In Pursuit of Privilege

In 1892, 1,265 millionaires lived in greater New York. In 2014 Manhattan alone had 21,353 (p. 191). Clifton Hood's In Pursuit of Privilege tells the story of the upper class of New York City in eight substantial chapters, beginning in the 1750s, and concluding in the 1970s and beyond. He argues that the upper class has been “vital to the histories of New York City and the United States” (p. xiv). He is skeptical of the usual focus of Gilded Age studies of the upper class, though the Gilded Age has provided a persuasive template for the New York of our own time. He argues that such an emphasis has been too narrow and has paid insufficient attention to the city's economic energies. He seems much taken by the “dynamic, open, and aggressive” New York elites as opposed to the “straitlaced and tradition-bound elites” of Boston (pp. xi, 65). In Pursuit of Privilege suggests that a cultural history of New York City's upper class needs better empirical evidence than is usually provided by the study of manuscripts, letters, and memoirs. There are certainly many manuscripts and letters cited in the 110 pages devoted to his footnotes. Empirical evidence leaves little room for those outside the tight boundaries of the upper class. Wealthy women seem to play a smaller part in Hood's story than would be expected. In Pursuit of Privilege makes no mention of Joseph Pulitzer, whose New York World made a sustained attack on the late nineteenth-century upper class. John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and the greatest merchant of the era, A. T. Stewart (who was very rich and decisively excluded from the invitation list of Mrs. William Astor [Caroline Schermerhorn Astor]), make up an interesting gallery of the excluded. Their experience might tell us a great deal about the way the upper class closed its doors and then opened them. Theodore Roosevelt does not appear in the index. Yet his place in the city's upper class, and contempt for gilded privilege, make him a powerful counterexample to Hood's approach. The index is further wanting because it lacks many of the figures present in the text. It is the somewhat less-than-empirical response we make to the taste of the upper class, their cultural interests, the (mediocre) paintings they bought, the forgettable Worth ball gowns so heavily taxed on importation into America, and—until Elsie de Wolfe arrived to raise standards—the heavy decor and stultifying architecture of most of the great mansions that lined Fifth Avenue, that open a window upon the upper class

Art history · Class (philosophy · Epistemology · Gilded Age · Memoir · Political science · Privilege (computing · Skepticism · Sociology · Theology · Upper class · History · Law · Philosophy · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies