Ward Mcallister Quotes

Any aspirant who deviated from the standards laid down by Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister was doomed. A big house, tasteful parties, fine horses, a reasonably presentable husband guaranteed nothing. If Mrs. Astor refused to know you, you might as well be living in Cleveland.

Stuyvesants and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts and staid, respectable Washington Square. Trinity Church. Mrs. Astor’s famous ballroom, the Four Hundred, snobby Ward McAllister, that traitor Edith Wharton, Delmonico’s. Zany Zelda and Scott in the Plaza fountain, the Algonquin Round Table, Dottie Parker and her razor tongue and pen, the Follies. Cholly Knickerbocker, 21, Lucky Strike dances at the Stork, El Morocco. The incomparable Hildegarde playing the Persian Room at the Plaza, Cary Grant kneeling at her feet in awe. Fifth Avenue: Henri Bendel, Bergdorf’s, Tiffany’s.

The most shocking costume, however, was neither an abstract concept nor a famous aristocrat lending Old World cachet to New World wealth. Writing in his memoir, Ward McAllister recalled that the most remarkable costume at the famous Vanderbilt ball was that of a young woman, Miss Kate Fearing Strong, who came dressed as a cat. Her costume consisted of a gown made of white cat tails with a bodice of skinned cat heads and was topped with a hat made of a taxidermied white cat curled up and perched upon her heaps of blond curls. Around her throat, Miss Strong wore a black velvet ribbon with a bell and the word puss spelled out on the choker in large diamond letters.

The Sephardic merchant families, “remarkable for their haughtiness, high sense of honor and their stately manners,” according to a contemporary chronicler, occupied a quiet but secure place in society, Ward McAllister notwithstanding. A number of men of old New York gentile society, including a Hamilton and a DeLancey, had married Sephardic Jewesses. There were Sephardim in all the best clubs. The Union Club, New York’s most exclusive, contained several Hendrickses, Lazaruses, and Nathans, along with Mr. McAllister.

Unfortunately, many of these wide-based labor organizations had other agendas besides improving the wages and working conditions of their members. They increasingly adhered to socialist ideas imported from Europe that, perhaps not surprisingly, found little support among the population of a nation that had been founded and built by generations of individualists bent on their own economic advancement. Socialism, in all its many forms, is based on class and the idea that the various social classes are fixed, and therefore the members of each class have economic interests that are in common and opposed to the other classes. But the so-called classes in democratic countries are, in fact, nothing more than lines drawn by intellectuals across what are, in the real world, economic continua. For generations now, more than 90 percent of Americans have defined themselves as “middle class.” And no country in history has developed a social structure more rewarding of individual economic success than the United States. Ward McAllister, the self-appointed arbiter of New York society in the Gilded Age—he coined the phrase “the four hundred”—described that group’s membership. It consisted, he wrote, of those, “who are now prominently to the front, who have the means to maintain their position, either by gold, brains or beauty, gold being always the most potent ‘open sesame,’ beauty the next in importance, while brains and ancestors count for very little.” No wonder so many intellectuals have been chronically disaffected with American society.