Aristocrats versus Plutocrats

How and why has the relationship between the generation of wealth and social status varied between societies?

This essay compares the relationship between wealth-generation and social status in Great Britain and the United States in the period 1880-1900, by reference to the degree and speed of penetration of the top social élites by major wealth-creators in the two countries.

Throughout the course of English history, the hierarchy of social order - as opposed to the gradations of relative wealth - has tended to cast a shadow over the personal relations of all English people. Americans, by contrast, congratulated themselves on creating a new nation in which wealth creators are respected and traditional hierarchies of class were replaced by a society ordered by wealth and the uses to which wealth is put. During this period, the trappings of formal social hierarchy – monarchy, peerage, gentry and every fine gradation below – were much more evident in Britain than the looser social structures of the New World. But this does not of itself prove that the English social elite was impenetrable to wealth-creators, nor that wealth was synonymous with social status at the highest levels in the United States. Income does affect an individual's standard of living, but in Max Weber's words, 'status honour… normally stands in sharp opposition to the pretensions of sheer property.'¹ A better way to measure social status was described by Weber. 'In contrast to the purely economically determined "class situation," we wish to designate as "status situation" every typical component of life that is determined by a specific, positive or negative, social estimation or honour… Property as such is not always recognised as a status qualification, but in the long run it is, and with extra-ordinary regularity.'²

The social grouping this essay proposes to survey is 'High Society' in Great Britain and the United States of America in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, and the extent to which rich, self-made, businessmen could get access to it. How quickly were nouveaux riches admitted to the highest social circles despite their lack of social graces and pedigree? For the purposes of this essay, 'High Society' refers to a group or groups, holding positions of influence at the top level of a society - and controlling, or playing an important part in controlling, the tastes of the entire society. The period 1880-1900 saw new sources of wealth challenge the dominance of agriculture, and therefore new sets of people challenging for social leadership. The reactions of the traditional élites to this challenge show some flexibility to the changing times and their efforts to remain the social if not the political or economic pinnacles of society.

The essay concludes that the relative poverty of the élites in the United Kingdom allowed more permeability to "new money", while there was a less direct correlation between money and social cachet in America. At a level beyond that of individuals, however, the ideals of traditional High Society, were preserved better in Great Britain, since during this period there was an almost complete identity between the social, financial and governing élites - and hence self-made businessmen wishing to join these élites were forced to adopt their views and outlook. In contrast, American politicians were already typically drawn from business, hence wealth-creators were able to enter politics or society on their own terms and in their own lifetimes, ultimately dominating society as a whole.

Traditional lifestyles of 'gentlemen'

For centuries, the British social and political élites were landowners. By the end of the eighteenth century, three quarters of the land was owned by some 4,000 families.³ A century later, the 1876 Return of the Owners of Land showed a very similar situation, with one quarter of the land of England and Wales owned by 710 individuals.⁴ At the moment of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the same circumstances were visible in America - at most only 3 per cent of the propertied possessed estates worth $5000.⁵ All of the first six American Presidents were wealthy landowners.⁶ This historic predominance of a landed elite had established a common view of the correct ways to be a 'gentleman.' Cardinal Newman, outlined them in his 1876 by saying 'All that goes to constitute a gentleman, - the carriage, gait, address, gestures, voice, the ease, the self-possession, the power of conversing, the talent of not offending, the lofty principles, the delicacy of thought, the happiness of expression, the taste and propriety, the generosity and forbearance, the candour and consideration, the openness of hand.'⁷ Viscount Bryce, the British ambassador to the USA, confirmed this definition held true for America: 'those who deem themselves ladies and gentlemen draw just the same line between themselves and the multitude as is drawn in England, and draw it in much the same way. The nature of a man's occupation, his education, his manners and breeding, his income, his connections all come into view in determining whether he is in this narrow sense of the word "a gentleman", almost as they would in England.'⁸

In both countries, the number of people who considered themselves within the true social elite was rigidly small. In 1880, there were 580 peers, of whom 431 were hereditary members of the House of Lords by virtue of possessing United Kingdom peerages.⁹ In America too, the highest social spheres remained exclusive, so that the group in New York was even known as 'the Four-Hundred.' As Bryce explains, 'as in the old-fashioned English counties, the 'best set' considers itself very select indeed. In such a city I remember to have heard a family belonging to the best set, which is mostly to be found in a particular quarter of the city, speak of the inhabitants of a handsome suburb two miles away just as Belgravians might speak of Islington.' As for the other suburb, 'I discovered that these North Shore people were as rich and doubtless thought themselves as cultivated as the people of my friend's quarter. But all the city knew that the latter were the 'best set.'¹⁰

