453. Caste and Class in the U.S.

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                 Caste and Class in the U.S. 

There’s equality and inequality.  A front-page article in the Business section of a recent Sunday Times is entitled “Is America on the Way to a Caste System?” and argues that it is.  The first few rows at Yankee Stadium cost $1000 and let holders bypass the long lines of fans waiting to enter the park.  These lucky few are escorted in by friendly security guards, enjoy a private dining room and concierge access (whatever that is), and are separated from the hoi polloi by a concrete moat. 

But so what?  Money has always brought privileges.  Ah, but there’s a club within the privileged club called the Harman Lounge, which offers nothing special except the fact that it is restricted to fans sitting in the first row only.  It exists solely to exclude the other privileged fans.  What cozy comfort its members must experience, sinking into its gray suede couches, or patronizing its bar and watching TV.  And then, of course, there is the game, but that’s for everyone.

The point of the article: as the rich get richer (and they have been getting richer for years), businesses focus more exclusively on them and offer shabby service to everyone else.  And everyone else feels abandoned, and their mounting anger inspires some to vote for — well, guess who?  Or for candidates who rage against millionaires and billionaires.  

Further examples of a caste system:

• Members of Congress and big political donors avoid our deteriorating public transportation system by getting to and from airports with a luxury helicopter service.  So why be concerned about public transit?
• Wealthy consumers employ pricey counselors to get special access to the best hospitals and elite schools, hence are less interested in health care and education reform.
• Having private jets costing millions. richies never wait in lines at airports and, when traveling, enjoy more comforts than even first-class passengers.
• When fires were raging in California, private firefighters sent in by insurers saved the vineyards and estates of the wealthy, while neighboring homes were reduced to ashes.
• For $50,000, private health care consultants steer cancer patients into potentially lifesaving clinical trials not accessible to other patients.
• According to a 2016 study, the richest 1 percent of Americans live nearly 15 years longer than the poorest 1 percent.

All of which, if accurate, is a truly serious indictment.  Yes, the Times article concludes, we do have a caste system, and the differences between filthy rich and shabby poor — or even between filthy rich and slightly less filthy rich — are growing.

Flying in one of these lets one bypass airport lines.
Eduard Marmet

And you fly in comfort, as well.
David Brossart

Not being a billionaire, I cannot savor the joys and privileges of the ultra wealthy, but I have had glimpses of them.  My partner Bob and I once paid extra — a lot extra — to have an early dinner at the Metropolitan Opera before attending a performance there.  Just waiting at the bottom of an elegant stairway, behind a velvet rope, was a very special experience, and in the well-dressed attendees waiting there with us I sensed elegance, taste, culture, and money.  

The meal was satisfactory, though not exceptional, and my pricey bottle of wine tasted no better than the cheapies I usually buy.  But the supreme pleasure, after paying the restaurant bill, was to walk in the most leisurely way across the carpeted floor to the theater: no rush, no bus or train delays, no nervous looking at your watch, dreading the fuss and embarrassment of a late arrival, and the frowns they provoke in other operagoers who managed to arrive on time.

The performance itself — Verdi’s La Traviata, that ever-popular mix of champagne and tears, conveying a perennial male fantasy, the whore with a heart of gold — was almost anticlimactic, all the more so in that the final, usually claustrophobic scene, where the heroine dies, was done on a far-too-spacious stage.  But what the hell, we had entered by a special entrance, dined in ease, and experienced a mere five-minute commute to our seats — this was living!  

So did I do it again?  Are you crazy?  At that price, never.  But Bob did, with his mother, a great opera fan, and more than once.  But he was always more of a spender than I was, and after all, Mom is Mom, she deserves the best.

Have we had a caste system here in the past?  Let's start by having a look at inequality in America.  Foreign visitors have always joked that in this democratic society where all are equal, some are more equal than others.  They are right, of course, and it dates back to our Founding Fathers, affluent Northern merchants and Southern plantation owners (meaning slaveholders), who crafted the Constitution to make change difficult and thus protect their interests.  Which involved all kinds of compromises, such as counting slaves as three-fifths of a person in determining representation in Congress, until the Civil War, at a fearful cost, brought emancipation and the right to vote.  (For black males, of course, not for women.  And even for males that right was soon suppressed, and remained so for years.)

This country has always known a great disparity in wealth and influence, and never more so than in New York City.  In mid-nineteenth-century New York the wealthy lived in stately brownstones whose steep stoops separated them from tradesmen and the lower classes, who, if they needed to call, had access to a basement entrance underneath the stoop.  And a block or two away there was often an avenue lined with pretty-waiter-girl saloons where gentlemen might, perhaps furtively, feel entitled to enter, but never with their women, who must be sheltered from such depraved (and enticing) establishments.  

