CHAPTER VCASTE-COMPELLERS
Itis still an open and anxious question whether this fashionable society, the growth, as we have seen, of the last two or three decades, constitutes a genuine aristocracy. The society itself hopes so and tries to believe so, and struggles to forget its uncertain tenure, its sordid basis and its humble ancestry. And it is encouraged in its pretensions by many thousands of agile and aggressive climbers who would not for worlds lose their delusion that their climbing has a goal, and a goal worth achieving. But uneasy doubts refuse to down, and whenever one of the fashionables says, with a brave essay at the careless, matter-of-course tone, “We of the upper classes,” he—or she, for it is more often she—can’t refrain from a furtive glance to see whether all faces within sight are perfectly sober, self-complacent and approving.
No such uncertainty, however, exists in the case of the servants of wealth and fashion. They know that they themselves are an aristocracy, and they are determined that there shall be no doubt about their being dignified, if menial, bulwarks of an aristocracy of their employers. These servants, both male and female, are not Americans. Once in a while you will find among them a naturalized American; once in a long while you will find a shamefaced, apologetic American-born. But they are essentially an immigrant aristocracy, and nine-tenths of them are from England, where the iron caste-distinctions of feudalism have come down even unto the present day, not only merely intact, but monstrously exaggerated, where snobbishness is not only part of the statute law, but deeply imbedded in the vastly more potent customary law, and is even incorporated in the divine law, is read out from the pulpit each Sunday and piously echoed by reverent congregations.
In Europe the “upper class” and its haughty servants are born to their lofty stations; here the “upper class” is manufactured, largely out of watered stock and bonds and stolen franchises, and its servants are imported. It is the natural instinct ofsmall people, suddenly elevated in material wealth, to try to believe that the wealth which relieves them of the necessity for daily labor also produces a chemical change, a refining transformation, in the clay whereof their singularly human-looking bodies are composed. Against this instinct is the good old American sense of humor that recognizes in the unerasable physical and mental mint-marks of human brotherhood Nature’s mocking rebuke to the vanities of pose and pretense. But few people’s sense of humor extends to themselves; and if they get the least encouragement, off they go on a high horse. Our rich people get more than a little encouragement from certain of their fellow-citizens and from upper-class foreigners, who for obvious reasons cultivate and flatter them in the delusion that it is not their bank accounts but themselves that are superior. But the fashionable section would never have gone so fast or so far in this hallucination had it not been for this important menial aristocracy. Students of human development, in their passion for dealing only with the seemingly big, with the high-sounding, often reach conclusions ludicrously wide of the truth, often neglect those humble but mighty causes that reallyshape human destiny. They find in the great and burning thoughts of philosophers the explanations of revolutions which a glance at the prices of bread would more justly explain. Let us make no such mistake. In seeking the cause of our rich people’s sudden and furious craze for caste let us not be proud. Let us turn away from the bronze front doors and the magnificent drawing-room and go humbly to the area gate and the backstairs quarters, where the real cause of their curious, amusing and pitiful backsliding from the grand concepts of Democracy is to be found.
When rich Americans first began to go abroad the servility of English servants offended. But custom soon changed that. Servility is insidious. The Americans, longing to feel themselves the equals of the complacent and secure upper class in England, and realizing that they could never hope to get deferential respect from their fellow-countrymen—even from those willing to go into domestic service—began to import servants. “The English servants are so much better, you know; understand their business and their place.” But the English servant’s “place” in the social hierarchy is dependent upon his master’s place. Whoeverseeks to lower the master in the social scale seeks to lower the servant. On the other hand, whatever raises the master socially raises the servant. Your Englishman who is a servant born and bred is even more incapable of understanding and warming up to Democracy than his king would be. He loathes Democracy—does it not lower him in the social scale by putting all men on the same level; does it not take away his dear gods of rank and birth and leave him godless and adrift? He wants none of it. It may be good enough for foreigners, but not for an Englishman.
