Mrs Astor and the Four Hundred

McAllister’s proclamation came at the height of the so-called Gilded Age, a term inspired by an 1873 novel by Mark Twain. In The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, the author satirised the showy materialism and political corruption that he felt characterised American society in the period between the American Civil War (1861–65) and the turn of the 20th century. It was a time when families of ‘new money’, having made their fortunes ‘out west’, flocked with their wealth to the eastern cities of New York, Boston, and Newport, Rhode Island, that had previously been havens of the established old guard.

This new breed of tycoons – Andrew Carnegie, JD Rockefeller, and Cornelius Vanderbilt, to name a few – had made their riches in exploding industries such as railroads, oil, and steel. They soon found that with sizable ‘donations’ into the right pockets, they could machete their way through tradition and into the spaces of the city elite, coming to wield both economic and political power.

But many of the Knickerbockers of New York – descendants of the Anglo-Dutch families who had settled in what was then New Amsterdam in the 17th and 18th centuries – were determined that these interlopers and their families were not to make it into 'real society'.

No matter that their mansions might be built by the same eminent architect, Richard Morris Hunt, or their children educated in the same hallowed halls of Harvard and Yale; in the eyes of the elite, these newly minted millionaires could simply not claim the same pedigree. And in the late 19th century, the power to decide just who made the cut resided with one woman: Mrs Caroline Backhouse Astor.

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Who was the Mrs Astor?

Simply known in society by this time as the Mrs Astor, she had been born Caroline Schermerhorn in September 1830, into the city’s Knickerbocker elite; her family could trace their lineage back to the earliest settlers in colonial North America.

In 1853, she married into the Astor family, a name that was a byword for wealth and opulence (John Jacob Astor, a German emigrant who had made an unprecedented fortune in the fur trade in post-revolution America, was her husband’s grandfather). But by the standards of the day, she was the one who brought a higher social status to their union.

Together with her husband William Backhouse Astor Jr she had five children, including her favoured daughter, Caroline ‘Carrie’ Astor, and John Jacob Astor IV (who died in the 1912 Titanic disaster). After seeing her children to adulthood, she seized the advantage granted by her combination of family and wealth, and by the latter half of the 19th century she had become the established gatekeeper to the world of ‘acceptable’ New York society.

What better way, for Mrs Astor and her social arbiter companion, Ward McAllister, to enshrine this social order, but a party? A regular soiree was soon established, exclusive and opulent, with invites coveted as precious social capital.

Hosting the parties in her mansion at 350 Fifth Avenue (on a site that today houses the Empire State Building), Mrs Astor was the ruler of this affluent set. They in turn craved her approval, thrilled to be in attendance amid the peacock feather rugs and midnight suppers served by liveried footmen. She cultivated a regal presence; she wore dark or jewel tones, and often purple, and was always swathed in diamonds (she famously wore a ‘stomacher’ once owned by the young, doomed queen of France, Marie Antoinette).

During her parties, she would often be seen sitting on a red velvet couch, surveying her guests’ behaviour (and making sure that no vulgarity was displayed by the errant flash of woman’s ankle or calf). By the 1880s, these annual balls, always thrown on a Monday in January, were a must-attend event, with the guest list determining who was ‘in’ for the rest of the year.

The game of calling cards

Even if one wasn’t granted an exclusive invitation, there was another way to obtain access to society, and that was by receiving Mrs Astor’s calling card.

A vital aspect of etiquette that demanded to be observed, the calling card was just one way that the old guard like Mrs Astor had the power to elevate a family with a single visit, or keep others indefinitely on the fringes.

One of the rituals of society women at this time was to call upon other society women. Upon calling, a woman would leave her card, which would then be carried by a servant to the lady of the house who would choose whether to admit the visitor. Sometimes the caller wouldn’t even pay the initial visit, but simply leave her card as an introduction, a signal of her intent to call again.

But not everyone could leave a calling card; tradition dictated that women of a higher social standing do the calling; they would not be summoned, as they saw it, by those down the hierarchy. Newcomers could only wait for a coveted visit, with no power to sidestep this carefully controlled ritual.

One such newcomer, though, would have the last laugh, pressing the rules of etiquette to her advantage. Alva Vanderbilt (née Smith), the daughter of a commodities trader from Mobile, Alabama, had married William Kissam Vanderbilt (the grandson of the tycoon Cornelius) in 1875. Dismissed as ‘nouveau riche’ by the old guard, the Vanderbilts had struggled for decades to find social standing in New York despite their vast wealth (William inherited $55 million after his father’s death in 1885), and upon her marriage Alva suffered the same snub. The answer, as she saw it, was to leverage what they did have: money.

The Vanderbilts had commissioned their own mansion a stone’s throw away from the Astor’s estate. The palatial residence at 660 Fifth Avenue was three-and-a-half storeys, inspired by French Gothic style and filled with treasures from Europe. In 1883, in a seemingly calculated social campaign, Alva planned an extravagant costume party to christen their new ‘petite chateau’, inviting more than 1,000 guests – a far cry from Astor and McAllister’s slimmed-down guestlists.

“Amid the rush and excitement of business, men have found their minds haunted by uncontrollable thoughts as to whether they should appear as Robert Le Diable, Cardinal Richelieu, Otho the Barbarian, or the Count of Monte Cristo,” reported the New York Times, “while the ladies have been driven to the verge of distraction in the effort to settle the comparative advantages of ancient, medieval, and modern costumes.”

As the daughter of the powerful Mrs Astor, Carrie Astor was the toast of society. Convinced that she would be in attendance, she – along with many other eligible society beauties – discussed what she would wear and began to practice her quadrille. But an invite never arrived.

“Mrs Vanderbilt, hearing what was brewing, was quick to point out that since Mrs Astor had never left so much as a pasteboard at her gates, the inclusion of her daughter at the gala was most regrettably, inconceivable,” wrote journalist Frank Crowninshield in the 1940s. In a subtle leveraging of social mores, Alva had made clear that she could not invite Carrie until she gained introduction to Mrs Astor. Duly, a servant arrived at the Vanderbilt residence soon afterwards, bearing a card from Mrs Astor, and Alva Vanderbilt had unlocked the final gate.

On Monday 26 March 1883, police had to hold back crowds that had gathered on Fifth Avenue to watch the arrival of the guests, who came variously dressed as witches, pharaohs, living dolls and animals. One relative of Alva had dressed as a hornet, with a striped satin skirt that tapered to a sting-like point, while Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt was swathed in a yellow satin covered in lightning bolts, and carried a battery-powered light that she could raise over her head like the Statue of Liberty. Alva herself attended in costume as a renaissance Venetian courtier, and hosted a swelled guestlist of 1,200 of New York’s upper crust at the now-landmark event.

As well as securing her daughter an invite, Mrs Astor herself also attended the party, and was reported to say afterwards, in a hat-tip towards the new generation: “We have no right to exclude those whom the growth of this great country has brought forward, provided they are not vulgar in speech and appearance. The time has come for the Vanderbilts.”

Alva was one of three society women (along with Mamie Fish and Theresa Fair Oelrichs) who would accede to the unofficial reins of power after Mrs Astor’s decline into dementia in her later years and eventual death in 1908. Nicknamed ‘the triumvirate’, they presided over the final years of the Gilded Age, and went on to hold great influence in the social and political issues of New York, and the US, at the dawn of the 20th century.