Snobbery Read online

  To this day the longing for aristocracy on the part of Americans crops up in odd places. Royalty in close proximity seems to make Americans lose their balance, if not get positively goofy. Princess Diana, not long before she died, visited Northwestern University, where I teach. The spectacle of the university president, a smallish man in glasses, following the Princess about the campus, yapping away, reminded one of nothing so much as that of a chihuahua attempting to mount an Afghan hound. A plaque has been placed on a rock on the campus commemorating in perpetuity the sad, rather airheaded princess’s completely perfunctory visit.

  As for an actual American aristocracy, regional patriciates burgeoned in nineteenth-century America and long before in New England, in New York and Philadelphia, in the South. Where they weren’t bogged down in mossy fantasy, as in the postbellum South, they could be impressive. Not all of them were philistine—the Boston Brahmin class was intellectually extraordinary—but they could also be impressive even in their philistinism. In A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton records one such family, her own, the Joneses of New York (not, one suspects, those very Joneses with whom others felt they had always to keep up). Although Edith Wharton was in her seventies and acknowledged as a great American writer, in her memoir she still felt it necessary to inform readers that ancestors on both sides of her family had been in America for nearly three hundred years. Her own lineage was composed of bankers, lawyers, and merchant traders. Dullish though she allows her own parents and their social set to have been, their value lay “in upholding two standards of importance in any community, that of education and good manners, and of scrupulous probity in business and private affairs.”

  Good manners and reverence for education (of a certain kind) ran deep through the established American upper class. Edith Wharton reports bringing her first effort at story writing to her mother. The eleven-year-old author’s opening sentences were “‘Oh, how do you do, Mrs. Brown?’ said Mrs. Tompkins. ‘If only I had known you were going to call I should have tidied up the drawing-room.’” To which her mother’s icy reply was: “Drawing-rooms are always tidy.” Neither of Wharton’s parents could be said to be serious readers, but their reverence for careful English was genuine; it “was more than reverence,” their daughter reports, “it was love,” for they had “sensitive ears for pure English.” In their set, careful language and careful manners went together. “It would have been ‘bad manners’ to speak ‘bad’ English, and ‘bad manners’ were the supreme offense.”

  The weakness of her class, Edith Wharton felt, lay in their “blind dread of innovation”—of any sort. Her father kept an impressive library in which the young Edith read freely and capaciously. The only writers held to be respectable were dead writers. Actually to become a writer was itself unthinkable, quite beyond the pale. In the case of her own parents, “they were genuinely modest and shy in the presence of any one who wrote or painted.” The world of art—excluding singing, still a drawing room accomplishment—suggested the possibility of political or moral contamination. New ideas generally were not welcome. Standards were set high, but they existed, in good part, to induce conformity.

  Edith Wharton was born into an American rentier class, that class of people who lived mainly off their real estate and land. If the men of this class worked, it usually wasn’t under great strain. “The group to which we belonged was composed of families to whom a middling prosperity [I’m not sure Wharton’s notion of “middling” is to be trusted, for her own tastes in later life, from limousines to mansions, were very grand] had come, usually by the rapid rise in value of inherited real estate, and none of whom, apparently, aspired to be more than moderately well-off [compared, say, to the Astors and Goelets].”

  Money, though ample quantities of it were assumed, was not yet taken to be the point of the game. “I never in my early life,” Wharton writes, “came in contact with gold fever in any form, and when I hear that nowadays business life in New York is so strenuous that men and women never meet socially before the dinner hour, I remember the delightful week-day luncheons of my early married years, where the men were as numerous as the women, and where one of the first rules of conversation was the one early instilled in me by my mother: ‘Never talk about money, and think about it as little as possible.’” Of course it is much easier not to think about money when one has gobs of it.