These developments, which grew on both sides of the Atlantic, allowed the social theorist Thorstein Veblen to observe that 'the basis on which good repute in any highly organised industrial community ultimately rests,' he said, 'is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.'¹¹

For Veblen, economic self-advancement led directly to a desire to achieve social self-advancement - and the most important way to achieve this was through leisure. 'Industry has advanced so far that … the characteristic feature of leisure-class life is a conspicuous exemption from all useful employment.'¹² He repeats this central message again, 'with the superior pecuniary class, with which we are here immediately concerned, the most imperative of the secondary demands of emulation… is the requirement of abstention from productive work. By virtue of this tradition, labour is felt to be debasing, and this tradition has never died out.'¹³ The British socialist William Morris echoed this in his 1886 book, Useful Work Versus Useless Toil. He said 'as to the class of rich people doing no work, we all know that they consume a great deal while they produce nothing. Therefore, they have to be kept at the expense of those who do work, just as paupers have, and are a mere burden on the community.'¹⁴ As Veblen and Morris suggest, a wealth-creator would only be acceptable in the highest social sets if he gave up labour.

The reason why leisure held such social importance, was because it demonstrated outwardly an individual's wealth - and as Veblen was at pains to point out, 'the basis on which good repute in any highly organised industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength.'¹⁵ Leisure had the added virtue of demonstrating an individual's pecuniary strength in a variety of different ways. It demonstrated that an individual had sufficient amounts of unearned income to live without earning; in order for leisure to be enjoyed, one had to spend of this surplus; the process filling leisure time gave ample opportunity for social occasions in which other people could witness the extent of an individual's surplus income.

Certainly the standards of life required for those in High Society in London and New York were high and conspicuously expensive. The stockbroker Henry Clews related New York Society as being 'the roll of splendid equipages in the "Bois de Boulogne of America," the Central Park; the constant round of brilliant banquets, afternoon teas and receptions . . . beautiful women and brave men threading the mazes of the dance; scenes of revelry by night in an atmosphere loaded with the perfume's of rare exotics, in the swell of sensuous music. . Soon nothing remains for the wives of the Western millionaires but to purchase a brownstone mansion, and swing into the tide of fashion with receptions, balls and kettledrums, elegant equipages with coachmen in bright-buttoned livery, footmen in top-boots, maid-servants and man-servants, including a butler, and all the other adjuncts of fashionable life in a great metropolis.'¹⁶ When Oscar Wilde satirised London Society in An Ideal Husband, the most glamorous character 'rides in the Row at ten o'clock in the morning, goes to the Opera three times a week, changes his clothes at least five times a day, and dines out every night of the season. You don't call that leading an idle life, do you?'¹⁷ According to Veblen, this was how it had to be. 'In order to be reputable, it must be wasteful. No merit would accrue from the consumption of the bare necessaries of life, except by comparison with the abjectly poor who fall short even of the subsistence minimum.'¹⁸ He explicitly pointed out certain items of expenditure, such as the balls, the fine clothes, the artwork and the carriages which formed the essential part of the New York society he had observed, and even more so the London Season.

However, conspicuous consumption on its own was not sufficient, since monetary power had to be channelled in socially acceptable, tasteful and 'civilised' directions. EL Godkin, wrote in the Nation in 1861 of a 'gaudy stream of bespangled, belaced, and beruffled barbarians… who knows how to be rich in America? Plenty of people know to get money; but… to be rich properly is, indeed, a fine art. It requires culture, imagination, and character.'¹⁹ Certainly, as Veblen argues, there were infinite subtleties which attached themselves to the art of conspicuous consumption and which made it harder for nouveaux riches to attain the social standing their money would otherwise provide. 'This cultivation of the aesthetic faculty requires time and application, and the demands made upon the gentleman in this direction therefore tend to change his life of leisure into a more or less arduous application to the business of learning how to live a life of ostensible leisure in a becoming way.'²⁰ Luxury and taste were not necessarily the same - and to confuse the two would be to betray origins which were not conspicuously leisurely. When John Morley visited Skibo, where Carnegie had constructed a swimming pool, he asked his accompanying detective for his opinion. "Well, sir," the detective replied judiciously, 'it seems to me to savour of the parvenu."²¹

Rise of new wealth

In both Britain and America, the landed interests which had provided generations of economic leadership were being challenged by a wholesale change in source of wealth. This period saw a sharp decline in agricultural incomes for the major landowners. Rapid technological advance meant that fewer farms were needed to fulfil national food requirements, and thus increased competitive pressures on the land. In the 1890s an average of 1,845,000 tons per year of chemical fertiliser was used in America, doubling in the decade following. The combine harvester, introduced in the 1890s, reduced the labour needed to harvest a field of wheat by 80%.²² Further competition came from the newly-globalised economy: refrigerated vans allowing meat to be transported from as far as the Mid-West and New Zealand; canning technology improved, such that while 40,000 cases of canned vegetables were sold in 1870, by 1914, this figure had increased by 1374% to 55m. Oversupply led to a twenty-year depression in farm prices, further depressing the estate-rentals and land-prices. The gross value of arable land in Britain fell from £104m in 1867-9 to £62m in 1894-1903, and agriculture declined from one fifth of national income in 1850 to one sixteenth in 1900.²³ Such was the new poverty of the aristocrats that at the beginning of the twentieth century, the satirical magazine, Truth, quoted the aphorism, "The eldest son must live on the estate; the younger sons on the State."²⁴ Jack Worthing, in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, happily admitted that his income came from investments, not land. Joseph Chamberlain supposed in 1885 'that almost universally throughout England and Scotland agriculture has become a ruinous occupation.'²⁵

If the established social hierarchies were suffering from technological change, industrialisation and the corporation offered poor entrepreneurs unprecedented opportunities for personal enrichment. The amount of railroad track in operation in the United States quadrupled in the twenty years after 1877, reaching a total of over 240,000 miles by 1897.²⁶ Between 1875 and 1900 the UK railway network grew from 16,658 to 21,855 miles.²⁷ The railways succeeded in expanding so fast, since they were a more profitable investment outlet than property. Limited-liability corporations were less risky investments than unlimited liability partnerships; could attract large amounts of surplus capital from the money markets; and proved to give better returns - and Britain and the USA introduced Joint-Stock Companies Acts in the 1850s and 1860s, allowing the creation of limited liability companies.²⁸ Large railway profits hugely boosted share values on the large metropolitan stock exchanges of New York and London - the Dow Jones RailRoad Average doubled just 53 months after it was launched in 1896; and rising prices enticed even more new capital into the market, either from the domestic market or from overseas.²⁹ Joint-stock structures, and nationwide distribution via rail, enabled many other industries to grow. Yet financiers such as JP Morgan took special interest to avoid the competition unleashed by nationwide presence. The twin processes of amalgamation and vertical integration created cost-savings, which could lead to industrial behemoths - particularly in the coal and steel industries. The British firm of Dorman, Long and Co., for example began, in 1876, as ironfounders. Over the next two decades, it ventured into steelmaking; opened rolling-mills; acquired sheet-works and wire-works; and finally acquired its own mines, collieries and limestone quarries. In 1908 it expanded further, absorbing the North-Eastern Steel Co. - the combined firm controlled a capital of over £3 million.³⁰ More impressive was the Carnegie Steel Company of Pittsburgh, which was founded by an immigrant as late as 1875, yet by 1901, the company was sold for $480m to Morgan's US Steel. An even more spectacular rise to dominance was the Standard Oil Trust, which was founded in 1870, and by the time it was broken up in 1899, it controlled 90% of all American oil refineries, and had given John D. Rockefeller a personal fortune of almost $1bn. More widely, the wealthiest 5% of the American population received a third of all disposable income by 1929.³¹

The main beneficiaries from growth in communications and big corporations were from the social élites. Andrew Carnegie explained the secret of his success to his humble, immigrant origins, by saying 'The emigrant is the capable, energetic, ambitious discontented man.'³² Later, he noted that 'An aristocracy of wealth is impossible. . . Wealth cannot remain permanently in any class if economic laws are allowed free play.'³³ It is certainly true that the period saw a remorseless growth in the number of super-rich. Where in the period 1859-79, 30 people died in Britain leaving estates worth over a million pounds, forty years later this figure had more than doubled to 73 millionaires.³⁴ By 1892 there were over 4,000 millionaires in the United States, and at the end of the century 10 per cent of the families owned some three-quarters of the national wealth.³⁵ In Britain, it is likely that the richest commoner of the nineteenth century was the self-made textile warehouseman and merchant banker James Morrison, who left £4-6 million at his death in 1857, in addition to more than 100,000 acres of land. His financier heir Charles left nearly £11 million in 1909.³⁶ Yet even these sums pale in comparison with the immense riches accumulated by American moguls. The railroad magnate James J Hill was worth $53m, JP Morgan left an estate worth $80m, Andrew Carnegie was for some time the world's richest man on retiring from business in 1901 with $250m, and by the time of his death in 1919, he had given away $311m. John D Rockefeller, by 1913, had acquired the staggering figure of $900m.³⁷

Clearly, the balance of economic power was shifting away from old élites towards the plutocratic rich. Yet the prime social status remained with the community which formed High Society. In England just as in the United States, social leadership remained absolute, if not necessarily exclusive - and Society sought to maintain its dominant position by encouraging the new rich to join it. Edward Collins explained this, when he explained that 'A Tory is a man who believes England should be governed by gentlemen. A Liberal is a man who believes any Englishman may become a gentleman if he likes.'³⁸ Since education was necessary to form a gentleman from a young man of means, education too could create gentlemen from mere plutocrats.

