each has its own particular
view of them.1
It should not be supposed that the old upper class is necessarily
"higher' than the new, or that the new is simply a nouveau
riche, struggling to drape new-won wealth in the prestige garments
worn so easily by the old. The new upper class has a style of
life of its own, and although its members—especially the women
—borrow considerably from the old upper-class style, they also—
especially the men—debunk that style in the name of their own
values and aspirations. In many ways, these two upper sets compete for prestige and their competition involves some mutual deflation
of claims for merit.
The old upper-class person feels that his prestige originates in
time itself. 'Somewhere in the past,' he seems to say, 'my Original
Ancestor rose up to become the Founder Of This Local Family
Line and now His Blood flows in my veins. I am what My Family
has been, and My Family has always been among the very best
people.' In New England and in the South, more families than in
other regions are acutely conscious of family lines and old residence,
and more resistant to the social ascendancy of the newly
rich and the newly arrived. There is perhaps a stronger and more
embracing sense of family, which, especially in the South, comes
to include long faithful servants as well as grandchildren. The
sense of kinship may be extended even to those who, although
not related by marriage or blood, are considered as 'cousins' or
'aunts' because they 'grew up with mother.' Old upper-class families
thus tend to form an endogenous cousinhood, whose clan piety
and sense of kinship lead to a reverence for the past and often
to a cultivated interest in the history of the region in which the
clan has for so long played such an honorable role.
To speak of 'old families' is of course to speak of 'wealthy old
families,' but in the status world of the old upper class, ready
money and property are simply assumed—and then played down:
'Of course, you have to have enough of this world's goods to stand
the cost of keeping up, of entertaining and for church donations ...
but social standing is more than money.' The men and women of
the old upper class generally consider money in a negative way—
as something in which the new upper-class people are too closely
interested. 'I'm sorry to say that our larger industrialists are increasingly
money-conscious,' they say, and in saying it, they have
in mind the older generation of industrialists who are now retired,
generally on real-estate holdings; these rich men and their women
folk, the old upper class believes, were and are more interested in
'community and social' qualifications than in mere money.
One major theme in old upper-class discussions of smaller business
people is that they made a great deal of money during the
late war, but that socially they aren't to be allowed to count. Another
theme concerns the less respectable ways in which the money of the newly moneyed people has been earned. They mention
pin-ball concessionaires, tavern keepers, and people in the
trucking lines. And, having patronized them, they are quite aware
of the wartime black markets.
The continuance of the old-family line as the basis of prestige
is challenged by the ripsnorting style as well as the money of the
new upper classes, which World War II expanded and enriched,
and made socially bold. Their style, the old upper classes feel, is
replacing the older, quieter one. Underlying this status tension,
there is often a tendency of decline in the economic basis of many
old upper-class families, which, in many towns, is mainly real estate.
Yet the old upper class still generally has its firm hold on local
financial institutions: in the market centers of Georgia and
Nebraska, the trading and manufacturing towns of Vermont and
California—the old upper-class banker is usually the lord of his
community's domain, lending prestige to the businessmen with
whom he associates, naming The Church by merely belonging to
it. Thus embodying salvation, social standing and financial soundness,
he is accepted by others at his own shrewd and able valuation.
In the South the tension between old and new upper classes
is often more dramatic than in other regions, for here old families
have been based on land ownership and the agricultural economy.
The synthesis of new wealth with older status, which of
course has been under way since the Civil War, has been accelerated
since the slump and World War II. The old southern aristocracy,
in fictional image and in researched fact, is indeed often in
a sorry state of decline. If it does not join the rising class based on
industry and trade, it will surely die out, for when given sufficient
time if status does not remain wealthy it crumbles into ignored
eccentricity. Without sufficient money, quiet dignity and self-satisfied
withdrawal comes to seem mere decay and even decadence.
The emphasis upon family descent, coupled with withdrawal,
tends to enhance the status of older people, especially of those
older women who become dowager judges of the conduct of the
young. Such a situation is not conducive to the marriage of old
upper-class daughters to sons of a new but up-and-coming class
of wealth. Yet the industrialization of the smaller cities steadily
breaks up old status formations and leads to new ones: the rise of the enriched industrialist and tradesman inevitably leads to the
decline of the land-owning aristocracy. In the South, as well as
elsewhere, the larger requirements of capital for agricultural endeavor
on sufficient scale, as well as favorable taxation and subsidy
for 'farmers,' lead to new upper-class formations on the land
as in the city.
The new and the old upper classes thus stand in the smaller
cities eyeing one another with considerable tension, with some
disdain, and with begrudging admiration. The upper-class man
sees the old as having a prestige which he would like to have, but
also as an old fogy blocking important business and political traffic
and as a provincial, bound to the local set-up, without the vision
to get up and go. The old upper-class man, in turn, eyes the new
and thinks of him as too money-conscious, as having made money
and as grabbing for more, but as not having acquired the social
background or the style of cultured life befitting his financial rank,
and as not really being interested in the civic life of the city, except
in so far as he might use it for personal and alien ends.
When they come up against the prestige of the old upper class
on business and on civic and political issues, the new upper-class
men often translate that prestige into 'old age,' which is associated
in their minds with the quiet, 'old-fashioned' manner, the slower
civic tempo, and the dragging political views of the old upper
class. They feel that the old upper-class people do not use their
prestige to make money in the manner of the new upper class.
They do not understand old prestige as something to be enjoyed;
they see it in its political and economic relevance: when they do
not have it, it is something standing in their way.* that they have achieved something and yet are not thought to be
good enough to possess it fully. There are men in Texas today
whose names are strictly local, but who have more money than
many nationally prominent families of the East. But they are not
often nationally prominent, and even when they are, it is not in
just the same way* that they have achieved something and yet are not thought to be
good enough to possess it fully. There are men in Texas today
whose names are strictly local, but who have more money than
many nationally prominent families of the East. But they are not
often nationally prominent, and even when they are, it is not in
just the same way.
* The woman of the new upper class has a somewhat different image:
she often sees the prestige of the old upper class as something 'cultural'
to appreciate. She often attempts to give to the old status an 'educational'
meaning: this is especially true among those younger women of
the station-wagon set whose husbands are professional men and who
are themselves from a 'good college.' Having education themselves, and
the time and money with which to organize cultural community affairs,
the new upper-class women have more respect for the 'cultural' component
of the old upper-class style than do their men. In thus acknowledging
the social superiority of the older class, new upper-class women
stress those of its themes which are available to them also. But such
women form today the most reliable cash-in area for the status claims of the old upper classes in the small towns. Toward the middle classes, in
general, such women snobbishly assert: They might be interested in
cultural things but they would not have the opportunities or background
or education. They could take advantage of the lecture series,
but they don't have the background for heading it.'
* See below, FOURTEEN: The Conservative Mood.
That the social and economic split of the upper classes is also a
political split is not yet fully apparent in all localities, but it is a
fact that has tended to become national since World War II.
Local upper classes—new and old, seen and unseen, active and
passive—make up the social backbone of the Republican party.
Members of the old upper class, however, do not seem as strident
or as active politically in the postwar scene as do many of the new.
Perhaps it is because they do not feel able, as Allison Davis and
others have suggested of the old southern upper classes, 'to lessen
the social distance between themselves and the voters.' Of course,
everywhere their social position 'is clearly recognized by the officials.
They are free from many of the minor legal restrictions, are
almost never arrested for drunkenness or for minor traffic violations,
are seldom called for jury duty, and usually receive any
favors they request.'2
They are, it is true, very much concerned
with tax rates and property assessments, but these concerns, being
fully shared by the new upper classes, are well served without the
personal intervention of the old.
The new upper class often practices those noisy political emotions
and status frustrations which, on a national scale and in
extreme form, have been so readily observable in The Investigators.
The key to these political emotions, in the Congress as in the
local society, lies in the status psychology of the nouveau riche.*
Such newly enriched classes—ranging from Texas multi-millionaires
to petty Illinois war profiteers who have since consolidated
their holdings—feel that they are somehow held down by the status
pretensions of older wealth and older families. The suddenly
$30,000-a-year insurance salesmen who drive the 260 hp cars and
guiltily buy vulgar diamond rings for their wives; the suddenly
$60,000-a-year businessmen who put in 50-foot swimming pools
and do not know how to act toward their new servants—they feel that they have achieved something and yet are not thought to be
good enough to possess it fully. There are men in Texas today
whose names are strictly local, but who have more money than
many nationally prominent families of the East. But they are not
often nationally prominent, and even when they are, it is not in
just the same way
* See below, FOURTEEN: The Conservative Mood.
Such feelings exist, on a smaller scale, in virtually every smaller
city and town. They are not always articulated, and certainly they
have not become the bases of any real political movement. But
they lie back of the wide and deep gratification at beholding men
of established prestige 'told off,' observing the general reprimanded
by the upstart, hearing the parvenu familiarly, even
insultingly, call the old wealthy by their first names in public
controversy.
The political aim of the petty right formed among the new upper
classes of the small cities is the destruction of the legislative
achievements of the New and Fair Deals. Moreover, the rise of
labor unions in many of these cities during the war, with more
labor leaders clamoring to be on local civic boards; the increased
security of the wage workers who during the war cashed larger
weekly checks in stores and banks and crowded the sidewalks on
Saturday; the big new automobiles of the small people—all these
class changes of the last two decades psychologically threaten the
new upper class by reducing their own feelings of significance,
their own sense of a fit order of prestige.
The old upper classes are also made less socially secure by such
goings on in the street, in the stores, and in the bank; but after
all, they reason: 'These people do not really touch us. All they
have is money.' The newly rich, however, being less socially firm
than the old, do feel themselves to be of lesser worth as they see
others also rise in the economic worlds of the small cities.
Local society is a structure of power as well as a hierarchy of
status; at its top there is a set of cliques or 'crowds' whose members
judge and decide the important community issues, as well as
many larger issues of state and nation in which 'the community' is
involved.3
Usually, although by no means always, these cliques
are composed of old upper-class people; they include the larger
businessmen and those who control the banks who usually also have connections with the major real-estate holders. Informally
organized, these cliques are often each centered in the several
economic functions: there is an industrial, a retailing, a banking
clique. The cliques overlap, and there are usually some men who,
moving from one to another, co-ordinate viewpoints and decisions.
There are also the lawyers and administrators of the solid
rentier families, who, by the power of proxy and by the many contacts
between old and new wealth they embody, tie together and
focus in decision the power of money, of credit, of organization.
Immediately below such cliques are the hustlers, largely of new
upper-class status, who carry out the decisions and programs of
the top—sometimes anticipating them and always trying to do so.
Here are the 'operations' men—the vice-presidents of the banks,
successful small businessmen, the ranking public officials, contractors,
and executives of local industries. This number two level
shades off into the third string men—the heads of civic agencies,
organization officials, the pettier civic leaders, newspaper men,
and, finally, into the fourth order of the power hierarchy—the
rank and file of the professional and business strata, the ministers,
the leading teachers, social workers, personnel directors.
On almost any given topic of interest or decision, some top
clique, or even some one key man, becomes strategic to the decision
at hand and to the informal co-ordination of its support
among the important cliques. Now it is the man who is the clique's
liaison with the state governor; now it is the bankers' clique; now
it is the man who is well liked by the rank and file of both Rotary
Club and Chamber of Commerce, both Community Chest and
Bar Association.
Power does not reside in these middle-level organizations; key
decisions are not made by their membership. Top men belong to
them, but are only infrequently active in them. As associations,
they help put into effect the policy-line worked out by the higher
circles of power; they are training grounds in which younger hustlers
of the top prove themselves; and sometimes, especially in the
smaller cities, they are recruiting grounds for new members of the
top.
'We would not go to the "associations," as you call them—that is,
not right away,' one powerful man of a sizable city in the midSouth
told Professor Floyd Hunter. 'A lot of those associations, if you mean by associations the Chamber of Commerce or the Community
Council, sit around and discuss "goals" and "ideals." I don't
know what a lot of those things mean. I'll be frank with you, I do
not get onto a lot of those committees. A lot of the others in town
do, but I don't... Charles Homer is the biggest man in our crowd
... When he gets an idea, others will get the idea... recently he got
the idea that Regional City should be the national headquarters
for an International Trade Council. He called in some of us [the
inner crowd], and he talked briefly about his idea. He did not talk
much. We do not engage in loose talk about the "ideals" of the situation
and all that other stuff. We get right down to the problem,
that is, how to get this Council. We all think it is a good idea right
around the circle. There are six of us in the meeting ... All of us are
assigned tasks to carry out. Moster is to draw up the papers of incorporation.
He is the lawyer. I have a group of friends that I will
carry along. Everyone else has a group of friends he will do the
same with. These fellows are what you might call followers.
'We decide we need to raise $65,000 to put this thing over. We
could raise that amount within our own crowd, but eventually
this thing is going to be a community proposition, so we decide to
bring the other crowds in on the deal. We decide to have a meeting
at the Grandview Club with select members of other crowds
. . . When we meet at the Club at dinner with the other crowds,
Mr. Homer makes a brief talk; again, he does not need to talk long.
He ends his talk by saying he believes in his proposition enough
that he is willing to put $10,000 of his own money into it for the
first year. He sits down. You can see some of the other crowds getting
their heads together, and the Growers Bank crowd, not to be
outdone, offers a like amount plus a guarantee that they will go
along with the project for three years. Others throw in $5,000 to
$10,000 until—I'd say within thirty or forty minutes—we have
pledges of the money we need. In three hours the whole thing is
settled, including the time for eating!
There is one detail I left out, and it is an important one. We
went into that meeting with a board of directors picked. The constitution
was all written, and the man who was to head the council
as executive was named ... a third-string man, a fellow who will
take advice .. . The public doesn't know anything about the project
until it reaches the stage I've been talking about. After the matter is financially sound, then we go to the newspapers and say
there is a proposal for consideration. Of course, it is not news to a
lot of people by then, but the Chamber committees and other civic
organizations are brought in on the idea. They all think it's a good
idea. They help to get the Council located and established. That's
about all there is to it.'4
The status drama of the old and the new upper class; the class
structure that underpins that drama; the power system of the
higher cliques—these now form the rather standard, if somewhat
intricate, pattern of the upper levels of local society. But we could
not understand that pattern or what is happening to it, were we to
forget that all these cities are very much part of a national system
of status and power and wealth. Despite the loyal rhetoric practiced
by many Congressional spokesmen, no local society is in
truth a sovereign locality. During the past century, local society
has become part of a national economy; its status and power hierarchies
have come to be subordinate parts of the larger hierarchies
of the nation. Even as early as the decades after the Civil
War, persons of local eminence were becoming—merely local.5
Men whose sphere of active decision and public acclaim was regional
and national in scope were rising into view. Today, to remain
merely local is to fail; it is to be overshadowed by the
wealth, the power, and the status of nationally important men. To
succeed is to leave local society behind—although certification by
it may be needed in order to be selected for national cliques.
All truly old ways in America are, of course, rural. Yet the value
of rural origin and of rural residences is sometimes ambiguous.
On the one hand, there is the tradition of the town against the hayseed,
of the big city against the small-town hick, and in many
smaller cities, some prestige is achieved by those who, unlike the
lower, working classes, have been in the city for all of one generation.
On the other hand, men who have achieved eminence often
boast of the solidity of their rural origin; which may be due to the
Jeffersonian ethos which holds rural virtues to be higher than the
ways of the city, or to the desire to show how very far one has
come.
If, in public life, the farm is often a good place to have come
from, in social life, it is always a good place to own and to visit.
Both small-city and big-city upper classes now quite typically
own and visit their 'places in the country.' In part, all this, which
even in the Middle West began as far back as the eighteen-nineties,
is a way by which the merely rich attempt to anchor themselves
in what is old and esteemed, of proving with cash and loving
care and sometimes with inconvenience, their reverence for
the past. So in the South there is the exactly restored Old Plantation
Mansion, in Texas and California the huge cattle spread or
the manicured fruit ranch, in Iowa the model farm with its purebred
stock and magnificent barns. There is also the motive of buying
the farm as an investment and as a tax evasion, as well as, of
course,, the pleasure of such a seasonable residence and hobby.
For the small town and the surrounding countryside, these facts
mean that local status arrangements can no longer be strictly local.
Small town and countryside are already pretty well consolidated,
for wealthy farmers, especially upon retiring, often move into the
small city, and wealthy urban families have bought much country
land. In one middle-western community, Mr. Hollingshead has
reported, some twenty-five families of pioneer ancestry have
accumulated more than sixty per cent of the surrounding one hundred
sixty square miles of rich agricultural land.6
Such concentration
has been strengthened by marriages between rural and
urban upper-class families. Locally, any 'rural aristocracy' that
may prevail is already centered in at least the small city; rural upper
classes and the local society of smaller cities are in close contact,
often in fact, belonging to the same higher cousinhood.
In addition to the farms owned by city families and the town centered
activities and residences of rural families, there is the increased
seasonal change of residence among both rural and
small-town upper classes. The women and children of the rural
upper classes go to 'the lake' for the summer period, and the men
for long weekends, even as New York families do the same in the
winters in Florida. The democratization of the seasonable vacation
to coast, mountain, or island now extends to local upper
classes of small cities and rural district, where thirty years ago it
was more confined to metropolitan upper classes.
The connections of small town with countryside, and the centering of the status worlds of both upon the larger city, are most
dramatically revealed when into the country surrounding a small
town there moves a set of gentlemen farmers. These seasonal
residents are involved in the conduct and values of the larger cities
in which they live; they know nothing and often care less for local
claims to eminence. With their country estates, they come to occupy
the top rung of what used to be called the farm ladder,
although they know little or nothing of the lower rungs of that
ladder. In one middle-western township studied by Evon Vogt,
such urban groups own half the land.7
They do not seek connections
with local society and often do not even welcome its advances,
but they are passing on these country estates to their children
and now even to their grandchildren. [I would venture a guess that these are those who became corporate farmers D.C]
The members of local society, rural and urban, can attempt to
follow one of two courses: they can withdraw and try to debunk
the immoral ways of the newcomers, or they can attempt to join
them, in which case they too will come to focus their social ways
of life upon the metropolitan area. But whichever course they
elect, they soon come to know, often with bitterness, that the new
upper class as well as the local upper-middle classes, among whom
they once cashed in their claims for status, are watching them
with close attention and sometimes with amusement. What was
once a little principality, a seemingly self-sufficient world of status,
is becoming an occasionally used satellite of the big-city upper
class.
What has been happening in and to local society is its consolidation
with the surrounding rural area, and its gradual incorporation
in a national system of power and status. Muncie, Indiana, is
now much closer to Indianapolis and Chicago than it was fifty
years ago; and the upper classes of Muncie travel farther and
travel more frequently than do the local middle and lower classes.
There are few small towns today whose upper classes, both new
and old, are not likely to visit a near-by large city at least every
month or so. Such travel is now a standard operation of the business,
educational, and social fife of the small-city rich. They have
more friends at a distance and more frequent relations with them.
The world of the local upper-class person is simply larger than it was in 1900 and larger than the worlds of the middle and lower
classes today.
It is to the metropolitan upper classes that the local society of
the smaller cities looks; its newer members with open admiration,
its older, with less open admiration. What good is it to show
a horse or a dog in a small city of 100,000 population, even if
you could, when you know that The Show will be in New York
next fall? More seriously, what prestige is there in a $50,000 local
deal, however financially convenient, when you know that in Chicago,
only 175 miles away, men are turning over $500,000? The
very broadening of their status area makes the small-town woman
and man unsatisfied to make big splashes in such little ponds,
makes them yearn for the lakes of big city prestige, if not for truly
national repute. Accordingly, to the extent that local society maintains
its position, even locally, it comes to mingle with and to identify
itself with a more metropolitan crowd and to talk more easily
of eastern schools and New York nightclubs.
There is one point of difference between the old and the new
upper classes in the smaller cities that is of great concern to the
old, for it causes the new to be a less ready and less reliable cash-in
area for the status claims of the old. The old upper class, after all,
is old only in relation to the new and hence needs the new in order
to feel that all is right in its little world of status. But the new, as
well as many of the old, know well that this local society is now
only local.
The men and women of the old upper class understand their
station to be well within their own city. They may go to Florida
or California in the winter, but they go always as visitors, not as
explorers of new ways or as makers of new business contacts. They
feel their place to be in their own city and they tend to think of
this city as containing all the principles necessary for ranking all
people everywhere. The new upper class, on the other hand, tends
to esteem local people in terms of the number and types of contacts
they have with places and people outside the city—which the
true old upper-class person often excludes as 'outsiders.' Moreover,
many articulate members of the middle and lower classes look
up to the new upper class because of such 'outside' contacts
which, in a decisive way, are the very opposite of 'old family residence.'
Old family residence is a criterion that is community-centered; outside contacts center in the big city or even in the national
scene.*
Today 'outside contacts' often center in one very specific and
galling reminder of national status and power which exists right
in the local city: During the last thirty years, and especially with
the business expansions of World War II, the national corporation
has come into many of these smaller cities. Its arrival has upset
the old economic status balances within the local upper classes;
for, with its local branch, there have come the executives from
the big city, who tend to dwarf and to ignore local society.8
Prestige is, of course, achieved by 'getting in with' and imitating
those who possess power as well as prestige. Nowadays such social
standing as the local upper classes, in particular the new upper classes, may secure, is increasingly obtained through association with the leading officials of the great absentee-owned corporations, through following their style of living, through moving to their suburbs outside the city's limits, attending their social functions. Since the status world of the corporation group does not characteristically center in the local city, local society tends to drift away from civic prestige, looking upon it as 'local stuff.'
* More aggressive than the old, the new upper-class criterion for the
really top people is not only that they are rich but that they are 'going
places' and have connections with others who are 'going places' in an
even bigger way than they. In one typical small city, the heroes of the
new upper class were described to me as 'Boys with a lot of dynamite ...
They're in there together going places and doing everything that's good
for [the city]. They operate nationally, see, and that's very important in
their outlook. They're not very active in strictly local affairs, but they
are active men. They have active investments all over, not money just
lying around doing nothing.' Stories of old families that have fallen and
of active new families that have risen illustrate to the new upper class
the 'workings of democracy' and the possibility of 'anybody with the
energy and brains' getting ahead. Such stories serve to justify their own
position and style, and enable them to draw upon the national flow of
official myths concerning the inevitable success of those who know how
to work smartly. The old upper classes do not tell such stories, at least
not to strangers, for among them prestige is a positive thing in itself,
somehow inherent in their way of life, and indeed, their very being.
But to the new upper-class man, prestige seems something that he himself
does not truly possess, but could very well use in his business and
social advancement; he tends to see the social position of the old upper
class as an instrument for the 'selling' of a project or the making of more
money. 'You can't get anything done in this town without them [the old
upper class]. The handles on those names are very important . . .
Look, if you and I go out on a project in this town, or any other town
we've got to have names with handles. Investors, proprietors, and so on,
they just hold back until we do that. Otherwise if we had the finest
project in the world, it would be born dead.'
In the eyes of the new upper class, the old social leaders of the
city come gradually to be displaced by the corporation group. The
local upper classes struggle to be invited to the affairs of the new
leaders, and even to marry their children into their circles. One of
the most obvious symptoms of the drift is the definite movement
of the local upper-class families into the exclusive suburbs built
largely by the corporation managers. The new upper class tends
to imitate and to mingle with the corporation group; the 'bright
young men' of all educated classes tend to leave the small city and
to make their careers within the corporate world. The local world
of the old upper class is simply by-passed.
Such developments are often more important to women than
to men. Women are frequently more active in social and civic
matters—particularly in those relating to education, health, and
charities—if for no other reason than that they have more time for
them. They center their social life in the local cities because 'it is
the thing to do,' and it is the thing to do only if those with top prestige
do it. Local women, however, gain little or no social standing
among the corporate elite by participating in local affairs, since
the executives' wives, corporation- and city-centered, do not concern
themselves with local society, nor even with such important
local matters as education; for they send their own children to
private schools or, on lower executive levels, to their own public
schools in their own suburbs, distinct and separate from the city's.
A typical local woman could work herself to the bone on civic matters
and never be noticed or accepted by the executives' wives.
But if it became known that by some chance she happened to be
well acquainted with a metropolitan celebrity, she might well be
'in.'
Local women often participate in local and civic affairs in order
to help their husband's business, but the terms of the executive's
success lie within his national corporation. The corporate officials have very few business dealings with strictly local businessmen.
They deal with distant individuals of other corporations who buy
the plant's products or sell it materials and parts. Even when the
executive does undertake some deal with a local businessman, no
social contact is required—unless it is part of the corporation's
'good-will' policy. So it is quite unnecessary for the executive's wife
to participate in local society: the power of the corporation's name
will readily provide him with all the contacts in the smaller city
that he will ever require.
Perhaps there was a time—before the Civil War—when local societies
composed the only society there was in America. It is still
true, of course, that every small city is a local hierarchy of status
and that at the top of each there is still a local elite of power and
wealth and esteem. But one cannot now study the upper groups
in even a great number of smaller communities and then—as many
American sociologists are prone to do—generalize the results to
the nation, as the American System.9
Some members of the higher
circles of the nation do live in small towns—although that is not
usual. Moreover, where they happen to maintain a house means
little; their area of operation is nation-wide. The upper social
classes of all the small towns of America cannot merely be added
up to form a national upper class; their power cliques cannot
merely be added up to form the national power elite. In each locality
there is an upper set of families, and in each, with certain
regional variations, they are quite similar. But the national structure
of classes is not a mere enumeration of equally important local
units. The class and status and power systems of local societies
are not equally weighted; they are not autonomous. Like the economic
and political systems of the nation, the prestige and the
power systems are no longer made up of decentralized little hierarchies,
each having only thin and distant connections, if any at
all, with the others. The kinds of relations that exist between the
countryside and the town, the town and the big city, and between
the various big cities, form a structure that is now national in
scope. Moreover, certain forces, which by their very nature are
not rooted in any one town or city, now modify, by direct as well as indirect lines of control, the local hierarchies of status and
power and wealth that prevail in each of them.
It is to the cities of the Social Register and the celebrity, to the
seats of the corporate power, to the national centers of political
and military decision, that local society now looks—even though
some of its older members will not always admit that these cities
and corporations and powers exist socially. The strivings of the
new upper class and the example of the managerial elite of the
national corporation cause local societies everywhere to become
satellites of status and class and power systems that extend beyond
their local horizon. What town in New England is socially
comparable with Boston? What local industry is economically
comparable with General Motors? What local political chief with
the political directorate of the nation?
3
Metropolitan 400
THE little cities look to the big cities, but where do the big cities
look? America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no
Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the
political capital, and the financial hub. Local societies of small
town and large city have had no historic court which, once and for
all and officially, could certify the elect. The political capital of the
country is not the status capital, nor even in any real sense an important
segment of Society; the political career does not parallel
the social climb. New York, not Washington, has become the financial
capital. What a difference it might have made if from the
beginning Boston and Washington and New York had been combined
into one great social, political, and financial capital of the
nation! Then, Mrs. John Jay's set ('Dinner and Supper List for
1787 and 1788'), in which men of high family, great wealth, and
decisive power mingled, might, as part of the national census,
have been kept intact and up-to-date.1
And yet despite the lack of official and metropolitan unity, today—seventeen
decades later—there does flourish in the big cities
of America a recognizable upper social class, which seems in many
ways to be quite compact. In Boston and in New York, in Philadelphia
and in Baltimore and in San Francisco, there exists a solid
core of older, wealthy families surrounded by looser circles of
newer, wealthy families. This older core, which in New York was
once said—by Mrs. Astor's Ward McAllister—to number Four
Hundred, has made several bids to be The Society of America,
and perhaps, once upon a time, it almost succeeded. Today, in so far as it tries to base itself on pride of family descent, its chances
to be truly national are subject to great risks. There is little doubt,
however, that among the metropolitan 400's, as well as among
their small-town counterparts, there is an accumulation of advantages
in which objective opportunity and psychological readiness
interact to create and to maintain for each generation the world
of the upper social classes. These classes, in each of the big cities,
look first of all to one another.