Once the imported members of the servile aristocracy were among us in considerable numbers they began to plot and to compel an aristocracy above them. The general theory is that these rich Americans who have gone crazy about themselves were infected by associating with the aristocracies of the Old World, and no doubt that association is partly responsible. But the main cause of the malady is that every American family living ostentatiously, or even at all luxuriously, soon found established within its gates an aristocracy of caste that compelled the family to seem to put on airs. And any American family that assembles a householdstaff of these aristocrats will soon be strutting and posing, however hard it may strive to remain sensible. The servants simply won’t have “under-bred” Democracy; they would despise themselves if they found themselves working for men and women not their superiors. And it isn’t in human nature, weakened by the example of all around it, to resist the subtle and insinuating compulsion of the “well-bred” hints and innuendos of “well-bred” servants. A man and a woman are no longer master and mistress of themselves, not to speak of their house, when they have given way to the luxury and vanity of a real high-class English butler backed up by half a dozen English footmen, an English coachman and three or four English grooms. He and she will begin to cut pigeon-wings like a colored gentleman on the first warm day of Spring. He and she will do it because the servants expect it, because the servants have convinced them that it is the correct form, because the servants will not tolerate any departure from the pose of “my lord” and “my lady”—and because such posings are so titillating to the vanity. And from striving to seem a truly “my lord” and a truly “my lady” before the “well-bred” butler and coachman and theirhenchmen, the man and the woman pass on naturally and by imperceptible stages to making the same ludicrous struggle in all seriousness before their associates, all of whom are doing precisely the same silly thing from precisely the same silly cause.
There is a woman in one of our big cities who is now a leader of fashion, very “classy” indeed, most glib on the subject of the “traditions of people of our station.” Her father was an excellent peddler, her mother a farmer’s daughter who could be induced to “help out” a neighbor in the rush of the harvest time. This typical American woman behaved very sensibly so long as her sensible father and mother were alive and until the craze for English households arose. She fell in line. But the haughty servants were most trying at first. For instance, she loved bread spread with molasses. She ate it before the butler once; his face told her what a hideous “break” she had made. She tried to conquer this low taste—never did weak woman fight harder against the gnawings of sinful appetite. At last she gave way, and in secret and in stealth indulged. She was not caught and, encouraged, she proceeded to add one low common habit to another until she was leading a double life. Ithad its terrors; it had its compensating joys. But before she had gone too far she was happily saved. One morning her maid caught her, and the whole household was agog. The miseries endured in the few following weeks completely cured her. She is now in private, as well as in public, as sound a snob as ever reveled in “exclusiveness.”
This is no isolated case. For bread and molasses substitute any plain, natural human habit not tolerated in England, and you have a story in outline that would apply to hundreds. How contemptuously our fashionables would deny if accused! How indignantly the younger generations who have never known what it was to be free from the English strait-jacket would protest against such coarse insinuations about our aristocracy. But the laughable truth remains unshaken—and also the truth that our aristocracy is wofully servant-pecked.
Fully to realize what a tremendous pressure this servile aristocracy entrenched in the privacy of the home can exert, let us glance at the composition of a fashionable household in America to-day. Take a family of some aspiring money-lender or stock swindler or franchise grabber who has got together in one way and another—principally another—afortune of a dozen millions or so. There are himself, his wife with the longing to be “in it” or to keep “in it” gnawing at her, the grown son and the grown daughter. Papa is willing to have the family show off, but he is not quite ready to go the limit. So the establishment is what other fashionable people call modest, and what his wife and two children tell him is “mean.” Here is the schedule:
General Staff—Housekeeper, a broken-down “gentlewoman”; butler, formerly with the Earl of Tyne and still with him in spirit; chef, a Frenchman, but thoroughly Anglicized in soul, though not in accent or cooking; coachman, an Englishman, recently with Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Doodles; chauffeur, a Frenchman who speaks to nobody unless spoken to and keeps clear of the whole mess as much as possible.Housekeeper’s Staff—Two English parlor maids from the best English houses, most expert in handling bric-à-brac and such perishables; two very humble, very impudent English chambermaids; a French laundress, who disdains all but the butler and the coachman, and sighs for the haughty chauffeur; a seamstress, a great gossip and an authorityon “fashionable intelligence”; a linen woman, daughter of an English tavern-keeper whose glory was that he had been valet to a duke; a useful woman, for packing, etc., etc., most “respectable,” most English; a useful man, for heavy work, windows, errands, etc., an Englishman who shows that he is spiritually prostrate whenever a superior speaks to him; three chambermaids, very English-Irish.Butler’s Staff—Two Englishmen to stand in the hall in immaculate livery, white silk stockings, etc., etc.; two Englishmen, equally immaculate, to assist at table, etc.; two other English assistants, not at all times immaculate.Coachman’s Staff—Four English grooms.Chauffeur’s Staff—One assistant, learning the profession.Chef’s Staff—An assistant, a Frenchwoman; two English kitchen maids or “scullions.”Personal Servants—Valet to the master, a quiet, well-bred, insolent Englishman; valet to the young master, an understudy to the other valet; maid to Madame (French); maid to Mademoiselle (French); valet to the upper caste men-servants (English); valet to the lower class men-servants(English); maids to the servants (three English-Irish); laundress to the servants (English).