Civilising new wealth

On both sides of the Atlantic, there followed concerted efforts to civilise the products of Big Business, and to mould them to a more 'gentlemanly' style of life. The first, of course, was to persuade businessmen to become landed gentlemen themselves. The Economist recommended in 1870 that 'It would pay a millionaire to sink half his fortune in buying 10,000 acres of land to return only one shilling per cent, and live upon the remainder, rather than to live upon the whole without land. He would be a greater man in the eyes of more people.'⁴⁰ Some plutocrats, actually did this, becoming more aristocratic than the aristocrats in their anxiety to conform to the rules of country life.³⁹ The London merchant banker Baron von Schroeder bought a country house in Cheshire about 1868, 'became a magistrate in 1876, and was high sheriff and returning officer at the time of the first county council elections in January 1889. He was a well-known follower of the Cheshire hounds.'⁴¹ America, however, lacked the traditions of deference which made land-holding a viable form of social advancement. Land-owning, instead, was used as an opportunity for further profits, with the railroads receiving some 158 million acres, of which they secured final patents for 130 million acres.⁴² Faceless railroad shareholders gained no social status. The United States, with its unclosed frontier, also had too much surplus land for it to be a viable source of wealth. With low land-prices in America, and declining values in Great Britain, only landowners with metropolitan estates, such as the Astors in Manhattan and the Grosvenors in London, could grow wealthy from property. Yet while British landowners gained some form of paternal deference, slum-landowners such as the Astors mostly gained the bitterness of their underprivileged tenants.

If nouveaux riches could not be brought to invest in land, they could at least invest in the education of a gentleman. In the words of Cardinal Newman, noble manners had to be taught. 'Some of them come by nature, some of them may be found in any rank, some of them are a direct precept of Christianity; but the full assemblage of them, bound up in the body of an individual man, do we expect they can be learned from books?'⁴³ In the United States institution builders of the post-Civil War period such as Harvard's President Charles Eliot firmly believed in 'an aristocracy of talent.. . . to which the sons of Harvard have belonged, end, let us hope, will ever aspire to belong-the aristocracy which excels in manly sports, carries off the honors and prizes of the learned professions, and bears itself with distinction in all fields of intellectual labor and combat; the aristocracy which in peace stands firmest for the public honor and renown, and in war rides first into the murderous thickets.'⁴⁴ The public schools and the Universities which grew to be almost extensions of them, did play a role in forging a new understanding between commerce and the landed classes. By 1896, 167 noblemen, a quarter of the peerage, were directors of companies - and some of these relationships were no doubt sown on the playing fields of mid-Victorian public schools, which emphasised 'individual effort within a context of communal endeavour, and instilling the values of order, duty and loyalty.'⁴⁵

According to Veblen, a key condition for the social acceptability of wealth is that it should involve no active labour by its owner. Businessmen could not easily qualify - but if their heirs based their wealth on investments and finance, this would progress them on the road to gentrification. In 1857, James Morrison, a self-made textile warehouseman, left between £4 million and £6 million: but also more than 100,000 acres of land. His eldest son and heir Charles did not follow in the family business, but became a financier, leaving nearly £11 million at his death.⁴⁶ Financiers did not always receive unambiguous support, especially in the United States where a majority of the population remained rural. Senators, in the aftermath of the 1873 financial panic, declared: 'These men produce nothing, add nothing to wealth; they toil not, neither do they spin. . . They are the drones in the hive of industry . . . they are the buzzards who batten and fatten on the corruption of the body politic?'⁴⁷ It was this very fact that appeared, over time, to make financiers socially acceptable. In 1869, Queen Victoria had refused to honour Lionel de Rothschild, because he made his money by 'a species of gambling . . . far removed from the legitimate trading which she delights to honour.'⁴⁸ Yet just 30 years, later, JP Morgan wore court dress and drove in a coach to attend Edward VII's coronation procession, while on the pavement peddlers sold mock licences inscribed 'Permission to remain on the face of the earth, signed JP Morgan'. At Cecil Rhodes's memorial service in St Paul's Cathedral in 1902, Morgan was seated immediately behind the Dean and bathed in the refulgence of £9000 worth of electric lights he had paid for.⁴⁹ Financial wealth reaffirmed the patterns of economic centralisation created by the railway revolution in both the United States and Britain. New York toppled its nearby rivals of Philadelphia and Baltimore to become the premier financial centre of the United States. 1 million shares were traded on a single day in the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street in 1886, and the yearly total climbed to 265 million shares during 1903. In Britain, London served as a magnet for wealth, as shown by income tax assessments. In 1879-80, the average Schedule D tax assessment in the 28 largest provincial towns was under £12 per capita, while the equivalent for the ten London boroughs, was over £25 per capita, more than double.⁵⁰

