An Age of Excess

M.H. Dunlop. Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York . New York: William Morrow, 2000. xxi + 296 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $25.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).

For a brief moment in the mid-1890s, says M. H. Dunlop, urban Americans became obsessed with the foot. It was Trilby's beautiful foot that set off the craze, but the passion also reawakened fascination with the Cinderella story, staged in countless amateur and professional productions in these years. Less innocently, the fetish also partook of the age's favorite perversion, flagellation, about which a lively underground literature was produced.

The age loved diamonds even more. South Africa's prodigious output of gems, beginning in the 1870s, flooded the market and brought them within reach of many. "Diamond" Jim Brady's twenty thousand rocks became a token of tasteless consumption, while clergyman Russell Conwell's "Acres of Diamonds" lecture—perhaps the most oft-delivered talk of the century—exhorted countrymen that "it is your duty to get rich . . . it is your Christian and godly duty to do so" (p. 15).

If diamonds threatened to become commonplace, royalty remained uncommon on this side of the Atlantic. Thus, sightings of genuine European nobility excited both crowds and prolific newspaper coverage. The separate American visits of the Duc de Veragua (a direct descendent of Columbus) and the Spanish Infanta Eulalie (a many-generations removed issue of Ferdinand and Isabella) during the Chicago Columbian Exposition thrilled democratic hearts. That is, until Veragua admitted bankruptcy, at which point newspaper coverage suddenly stopped. Even worse was the Infanta's "lack of democratic instinct," exemplified by her rebuff of Mrs. Potter Palmer's hospitality: Eulalie was appalled to learn that she was visiting people "who kept an inn" (p. 119). The demands of royalty wore thin on American ears, and the Infanta's visit trailed off into public apathy.

Such well-told anecdotes fill M. H. Dunlop's Gilded City. But Dunlop's study rises above the usual stack of easy summer reading by the shrewd intelligence and suggestiveness she brings to her effort. The stories add up to something, making Dunlop's effort a notable contribution to American cultural history. Gilded City deserves attention in part for its provocative comments about fin-de-siècle America and also for its place in the larger genre of American social history.

Gilded City is a difficult book to classify. It might best be grasped as an attempt to understand the interrelationship of New York's haute bourgeois and its scrutinizing public at the turn of the nineteenth century, largely through their respective fascination with material objects. Dunlop seeks to display the peculiar aspirations and anxieties of a people for whom wealth—not just the personal fortunes of the rich but also the incredible affluence of the civilization—seemed to weigh heavily. The "world of goods" cast obligations upon the pecuniary class, which it manfully struggled to fulfill. The rich were expected not only to consume but to do so in a very public manner. They had to accomplish this in a way that satisfied increasingly high expectations among the common folk yet did not cross an invisible line into anti-democratic display. Thus the ongoing saga of the Bradley Martins, whose daughter's 1893 wedding to an Englishman of impressive title but meager wealth prompted weeks of newspaper coverage about wedding plans, guests, and gifts, and which attracted thousands to the streets around the church on the day of the nuptials. Less successfully, four years later the Bradley Martins staged a costume ball, a massive affair where guests were commanded to don European aristocratic garb and attend court at the Waldorf—only to have the Martins commit the unpardonable sin of attempting to keep the curious public at bay. Set against the recent national economic depression, the ball prompted a national debate on conspicuous consumption. (However, Dunlop debunks a favorite story of social historians: that the Bradley Martins were effectively...