Before the Civil War the big-city upper classes were compact
and stable. At least social chroniclers, looking back, say that they
were. 'Society,' Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer wrote, grew 'from
within rather than from without . . . The foreign elements absorbed
were negligible. The social circle widened, generation by
generation, through, the abundant contributions made by each
family to posterity . . . There was a boundary as solid and as
difficult to ignore as the Chinese Wall' Family lineage ran back to
the formation of the colonies and the only divisions among upper class
groups 'were those of the church; Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed
and Episcopalians formed fairly definite sections of a compact
organization.'2
In each locality and region, nineteenth-century wealth created
its own industrial hierarchy of local families. Up the Hudson, there
were patroons, proud of their origins, and in Virginia, the planters.
In every New England town, there were Puritan shipowners and
early industrialists, and in St. Louis, fashionable descendants of
French Creoles living off real estate. In Denver, Colorado, there
were wealthy gold and silver miners. And in New York City, as
Dixon Wecter has put it, there was 'a class made up of coupon clippers,
sportsmen living off their fathers' accumulation, and a
stratum like the Astors and Vanderbilts trying to renounce their
commercial origins as quickly as possible.'3
The richest people could be regarded as a distinct caste, their
fortunes as permanent, their families as honorably old. As long as
they kept their wealth and no newer and bigger wealth threatened
it, there was no reason to distinguish status by family lineage
and status by wealth.4
The stability of the older upper classes
rested rather securely upon the coincidence of old family and great wealth. For the push, the wealth, the power of new upper
classes was contained by the old, who, while remaining distinct
and unthreatened, could occasionally admit new members.
In the decades following the Civil War, the old upper classes
of the older cities were overwhelmed by the new wealth. 'All at
once,' Mrs. Van Rensselaer thought, Society 'was assailed from
every side by persons who sought to climb boldly over the walls
of social exclusiveness.' Moreover, from overseas the immigrants
came, like southerners, and later westerners, to make their fortunes
in the city. 'Others who had made theirs elsewhere, journeyed
to New York to spend them on pleasure and social recognition.'5
From the eighteen-seventies until the nineteen-twenties, the
struggle of old family with new money occurred on a grandiose
national scale. Those families that were old because they had become
wealthy prior to the Civil War attempted to close up their
ranks against the post-Civil War rich. They failed primarily because
the new wealth was so enormous compared with the old
that it simply could not be resisted. Moreover, the newly wealthy
could not be contained in any locality. Like the broadening national
territory, new wealth and power—in family and now in corporate
form as well—grew to national size and scope. The city, the
county, the state could not contain this socially powerful wealth.
Everywhere, its possessors invaded the fine old families of metropolitan
society.
All families would seem to be rather 'old,' but not all of them have
possessed wealth for at least two but preferably three or four generations.
The formula for 'old families' in America is money plus
inclination plus time. After all, there have only been some six or
seven generations in the whole of United States history. For every
old family there must have been a time when someone was of
that family but it was not 'old.' Accordingly, in America, it is almost
as great a thing to be an ancestor as to have an ancestor.
It must not be supposed that the pedigreed families do not and
have not admitted unregistered families to their social circles, especially
after the unregistered have captured their banking firms.
It is only that those whose ancestors bought their way into slightly older families only two or three generations ago now push hard to
keep out those who would follow suit. This game of the old rich
and the parvenu began with the beginning of the national history,
and continues today in the small town as in the metropolitan center.
The one firm rule of the game is that, given persistent inclination,
any family can win out on whatever level its money permits.
Money—sheer, naked, vulgar money—has with few exceptions
won its possessors entrance anywhere and everywhere into American
society.
From the point of view of status, which always tries to base itself
on family descent, this means that the walls are always crumbling;
from the more general standpoint of an upper social class of more
than local recognition, it means that top level is always being renovated.
It also means that, no matter what its pretensions, the
American upper class is merely an enriched bourgeoisie, and that,
no matter how powerful its members may be, they cannot invent
an aristocratic past where one did not exist. One careful genealogist
has asserted that at the beginning of this century, there were
'not ten families occupying conspicuous social positions' in either
the moneyed set or the old-family set of New York 'whose progenitors'
names appeared on Mrs. John Jay's dinner list.'6
In America, the prideful attempt to gain status by virtue of family
descent has been an uneasy practice never touching more than
a very small fraction of the population. With their real and invented
ancestors, the 'well-born' and the 'high-born' have attempted
to elaborate pedigrees and, on the basis of their consciousness of
these pedigrees, to keep their distance from the 'low-born.' But
they have attempted this with an underlying population which, in
an utterly vulgar way, seemed to glory in being low-born, and
which was too ready with too many jokes about the breeding of
horses to make such pretensions easy or widespread.
There has been too much movement—of family residence and
between occupations, in the lifetime of an individual and between
the generations—for feeling of family line to take root. Even
when such feeling does strengthen the claims of the upper classes,
it is without avail unless it is honored by the underlying strata.
Americans are not very conscious of family lines; they are not
the sort of underlying population which would readily cash in claims for prestige on the basis of family descent. It is only when
a social structure does not essentially change in the course of generations,
only when occupation and wealth and station tend to become
hereditary, that such pride and prejudice, and with them,
such servility and sense of inferiority, can become stable bases of
a prestige system.
The establishment of a pedigreed society, based on the prestige
of family line, was possible, for a brief period, despite the
absence of a feudal past and the presence of mobility, because of
the immigrant situation. It was precisely during the decades
when the flow of the new immigration into the big cities was
largest that metropolitan Society was at its American peak. In
such Yankee ghettoes, claims for status by descent were most successful,
not so much among the population at large as among those
who claimed some descent and wanted more. Such claims were
and are involved in the status hierarchy of nationality groups.
But there came a time when the lowly immigrant no longer served this purpose: the flow of immigration was stopped, and in a little while everyone in North America became—or soon would become—a native-born American of native-born parents.
Even while the supply of immigrants was huge and their number in the big cities outnumbered those of native parentage, liberal sentiments of nationalism were becoming too strong to be shaped by the barriers of strict descent. 'The Americanization of the Immigrant'—as an organized movement, as an ideology, and as a fact—made loyalties to one ideological version of the nation more important than Anglo-Saxon descent. The view of the nation as a glorious melting pot of races and nations—carried by middle classes and intelligentsia—came to prevail over the Anglo-Saxon views of those concerned with 'racial' descent and with the pedigreed, registered society. Besides, each of these national groups— from the Irish to the Puerto Rican—has slowly won local political power.
But there came a time when the lowly immigrant no longer served this purpose: the flow of immigration was stopped, and in a little while everyone in North America became—or soon would become—a native-born American of native-born parents.
Even while the supply of immigrants was huge and their number in the big cities outnumbered those of native parentage, liberal sentiments of nationalism were becoming too strong to be shaped by the barriers of strict descent. 'The Americanization of the Immigrant'—as an organized movement, as an ideology, and as a fact—made loyalties to one ideological version of the nation more important than Anglo-Saxon descent. The view of the nation as a glorious melting pot of races and nations—carried by middle classes and intelligentsia—came to prevail over the Anglo-Saxon views of those concerned with 'racial' descent and with the pedigreed, registered society. Besides, each of these national groups— from the Irish to the Puerto Rican—has slowly won local political power.
The attempt to create a pedigreed society has gone on among
an upper class whose component localities competed: the eastern
seaboard was settled first; so those who remained there have been
local families longer than the families of more recently populated
regions. Yet there are locally eminent families who have been locally
eminent in many small New England towns for as long as any Boston family; there are small-town southern families whose
claims for continuity of cousinhood could not be outdone by the
most fanatic Boston Brahmin; and there are early California families
who, within their own strongly felt framework of time, feel
older and better established than any New York family might be.
The localities competed economically as well. The mining families
and the railroad families and the real-estate families—in each
industry, in each locality and region, as we have said, big wealth
created its own hierarchy of local families.
The pedigree is a firm and stable basis of prestige when the class structure is firm and stable. Only then can all sorts of conventions and patterns of etiquette take root and flower in firm economic ground. When economic change is swift and mobility decisive, then the moneyed class as such will surely assert itself; status pretensions will collapse and time-honored prejudices will be swept away. From the standpoint of class, a dollar is a dollar, but from the standpoint of a pedigreed society, two identical sums of money—the one received from four generations of inherited trusts, the other from a real kill on the market last week—are very different sums. And yet, what is one to do when the new money becomes simply enormous? What is Mrs. Astor (the pedigreed lady of Knickerbocker origin married to old, real-estate wealth) going to do about Mrs. Vanderbilt (of the vulgar railroad money and the more vulgar grandfather-in-law) in 1870? Mrs. Astor is going to lose: in 1883 she leaves her calling card at Mrs. Vanderbilt's door, and accepts an invitation to Mrs. Vanderbilt's fancy dress ball.7 With that sort of thing happening, you cannot run a real pedigreed status show. Always in America, as perhaps elsewhere, society based on descent has been either by-passed or bought-out by the new and vulgar rich.*
* But not only the fast-moving mechanics of class upset the show. Almost anything fast moving does. For the conventions of a style of life are important to the prestige of local society, and only where class and status relations are stable can conventions be stabilized. If conventions are truly rigid, then dress becomes 'costume,' and conventions become 'traditions.' High prestige of ancestors, of old age, of old wealth, of antiques, of 'seniority' of residence, and membership and of old ways of doing anything and everything—they go together and together make up the status conventions of a fixed circle in a stable society. When social change is swift, prestige tends to go to the young and the beautiful, even if they are the damned; to the merely different and to the 'novel,' even if they are the vulgar. Costumes then become 'old fashioned,' and what matters, above all, is to be 'fashionable.' The appearance value of one's house, and even of one's manners and one's self, become subject to fashion. There is, in short, an appreciation of the new for its own sake: that which is new is prestigeful. In such a situation, money more easily decides who can keep up with such a dynamic and steeply graded pattern of consumption differences in dresses, cars, houses, sports, hobbies, clubs. It is, of course, to such a situation as this, and not to a stabilized leisure class, that Veblen directed his phrases: 'ostentatious consumption' and 'conspicuous waste.' For America, and for the second generation of the period of which he wrote, he was generally correct.
The pedigree is a firm and stable basis of prestige when the class structure is firm and stable. Only then can all sorts of conventions and patterns of etiquette take root and flower in firm economic ground. When economic change is swift and mobility decisive, then the moneyed class as such will surely assert itself; status pretensions will collapse and time-honored prejudices will be swept away. From the standpoint of class, a dollar is a dollar, but from the standpoint of a pedigreed society, two identical sums of money—the one received from four generations of inherited trusts, the other from a real kill on the market last week—are very different sums. And yet, what is one to do when the new money becomes simply enormous? What is Mrs. Astor (the pedigreed lady of Knickerbocker origin married to old, real-estate wealth) going to do about Mrs. Vanderbilt (of the vulgar railroad money and the more vulgar grandfather-in-law) in 1870? Mrs. Astor is going to lose: in 1883 she leaves her calling card at Mrs. Vanderbilt's door, and accepts an invitation to Mrs. Vanderbilt's fancy dress ball.7 With that sort of thing happening, you cannot run a real pedigreed status show. Always in America, as perhaps elsewhere, society based on descent has been either by-passed or bought-out by the new and vulgar rich.*
* But not only the fast-moving mechanics of class upset the show. Almost anything fast moving does. For the conventions of a style of life are important to the prestige of local society, and only where class and status relations are stable can conventions be stabilized. If conventions are truly rigid, then dress becomes 'costume,' and conventions become 'traditions.' High prestige of ancestors, of old age, of old wealth, of antiques, of 'seniority' of residence, and membership and of old ways of doing anything and everything—they go together and together make up the status conventions of a fixed circle in a stable society. When social change is swift, prestige tends to go to the young and the beautiful, even if they are the damned; to the merely different and to the 'novel,' even if they are the vulgar. Costumes then become 'old fashioned,' and what matters, above all, is to be 'fashionable.' The appearance value of one's house, and even of one's manners and one's self, become subject to fashion. There is, in short, an appreciation of the new for its own sake: that which is new is prestigeful. In such a situation, money more easily decides who can keep up with such a dynamic and steeply graded pattern of consumption differences in dresses, cars, houses, sports, hobbies, clubs. It is, of course, to such a situation as this, and not to a stabilized leisure class, that Veblen directed his phrases: 'ostentatious consumption' and 'conspicuous waste.' For America, and for the second generation of the period of which he wrote, he was generally correct.
Here, in the social context of the self-made man, the parvenu
claimed status. He claimed it as a self-made man rather than despite
it. In each generation some family-made men and women
have looked down upon him as an intruder, a nouveau riche, as
an outsider in every way. But in each following generation—or the
one following that—he has been admitted to the upper social
classes of the duly pedigreed families.
The status struggle in America is not something that occurred at a given time and was then done with. The attempt of the old rich to remain exclusively prominent by virtue of family pedigree has been a continual attempt, which always fails and always succeeds. It fails because in each generation new additions are made; it succeeds because at all times an upper social class is making the fight. A stable upper class with a really fixed membership does not exist; but an upper social class does exist. Change in the membership of a class, no matter how rapid, does not destroy the class. Not the identical individual or families, but the same type prevails within it.
There have been numerous attempts to fix this type by drawing the line in a more or less formal way. Even before the Civil War, when new wealth was not as pushing as it later became, some social arbiter seemed to be needed by worried hostesses confronted with social decisions. For two generations before 1850, New York Society depended upon the services of one Isaac Brown, sexton of Grace Church, who, we are told by Dixon Wecter, had a 'faultless memory for names, pedigrees, and gossip.' 'He was quite ready to tell hostesses about to issue invitations who was in mourning,who had gone bankrupt, who had friends visiting them, who were the new arrivals in town and in Society.' He would preside at the doorstep at parties, and some observers claimed that he 'possessed a list of "dancing young men" for the benefit of newly arrived party-givers.'8
The extravagant wealth of the post-Civil War period called for a more articulate means of determining the elect, and Ward McAllister, for a time, established himself as selector. In order that 'society might be given that solidity needed to resist invasion of the flashiest profiteers,' McAllister wished to undertake the needed mixture of old families with position but without fashion, and the ' "swells" who had to entertain and be smart in order to win their way.' He is said to have taken his task very seriously, giving over 'his days and nights to study of heraldry, books of court etiquette, genealogy, and cookery . . .' In the winter of 1872-3, he organized the Patriarchs, 'a committee of twenty-five men "who had the right to create and lead Society" by inviting to each ball four ladies and five gentlemen on their individual responsibility, which McAllister stressed as a sacred trust.' The original patriarchs were old-family New Yorkers of at least four generations, which, in McAllister's American generosity, he thought 'make as good and true a gentleman as forty.'9 [Dang the original Robin Leach DC]
During the 'eighties, McAllister had been dropping comments to newspaper men that there were really 'only about 400 people in fashionable New York Society. If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.'10 In 1892, when both the exclusiveness of the Patriarchs and the popularity of Ward McAllister were beginning seriously to decline, he published his list of '400,' which in fact contained about 300 names. It was simply the roll call of the Patriarch Balls, the inner circle of pre-Civil War New York families, embellished by unattached daughters and sons who liked to dance, and a select few of the new rich whom McAllister deemed fit for admittance. Only nine out of a list of the ninety richest men of the day 11 appear on his list.