A New York brownstone stoop.
Going up it took you into another world.
WFinch

If one had money, one wanted to show it off.  Gentlemen dressed in broadcloth from their tailor, who for formal wear gave them frock coats with velvet collars and silk lapels. On their shirtfront, under a well-brushed silk topper, flashed a diamond. They never wore denim, a rough material appropriate for workers and other inferiors.  Nor did they ever, heaven forfend, wear readymades.  

For affluent ladies, the rules were even stricter.  With great care they selected the fabrics for their outfits, which their seamstress or dressmaker then produced.  The only readymade items allowed were frills and other adornments imported from Paris, or less costly local imitations of the same.  Their fashionable bonnets were adorned with feathers and ribbons and tucks of silk, and rosebuds and leaves au naturel, and sometimes, on top, nestled in blond silk leaves, a stuffed hummingbird.  Since wearing the same bonnet two seasons in a row was unthinkable, the cost of such a headdress, and still more a series of them, was enough to bankrupt hubby.  

Fashionable ladies with parasols in carriage.
An 1881 drawing.

On outings ladies carried parasols to protect their milk-white skin from the rays of the sun, since a sun tan, so desired  today, was the sign of a market woman or farmer’s wife, far below them in status.  And when, in 1856, the fad of the hoopskirt came in — launched by Eugénie, Empress of the French, to conceal either her bad legs or her pregnancy (she was about to deliver the Prince Imperial) — it became all the rage, and the city’s factories were soon turning out four thousand of these cagelike monstrosities a day.  To the amusement of irreverent observers, hoopskirted demoiselles now had to maneuver with great difficulty to pass through narrow doorways that had hitherto allowed easy entrance to  visitors.   And to sit in a hoopskirt and still be ladylike was another dire challenge. 

Empress Eugénie
in the hoopskirt she made famous.

Mercifully for all concerned, about a decade later came word that the Empress now favored the bustle, a less voluminous fashion that the elegant ladies of New York and elsewhere promptly adopted.  That it put emphasis on their posterior seems not to have caused concern, even in those strictest of Victorian times.

The bustle.  A fashion plate, circa 1885.
A wasp waist enhanced its effect even further.

Dressing fancy and living in a fashionable brownstone, or from the 1880s on, in a marble French-style chateau on Fifth Avenue, the axis of elegance, told the world of your wealth.  But the supreme display came when, in a fancy carriage with a liveried coachman and grooms, you joined other tophatted and parasoled fashionables on the Drive in the new Central Park (new as of 1860, when it opened), showing off your outfits and rig, while nodding an appropriate greeting to acquaintances who were there to do the same.  

And when the opera came in, with the traditional u-shaped theater, opera glasses gave a better view of the boxes opposite than of the stage.  This was fine, since seeing and being seen by other fashionables was the point of attending.  Oh yes, the music was enjoyable, too, especially since one’s social inferiors, with a few notable exceptions, had little knowledge of it and gladly consigned it to those who were “in Society.”  And to be "in Society" was to have vast wealth that freed you from the need for daily toil.  

The self-appointed queen of high society was Caroline Astor, the Mrs. Astor, whose admirers christened her the Mystic Rose. She was married to an Astor, the grandson of old John Jacob, the founder of the Astor fortune, from whose smelly fur business and grubby real estate doings she and her spouse were safely removed by two generations.  To her annual ball she invited the 400 people whom she deemed socially acceptable in New York society, that being the number that her sumptuous ballroom could accommodate.  For the socially ambitious, not to be invited was disastrous.  So here we see, far before our own time, the caste system at work.  Money, fine clothes, a palatial mansion, and a fancy turnout weren’t enough to qualify you for the highest rank of New York society.  For that, you had to be invited to the annual shindig of the Mystic Rose, which signaled your inclusion in the super-exclusive Four Hundred. 

Mrs. Astor (in black) at one of her balls.

Caroline Astor reigned supreme until, in 1890, Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives was published, with photographs showing the city’s poor living in squalor.  Suddenly the whole concept of the Four Hundred and the annual Astor ball seemed irrelevant, a pretentious and deplorable frivolity of the idle rich.  

A tenement yard.
From Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives.
Preus museum

Years passed.  Gradually the Mystic Rose faded from the scene, and time took its toll.  The Astor ball survived, but only in the aging Caroline Astor’s demented imagination, as she stood at the entrance to her empty ballroom, greeting imagined guests.  

Conclusion: The caste system did once indeed flourish in New York, but in time it was demolished.  Will that be the fate of today’s caste system?  Only time will tell.


Source note:  This post was inspired by Nelson D. Schwartz's article "Is America on the Way to a Caste System?" in the Sunday Business section of the New York Times of Sunday, March 1, 2020.

Coming soon:  Deutsche Bank: Adventures in Cloud Cuckoo Land.


©  2020  Clifford Browder