If families did not switch their source of wealth to finance, professional skills came to be increasingly acceptable as well. As late as the 1880s, the law was still widely regarded as the profession that carried the greatest social prestige. In the words of The Times in 1884, it was still widely believed that 'the main object of the profession is to furnish amusement for gentlemen, an agreeable change from field sports and the pleasures of society. The clients occupy very much the same position as the foxes and the pheasants.' Since the pinnacle of the legal profession in England was the House of Lords itself, it was inevitable that most successful lawyers came from a titled and genteel background or, if from more humble beginnings, were eventually assimilated into it.⁵¹ Yet even as Charles Eliot emphasised the egalitarian nature of American life, by saying 'we are accustomed to seeing men leap from farm or shop to courtroom or pulpit, and we half believe that common men can safely use the seven-league boots of genius,' he also pressed a question which safeguarded the prestige of professional trades: 'What amount of knowledge and experience do we habitually demand of our lawgivers? What special training do we ordinarily think necessary for our diplomatists?'⁵² By means of tying entry to the professions to the same university and public school system which produced 'gentlemen', the social future of the professions was secure. An example of this is how in Tom Brown's Schooldays, a master dissuades the hero from thinking to make money in his profession: 'you may be getting a very good living in a profession, and yet doing no good at all in the world. Keep the latter before you as your only object, and you will be right, whether you make a living or but if you dwell on the other, you'll very likely drop into mere money-making.⁵³ In fact the ethos of the professions strove to maintain prestige by distancing itself from flagrant "money grubbing." T.H.S. Escott explained in 1885 that GPs and solicitors had lower occupational status than barristers and clergymen partly because the former had to undergo the "vulgar" commercial process of receiving money directly from their clients.⁵⁴

Through these mechanisms of social absorption, industry, inventiveness, material production, and money making habits were diverted within a generation towards a life of leisure or non-manual work. In the words of Veblen, 'the normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this mature phase of its life history are: government, war, sports, and devout observances. At this as any other cultural stage, government and war are, at least in part, carried on for the pecuniary gain of those who engage in them.⁵⁵ However, in respect of government and politics, Britain and America held very different traditions. In America, government held very few interests for young men of talent, and that politics and administration were fields for those men with insufficient talent succeed in business. As the famous journalist Lincoln Steffens said, it 'was thought natural, inevitable, and - possibly - right that business - by bribery, corruption, or somehow - get and be the government.'⁵⁶ The most scandalous figure to exploit this lack of probity was Charles T. Yerkes, who controlled forty-eight separate transit lines spanning the city of Chicago - since he purchased control of a majority of the City Council, which compliantly extended his franchises and ignored wholesale violations of the law. The vast majority of Chicago aldermen, fifty-eight of sixty-eight by one estimate, were known to be dishonest.⁵⁷ Yerkes refused to run enough cars to keep a regular schedule, used inadequate, poorly maintained equipment - sometimes open cars in the winter-and would not attach required safety devices. On occasion pedestrians injured by Yerkes's cars were rushed to a railway office and forced to sign a liability waiver before they could receive medical attention.⁵⁸ At all levels, therefore, patricians - often called Mugwumps - championed civil service reform, seeking to replace patronage appointees with administrative officials, often Mugwumps themselves, chosen on the basis of their intellectual merits. The passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883, which established the federal civil service, was a major Mugwump accomplishment.⁵⁹ In Britain, the reverse was true, in that the effects of patronage were already to give political power to the social élites. The passing of the University Test Act and the Army Regulation Act in 1871 marked moves towards professionalising the bureaucracy. Nevertheless, government service remained socially acceptable as a source of income which did not involve manual labour. Yet in England, the fact that public service and social status had been synonymous for so long meant that new aspirants to social success, also sought to involve themselves in public life.