The status struggle in America is not something that occurred at a given time and was then done with. The attempt of the old rich to remain exclusively prominent by virtue of family pedigree has been a continual attempt, which always fails and always succeeds. It fails because in each generation new additions are made; it succeeds because at all times an upper social class is making the fight. A stable upper class with a really fixed membership does not exist; but an upper social class does exist. Change in the membership of a class, no matter how rapid, does not destroy the class. Not the identical individual or families, but the same type prevails within it.
There have been numerous attempts to fix this type by drawing the line in a more or less formal way. Even before the Civil War, when new wealth was not as pushing as it later became, some social arbiter seemed to be needed by worried hostesses confronted with social decisions. For two generations before 1850, New York Society depended upon the services of one Isaac Brown, sexton of Grace Church, who, we are told by Dixon Wecter, had a 'faultless memory for names, pedigrees, and gossip.' 'He was quite ready to tell hostesses about to issue invitations who was in mourning,who had gone bankrupt, who had friends visiting them, who were the new arrivals in town and in Society.' He would preside at the doorstep at parties, and some observers claimed that he 'possessed a list of "dancing young men" for the benefit of newly arrived party-givers.'8
The extravagant wealth of the post-Civil War period called for a more articulate means of determining the elect, and Ward McAllister, for a time, established himself as selector. In order that 'society might be given that solidity needed to resist invasion of the flashiest profiteers,' McAllister wished to undertake the needed mixture of old families with position but without fashion, and the ' "swells" who had to entertain and be smart in order to win their way.' He is said to have taken his task very seriously, giving over 'his days and nights to study of heraldry, books of court etiquette, genealogy, and cookery . . .' In the winter of 1872-3, he organized the Patriarchs, 'a committee of twenty-five men "who had the right to create and lead Society" by inviting to each ball four ladies and five gentlemen on their individual responsibility, which McAllister stressed as a sacred trust.' The original patriarchs were old-family New Yorkers of at least four generations, which, in McAllister's American generosity, he thought 'make as good and true a gentleman as forty.'9 [Dang the original Robin Leach DC]
During the 'eighties, McAllister had been dropping comments to newspaper men that there were really 'only about 400 people in fashionable New York Society. If you go outside that number you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.'10 In 1892, when both the exclusiveness of the Patriarchs and the popularity of Ward McAllister were beginning seriously to decline, he published his list of '400,' which in fact contained about 300 names. It was simply the roll call of the Patriarch Balls, the inner circle of pre-Civil War New York families, embellished by unattached daughters and sons who liked to dance, and a select few of the new rich whom McAllister deemed fit for admittance. Only nine out of a list of the ninety richest men of the day 11 appear on his list.
The attention given McAlister's list of the '400,' and his subsequent
retirement from high society, reflect the precarious situation
of the old upper classes he tried to consolidate. Not only in
New York, but in other cities as well, all sorts of attempts have been made to preserve the 'old-guard' from the social entree of
new wealth. McAlister's demise symbolizes the failure of all these
attempts. The only sensible thing that could be done was to admit
the new wealth, or at least selected members of it. This, the most
successful attempt, The Social Register, has done.
In the gilded age of the 1880's, a New York bachelor who had inherited 'a small life-income and a sound though inconspicuous social standing,' decided to publish 'a list of the Best People from which advertising was wisely excluded but which merchants might buy.'12 The Social Register presented a judicious combination of the old with the new, and, with the hearty support of friends among such New York clubs as Calumet and Union, became an immediate success. The first Social Register of New York contained some 881 families; in due course, lists were published for other cities, and the business of compiling and publishing such lists became incorporated as The Social Register Association. During the 'twenties, social registers were being issued for twentyone cities, but nine of these were later dropped 'for lack of interest.' By 1928, twelve volumes were being printed in the autumn of each year, and ever since then there have been Social Registers for New York and Boston (since 1890), Philadelphia (1890), Baltimore (1892), Chicago (1893), Washington (1900), St. Louis (1903), Buffalo (1903), Pittsburgh (1904), San Francisco (1906), Cleveland (1910), and Cincinnati (1910).13
The Registers list the 'socially elect' together with addresses, children, schools, telephone numbers, and clubs. Supplements appear in December and January, and a summer edition is published each June. The Association advises the reader to purchase an index containing all the names in all the Registers, this being useful in so far as there are many intermarriages among families from the various cities and changes of address from one city to another.
The Social Register describes the people eligible for its listing as 'those families who by descent or by social standing or from other qualifications are naturally included in the best society of any particular city or cities.' The exact criteria for admission, however, are hard to discern perhaps because, as Wecter has asserted, 'an efficient impersonality, detachment, and air of secret inquisition surround The Social Register. A certain anonymity is essential to its continued success and prestige.'14 Today, the Social Register Association, with headquarters in New York, seems to be run by a Miss Bertha Eastmond, secretary of the Association's founder from the early days. She judges all the names, some to be added, some to be rejected as unworthy, some to be considered in the future. In this work, she may call upon the counsel of certain social advisers, and each city for which there is a Register has a personal representative who keeps track of current names, addresses, and telephone numbers.
Who are included in the some 38,000 conjugal family units now listed,15 and why are they included? Anyone residing in any of the twelve chosen cities may apply for inclusion, although the recommendations of several listed families must be obtained as well as a list of club memberships. But money alone, or family alone, or even both together do not seem to guarantee immediate admittance or final retention. In a rather arbitrary manner, people of old-family are sometimes dropped; second generations of new wealth which try to get in are often not successful. To say, however, that birth and wealth are not sufficient is not to say that they, along with proper conduct, are not necessary.
Moderately successful corporation executives, once they set their minds to it, have been known to get into the Register, but the point should not be overstressed. In particular, it ought to be made historically specific: the thirty-year span 1890-1920 was the major period for entrance into the registered circle. Since the first decade of the twentieth century, in fact, the rate of admission of new families into the Social Register—at least in one major city, Philadelphia—has steadily declined: during the first decade of this century, there was a 68 percent increase, by the decade of the 'thirties, the rate of increase was down to 6 percent.16
Those who are dropped from The Social Register are often so well known that much is made of their being dropped; the 'arbitrary' character of the Register is then used to ridicule its social meaning. Actually, Dixon Wecter has concluded, 'unfavorable publicity seems as near as one can come to the reason for banishment, but this again is applied with more intuition than logic . . . It is safe to say that anyone who keeps out of [the newspaper's] columns—whatever his private life may be, or clandestine rumors may report—will not fall foul of The Social Register.'17
With all the seemingly arbitrary selection and rejection, and with all the snobbery and anguish that surrounds and even characterizes it, The Social Register is a serious listing that does mean something. It is an attempt, under quite trying circumstances, to close out of the truly proper circles the merely nouveau riche and those with mere notoriety, to certify and consolidate these proper circles of wealth, and to keep the chosen circles proper and thus presumably worthy of being chosen. After all, it is the only list of registered families that Americans have, and it is the nearest thing to an official status center that this country, with no aristocratic past, no court society, no truly capital city, possesses. In any individual case, admission may be unpredictable or even arbitrary, but as a group, the people in The Social Register have been chosen for their money, their family, and their style of life. Accordingly, the names contained in these twelve magic volumes do stand for a certain type of person.
In each of the chosen metropolitan areas of the nation, there is an upper social class whose members were born into families which have been registered since the Social Register began. This registered social class, as well as newly registered and unregistered classes in other big cities, is composed of groups of ancient families who for two or three or four generations have been prominent and wealthy. They are set apart from the rest of the community by their manner of origin, appearance, and conduct.
They live in one or more exclusive and expensive residential areas in fine old houses in which many of them were born, or in elaborately simple modern ones which they have constructed. In these houses, old or new, there are the correct furnishings and the cherished equipage. Their clothing, even when it is apparently casual and undoubtedly old, is somehow different in cut and hang from the clothes of other men and women. The things they buy are quietly expensive and they use them in an inconspicuous way. They belong to clubs and organizations to which only others like themselves are admitted, and they take quite seriously their appearances in these associations.
They have relatives and friends in common, but more than that, they have in common experiences of a carefully selected and family-controlled sort. They have attended the same or similar private and exclusive schools, preferably one of the Episcopal boarding schools of New England. Their men have been to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or if local pride could not be overcome, to a locally esteemed college to which their families have contributed. And now they frequent the clubs of these schools, as well as leading clubs in their own city, and as often as not, also a club or two in other metropolitan centers.
Their names are not in the chattering, gossiping columns or even the society columns of their local newspapers; many of them, proper Bostonians and proper San Franciscans that they are, would be genuinely embarrassed among their own land were their names so taken in vain—cheap publicity and cafe-society scandal are for newer families of more strident and gaudy style, not for the old social classes. For those established at the top are 'proud'; those not yet established are merely conceited. The proud really do not care what others below them think of them; the conceited depend on flattery and are easily cheated by it, for they are not aware of the dependence of their ideas of self upon others.*
* A word about Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) which—fortunately—is still read, not because his criticism of the American upper class is still adequate, but because his style makes it plausible, even when the criticism is not taken seriously. What he wrote remains strong with the truth, even though his facts do not cover the scenes and the characters that have emerged in our own time. It remains strong because we could not see the newer features of our own time had he not written what and as he did. Which is one meaning of the fact that his biases are the most fruitful that have appeared in the literature of American social protest. But all critics are mortal; and Veblen's theory is in general no longer an adequate account of the American system of prestige.
The Theory of the Leisure Class, is not the theory of the leisure class. It is a theory of a particular element of the upper classes in one period of the history of one nation. It is an account of the status struggle between new and old wealth and, in particular, it is an examination of the nouveau riche, so much in evidence in Veblen's formative time, the America of the latter half of the nineteenth century, of the Vanderbilts, Goulds, and Harrimans, of Saratoga Springs and Newport, of the glitter and the gold.
It is an analysis of an upper class which is climbing socially by translating its money into symbols of status, but doing so in a status situation in which the symbols are ambiguous. Moreover, the audience for the Veblenian drama is not traditional, nor the actors firmly set in an inherited social structure, as in feudalism. Accordingly, consumption patterns are the only means of competing for status honor. Veblen does not analyze societies with an old nobility or a court society where the courtier was a successful style of life.
In depicting the higher style of American life, Veblen—like the actors of whom he writes—seems to confuse aristocratic and bourgeois traits. At one or two points, he does so explicitly: 'The aristocratic and the bourgeois virtues—that is to say the destructive and pecuniary traits should be found chiefly among the upper classes . . .'18 One has only to examine the taste of the small businessmen to know that this is certainly not true.
'Conspicuous consumption,' as Veblen knew, is not confined to the upper classes. But today I should say that it prevails especially among one element of the new upper classes—the nouveau riche of the new corporate privileges—the men on expense accounts, and those enjoying other corporate prerogatives—and with even more grievous effects on the standard and style of life of the professional celebrities of stage and screen, radio and TV. And, of course, among recent crops of more old fashioned nouveau riche dramatized by the 'Texas millionaires.'
In the middle of the twentieth century, as at the end of the nineteenth which Veblen observed, there are fantastic goings-on: 'Tenor Mario Lanza now owns an outsize, custom-built white Cadillac with a gold plated dashboard . . . Restaurateur Mike Romanoff ships his silk and pongee shirts air express to Sulka's in Manhattan for proper laundering . . . Construction Tycoon Hal Hayes . . . has a built-in bar in his Cadillac plus faucets for Scotch, bourbon, champagne and beer in his home. . . .'19 But in established local society, the men and women of the fourth and fifth generation are quietly expensive and expensively quiet; they are, in fact, often deliberately inconspicuous in their consumption: with unpretentious farm houses and summer retreats, they often live quite simply, and certainly without any ostentatious display of vulgar opulence.
Their sense of civic service does not seem to take direct political form, but causes them gladly to lead the charitable, educational, and cultural institutions of their city. Their wealth is such—probably several millions on the average—that they do not usually have to use the principal; if they do not wish to work, they probably do not have to. Yet their men—especially the more substantial older men—generally do work and sometimes quite diligently. They make up the business aristocracy of their city, especially the financial and legal aristocracy. The true gentleman—in the eastern cities, and increasingly across the nation—is usually a banker or a lawyer, which is convenient, for those who possess a fortune are in need of trusted, wise, and sober men to preserve its integrity. They are the directors and the presidents of the major banks, and they are the senior partners and investment counselors of the leading law firms of their cities.
Almost everywhere in America, the metropolitan upper classes have in common, more or less, race, religion, and nativity. Even if they are not of long family descent, they are uniformly of longer American origin than the underlying population. There are, of course, exceptions, some of them important exceptions. In various cities, Italian and Jewish and Irish Catholic families—having become wealthy and powerful—have risen high in status. But however important, these are still exceptions: the model of the upper social classes is still 'pure' by race, by ethnic group, by national extraction. In each city, they tend to be Protestant; moreover Protestants of class-church denominations, Episcopalian mainly, or Unitarian, or Presbyterian.
In many cities—New York for example—there are several rather than one metropolitan 400. This fact, however, does not mean that the big-city upper classes do not exist, but rather that in such cities the status structure is more elaborate than in those with more unified societies. That there are social feuds between competing status centers does not destroy the status hierarchy.
The family of higher status may belong to an exclusive country club where sporting activities and social events occur, but this pattern is not of decisive importance to the upper levels, for 'country clubs' have spread downward into the middle and even into the lower-middle classes. In smaller cities, membership in the best country club is often the significant organizational mark of the upper groups; but this is not so in the metropolitan status market. It is the gentlemen's club, an exclusive male organization, that is socially most important.