General Staff—Housekeeper, a broken-down “gentlewoman”; butler, formerly with the Earl of Tyne and still with him in spirit; chef, a Frenchman, but thoroughly Anglicized in soul, though not in accent or cooking; coachman, an Englishman, recently with Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Doodles; chauffeur, a Frenchman who speaks to nobody unless spoken to and keeps clear of the whole mess as much as possible.
Housekeeper’s Staff—Two English parlor maids from the best English houses, most expert in handling bric-à-brac and such perishables; two very humble, very impudent English chambermaids; a French laundress, who disdains all but the butler and the coachman, and sighs for the haughty chauffeur; a seamstress, a great gossip and an authorityon “fashionable intelligence”; a linen woman, daughter of an English tavern-keeper whose glory was that he had been valet to a duke; a useful woman, for packing, etc., etc., most “respectable,” most English; a useful man, for heavy work, windows, errands, etc., an Englishman who shows that he is spiritually prostrate whenever a superior speaks to him; three chambermaids, very English-Irish.
Butler’s Staff—Two Englishmen to stand in the hall in immaculate livery, white silk stockings, etc., etc.; two Englishmen, equally immaculate, to assist at table, etc.; two other English assistants, not at all times immaculate.
Coachman’s Staff—Four English grooms.
Chauffeur’s Staff—One assistant, learning the profession.
Chef’s Staff—An assistant, a Frenchwoman; two English kitchen maids or “scullions.”
Personal Servants—Valet to the master, a quiet, well-bred, insolent Englishman; valet to the young master, an understudy to the other valet; maid to Madame (French); maid to Mademoiselle (French); valet to the upper caste men-servants (English); valet to the lower class men-servants(English); maids to the servants (three English-Irish); laundress to the servants (English).
Quite a staff—and it does not include Madame’s private secretary, an American, a “gentlewoman,” thoroughly converted to the English system, or Mademoiselle’s visiting governess, a product of ten years’ training in a New York private school for the “young ladies of the upper class,” or extra servants of all kinds that are constantly coming and going. The total monthly pay-roll is never below one thousand seven hundred dollars; often, in the height of the winter season in New York or of the summer season at Newport, it climbs up to two thousand dollars. And, putting the feeding of all these people at twenty dollars apiece a month, which is exceedingly, ridiculously low, the board-bill would be more than eight hundred dollars a month. Then, naturally, all of them are as careless and as wasteful as they dare to be, and, wherever possible, corrupt in the taking of commissions from the “tradespeople.” This means a squandering of more than their wages and board together. But it is indeed a most “modest” establishment—there are at least a thousand in this country far more imposing.Why, our hero has not even provided servants for the servants of his servants! And, as everybody knows, that is always done in a really bang-up, swell, first-class establishment. Also, his liveries, although what the “tradespeople” would call elegant, are not nearly so sumptuous as those of the neighboring establishments.
But, dissatisfied though the servants are, they do their best to keep up appearances and they fight strenuously for the caste system. They are, roughly speaking, divided into five ranks. At the top stand the private secretary, the visiting governess, and the housekeeper. They are almost “gentlefolk”; in fact, they are gentlefolk in abeyance, as it were, like cadets of a royal house which has been kicked out by its unfeeling subjects. Next come butler and coachman and chef. Each admits the right of the other two to high rank, but each feels toward the others as they fancy a marquis must feel toward an earl. Below these high haughtinesses is the main body of servants, with the lowest rank made up of stablemen, scullions, servants’ servants. Each servant fiercely insists upon his own station, and still more fiercely insists upon the lower station of those whom the code of caste has assigned there.And all the servants insist upon the aristocratic principle being enforced from top to bottom of the household. The “master” and his wife, the boy and the girl, know that if they for an instant drop the pose they will be the butt of ridicule and contempt in the servants’ hall.
The effect of this incessant, subtle pressure upon the grown people is strong enough. But they retain some glimmerings of a sane point of view; at times they realize that there is not a little rotten nonsense in their mode of life. But think of the children! They were born into this noisome atmosphere; they are never allowed to breathe any other—for, even when they go away to school, it is to some “select,” “exclusive” institution, or to associate only with the “select” and “exclusive” in the big college. They know no more of the free and national and growing American life than a Mammoth Cave fish knows of the light and the radiant waters of the upper world. They regard Americanism as synonymous with demagoguery and anarchy. And they become sincere and, because of their wealth and display, successful missionaries of the gospel of snobbishness to all the children of the rich and the well-to-do brought into contact with them.
Truly, the service is not the most important item that comes up the back stairs of the fine houses of our plutocracy. The ideas—they are the real item.
