In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood (review)

If you can make it there, as the song goes, you can make it anywhere—the "there" being, of course, New York City. Clifton Hood's In Pursuit of Privilege is the story of those who made it (or whose ancestors had made it) in spades. It is a history of "New York City's Upper Class" from the eighteenth century to the recent past. It is a story of how New York City's upper class has defined and refined itself, set itself apart, gingerly mixed Old Money and New Money: how it played, worked, and entertained, where it lived, how it expressed its political and cultural sense of class dominance and tried to figure out what sort of "oblige" came with its high capitalist form of "noblesse." It is an absorbing story. I am not sure that it really is, as Hood claims, an extension of social historians' exploring "groups that previous scholars ignored or downplayed" (xvi), but there's little doubt that it is a subject that has not been especially vibrant in recent scholarship, and Hood's study is timely and a much welcome addition to the literature.

In Pursuit of Privilege anatomizes New York City's upper class by decades, focusing on the 1750s and 1760s, the 1780s and 1790s, the 1820s, the 1860s, the 1890s (giving the Gilded Age and Progressive Era two chapters), the 1940s, and the 1970s to the present. It is less a story of how fortunes were made or kept than an exploration of how those with money used their wealth to establish and maintain their class boundaries and distinctiveness. The author follows Pierre Bourdieu in dividing class privilege into several categories: economic capital, social capital (relationships with others), cultural capital (specific forms of expertise), and symbolic capital (prestige and honor).

Hood argues that New York City elites were motivated by "the centrality of money making" (13). This he claims distinguishes the upper class of New York City from those in other northern American cities, such as Puritan/Unitarian Boston or Quaker Philadelphia, where religion was more important in the self-definition of the upper classes. But New York City's elites did have some sense of a greater civic function beyond mere money grubbing. They claimed a central role in the civic life of the city and viewed themselves as "the indispensable leaders of their city and assumed New York would have fallen apart without them" (xix). Perhaps nowhere more than in New York City can one perceive the tension between the single-minded acquisition or retention of riches and the cultural and political pretensions that comes with great wealth.

Hood's approach is neither muckraking nor apologetic. He accepts that the upper class was usually narrowly focused on advancing its own interests, could be rapacious or even "bloodsuckers" (xv), had distorted views of the lower classes, and often had the power to put their hierarchical vision of social order into practice. At the same time, he argues that in many ways they decisively shaped New York City for the better, creating institutions like the Metropolitan Opera and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and providing critical leadership at decisive moments in the city's history, making the city a "richer" place to live in many senses of the word.

I suppose I am somewhat less sanguine about their contributions. I certainly won't begrudge upper-class patrons their civic mindedness, and this is certainly how some of the city's premier institutions were created, but it comes at a cost. The association of high culture with high social status has long had a deadening effect on its broader dissemination and appreciation. In Europe opera was a genuinely popular art form. In the United States it was long associated with snobbish pretension to refinement, epitomized...