Gentlemen belong to the metropolitan man's club, and the men of the upper-class stature usually belong to such clubs in more than one city; clubs for both sexes, such as country clubs, are usually local. Among the out-of-town clubs to which the old upper class man belongs are those of Harvard and Princeton and Yale, but the world of the urban clubs extends well beyond those anchored in the better schools. It is not unusual for gentlemen to belong to three or four or even more. These clubs of the various cities are truly exclusive in the sense that they are not widely known to the middle and lower classes in general. They are above those better-known arenas where upper-class status is more widely recognized. They are of and by and for the upper circles, and no other. But they are known and visited by the upper circles of more than one city.*
* Even in 1933, some fifty New Yorkers maintained their full-rate dues in Boston's Somerset Club.20
To the outsider, the club to which the upper class man or woman belongs is a badge of certification of his status; to the insider,
the club provides a more intimate or clan-like set of exclusive
groupings which places and characterizes a man. Their core of
membership is usually families which successfully claim status by
descent. From intimate association with such men, newer members
borrow status, and in turn, the accomplishments of the newer entrants help shore up the status of the club as a going concern.
Membership in the right clubs assumes great social importance when the merely rich push and shove at the boundaries of society, for then the line tends to become vague, and club membership clearly defines exclusiveness. And yet the metropolitan clubs are important rungs in the social ladder for would-be members of the top status levels: they are status elevators for the new into the old upper classes; for men, and their sons, can be gradually advanced from one club to the next, and so, if successful, into the inner citadel of the most exclusive. They are also important in the business life within and between the metropolitan circles: to many men of these circles, it seems convenient and somehow fitting to come to important decisions within the exclusive club. 'The private club,' one national magazine for executives recently put it, is becoming 'the businessman's castle.'21
The metropolitan upper classes, as wealthy classes having control of each locality's key financial and legal institutions, thereby have business and legal relations with one another. For the economy of the city, especially of a metropolitan area, is not confined to the city. To the extent that the economy is national and bigcity centered, and to the extent that the upper classes control its key places of big-city decision—the upper classes of each city are related to those of other cities. In the rich if gloomy quiet of a Boston club and also in the rich and brisk chrome of a Houston club to belong is to be accepted. It is also to be in easy, informal touch with those who are socially acceptable, and so to be in a better position to make a deal over a luncheon table. The gentlemen's club is at once an important center of the financial and business network of decision and an essential center for certifying the socially fit. In it all the traits that make up the old upper classes seem to coincide: the old family and the proper marriage and the correct residence and the right church and the right schools—and the power of the key decision. The 'leading men' in each city belong to such clubs, and when the leading men of other cities visit them, they are very likely to be seen at lunch in Boston's Somerset or Union, Philadelphia's Racquet or Philadelphia Club, San Francisco's Pacific Union, or New York's Knickerbocker, Links, Brook, or Racquet and Tennis.22
The upper-class style of life is pretty much the same—although there are regional variations—in each of the big cities of the nation. The houses and clothing, the types of social occasions the metropolitan 400 care about, tend to be homogeneous. The Brooks Brothers suit-and-shirt is not extensively advertised nationally and the store has only four branches outside New York City, but it is well-known in every major city of the nation, and in no key city do the 'representatives' of Brooks Brothers feel themselves to be strangers.23 There are other such externals that are specific and common to the proper upper-class style, yet, after all, anyone with the money and the inclination can learn to be uncomfortable in anything but a Brooks Brothers suit. The style of life of the old upper social classes across the nation goes deeper than such things.
The one deep experience that distinguishes the social rich from the merely rich and those below is their schooling, and with it, all the associations, the sense and sensibility, to which this educational routine leads throughout their lives. The daughter of an old upper-class New York family, for example, is usually under the care of nurse and mother until she is four years of age, after which she is under the daily care of a governess who often speaks French as well as English. When she is six or seven, she goes to a private day school, perhaps Miss Chapin's or Brearley. She is often driven to and from school by the family chauffeur and in the afternoons, after school, she is in the general care of the governess, who now spends most of her time with the younger children. When she is about fourteen she goes to boarding school, perhaps to St. Timothy's in Maryland or Miss Porter's or Westover in Connecticut. Then she may attend Finch Junior College of New York City and thus be 'finished,' or if she is to attend college proper, she will be enrolled, along with many plain middle-class girls, in Bryn Mawr or Vassar or Wellesley or Smith or Bennington. She will marry soon after finishing school or college, and presumably begin to guide her own children through the same educational sequence.*
* 'The daughter of the industrial leader, of the great professional man must thrive in a complex civilization which places little premium upon its women's homelier virtues: meekness and modesty, earnestness and Godliness. Yet such a man must, according to the mores of his kind, send his daughter to one of a handful of institutions whose codes rest upon these foundations... Of the 1,200-odd private schools for girls in this country, curiously enough only a score or more really matter ... so ephemeral are the things which make one school and mar another that intangible indeed are the distinctions.'24
The boy of this family, while under seven years of age, will follow a similar pattern. Then he too will go to day school, and, at a rather earlier age than the girls, to boarding school, although for boys it will be called prep school: St. Mark's or St. Paul's, Choate or Groton, Andover or Lawrenceville, Phillips Exeter or Hotchkiss.25 Then he will go to Princeton or Harvard, Yale or Dartmouth. As likely as not, he will finish with a law school attached to one of these colleges.
Each stage of this education is important to the formation of the upper-class man or woman; it is an educational sequence that is common to the upper classes in all the leading cities of the nation. There is, in fact, a strong tendency for children from all these cities to attend one of the more fashionable boarding or prep schools in New England, in which students from two dozen or so states, as well as from foreign countries, may be readily found. As claims for status based on family descent become increasingly difficult to realize, the proper school transcends the family pedigree in social importance. Accordingly, if one had to choose one clue to the national unity of the upper social classes in America today, it would best be the really exclusive boarding school for girls and prep school for boys.
Many educators of the private school world feel that economic shifts bring to the top people whose children have had no proper family background and tone, and that the private school is a prime institution in preparing them to live at the top of the nation in a manner befitting upper-class men and women. And whether the headmasters know it or not, it seems to be a fact that like the hierarchy of clubs for the fathers—but in more important and deeper ways—the private schools do perform the task of selecting and training newer members of a national upper stratum, as well as upholding the higher standards among the children of families who have long been at the top. It is in 'the next generation,' in the private school, that the tensions between new and old upper classes are relaxed and even resolved. And it is by means of these schools more than by any other single agency that the older and the newer families—when their time is due—become members of a self-conscious upper class.
As a selection and training place of the upper classes, both old and new, the private school is a unifying influence, a force for the nationalization of the upper classes. The less important the pedigreed family becomes in the careful transmission of moral and cultural traits, the more important the private school. The school rather than the upper-class family—is the most important agency for transmitting the traditions of the upper social classes, and regulating the admission of new wealth and talent. It is the characterizing point in the upper-class experience. In the top fifteen or twenty such schools, if anywhere, one finds a prime organizing center of the national upper social classes. For in these private schools for adolescents, the religious and family and educational tasks of the upper social classes are fused, and in them the major tasks of upholding such standards as prevail in these classes are centered.*
* 'These schools for boys,' the editors of Fortune have written, 'are conspicuous far out of proportion to the numbers enrolled in them. More than seven million boys and girls in the U.S. now (1944) receive secondary education, 460,000 of whom are in private schools. Of this number more than 360,000 were in Catholic schools (1941 figures, latest available) and more than 10,000 in military schools, whose special purposes are obvious. Of the remainder, girls' schools, whose job is also relatively well defined, accounted for almost 30,000 more. Forty thousand odd were in co-educational schools, largely day schools. Some 20,000 were in the schools for boys, the group that particularly desires self-justification.'26
These schools are self-supporting and autonomous in policy, and the most proper of them are non-profit institutions. They are not 'church schools' in that they are not governed by religious bodies, but they do require students to attend religious services, and although not sectarian, they are permeated by religiously inspired principles. The statement of the founders of Groton, still used today, includes this fundamental aim: 'Every endeavor will be made to cultivate manly, Christian character, having regard to moral and physical as well as intellectual development. The Headmaster of the School will be a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church.'27
'The vitals of a prep-school are not located in the curriculum. They are located in a dozen other places, some of them queer places indeed: in the relations between boys and faculty; in who the boys are and where they come from; in a Gothic chapel or a shiny new gymnasium; in the type of building the boys live in and the sort of thing they do after supper; and, above all in the headmaster.'28 There is a kind of implicit ideal for the school to be an organized extension of the family, but a large family in which the proper children from Boston and Philadelphia and New York together learn the proper style of conduct. This family ideal is strengthened by the common religious practices of the school, which tend to be Episcopalian; by the tendency for given upper class families to send all their sons to the same schools that the father, or even grandfather, attended; and by the donations as well as the social and sentimental activities of the alumni associations. The underlying purpose of the Choate School, for example, is to prove that family and school may be effectively combined, so that a boy while gaining the benefits that school provides—in particular 'spiritual leadership' and 'association with boys of purpose'—will retain the intimate influences that ought to characterize a proper home.
Daily life in the exclusive schools is usually quite simple, even Spartan; within its atmosphere of snobbish simplicity, there is a democracy of status. Everyone follows more or less the same routine, and there are no opportunities for officially approved inclinations for ostentatious display or snobbery.29
These schools are not usually oriented to any obvious practical end. It is true that the boys' schools are invariably preparatory for college; while those for girls offer one curriculum for college preparation, and one terminal course for girls contemplating earlier marriage. But the middle-class ethos of competitiveness is generally lacking. One should, the school seems to say, compare one's work and activity not with the boy or girl next to you, but with what you and your teacher believe is your own best. Besides, if you are too interested, you become conspicuous.
Certainly competition for status among students is held to a minimum: where allowances are permitted, they are usually fixed at modest levels, and the tendency is for boys to have no spending money at all; the wearing of school blazers by boys, or a uniform jumper or blouse, skirt and sweater by girls, is not, as it is usually interpreted by outsiders, so much upper-class swash as it is an attempt to defeat displays of haberdashery within the exclusive group. And girls, however rich, are not usually allowed to own their own horses.
The elders of the school community are those older children in the higher Forms, and they become the models aspired to by the younger children. For young boys, up to eight and nine, there are carefully chosen Housemothers; between twelve and thirteen, they are weaned from women and have exclusively male teachers, although the wives of instructors often live with their husbands in apartments within the boys' dormitories and continue a virtual kinship role with them. Care is taken that the self image of the child not be slapped down, as it might by an insecure parent, and that manners at table as elsewhere be imbibed from the general atmosphere rather than from authoritarian and forbidding figures.
Then one will always know what to do, even if one is sometimes puzzled. One will react appropriately upon meeting the man who is too carefully groomed and above all, the man who tries too hard to please, for one knows that that is not necessary if one is 'the right sort of person.' There will be the manner of simplicity and the easy dignity that can arise only out of an inner certainty that one's being is a definitely established fact of one's world, from which one cannot be excluded, ignored, snubbed, or paid off. And, in due course, as a young broker, banker, executive, one will feel smooth and handsome, with the easy bonhomie, the look of superior amusement, and all the useful friendships; one will have just the proper touch of deference toward the older men, even if they are members of your own club, and just the right degree of intelligence and enthusiasms—but not too much of either, for one's style is, after all, a realization of the motto of one's schooling: nothing in excess.30
Harvard or Yale or Princeton is not enough. It is the really exclusive prep school that counts, for that determines which of the 'two Harvards' one attends. The clubs and cliques of college are usually composed of carry-overs of association and name made in the lower levels at the proper schools; one's friends at Harvard are friends made at prep school. That is why in the upper social classes, it does not by itself mean much merely to have a degree from an Ivy League college. That is assumed: the point is not Harvard, but which Harvard? By Harvard, one means Porcellian, Fly, or A.D.: by Yale, one means Zeta Psi or Fence or Delta Kappa Epsilon; by Princeton, Cottage, Tiger, Cap and Gown, or Ivy.31 It is the prestige of a properly certified secondary education followed by a proper club in a proper Ivy League college that is the standard admission ticket to the world of urban clubs and parties in any major city of the nation. To the prestige of the voice and manner, constructed in such schools, local loyalties bow, for that experience is a major clue to the nation-wide upper class that is homogeneous and self-conscious.
Among those who are being educated in similar ways, the school naturally leads to marriage. The prep schools for boys are usually within a convenient range of boarding schools for girls of similar age, and several times a year the students from each are thrown together for chaperoned occasions. There are, in addition, the sisters of the other boys and the brothers of the other girls. And for those attending the more exclusive boys' and girls' colleges, there are formally arranged visits and parties—in short, dating patterns—established between them. On the college level, the exclusive schools become components of a broadened marriage market, which brings into dating relation the children of the upper social classes of the nation.
The rich who became rich before the Civil War also became the founders of most old American families, and those who have become rich since then have joined them. The metropolitan upper class which they have formed has not been and is not now a pedigreed society with a fixed membership, but for all of that, it has become a nationally recognized upper social class with many homogeneous features and a strong sense of unity. If new families are added to it, they are always wealthy families, and new or old, their sons and daughters attend the same types of exclusive schools and tend to marry one another. They belong to the same associations at the same set of Ivy League colleges, and they remain in social and business touch by means of the big-city network of metropolitan clubs. In each of the nation's leading cities, they recognize one another, if not strictly as peers, as people with much in common. In one another's biographies they recognize the experiences they have had in common; in their financial positions of brokerage firm, bank, and corporation, they recognize the interests they would all serve. To the extent that business becomes truly national, the economic roles of the upper classes become similar and even interchangeable; to the extent that politics becomes truly national, the political opinion and activity of the upper classes become consolidated. All those forces that transform a confederation of localities and a scatter of companies into a corporate nation, also make for the coinciding interests and functions and unity of the metropolitan 400.
The upper social classes have come to include a variety of members concerned with power in its several contexts, and these concerns are shared among the members of the clubs, the cousinhoods, the firms, the law offices. They are topics of conversation around the dinner table, where family members and club associates experience the range of great issues in a quite informal context. Having grown up together, trusting one another implicitly, their personal intimacy comes to include a respect for the specialized concerns of each member as a top man, a policy-maker in his own particular area of power and decision.