  Edith Wharton was highly ambiguous about the quality of her social class. In The House of Mirth, she put on display the heartlessness that was at the center of it. In The Custom of the Country, she showed the eagerness with which parvenus longed to become part of it and took pleasure in describing their coarseness. In The Age of Innocence, the best of the novels of her maturity, she showed what an extraordinary mixture of admirable strength and yet crushing narrow-mindedness propelled her class. She wrote the emotional history of the American upper class from the inside, and it has had no subtler chronicler than she.

  Edith Wharton’s family was unusual chiefly because in its daughter it raised a considerable literary artist. So, too, did the family of Henry James, Sr., which threw in a great philosopher for good measure, though it was not so well placed socially as the Joneses, for Henry and William James’s grandfather, an Irish immigrant, made his killing in real estate in Albany, New York; and Albany was not New York City, as Irish most assuredly wasn’t English or Dutch. Yet in Boston and New York the Jameses gained entry to the best Society through a combination of talent and money. In America, entrée into Society, itself a euphemism for the upper class, was not utterly sealed off by birth.

  Talent might be admitted a place. So, more often, might money, even hideously new money, if allowed a generation or so to dry off and clean itself up by carefully chosen good works. Think of a figure such as John D. Rockefeller, Sr., a Baptist, whose father was accused of horse stealing and was once indicted for rape. Rockefeller himself wasn’t eligible for Society, but his children and grandchildren qualified easily. With enough money, a single generation could do it. “In America,” said the Russian-born painter Pavel Tchelitchew, “there are two social classes, those who are rich and those who aren’t.” In Chicago the children of Swifts and Armours, butchers and meatpackers, came to play central roles in local Society.

  In American cities small or large, money could bring one into the inner circle, where, it was assumed, life was lived on a more elevated, more pleasurable, generally happier plane. With money, if one moved gingerly, one could not so much crash as slide through the gates, where entrée to the best neighborhoods and clubs and among the best families awaited. Not that this was everyone’s idea of a good time. Oscar Wilde, in the words of one of his biographers, said that he enjoyed Society because he “found in it both the satisfaction of his vanity and an inexhaustible source of fatuity.” But most people, when offered the chance to become part of what passed for Society, did not turn it down.

  If one looks at the occupations of the members of Ward McAllister’s Four Hundred in New York City, one finds a preponderance of bankers, brokers, lawyers, and manufacturers, with only the occasional “clubman” or “sportsman,” the latter two living, clearly, either on investments or on Father. Yet in New York and elsewhere the people who constituted Society were of great municipal earnestness—movers, you might say, who weren’t usually noisy shakers. They were almost always the people who underwrote public institutions: the libraries, the art and natural history museums, many of the private universities, the symphony orchestras. At least three ways of viewing such people are possible: that they were astonishingly selfish and privileged, which they certainly were; that they were immensely generous and civic-minded, which they also were; and that, most convincingly, they were both. (A kind word needs to be inserted here for the too crudely named Robber Barons—Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Frick, Huntington, Stanford, and company—without whom American cultural and educational life would look very different than it does today. Worth recalling also that these men gave away vast sums without the inducement of ta
x write-offs, since the income tax had not yet come into being during the period of their greatest benefactions. The view that they did so out of guilt doesn’t persuade; if they were the monsters that the name Robber Baron suggests, they should scarcely have been hampered in any way by guilt.)

  From the Gilded Age (roughly the 1880s until World War One) such people dominated in the larger American cities. They were able, moreover, to hand on their position of dominance to their children, and these children to their children. Some families fell out, room was made for energetic and socially ambitious newcomers, but by and large the club—for tight-knit clubs this clustering of important families tended to be—remained intact. They commanded the presidencies and a considerable majority of the students at Ivy League universities; they comprised the exclusive membership of the most admired city and country clubs; their voice in politics wasn’t always supreme, true, but they were always a force that had to be taken into serious consideration.

