On February 12th, 1892, the New York Times gave a new name to an old social stratum: “Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred.” This designation referred to the ladies and gentlemen whom New York’s reigning grande dame, Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, had deemed worthy to dance in her ballroom. A follow-up piece on February 16th listed the elect by name, scions for the most part of the city’s old-line Knickerbocker families or similarly blue-blooded clans in Newport, Boston, and Virginia.
Conspicuously absent from the list were the so-called robber barons, typically natives of hardscrabble regions far from the genteel East Coast who since the end of the Civil War had reaped millions from ventures thought too grubby for gentlemen: railroads, manufacturing, lumber, oil. To Mrs. Astor, these upstarts lacked the polished manners and ingrained respect for tradition that only generations of superior breeding could produce.
As for the upstarts, the Times reports merely confirmed something many of them had already discovered on their own: the American social establishment did not welcome their nouveau fortunes and families.
Surely not all the tycoons barred from Mrs. Astor’s ballroom subscribed to her belief in the supremacy of Mayflower over Midwestern bloodlines, or of old money over new. Yet a number of them actually did. Toward their anointed betters, these men and their families bore much the same blend of reluctant admiration, simmering status envy, and desperate yearning to belong that the fictional Jay Gatsby (né Jimmy Gatz of North Dakota) would come to typify a few decades later.
In this sense, they unknowingly replicated a dynamic from the old court aristocracies of Europe. When a sovereign “elevated” a nobleman or woman to a given place in the royal retinue, his or her standing at court rose appreciably. The work such appointments entailed was ceremonial and often menial. Nonetheless, the nobility prized them because the monarch who defined the social hierarchy had cast them as signal honors. (At Louis XIV’s Versailles, noblemen vied bitterly for the right to take off the king’s riding boots each day, even though his hygiene regimen involved only one bath a year.)
The admiration, envy, and longing a plum assignment generated among courtiers less favored imbued it with a palpable social reality, obscuring the flimsy reasoning at its root: the post was desirable because His or Her Majesty said so. The prestige of Mrs. Astor’s invitations was founded on the same spurious logic.
Paris—the center of noble French society and a favorite destination for Yankees of means—became the next-best hunting ground for heraldically laden game.
It was fitting, then, that those plutocrats most determined to avenge their exclusion from her guest-list should do so by going back to its source in the European nobility. To the sons of this storied caste, the robber barons offered their daughters, styled “dollar princesses,” in transactional wedlock. In exchange for a dowry generous enough to support him in pampered indolence (or at a minimum to pay off his gambling debts), the groom conferred on his bride a title grand enough to reverse her and her parents’ social fortunes back home.