They spread into various commanding circles of the institutions of power. One promising son enters upon a high governmental career—perhaps the State Department; his first cousin is in due course elevated to a high executive place in the headquarters of a corporation; his uncle has already ascended to naval command; and a brother of the first cousin is about to become the president of a leading college. And, of course, there is the family law firm, whose partners keep in close touch with outlying members and with the problems they face.
Accordingly, in the inner circles of the upper classes, the most impersonal problems of the largest and most important institutions are fused with the sentiments and worries of small, closed, intimate groups. This is one very important meaning of the upper class family and of the upper-class school: 'background' is one way in which, on the basis of intimate association, the activities of an upper class may be tacitly co-ordinated. It is also important because in such circles, adolescent boys and girls are exposed to the table conversations of decision-makers, and thus have bred into them the informal skills and pretensions of decision-makers; in short, they imbibe what is called 'judgment.' Without conscious effort, they absorb the aspiration to be—if not the conviction that they are—The Ones Who Decide.
Within and between the upper-class families as well as their firms and offices, there are the schoolboy friendships and the prep schools and the college clubs, and later the key social and political clubs. And, in all these houses and organizations, there are the men who will later—or at the time of meeting—operate in the diverse higher circles of modern society.
The exclusive schools and clubs and resorts of the upper social classes are not exclusive merely because their members are snobs. Such locales and associations have a real part in building the upper-class character, and more than that, the connections to which they naturally lead help to link one higher circle with another.
So the distinguished law student, after prep school and Harvard, is 'clerk' to a Supreme Court judge, then a corporation lawyer, then in the diplomatic service, then in the law firm again. In each of these spheres, he meets and knows men of his own kind, and, as a kind of continuum, there are the old family friends and the schoolboy chums, the dinners at the club, and each year of his life the summer resorts. In each of these circles in which he moves, he acquires and exercises a confidence in his own ability to judge, to decide, and in this confidence he is supported by his ready access to the experience and sensibility of those who are his social peers and who act with decision in each of the important institutions and areas of public life. One does not turn one's back on a man whose presence is accepted in such circles, even under most trying circumstances. All over the top of the nation, he is 'in,' his appearance, a certificate of social position; his voice and manner, a badge of proper training; his associates, proof at once of their acceptance and of his stereotyped discernment.
Next ...Celebrity
footnotes
2. Local Society
1. Much of this chapter is based upon my own observations and interviews in some dozen middle-sized cities in the Northeast, the Middle West, and the South. Some results of this work have appeared in 'Small Business and Civic Welfare, Report of the Smaller War Plants Corporation to the Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business,' (with Melville J. Ulmer), Senate Document No. 135, 79th Cong., 2nd Session, Washington, 1946; 'The Middle Classes in Middle sized Cities,' American Sociological Review, October 1946; and White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). I have also used field notes made during the course of an intensive study of a city of 60,000 in Illinois during the summer of 1945. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this chapter are from my own research.
I have also drawn upon a memorandum, prepared for me by Mr. J. W. Harless, in which all statements about local upper classes appearing in the following studies were organized: Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929) and Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937); Elin L. Anderson, We Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938); Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom (New York: The Viking Press, 1939); John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1950); W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), volume I of the Yankee City Series; Allison Davis and Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942); John Useem, Pierre Tangent, and Ruth Useem, 'Stratification in a Prairie Town,' American Sociological Review, July 1942; James West, Plainville, U.S.A. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950); Harold F. Kaufman, Defining Prestige in a Rural Community (New York: Beacon House, 1946); Evon Z. Vogt, Jr., 'Social Stratification in the Rural Midwest: A Structural Analysis,' Rural Sociology, December 1947; August B. Hollingshead, Elmtown's Youth (New York: John Wiley, 1949); W. Lloyd Warner, et al, Democracy in Jonesville (New York: Harper, 1949); M. C. Hill and Bevode C. McCall, 'Social Stratification in "Georgiatown,"' American Sociological Review, December 1950; and Alfred Winslow Jones, Life, Liberty and Property (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941).
Most local community studies of prestige, so often the unit of sociological study, are of merely local interest. One cannot even say that they are of interest beyond that because of the methodological innovations they make possible, for in truth most of these methodological advancements are suitable only for what they have been worked out for—local community studies.
It is interesting to notice that in examining the small American city, both novelist and sociologist have, each in his own way, been interested in similar details and reached quite similar conclusions. They have both generally been more interested in status than in power. The novelist has been more interested in manners and in the frustrating effects of small town life on human relations and personality; the sociologist has not paid very full attention to the small city as a structure of power, much less as a unit in a system of power that is nation-wide. The similarity of their descriptive effects is revealed by the fact that, despite the rituals of proof they contain, the endless 'community studies' of the sociologists often read like badly written novels; and the novels, like better-written sociology.
2. See Allison Davis, et al, op. cit. p. 497.
3. I have drawn in this section from various parts of Floyd Hunter's first-hand study, Community Power Structure (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
4. Cf. ibid. pp. 172-4.
5. See Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955), pp. 46 ff.
6. See Hollingshead, op. cit. p. 59. On farm ownership in a southern county, see Allison Davis, op. cit. p. 276.
7. On urban ownership of farm land in a Middle-Western county, see Evon Vogt, op. cit.
8. Compare, on the small city and the national corporation, Mills and Ulmer, 'Small Business and Civic Welfare,' op. cit.
9. For an example of the confusion of small town with nation to the point of caricature, see W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
Chapter 3. Metropolitan 400
1. Cf. Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society (New York: Scribner's, 1937), pp. 199 ff., which is the standard work on the history of American 'Society.' The best examinations of the 'Societies' of particular big cities are Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947); and Edward Digby Baltzell Jr., The Elite and the Upper Class in Metropolitan America: A Study of Stratification in Philadelphia, (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1953), both of which I have used.
2. Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, The Social Ladder (New York: Henry Holt, 1924), pp. 30-32.
3. Dixon Wecter, op. cit. pp. 294-5.
4. Cf. J. L. Ford, 'New York of the Seventies,' Scribner's Magazine, June 1923, p. 744.
5. Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, op. cit. pp. 53-4.
6. W. J. Mills, 'New York Society,' Delineator, November 1904. Cf. also Ralph Pulitzer, 'New York Society at Work,' Harper's Bazaar, December 1909.
7. Cf. Harvey O'Connor, The Astors (New York: Knopf, 1941), p. 197.
8. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 209-10.
9. Ibid. pp. 212, 214.
10. Cited in ibid. p. 215. 11. See FIVE: The Very Rich, and notes to that chapter. 12. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 232-3.
13. See Mona Gardner, 'Social Register Blues,' Collier's, 14 December 1946 and G. Holland, 'Social Register,' American Mercury, June 1932. On the volumes of The Social Register published up to 1925, see Wecter, op. cit. p. 233.
14. Wecter, op. cit. p. 234.
15. As of 1940. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. Table 2.
16. See ibid. Table 14, pp. 89
17. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 235, 234.
18. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899 (New York: New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1953), p. 162. Cf. also my Introduction to that edition for a fuller criticism of Veblen's theory.
19. Time, 26 October 1953.
20. See 'Boston,' Fortune, February 1933, p. 27.
21. Business Week, 5 June 1954, pp. 92-3.
22. From private estimations. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. p. 178.
23. Cf. ibid, footnote 5, p. 172.
24. 'Miss Chapin's, Miss Walker's, Foxcroft, Farmington,' Fortune, August 1931, p. 38.
25. See Porter Sargent, A Handbook of Private Schools, 25th ed. (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1941); 'Schools for Boys,' Fortune, May 1944, pp. 165 ff.; 'St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, Andover, et al,' Fortune, September 1931, pp. 76 ff. Cf. also George S. Counts, 'Girls' Schools,' Fortune, August 1931 and Twelve of The Best American Schools,' Fortune, January 1936, pp. 48 ff.
26. 'Schools for Boys, op. cit. p. 165. Cf. also 'Boys' Prep School,' Life, 1 March 1954, which deals with Hotchkiss. Compare Eleanor Roosevelt's feelings upon sending her youngest son, John, to Groton, as reported by her in This I Remember (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 43.
27. Cf. Frank D. Ashburn, Peabody of Groton (New York: Coward McCann, 1944), pp. 30, 67-8.
28. 'St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, Andover, et al,' op. cit. p. 76.
29. Cf. Allan Heely, Why the Private School? (New York: Harper, 1951).
30. Cf. John P. Marquand, ff. M. Pulham Esquire (New York: Bantam Edition, 1950), pp. 76, 60; and W. M. Spackman, Heyday (New York: Ballantine Edition, 1953), p. 12.
31. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. pp. 218-20.
In the gilded age of the 1880's, a New York bachelor who had inherited 'a small life-income and a sound though inconspicuous social standing,' decided to publish 'a list of the Best People from which advertising was wisely excluded but which merchants might buy.'12 The Social Register presented a judicious combination of the old with the new, and, with the hearty support of friends among such New York clubs as Calumet and Union, became an immediate success. The first Social Register of New York contained some 881 families; in due course, lists were published for other cities, and the business of compiling and publishing such lists became incorporated as The Social Register Association. During the 'twenties, social registers were being issued for twentyone cities, but nine of these were later dropped 'for lack of interest.' By 1928, twelve volumes were being printed in the autumn of each year, and ever since then there have been Social Registers for New York and Boston (since 1890), Philadelphia (1890), Baltimore (1892), Chicago (1893), Washington (1900), St. Louis (1903), Buffalo (1903), Pittsburgh (1904), San Francisco (1906), Cleveland (1910), and Cincinnati (1910).13
The Registers list the 'socially elect' together with addresses, children, schools, telephone numbers, and clubs. Supplements appear in December and January, and a summer edition is published each June. The Association advises the reader to purchase an index containing all the names in all the Registers, this being useful in so far as there are many intermarriages among families from the various cities and changes of address from one city to another.
The Social Register describes the people eligible for its listing as 'those families who by descent or by social standing or from other qualifications are naturally included in the best society of any particular city or cities.' The exact criteria for admission, however, are hard to discern perhaps because, as Wecter has asserted, 'an efficient impersonality, detachment, and air of secret inquisition surround The Social Register. A certain anonymity is essential to its continued success and prestige.'14 Today, the Social Register Association, with headquarters in New York, seems to be run by a Miss Bertha Eastmond, secretary of the Association's founder from the early days. She judges all the names, some to be added, some to be rejected as unworthy, some to be considered in the future. In this work, she may call upon the counsel of certain social advisers, and each city for which there is a Register has a personal representative who keeps track of current names, addresses, and telephone numbers.
Who are included in the some 38,000 conjugal family units now listed,15 and why are they included? Anyone residing in any of the twelve chosen cities may apply for inclusion, although the recommendations of several listed families must be obtained as well as a list of club memberships. But money alone, or family alone, or even both together do not seem to guarantee immediate admittance or final retention. In a rather arbitrary manner, people of old-family are sometimes dropped; second generations of new wealth which try to get in are often not successful. To say, however, that birth and wealth are not sufficient is not to say that they, along with proper conduct, are not necessary.
Moderately successful corporation executives, once they set their minds to it, have been known to get into the Register, but the point should not be overstressed. In particular, it ought to be made historically specific: the thirty-year span 1890-1920 was the major period for entrance into the registered circle. Since the first decade of the twentieth century, in fact, the rate of admission of new families into the Social Register—at least in one major city, Philadelphia—has steadily declined: during the first decade of this century, there was a 68 percent increase, by the decade of the 'thirties, the rate of increase was down to 6 percent.16
Those who are dropped from The Social Register are often so well known that much is made of their being dropped; the 'arbitrary' character of the Register is then used to ridicule its social meaning. Actually, Dixon Wecter has concluded, 'unfavorable publicity seems as near as one can come to the reason for banishment, but this again is applied with more intuition than logic . . . It is safe to say that anyone who keeps out of [the newspaper's] columns—whatever his private life may be, or clandestine rumors may report—will not fall foul of The Social Register.'17
With all the seemingly arbitrary selection and rejection, and with all the snobbery and anguish that surrounds and even characterizes it, The Social Register is a serious listing that does mean something. It is an attempt, under quite trying circumstances, to close out of the truly proper circles the merely nouveau riche and those with mere notoriety, to certify and consolidate these proper circles of wealth, and to keep the chosen circles proper and thus presumably worthy of being chosen. After all, it is the only list of registered families that Americans have, and it is the nearest thing to an official status center that this country, with no aristocratic past, no court society, no truly capital city, possesses. In any individual case, admission may be unpredictable or even arbitrary, but as a group, the people in The Social Register have been chosen for their money, their family, and their style of life. Accordingly, the names contained in these twelve magic volumes do stand for a certain type of person.
In each of the chosen metropolitan areas of the nation, there is an upper social class whose members were born into families which have been registered since the Social Register began. This registered social class, as well as newly registered and unregistered classes in other big cities, is composed of groups of ancient families who for two or three or four generations have been prominent and wealthy. They are set apart from the rest of the community by their manner of origin, appearance, and conduct.
They live in one or more exclusive and expensive residential areas in fine old houses in which many of them were born, or in elaborately simple modern ones which they have constructed. In these houses, old or new, there are the correct furnishings and the cherished equipage. Their clothing, even when it is apparently casual and undoubtedly old, is somehow different in cut and hang from the clothes of other men and women. The things they buy are quietly expensive and they use them in an inconspicuous way. They belong to clubs and organizations to which only others like themselves are admitted, and they take quite seriously their appearances in these associations.
They have relatives and friends in common, but more than that, they have in common experiences of a carefully selected and family-controlled sort. They have attended the same or similar private and exclusive schools, preferably one of the Episcopal boarding schools of New England. Their men have been to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or if local pride could not be overcome, to a locally esteemed college to which their families have contributed. And now they frequent the clubs of these schools, as well as leading clubs in their own city, and as often as not, also a club or two in other metropolitan centers.
Their names are not in the chattering, gossiping columns or even the society columns of their local newspapers; many of them, proper Bostonians and proper San Franciscans that they are, would be genuinely embarrassed among their own land were their names so taken in vain—cheap publicity and cafe-society scandal are for newer families of more strident and gaudy style, not for the old social classes. For those established at the top are 'proud'; those not yet established are merely conceited. The proud really do not care what others below them think of them; the conceited depend on flattery and are easily cheated by it, for they are not aware of the dependence of their ideas of self upon others.*
* A word about Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) which—fortunately—is still read, not because his criticism of the American upper class is still adequate, but because his style makes it plausible, even when the criticism is not taken seriously. What he wrote remains strong with the truth, even though his facts do not cover the scenes and the characters that have emerged in our own time. It remains strong because we could not see the newer features of our own time had he not written what and as he did. Which is one meaning of the fact that his biases are the most fruitful that have appeared in the literature of American social protest. But all critics are mortal; and Veblen's theory is in general no longer an adequate account of the American system of prestige.
The Theory of the Leisure Class, is not the theory of the leisure class. It is a theory of a particular element of the upper classes in one period of the history of one nation. It is an account of the status struggle between new and old wealth and, in particular, it is an examination of the nouveau riche, so much in evidence in Veblen's formative time, the America of the latter half of the nineteenth century, of the Vanderbilts, Goulds, and Harrimans, of Saratoga Springs and Newport, of the glitter and the gold.
It is an analysis of an upper class which is climbing socially by translating its money into symbols of status, but doing so in a status situation in which the symbols are ambiguous. Moreover, the audience for the Veblenian drama is not traditional, nor the actors firmly set in an inherited social structure, as in feudalism. Accordingly, consumption patterns are the only means of competing for status honor. Veblen does not analyze societies with an old nobility or a court society where the courtier was a successful style of life.
In depicting the higher style of American life, Veblen—like the actors of whom he writes—seems to confuse aristocratic and bourgeois traits. At one or two points, he does so explicitly: 'The aristocratic and the bourgeois virtues—that is to say the destructive and pecuniary traits should be found chiefly among the upper classes . . .'18 One has only to examine the taste of the small businessmen to know that this is certainly not true.
'Conspicuous consumption,' as Veblen knew, is not confined to the upper classes. But today I should say that it prevails especially among one element of the new upper classes—the nouveau riche of the new corporate privileges—the men on expense accounts, and those enjoying other corporate prerogatives—and with even more grievous effects on the standard and style of life of the professional celebrities of stage and screen, radio and TV. And, of course, among recent crops of more old fashioned nouveau riche dramatized by the 'Texas millionaires.'
In the middle of the twentieth century, as at the end of the nineteenth which Veblen observed, there are fantastic goings-on: 'Tenor Mario Lanza now owns an outsize, custom-built white Cadillac with a gold plated dashboard . . . Restaurateur Mike Romanoff ships his silk and pongee shirts air express to Sulka's in Manhattan for proper laundering . . . Construction Tycoon Hal Hayes . . . has a built-in bar in his Cadillac plus faucets for Scotch, bourbon, champagne and beer in his home. . . .'19 But in established local society, the men and women of the fourth and fifth generation are quietly expensive and expensively quiet; they are, in fact, often deliberately inconspicuous in their consumption: with unpretentious farm houses and summer retreats, they often live quite simply, and certainly without any ostentatious display of vulgar opulence.
The terms of Veblen's theory are not adequate to describe the established upper classes of today. Moreover—as we shall see in FOUR, Veblen's work, as a theory of the American status system, does not take into adequate account the rise of the instituted elite or of the world of the celebrity. He could not, of course, have been expected in the eighteen-nineties to see the meaning for a truly national status system of 'the professional celebrities,' who have arisen as part of the national media of mass communication and entertainment, or anticipate the development of national glamour, whereby the debutante is replaced by the movie star, and the local society lady by the military and political and economic managers—'the power elite'—whom many now celebrate as their proper chieftains.
Within and between the various cliques which they form, members
of these proud families form close friendships and strong loyalties. They are served at one another's dinners and attend one
another's balls. They take the quietly elegant weddings, the somber
funerals, the gay coming-out parties with seriousness and restraint.
The social appearances they seem to like best are often
informal, although among them codes of dress and manner, the
sensibility of what is correct and what is not done, govern the informal
and the natural as well as the formal. Their sense of civic service does not seem to take direct political form, but causes them gladly to lead the charitable, educational, and cultural institutions of their city. Their wealth is such—probably several millions on the average—that they do not usually have to use the principal; if they do not wish to work, they probably do not have to. Yet their men—especially the more substantial older men—generally do work and sometimes quite diligently. They make up the business aristocracy of their city, especially the financial and legal aristocracy. The true gentleman—in the eastern cities, and increasingly across the nation—is usually a banker or a lawyer, which is convenient, for those who possess a fortune are in need of trusted, wise, and sober men to preserve its integrity. They are the directors and the presidents of the major banks, and they are the senior partners and investment counselors of the leading law firms of their cities.
Almost everywhere in America, the metropolitan upper classes have in common, more or less, race, religion, and nativity. Even if they are not of long family descent, they are uniformly of longer American origin than the underlying population. There are, of course, exceptions, some of them important exceptions. In various cities, Italian and Jewish and Irish Catholic families—having become wealthy and powerful—have risen high in status. But however important, these are still exceptions: the model of the upper social classes is still 'pure' by race, by ethnic group, by national extraction. In each city, they tend to be Protestant; moreover Protestants of class-church denominations, Episcopalian mainly, or Unitarian, or Presbyterian.
In many cities—New York for example—there are several rather than one metropolitan 400. This fact, however, does not mean that the big-city upper classes do not exist, but rather that in such cities the status structure is more elaborate than in those with more unified societies. That there are social feuds between competing status centers does not destroy the status hierarchy.
The family of higher status may belong to an exclusive country club where sporting activities and social events occur, but this pattern is not of decisive importance to the upper levels, for 'country clubs' have spread downward into the middle and even into the lower-middle classes. In smaller cities, membership in the best country club is often the significant organizational mark of the upper groups; but this is not so in the metropolitan status market. It is the gentlemen's club, an exclusive male organization, that is socially most important.
Gentlemen belong to the metropolitan man's club, and the men of the upper-class stature usually belong to such clubs in more than one city; clubs for both sexes, such as country clubs, are usually local. Among the out-of-town clubs to which the old upper class man belongs are those of Harvard and Princeton and Yale, but the world of the urban clubs extends well beyond those anchored in the better schools. It is not unusual for gentlemen to belong to three or four or even more. These clubs of the various cities are truly exclusive in the sense that they are not widely known to the middle and lower classes in general. They are above those better-known arenas where upper-class status is more widely recognized. They are of and by and for the upper circles, and no other. But they are known and visited by the upper circles of more than one city.*
* Even in 1933, some fifty New Yorkers maintained their full-rate dues in Boston's Somerset Club.20
Membership in the right clubs assumes great social importance when the merely rich push and shove at the boundaries of society, for then the line tends to become vague, and club membership clearly defines exclusiveness. And yet the metropolitan clubs are important rungs in the social ladder for would-be members of the top status levels: they are status elevators for the new into the old upper classes; for men, and their sons, can be gradually advanced from one club to the next, and so, if successful, into the inner citadel of the most exclusive. They are also important in the business life within and between the metropolitan circles: to many men of these circles, it seems convenient and somehow fitting to come to important decisions within the exclusive club. 'The private club,' one national magazine for executives recently put it, is becoming 'the businessman's castle.'21
The metropolitan upper classes, as wealthy classes having control of each locality's key financial and legal institutions, thereby have business and legal relations with one another. For the economy of the city, especially of a metropolitan area, is not confined to the city. To the extent that the economy is national and bigcity centered, and to the extent that the upper classes control its key places of big-city decision—the upper classes of each city are related to those of other cities. In the rich if gloomy quiet of a Boston club and also in the rich and brisk chrome of a Houston club to belong is to be accepted. It is also to be in easy, informal touch with those who are socially acceptable, and so to be in a better position to make a deal over a luncheon table. The gentlemen's club is at once an important center of the financial and business network of decision and an essential center for certifying the socially fit. In it all the traits that make up the old upper classes seem to coincide: the old family and the proper marriage and the correct residence and the right church and the right schools—and the power of the key decision. The 'leading men' in each city belong to such clubs, and when the leading men of other cities visit them, they are very likely to be seen at lunch in Boston's Somerset or Union, Philadelphia's Racquet or Philadelphia Club, San Francisco's Pacific Union, or New York's Knickerbocker, Links, Brook, or Racquet and Tennis.22
The upper-class style of life is pretty much the same—although there are regional variations—in each of the big cities of the nation. The houses and clothing, the types of social occasions the metropolitan 400 care about, tend to be homogeneous. The Brooks Brothers suit-and-shirt is not extensively advertised nationally and the store has only four branches outside New York City, but it is well-known in every major city of the nation, and in no key city do the 'representatives' of Brooks Brothers feel themselves to be strangers.23 There are other such externals that are specific and common to the proper upper-class style, yet, after all, anyone with the money and the inclination can learn to be uncomfortable in anything but a Brooks Brothers suit. The style of life of the old upper social classes across the nation goes deeper than such things.
The one deep experience that distinguishes the social rich from the merely rich and those below is their schooling, and with it, all the associations, the sense and sensibility, to which this educational routine leads throughout their lives. The daughter of an old upper-class New York family, for example, is usually under the care of nurse and mother until she is four years of age, after which she is under the daily care of a governess who often speaks French as well as English. When she is six or seven, she goes to a private day school, perhaps Miss Chapin's or Brearley. She is often driven to and from school by the family chauffeur and in the afternoons, after school, she is in the general care of the governess, who now spends most of her time with the younger children. When she is about fourteen she goes to boarding school, perhaps to St. Timothy's in Maryland or Miss Porter's or Westover in Connecticut. Then she may attend Finch Junior College of New York City and thus be 'finished,' or if she is to attend college proper, she will be enrolled, along with many plain middle-class girls, in Bryn Mawr or Vassar or Wellesley or Smith or Bennington. She will marry soon after finishing school or college, and presumably begin to guide her own children through the same educational sequence.*
* 'The daughter of the industrial leader, of the great professional man must thrive in a complex civilization which places little premium upon its women's homelier virtues: meekness and modesty, earnestness and Godliness. Yet such a man must, according to the mores of his kind, send his daughter to one of a handful of institutions whose codes rest upon these foundations... Of the 1,200-odd private schools for girls in this country, curiously enough only a score or more really matter ... so ephemeral are the things which make one school and mar another that intangible indeed are the distinctions.'24
The boy of this family, while under seven years of age, will follow a similar pattern. Then he too will go to day school, and, at a rather earlier age than the girls, to boarding school, although for boys it will be called prep school: St. Mark's or St. Paul's, Choate or Groton, Andover or Lawrenceville, Phillips Exeter or Hotchkiss.25 Then he will go to Princeton or Harvard, Yale or Dartmouth. As likely as not, he will finish with a law school attached to one of these colleges.
Each stage of this education is important to the formation of the upper-class man or woman; it is an educational sequence that is common to the upper classes in all the leading cities of the nation. There is, in fact, a strong tendency for children from all these cities to attend one of the more fashionable boarding or prep schools in New England, in which students from two dozen or so states, as well as from foreign countries, may be readily found. As claims for status based on family descent become increasingly difficult to realize, the proper school transcends the family pedigree in social importance. Accordingly, if one had to choose one clue to the national unity of the upper social classes in America today, it would best be the really exclusive boarding school for girls and prep school for boys.
Many educators of the private school world feel that economic shifts bring to the top people whose children have had no proper family background and tone, and that the private school is a prime institution in preparing them to live at the top of the nation in a manner befitting upper-class men and women. And whether the headmasters know it or not, it seems to be a fact that like the hierarchy of clubs for the fathers—but in more important and deeper ways—the private schools do perform the task of selecting and training newer members of a national upper stratum, as well as upholding the higher standards among the children of families who have long been at the top. It is in 'the next generation,' in the private school, that the tensions between new and old upper classes are relaxed and even resolved. And it is by means of these schools more than by any other single agency that the older and the newer families—when their time is due—become members of a self-conscious upper class.
As a selection and training place of the upper classes, both old and new, the private school is a unifying influence, a force for the nationalization of the upper classes. The less important the pedigreed family becomes in the careful transmission of moral and cultural traits, the more important the private school. The school rather than the upper-class family—is the most important agency for transmitting the traditions of the upper social classes, and regulating the admission of new wealth and talent. It is the characterizing point in the upper-class experience. In the top fifteen or twenty such schools, if anywhere, one finds a prime organizing center of the national upper social classes. For in these private schools for adolescents, the religious and family and educational tasks of the upper social classes are fused, and in them the major tasks of upholding such standards as prevail in these classes are centered.*
* 'These schools for boys,' the editors of Fortune have written, 'are conspicuous far out of proportion to the numbers enrolled in them. More than seven million boys and girls in the U.S. now (1944) receive secondary education, 460,000 of whom are in private schools. Of this number more than 360,000 were in Catholic schools (1941 figures, latest available) and more than 10,000 in military schools, whose special purposes are obvious. Of the remainder, girls' schools, whose job is also relatively well defined, accounted for almost 30,000 more. Forty thousand odd were in co-educational schools, largely day schools. Some 20,000 were in the schools for boys, the group that particularly desires self-justification.'26
These schools are self-supporting and autonomous in policy, and the most proper of them are non-profit institutions. They are not 'church schools' in that they are not governed by religious bodies, but they do require students to attend religious services, and although not sectarian, they are permeated by religiously inspired principles. The statement of the founders of Groton, still used today, includes this fundamental aim: 'Every endeavor will be made to cultivate manly, Christian character, having regard to moral and physical as well as intellectual development. The Headmaster of the School will be a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church.'27
'The vitals of a prep-school are not located in the curriculum. They are located in a dozen other places, some of them queer places indeed: in the relations between boys and faculty; in who the boys are and where they come from; in a Gothic chapel or a shiny new gymnasium; in the type of building the boys live in and the sort of thing they do after supper; and, above all in the headmaster.'28 There is a kind of implicit ideal for the school to be an organized extension of the family, but a large family in which the proper children from Boston and Philadelphia and New York together learn the proper style of conduct. This family ideal is strengthened by the common religious practices of the school, which tend to be Episcopalian; by the tendency for given upper class families to send all their sons to the same schools that the father, or even grandfather, attended; and by the donations as well as the social and sentimental activities of the alumni associations. The underlying purpose of the Choate School, for example, is to prove that family and school may be effectively combined, so that a boy while gaining the benefits that school provides—in particular 'spiritual leadership' and 'association with boys of purpose'—will retain the intimate influences that ought to characterize a proper home.