There did nevertheless remain fundamental differences between Britain and the USA over the social acceptability of businessmen. In Horace Vachell's popular 1905 novel about Harrow, The Hill, a businessman's child arrives at school, but under a cloud of suspicion. Though rising by ability to captain of the cricket team, he remains an outsider, and is later expelled for dishonesty. "One is sometimes reminded," another boy typically comments, "that he is the son of a Liverpool merchant born or about the docks."⁶⁰ In America, suspicion of business origins simply did not exist - Barbara Tuchman suggests 'that there was a peculiar extra virtue in being lowly-born, that only the self-made carried the badge of ability and that men of easy circumstances were more likely than not to be stupid or wicked, if not both.'⁶¹ Andrew Carnegie recommended 'the business career as one in which there is abundant room for the exercise of man's highest power, and of every good quality in human nature. I believe the career of the great merchant, or banker, or captain of industry, to be favourable to the development of the powers of the mind, and to the ripening of judgement upon a wide range of general subjects; to freedom from prejudice, and to the peeping of an open mind.'⁶² Entrepreneurs themselves often took little personal interest in whether their occupations were socially acceptable. In the words of the 'Tea King,' Sir Thomas Lipton, 'A man may think he can go into society, be out at dinners, or go to theatres or dances every night and be just as good a businessman in the morning. But he isn't. You can't be a society man and a businessman at the same time.'⁶³ This attitude contrasted with their families - and in the words of the American ambassador Walter H. Page, 'When they make their money, they stop money-making and cultivate their minds and their gardens and entertain their friends and do all the high arts of living.'⁶⁴ Despite America's appreciation for the self-made man, social acceptability still largely depended on a person leading a life either of leisure, or at least from non-manual labour. The railroad tycoon Jay Gould was excluded from fashionable yacht clubs in Newport, while his son George was easily admitted. New York Society did not invite Gould's rival Cornelius Vanderbilt to dine with them, but all doors were open to his grandson William K. Vanderbilt: his grand-daughter Consuelo married the Duke of Marlborough. Andrew Carnegie only became socially acceptable after he had sold his steel assets to US Steel in 1901.

The triumph of new wealth

The consumption in New York thanks to the new wealth was more conspicuous and decadent than anything that had previously been seen. It became customary in New York City, for the rich in their stone and marble palaces on Fifth Avenue to leave their curtains undrawn on New Year's Day so that passers-by could see the splendour of their clothes and furnishings.⁶⁵ At Delmonico's the Silver, Gold and Diamond dinners succeeded each other unfailingly. At one, each lady present, opening her napkin, found a gold bracelet with the monogram of the host. At another, cigarettes rolled in hundred-dollar-bills were passed around after the coffee. One man gave a dinner for his dog, and presented him with a diamond collar worth $15,000. One season, the chief sensation was a ball on horseback. The guests all arrived in riding habit at a great hotel, and the party was conducted from handsomely groomed horses, equipped with rubber-padded shoes and a miniature table holding truffles and champagne.⁶⁶

Even benefaction and philanthropy - which mixed ostentatious expenditure with virtue - was taken to extremes never seen before. 'As far as my experience of the wealthy', wrote Andrew Carnegie, 'it is unnecessary to urge them to give of their super-abundance in charity so called. Greater good for the race is to be achieved by inducing them to cease impulsive and injurious giving. As a rule, the sins of millionaires in this part are not those of omission, but of commission, because they do not take time to think, and chiefly because it is much easier to give than to refuse.'⁶⁷ Carnegie himself built 2,507 public libraries - the free public library was to his mind the people's university. Before his death in 1919 he gave away $311 million.⁶⁸ A large number of American universities - such as Carnegie-Mellon, Stanford and Duke University - were founded directly from donations from plutocrats. In Britain, there was a division between the niggardliness of the old aristocrats and the munificence of new wealth. The Earl of Iveagh donated nearly one million pounds to Dublin charities and London hospitals; the Harmsworths endowed chairs at Oxford and Cambridge, and the Wills family provided over £250,000 for Bristol University.⁶⁹ In contrast, the traditional social élites were noticeably reluctant to commit their money to charitable causes, as the Musical Times records on the inauguration of the Royal College of Music in 1883. 'The subscription is the result of fourteen months whipping of … the bishops, ministers, clergy of all denominations, the nobles and municipal dignitaries of the kingdom … Boxes for voluntary contributions in the streets and lanes would have produced more.'⁷⁰ It was precisely this behaviour which compelled E. L. Godkin to write in the Nation in 1861 of a 'gaudy stream of bespangled, belaced, and beruffled barbarians.'⁷¹ Gladstone, writing in 1887, warned Englishmen : 'Let us beware of that imitative luxury, which is tempting all of us to ape our betters . . . let us be jealous of plutocracy, and of its tendency to infect aristocracy, its elder and nobler sister ; and learn, if we can, to hold by or get back to some regard for simplicity of life.'⁷²

Yet the only ways in which the traditional élites could express their jealousy of plutocracy was to exclude it from the sources of social success, and to limit the numbers in the highest society. This they completely failed to achieve. In America, an early attempt was made by Ward McAllister and Caroline Astor to make a list of New York society, the famous Four Hundred that could fit into Caroline's Fifth Avenue ballroom. After that number, he said, 'you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.' When The New York Times published the list on the occasion of Caroline's ball in February 1892, the entire country paid attention.⁷³ Yet even in America, the amount of conspicuous wealth was growing too fast to ensure a serious social exclusivity without resort to conspicuous consumption of distasteful proportions - for as Bryce said, 'the most remarkable phenomenon of the last twenty-five years has been the appearance, not only of those few colossal millionaires who fill the public eye, but of many millionaires of the second order, men with fortunes ranging from $5 million to $15 million.⁷⁴ Either figure was enough to capture Society, but too much to make Society a viable lifestyle to emulate.