  Moving now into the third decade of the twentieth century, in a purely New York deviation, they became known, at least in the press, as Café Society, so called by one its chroniclers, Lucius Beebe, himself a great snob who nonetheless earned his living writing about the goings-on of these people for the old New York Herald Tribune. “A general definition of Café Society might be,” Beebe wrote, “an unorganized but generally recognized group of persons who participate in the professional and social life of New York available to those possessed of a certain degree of affluence and manners.” Beebe thought the number of such people never rose above five hundred.

  One can see how smoothly all this worked—the interlocking of genealogies, social relationships, institutional affiliations, and financial arrangements—in the career of Joseph Alsop (1910–1989), the political columnist of impeccable upper-class connections. Alsop came out of Harvard—where he was an enthusiastic member of the Porcellian Club and an indifferent scholar—with an incipient drinking problem, little ambition, and no known aptitude. His mother, through her connection with “that nice Helen Reid,” wife of Ogden Reid, then the owner of the New York Herald Tribune, got him a job on that paper. He moved to New York, worked as a reporter, but kept a valet and cook. In 1935, toward the close of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term as president, he was transferred to the paper’s Washington bureau; Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth, both first cousins to his mother, resided in the capital, the former as wife to the president, the latter as the reigning social hostess. He had connections with many of Roosevelt’s Ivy League Brain Trusters and also in the State Department.

  Alsop was good at what he did, but his social connections put him on the inside of things—made him, in fact, an insider’s insider. Journalists were second-class citizens in Washington in those days—hired help, really—but not Joe Alsop, who was part of Dining-Out Washington and in time himself became a major host in social-political Washington. Throughout a long career, he traveled first class in every way. To his credit, he never doubted that, despite such considerable journalistic talents as he came to possess, he was “very lucky,” as he put it, “by way of being a very minor member of that ever diminishing group of survivors of the Wasp-ascendancy.” In his memoirs, he claimed that his idea of heaven was to be well dressed at an outdoor New England wedding.

  A club, as I say, and one that, if it sometimes allowed new members in, also drew the line, or lines, firmly and indelibly: the minimal but unrelenting qualification was to be white, Anglo-Saxon in heritage, and Protestant in religion. If one was Catholic, or surely Irish Catholic, or Jewish, forget about it; if one was black, don’t even think about it. E. Digby Baltzell, the sociologist and historian of the club, was the first man, in The Protestant Establishment, to use the acronym WASP— for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant—and it has since gone on to be misused to cover anyone who was white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant: Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton are two notably mistaken examples. By WASP Baltzell meant something much more specific; he intended the term to cover a select group of people who passed through a congeries of elite American institutions: certain eastern prep schools, the Ivy League colleges, and the Episcopal Church notable among them. (As for the importance of being Episcopalian, the journalist Nicholas Lemann refers to the old Wasp leadership as “the Episcopacy.”)

  Bred-in-the-bone Wasps also tended to live in exclusive, and often exclusionary, neighborhoods and suburbs: the Main Line near Philadelphia, Back Bay in Boston, upper Park and Fifth Avenues in New York, Lake Forest and Winnetka outside Chicago. They worked for, or availed themselves of, white-shoe law firms or blue-chip Wall Street houses. They lived among their own kind, belonged to the same clubs, went through the same social rituals, acquired affluence, assumed power and authority and privilege as a matter of birthright. The most impressive among them had a fine civic spirit, disinterested and generous, perhaps finer than our country will ever see again. For decades they ran the State Department as if it were a family business; occasionally they were to supply a United States president. Many among them considered Franklin Delano Roosevelt, very much a member of the club by birth, a traitor to his class. The last Wasp president brought up under the old Wasp regimen was George H. W. Bush (1988–1992). His son, George W. Bush, our current president, has done everything he can to expunge the notion of his Waspishness—which has the bad odor of elitism—and comes on as a Texan purely. He has even turned the brilliant trick of pretending to be of the privileged underclass, separating himself from the meritocrats who get into good schools on the basis of educational achievement and aligning himself with those who were poor students at such schools.