Daily life in the exclusive schools is usually quite simple, even Spartan; within its atmosphere of snobbish simplicity, there is a democracy of status. Everyone follows more or less the same routine, and there are no opportunities for officially approved inclinations for ostentatious display or snobbery.29
These schools are not usually oriented to any obvious practical end. It is true that the boys' schools are invariably preparatory for college; while those for girls offer one curriculum for college preparation, and one terminal course for girls contemplating earlier marriage. But the middle-class ethos of competitiveness is generally lacking. One should, the school seems to say, compare one's work and activity not with the boy or girl next to you, but with what you and your teacher believe is your own best. Besides, if you are too interested, you become conspicuous.
Certainly competition for status among students is held to a minimum: where allowances are permitted, they are usually fixed at modest levels, and the tendency is for boys to have no spending money at all; the wearing of school blazers by boys, or a uniform jumper or blouse, skirt and sweater by girls, is not, as it is usually interpreted by outsiders, so much upper-class swash as it is an attempt to defeat displays of haberdashery within the exclusive group. And girls, however rich, are not usually allowed to own their own horses.
The elders of the school community are those older children in the higher Forms, and they become the models aspired to by the younger children. For young boys, up to eight and nine, there are carefully chosen Housemothers; between twelve and thirteen, they are weaned from women and have exclusively male teachers, although the wives of instructors often live with their husbands in apartments within the boys' dormitories and continue a virtual kinship role with them. Care is taken that the self image of the child not be slapped down, as it might by an insecure parent, and that manners at table as elsewhere be imbibed from the general atmosphere rather than from authoritarian and forbidding figures.
Then one will always know what to do, even if one is sometimes puzzled. One will react appropriately upon meeting the man who is too carefully groomed and above all, the man who tries too hard to please, for one knows that that is not necessary if one is 'the right sort of person.' There will be the manner of simplicity and the easy dignity that can arise only out of an inner certainty that one's being is a definitely established fact of one's world, from which one cannot be excluded, ignored, snubbed, or paid off. And, in due course, as a young broker, banker, executive, one will feel smooth and handsome, with the easy bonhomie, the look of superior amusement, and all the useful friendships; one will have just the proper touch of deference toward the older men, even if they are members of your own club, and just the right degree of intelligence and enthusiasms—but not too much of either, for one's style is, after all, a realization of the motto of one's schooling: nothing in excess.30
Harvard or Yale or Princeton is not enough. It is the really exclusive prep school that counts, for that determines which of the 'two Harvards' one attends. The clubs and cliques of college are usually composed of carry-overs of association and name made in the lower levels at the proper schools; one's friends at Harvard are friends made at prep school. That is why in the upper social classes, it does not by itself mean much merely to have a degree from an Ivy League college. That is assumed: the point is not Harvard, but which Harvard? By Harvard, one means Porcellian, Fly, or A.D.: by Yale, one means Zeta Psi or Fence or Delta Kappa Epsilon; by Princeton, Cottage, Tiger, Cap and Gown, or Ivy.31 It is the prestige of a properly certified secondary education followed by a proper club in a proper Ivy League college that is the standard admission ticket to the world of urban clubs and parties in any major city of the nation. To the prestige of the voice and manner, constructed in such schools, local loyalties bow, for that experience is a major clue to the nation-wide upper class that is homogeneous and self-conscious.
Among those who are being educated in similar ways, the school naturally leads to marriage. The prep schools for boys are usually within a convenient range of boarding schools for girls of similar age, and several times a year the students from each are thrown together for chaperoned occasions. There are, in addition, the sisters of the other boys and the brothers of the other girls. And for those attending the more exclusive boys' and girls' colleges, there are formally arranged visits and parties—in short, dating patterns—established between them. On the college level, the exclusive schools become components of a broadened marriage market, which brings into dating relation the children of the upper social classes of the nation.
The rich who became rich before the Civil War also became the founders of most old American families, and those who have become rich since then have joined them. The metropolitan upper class which they have formed has not been and is not now a pedigreed society with a fixed membership, but for all of that, it has become a nationally recognized upper social class with many homogeneous features and a strong sense of unity. If new families are added to it, they are always wealthy families, and new or old, their sons and daughters attend the same types of exclusive schools and tend to marry one another. They belong to the same associations at the same set of Ivy League colleges, and they remain in social and business touch by means of the big-city network of metropolitan clubs. In each of the nation's leading cities, they recognize one another, if not strictly as peers, as people with much in common. In one another's biographies they recognize the experiences they have had in common; in their financial positions of brokerage firm, bank, and corporation, they recognize the interests they would all serve. To the extent that business becomes truly national, the economic roles of the upper classes become similar and even interchangeable; to the extent that politics becomes truly national, the political opinion and activity of the upper classes become consolidated. All those forces that transform a confederation of localities and a scatter of companies into a corporate nation, also make for the coinciding interests and functions and unity of the metropolitan 400.
The upper social classes have come to include a variety of members concerned with power in its several contexts, and these concerns are shared among the members of the clubs, the cousinhoods, the firms, the law offices. They are topics of conversation around the dinner table, where family members and club associates experience the range of great issues in a quite informal context. Having grown up together, trusting one another implicitly, their personal intimacy comes to include a respect for the specialized concerns of each member as a top man, a policy-maker in his own particular area of power and decision.
They spread into various commanding circles of the institutions of power. One promising son enters upon a high governmental career—perhaps the State Department; his first cousin is in due course elevated to a high executive place in the headquarters of a corporation; his uncle has already ascended to naval command; and a brother of the first cousin is about to become the president of a leading college. And, of course, there is the family law firm, whose partners keep in close touch with outlying members and with the problems they face.
Accordingly, in the inner circles of the upper classes, the most impersonal problems of the largest and most important institutions are fused with the sentiments and worries of small, closed, intimate groups. This is one very important meaning of the upper class family and of the upper-class school: 'background' is one way in which, on the basis of intimate association, the activities of an upper class may be tacitly co-ordinated. It is also important because in such circles, adolescent boys and girls are exposed to the table conversations of decision-makers, and thus have bred into them the informal skills and pretensions of decision-makers; in short, they imbibe what is called 'judgment.' Without conscious effort, they absorb the aspiration to be—if not the conviction that they are—The Ones Who Decide.
Within and between the upper-class families as well as their firms and offices, there are the schoolboy friendships and the prep schools and the college clubs, and later the key social and political clubs. And, in all these houses and organizations, there are the men who will later—or at the time of meeting—operate in the diverse higher circles of modern society.
The exclusive schools and clubs and resorts of the upper social classes are not exclusive merely because their members are snobs. Such locales and associations have a real part in building the upper-class character, and more than that, the connections to which they naturally lead help to link one higher circle with another.
So the distinguished law student, after prep school and Harvard, is 'clerk' to a Supreme Court judge, then a corporation lawyer, then in the diplomatic service, then in the law firm again. In each of these spheres, he meets and knows men of his own kind, and, as a kind of continuum, there are the old family friends and the schoolboy chums, the dinners at the club, and each year of his life the summer resorts. In each of these circles in which he moves, he acquires and exercises a confidence in his own ability to judge, to decide, and in this confidence he is supported by his ready access to the experience and sensibility of those who are his social peers and who act with decision in each of the important institutions and areas of public life. One does not turn one's back on a man whose presence is accepted in such circles, even under most trying circumstances. All over the top of the nation, he is 'in,' his appearance, a certificate of social position; his voice and manner, a badge of proper training; his associates, proof at once of their acceptance and of his stereotyped discernment.
Next ...Celebrity
footnotes
2. Local Society
1. Much of this chapter is based upon my own observations and interviews in some dozen middle-sized cities in the Northeast, the Middle West, and the South. Some results of this work have appeared in 'Small Business and Civic Welfare, Report of the Smaller War Plants Corporation to the Special Committee to Study Problems of American Small Business,' (with Melville J. Ulmer), Senate Document No. 135, 79th Cong., 2nd Session, Washington, 1946; 'The Middle Classes in Middle sized Cities,' American Sociological Review, October 1946; and White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951). I have also used field notes made during the course of an intensive study of a city of 60,000 in Illinois during the summer of 1945. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations in this chapter are from my own research.
I have also drawn upon a memorandum, prepared for me by Mr. J. W. Harless, in which all statements about local upper classes appearing in the following studies were organized: Robert S. Lynd and Helen M. Lynd, Middletown (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929) and Middletown in Transition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937); Elin L. Anderson, We Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938); Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom (New York: The Viking Press, 1939); John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper, 1950); W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lunt, The Social Life of a Modern Community (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), volume I of the Yankee City Series; Allison Davis and Burleigh B. Gardner and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941); Liston Pope, Millhands and Preachers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942); John Useem, Pierre Tangent, and Ruth Useem, 'Stratification in a Prairie Town,' American Sociological Review, July 1942; James West, Plainville, U.S.A. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1950); Harold F. Kaufman, Defining Prestige in a Rural Community (New York: Beacon House, 1946); Evon Z. Vogt, Jr., 'Social Stratification in the Rural Midwest: A Structural Analysis,' Rural Sociology, December 1947; August B. Hollingshead, Elmtown's Youth (New York: John Wiley, 1949); W. Lloyd Warner, et al, Democracy in Jonesville (New York: Harper, 1949); M. C. Hill and Bevode C. McCall, 'Social Stratification in "Georgiatown,"' American Sociological Review, December 1950; and Alfred Winslow Jones, Life, Liberty and Property (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941).
Most local community studies of prestige, so often the unit of sociological study, are of merely local interest. One cannot even say that they are of interest beyond that because of the methodological innovations they make possible, for in truth most of these methodological advancements are suitable only for what they have been worked out for—local community studies.
It is interesting to notice that in examining the small American city, both novelist and sociologist have, each in his own way, been interested in similar details and reached quite similar conclusions. They have both generally been more interested in status than in power. The novelist has been more interested in manners and in the frustrating effects of small town life on human relations and personality; the sociologist has not paid very full attention to the small city as a structure of power, much less as a unit in a system of power that is nation-wide. The similarity of their descriptive effects is revealed by the fact that, despite the rituals of proof they contain, the endless 'community studies' of the sociologists often read like badly written novels; and the novels, like better-written sociology.
2. See Allison Davis, et al, op. cit. p. 497.
3. I have drawn in this section from various parts of Floyd Hunter's first-hand study, Community Power Structure (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953).
4. Cf. ibid. pp. 172-4.
5. See Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York: Knopf, 1955), pp. 46 ff.
6. See Hollingshead, op. cit. p. 59. On farm ownership in a southern county, see Allison Davis, op. cit. p. 276.
7. On urban ownership of farm land in a Middle-Western county, see Evon Vogt, op. cit.
8. Compare, on the small city and the national corporation, Mills and Ulmer, 'Small Business and Civic Welfare,' op. cit.
9. For an example of the confusion of small town with nation to the point of caricature, see W. Lloyd Warner, American Life: Dream and Reality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).
Chapter 3. Metropolitan 400
1. Cf. Dixon Wecter, The Saga of American Society (New York: Scribner's, 1937), pp. 199 ff., which is the standard work on the history of American 'Society.' The best examinations of the 'Societies' of particular big cities are Cleveland Amory, The Proper Bostonians (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947); and Edward Digby Baltzell Jr., The Elite and the Upper Class in Metropolitan America: A Study of Stratification in Philadelphia, (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1953), both of which I have used.
2. Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, The Social Ladder (New York: Henry Holt, 1924), pp. 30-32.
3. Dixon Wecter, op. cit. pp. 294-5.
4. Cf. J. L. Ford, 'New York of the Seventies,' Scribner's Magazine, June 1923, p. 744.
5. Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, op. cit. pp. 53-4.
6. W. J. Mills, 'New York Society,' Delineator, November 1904. Cf. also Ralph Pulitzer, 'New York Society at Work,' Harper's Bazaar, December 1909.
7. Cf. Harvey O'Connor, The Astors (New York: Knopf, 1941), p. 197.
8. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 209-10.
9. Ibid. pp. 212, 214.
10. Cited in ibid. p. 215. 11. See FIVE: The Very Rich, and notes to that chapter. 12. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 232-3.
13. See Mona Gardner, 'Social Register Blues,' Collier's, 14 December 1946 and G. Holland, 'Social Register,' American Mercury, June 1932. On the volumes of The Social Register published up to 1925, see Wecter, op. cit. p. 233.
14. Wecter, op. cit. p. 234.
15. As of 1940. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. Table 2.
16. See ibid. Table 14, pp. 89
17. Wecter, op. cit. pp. 235, 234.
18. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899 (New York: New American Library, Mentor Edition, 1953), p. 162. Cf. also my Introduction to that edition for a fuller criticism of Veblen's theory.
19. Time, 26 October 1953.
20. See 'Boston,' Fortune, February 1933, p. 27.
21. Business Week, 5 June 1954, pp. 92-3.
22. From private estimations. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. p. 178.
23. Cf. ibid, footnote 5, p. 172.
24. 'Miss Chapin's, Miss Walker's, Foxcroft, Farmington,' Fortune, August 1931, p. 38.
25. See Porter Sargent, A Handbook of Private Schools, 25th ed. (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1941); 'Schools for Boys,' Fortune, May 1944, pp. 165 ff.; 'St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, Andover, et al,' Fortune, September 1931, pp. 76 ff. Cf. also George S. Counts, 'Girls' Schools,' Fortune, August 1931 and Twelve of The Best American Schools,' Fortune, January 1936, pp. 48 ff.
26. 'Schools for Boys, op. cit. p. 165. Cf. also 'Boys' Prep School,' Life, 1 March 1954, which deals with Hotchkiss. Compare Eleanor Roosevelt's feelings upon sending her youngest son, John, to Groton, as reported by her in This I Remember (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 43.
27. Cf. Frank D. Ashburn, Peabody of Groton (New York: Coward McCann, 1944), pp. 30, 67-8.
28. 'St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, Andover, et al,' op. cit. p. 76.
29. Cf. Allan Heely, Why the Private School? (New York: Harper, 1951).
30. Cf. John P. Marquand, ff. M. Pulham Esquire (New York: Bantam Edition, 1950), pp. 76, 60; and W. M. Spackman, Heyday (New York: Ballantine Edition, 1953), p. 12.
31. Cf. Baltzell Jr., op. cit. pp. 218-20.
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