The British social élites were effectively defined by ancient feudal system of titles and honours , which in large measure perpetuated the link between birth, land and status, to the exclusion of new money. In the United States, such anti-democratic devices were prohibited by the Constitution. Yet even this barricade for the old order in England had begun to weaken. In the words of Viscount Bryce, 'since Pitt in England and the Napoleons in France prostituted hereditary titles, these have ceased to be either respectable or useful. "They do not," say the Americans, "suggest antiquity, for the English families that enjoy them are mostly new; … they are merely a prize offered to wealth, the expression of a desire for gilding that plutocracy which has replaced the ancient aristocracy of your country."'⁷⁵ The rate of creation of new peers from 1882 until 1911 was nearly double that of the previous half-century, and between 1915 and 1944, it reached more than ten a year. ⁷⁶ A third of these were the new, plutocratic rich, and their rise drew yet more panicked criticism from commentators. As early as 1905, the Saturday Review had protested against 'this policy of adulterating the peerage with mere wealth'; and it went on to object to 'the principle that seems to have silently grown up and got itself accepted in the last ten years that a man may be ennobled and given the right to sit and vote among the hereditary aristocracy of Great Britain merely because he is very rich.'⁷⁷ The career of the American plutocrat, William Waldorf Astor, demonstrates how massive wealth from whatever source, could now buy the English aristocracy. Astor arrived in England in 1890 from America, with a $170 million fortune which he spent in a sustained assault on the patrician status system. He acquired London palaces, country mansions, a seat in Parliament, and a newspaper. He became a naturalised British citizen, published an elaborate genealogy which purported to trace his descent from French and Spanish nobility, and at a fancy dress ball in London in 1911, he appeared - ever subtle - clad in peer's robes. He gave $100,000 to help the national effort in the Boer War, $250,000 to the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and London, and $275,000 to charities and hospitals; and during the First World War, he donated $500,000 to various veterans' and widows' charities. He duly obtained a barony in 1916, and a viscountcy in the following year.⁷⁸ Twenty-five years from immigrant to peer of the realm. Such rapid social returns for a massive cash outlay were unprecedented.

In America the refinements of 'taste' and leisured occupations were becoming more easily accessible to those with enormous riches. New York's central venue for operas was the Academy of Music, where the eighteen boxes were reserved, from generation to generation, by the city's old guard of patrons and landlords. Any nouveau riche trying to acquire a box was refused, and even when William H. Vanderbilt offered $30,000 for one that was temporarily available, he was turned down. In revenge, Vanderbilt and such fellow outcasts as Jay Gould, William Rockefeller, George F. Baker, and Collis P. Huntington built a new opera house - the Metropolitan - largely financed by 35 boxes priced at $60,000 each. On its inaugural night in 1883, the Met was boycotted by the old guard, but the joint fortunes of the new guard were totted up at $540 million. Unable to beat such massed power, Lorillard, Belmont, et al., joined it, leaving the old Academy to be closed down.⁷⁹ Social arbiters could faced being superseded by wealth in other social settings as well. That same year, Alva Vanderbilt breached the 'Four Hundred' by organising one of the most splendid balls ever held in the United States, for the

opening of her $3 million New York 'Château.' When it became evident that the Mrs Astor had not been invited, the slight forced 'Queen' Caroline Astor, to dispatch a blue-liveried footman to deliver her card, corner turned down, to the Vanderbilts' maroon-liveried butler.⁸⁰

This was the reverse of the previous situation. In 1867, Walter Bagehot explained that the difference between Britain and the USA was that 'The order of nobility is of great use, too, not only in what it creates, but in what it prevents. It prevents the rule of wealth - the religion of gold… The experiment is tried every day and every day it is proved that money alone - money pur et simple - will not buy 'London Society'. Money is kept down, and, so to say, by the predominant authority of a different power.⁸¹ By the end of the century, he was proved comprehensively wrong. Worse than that, Britain proved even easier for the American plutocrat to be accepted in Britain than in his own country. Europeans made no distinction between Americans, totally disregarded the social hierarchy the latter had so carefully established, and cheerfully agreed to be bought or entertained.⁸² As Viscount Bryce wrote, 'In England, great wealth can, skilfully employed, will more readily force these doors open. For in England great wealth can, by using the appropriate methods, practically buy rank from those who bestow it; or by obliging persons whose position enables them to command fashionable society, can induce them to stand sponsors for the upstart, and force him into society, something which no person in America has to power of doing.… The existence of a system of artificial rank enables a stamp to be given to base metal in Europe which cannot be given in a thoroughly republican country.'⁸³

