From the Archive: Judge Magazine makes fun of Ward McAllister

Meet Samuel Ward McAllister, bon vivant, arbiter of taste, author of the fabled list of “Mrs. Astor’s 400,” and the butt of more than a few jokes. 

Click the hot spots above to learn more.

Many 19th century cartoons are very hard to decipher — the story is too complicated, or the characters are too unfamiliar. But every once in a while, you come across one that so perfectly sums up an aspect of 19th century New York City culture, that if you look close enough, you can figure out the joke, and learn something while you are at it. This cartoon, titled “Snobbish Society’s Schoolmaster” is one of these. I found it when I was doing research for my essay in the exhibition catalog Gilded New York.

Remember how Lady Grantham in Downton Abbey was American? Her character is based on a real phenomenon in Gilded New York’s “high society”. She is what would have been called back then, a “dollar princess” — a wealthy American woman who married a titled Englishman whose estate wasn’t in the best shape, financially. In essence, the marriage was an exchange of self-made American capital (which American daughters — unlike English ones — could actually inherit from their fathers) for English nobility and all of its trappings — the title, the tiaras, the estate, the life of leisure.

In real life, the most famous dollar princess was probably Alva Vanderbilt’s daughter Consuelo, who married the Duke of Marlborough in 1895 in what was one of the first examples of a celebrity wedding, judging by the paparazzi-like photographs by New York’s Byron Company now in the collection of the Museum of the City of New York. By her account, the marriage was a miserable one (unlike, of course, Lady Grantham’s).

Why on earth did they do this? Well, social status among New York City’s wealthy at the end of the 19th century was a source of constant anxiety. During this period an estimated one third of America’s millionaires lived in New York City and it was becoming harder and harder for elite New Yorkers to know who was “in” society and who was merely what they called a “bouncer” — someone who simply had cash, or worse, appeared to have cash, and could trick society into thinking he was one of them. (It was most often, but not always a “he” — the beautiful but deceitful midwestern-born heroine of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country who marries into an old New York society family, sowing discontent wherever she goes, is also the type.)

So, since America didn’t have a system of nobility, like the Europeans did, New York’s elite — the Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans, and Rockefellers — grasped for what they could to set themselves apart from others who were merely wealthy — or, worse, in their opinion, the newly so. One thing they landed on was simply pretending to be European, and in particular, English, modeling their behavior, dress (down to the popularity of tiaras), and even architecture and art collections on the norms of English society — to the point of marrying their daughters to titled Englishmen — in order to establish legitimacy based on something other than the ability make money. 

(They also liked to dress up as actual European kings and queens for their costume balls, Marie Antoinette was a favorite, but that’s a story for another time.)

The other thing society needed to keep out the bouncers was gatekeepers. The most famous of these was a portly man from Savannah, Georgia, named Samuel Ward McAllister. He became a sort of concierge to the elite, helping to plan balls, orchestrate débuts of society’s daughters, and manage guest lists (including Mrs. Astor’s famous list of “Four Hundred” — supposedly the number of people her ballroom could hold and shorthand for truly being “in” society).  The funny thing is that as well as McAllister played the part of a member of New York’s “patriarchs” of old high society, being from Georgia, he wasn’t really one himself.

In this magazine cover from 1890, the satirists at Judge magazine poke fun at both of these things — the elite’s desire to imitate the English, and McAllister himself in his role as society’s arbiter. McAllister (depicted as an ass) points to a cowering example of “the English Snob of the 19th Century” and instructs Uncle Sam “You must imitate this…or you will never be a gentleman.”  

But what’s even more interesting is that McAllister is depicted as a teacher, not a gatekeeper.  He’s trying his best to show Uncle Sam how to be more English. This is perhaps because 1890 was the same year McAllister made a fatal mistake that forever tarnished his impeccable reputation as society’s gatekeeper: he published a book. Titled Society as I have Found It, the book purported to be simply a memoir of the high society McAllister had known; but it was read by that very society as a how-to for those dreaded bouncers. The gatekeeper had opened the floodgate, and society never forgave him for it. “What a pity it is that he wrote a book!” remarked one of his high-society “friends” to the New York Times at the time of his death five years later.

So, although the cartoon may not exactly be funny to modern eyes, it’s amazing how much it tells you about how strangely funny 19th century New Yorkers actually were.