  In a less than riotous but sociologically telling joke, two Jewish bees are flying about when one of them places a yarmulke on his head. “Why are you doing that?” the other bee asks. “I’m doing it,” says the first bee, “so that no one will take me for a Wasp.” The point of this joke, which was going the rounds in the early 1990s, is that it was not good to be taken for a Wasp. But things had begun to unravel long before. Some—E. Digby Baltzell prominent among them—claim things had begun to go sour as early as before 1964, when he published The Protestant Establishment. At that time Baltzell remarked that the Wasp “still remains an affluent class, [but] no longer possesses the qualities of an authoritative aristocracy.” The reason it no longer possessed those qualities, Baltzell believed, was that “its standards of admission have gradually come to demand the dishonorable treatment of far too many distinguished Americans for it to continue, as a class, to fill the traditional function of moral leadership.” Proust said that “each social class has its own pathology,” and that of the Wasps included a serious want of imagination and sympathy.

  When the shakeup of the 1960s was under way, one of the great public enemies was something called, with more vagueness than acuity, “the Establishment.” The Establishment was a not-so-obscure code word, in good part, for the Waspocracy, which was thought to have tied the country up in a disastrous foreign policy (for which read: Vietnam and anti-Communism generally), a lingering anti-Semitism, a passive acceptance of racism, and a deep stagnation of spirit. In literature during these years, Jewish and black writers easily attracted the most attention. This same period saw the rise of ethnic pride. Everyone featured and vaunted his own ethnic ancestry, which hitherto tended to be played down, if not hidden. Ethnic food was everywhere the rage. The ethnic story was almost always a story of pride at overcoming, or pride in still attempting to overcome, one or another form of hardship or oppression. Such was the rush to claim ethnicity that feminists and homosexuals, when their political movements got started, assumed something like ethnic status. The oppressors, presumably, were the only people with no oppression story, and that would be the Wasps. Much better, it turned out, to be among the unwashed than to be overwashed.

  If one’s heritage was Wasp, one tended to play it down. Thus George Bush, Sr., when running for president in 1988, reinvented himself (in the cant phrase) as a good ole b
oy from Texas, even though he qualified as a Wasp among Wasps: his father (and uncles and cousins) had been tapped for Skull and Bones at Yale, and was a member of the investment firm of Brown Brothers Harriman; and George, in marrying Barbara Pierce of Rye, New York, had actually married up. But when Bush campaigned against Michael Dukakis he claimed the Oak Ridge Boys as his favorite singing group, campaigned with a female country-western singer in tow, and chomped on pork rinds. He sensed—correctly, judging by the results—that running as the patrician he was would have been a serious error.

  Not that the American rejection of the Waspocracy was complete. For there remained a strong current, not quite dead even now, of what I should call Wasp longing on the part of people outside the club. I have felt it myself. About a quarter century ago, I took my son to Brooks Brothers, then the principal supplier of Waspish clothes, for a suit for his bar mitzvah, and the kindly woman who fitted him remarked, as my little son walked off into the dressing room, “He’s a real Brooks boy, Mr. Epstein.” I recall feeling a slight flutter, as if our family had, in its third generation, now at last arrived in America.

  How could it be otherwise, for Wasp culture during its long reign set the tone, the criteria for excellence, and (not least) the standard for snobbery. Attesting to the endurance of this Wasp longing is the continued success of the designer Ralph Lauren, who began with a line of men’s clothes that soon became what in the trade is known as lifestyle design, one that takes its imprimatur from his logo of a polo player. Lauren’s career was built on the fantasies of a short Bronx-born Jewish boy (ne Lifshitz) of how Wasps live, or at least ought to live. The way they ought to live, in Lauren’s clothing designs, is the way he imagines English patricians lived; and he has taken those who can afford his expensive duds to a Newport or a Kenya of his own commercial imagining.