Proof that wealth could also bring social acceptability must come from the numbers of American heiresses of little or no lineage who married members of the English aristocracy. By 1909, it was calculated that more than 500 American women had married titled foreigners, and that some $220 million of American capital had been drained away as a consequence.⁸⁴ Within the first generation of wealth-creators, it also appeared that nouveaux riches were more acceptable in British High Society than in its American equivalent. As Walter H. Page recalls, British people did not draw distinctions between Americans, regardless of their social origins -'I have a club book on my table wherein the members are classified as British, Colonial, American, and Foreign - quite unconsciously.'⁸⁵ A second prime reason for the ease of rich people entering British Society was the central figure of King Edward VII, who as monarch held sole charge over the shape of fashionable society. His preferences were for wealth, and his preferred companions were those who could provide him with it , even if, like Sir Thomas Lipton, 'the king's grocer', they were dismissed by aristocrats. Indeed, it was also suggested that even when Prince of Wales, he actively connived at allowing pure wealth to breach Society. Gladstone wrote in his diary in 1881 of a man whom 'a gentleman had told him that he had been offered a baronetcy by the Prince of Wales… on condition that he would pay £70,000 to the Prince's agent on receiving the title.'⁸⁶

Actions such as these cheapened the system of titles, and according to Bryce, Americans realised that 'they are merely a prize offered to wealth, the expression of a desire for gilding that plutocracy which has replaced the ancient aristocracy of your country.'⁸⁷

On the other hand, in order for new wealth to be accepted, however grudgingly, its owners had to make changes in their own lifestyle. Rich English industrialists often saw their families acquire land and ape aristocratic fashions like fox-hunting and grouse-shooting. American and English plutocrats acquired status symbols such as an enormous mansion in Mayfair or Fifth Avenue, glittering jewellery, servants and ostentatious carriages. Their lifestyles moved away from the industrious capitalist work-pattern to fit around the aristocratic world of balls, theatres and dinners. In Veblen's words, 'the normal and characteristic occupations of the class in this mature phase of its life history are in form very much the same as in its earlier days. These occupations are government, war, sports, and devout observances.' Social lives became ever more centralised around the big cities, and increased further the pressure to spend: 'Conspicuous consumption claims a relatively larger portion of the income of the urban than the rural population, and the claim is also more imperative.'⁸⁸

Conclusion

Veblen's thesis - that 'the basis on which good repute in any highly organised industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength.'⁸⁹ - proved correct in both the societies here examined. As fabulous wealth came into new hands, so social status followed. As Andrew Carnegie said: 'An aristocracy of wealth is impossible… Wealth cannot remain permanently in any class if economic laws are allowed free play.'⁹⁰ Both social élites were forced to accept rich newcomers.

However, the pace of change was very different in the two societies. The permeability was much greater and more rapid in America; and the main reason was that in Great Britain during this period there was an almost complete identity between the social, financial and governing élites With the rare exceptions we have noted, self-made businessmen found themselves kept outside these élites for at least a full generation; it was their sons and daughters who reaped the benefit. In contrast, in the United States, politicians were not typically drawn from "high society", hence wealth-creators were more readily able to enter politics themselves and to become part of the ruling Establishment as well as the social elite in their own lifetimes, and by 1900, to dominate American society as a whole. In Great Britain, the same process took most of the succeeding century to work its way through - and some would argue that it has yet to be completed.

1. Frank Parkin, Class Inequality and Political Order, (London, 1971), p.28

2. Max Weber, 'Class, Status and Party,' in (trans by Gerth & Mills), From Max Weber: essays in sociology, (London, 1991) p.24

3. G.E. Mingay, English Landed Society in the eighteenth century, (London, 1963), p.22

4. David Cannadine, The decline and fall of the British aristocracy, (New Haven, 1990), p.55

5. R. A. Burchell, 'The role of the upper class in the formation of American culture, 1780-1840,' in ed. R. A. Burchell, End of Anglo-America, (Manchester, 1991), p.185

6. Burchell, 'The role of the upper class in the formation of American culture, 1780-1840,' p.185

7. Cardinal W. Newman, 'Rise and Progress of Universities', (Historical Sketches, 1876), quoted in W. L. Guttsman, The English Ruling Class, (London, 1969), p.210

8. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, (London, 1895), p.753

9. Cannadine, The decline and fall of the British aristocracy, p.11

10. Bryce, The American Commonwealth, p.753

11. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, (New York, 1899), p.84

12. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, p.40