English servants do not, as a rule, like to come to this country. Few of the best class, as yet, will consent to give up the splendor and assured aristocracy of England and go to live among a lot of vulgarians, hard though those vulgarians are striving to be worthy of the support of an aristocratic menialdom. Those few of the best who do condescend to exile themselves wear sad faces and show that they keenly feel the humiliation. For they cannot blind themselves to the truth that their masters and mistresses, striving hard to please and to delude, are still not really “ladies” and “gentlemen,” but just Americans. Have they titles? No. Do the common people doff the hat to them? No. Have they “ancestry”? They pretend to have, but the genealogical trees look about as much like real trees as the papier-mâché palm looks like the genuine thing; and Burke’s peerage and the Almanach de Gotha know them not. No, they are not aristocrats, and it pains the aristocratic servants to serve them much as it would pain a first gentleman of the bedchamber to King Edward to get onhis knees to some “big nigger” who called himself Emperor of Ashanteeland. The commiseration of all sympathizers with sensitive souls belongs of right to these aristocrats of menialdom in exile.
The great mass of these imported servants, excepting those who come here for the chance to become men and women and to shake off servitude, are a worthless lot, weedings from those perfect English gardens of menialdom. And a hard time their American masters have with them. Insolence, shiftlessness, drunkenness, petty thieving are tolerated to and beyond the most asinine patience; then, one furious day, the housekeeper, under orders from an outraged master or mistress, ejects the whole crew and gets in an entirely new lot. But this revolt of the downtrodden “upper classes” is rare and dangerous and often disastrous. For this servile aristocracy is a close corporation, very limited in numbers and fully awake to its own power over the plutocrats who must at any cost in money, manhood and discomfort have servility and an imitation of the English way of living. Woe, woe, woe unto the plutocrat who gets himself on the imported servants’ black-list! He may have actually to close in whole or in part his vast houses,and to cease from inviting in his hordes of rich friends to see how much more gaudily he is showing off than they are. He may have to call in colored or plain Irish or Swedish servants, mostly women, to save him and his family from the horrors of waiting on themselves. But one shrinks from pushing inquiry in so harrowing a direction.
How long will it be before we have a home-grown menial aristocracy to bolster up and make strong our fashionable aristocracy? It may be longer than one might imagine. The educated people, the lawyers, superintendents, merchants, social, political and financial hangers-on, who serve the plutocracy, fall easily into servile habits. The big corporation lawyer and his family, the fifty thousand dollars a year dummy railway president and his family, eagerly pay court to the great plutocrat, bow and scrape and mould themselves to his and his family’s humors. But the “lower classes” here remain obstinately insolent. They go into plutocratic domestic service only under stress; they act in a manner that exasperates their servility-seeking employers; they leave as soon as they can get any sort of job anywhere. Also, they rouse the soundly sleeping or stunned manhood and womanhoodof the imported aristocracy-adoring servants, and so compel the constant recruiting of the ranks of the menial aristocracy by fresh importations.
True, among the mass of our immigrants, almost all from countries where a real caste system has prevailed always, there is a tendency toward a searching after an aristocracy in this country. They miss it; they cannot believe that a land in all its physical aspects like unto the lands from which they have fled should be without what has always seemed to them a natural and necessary part of the order of the universe. But they hunt for this aristocracy not with the idea of worshipping it, but with the idea of destroying it. And hence we find that the loudest angry assertion of the existence of a true aristocracy here comes from those of our democracy-loving citizens who are foreign-born. They see this monstrous pretense rearing itself as imposingly as the true aristocracies of Europe; and they do not pause to distinguish between marble and plaster painted to look like marble. They raise a wild shriek and demand that snickersnees be drawn and that heads begin to fall. A natural mistake, and highly gratifying to our would-be aristocrats. They are not terrified by the uncouthand futile clamors; though to make the thing more realistic to themselves, they sometimes pretend to be. But they are through and through pleased at hearing themselves in seriousness called what they would fain believe themselves to be; and they say delightedly: “At last, the lower classes begin to recognize themselves, and us!”
But this rejoicing is premature. They are right in seeing that it takes a body of self-confessed peasantry to make a prince—that the prince proclaiming himself and proclaimed by hirelings and dependents only is no prince at all, but a laughing-stock. But they are wrong in seeing signs of a forming peasantry; what they see is an un-forming peasantry—a vastly different matter.
The obstinacy of the American and thoroughly Americanized “lower classes” seems incurable. And until it is cured, until a body of citizens is created that will accept the aristocratic idea not as applying to themselves and making them superior, but as applying to a fixed class of superiors to whom they themselves must be and must remain inferiors—until then, the plutocracy will sigh in vain for transformation into an aristocracy. Imported servants and our own snob graduates of snob collegeswith yearnings after the “cultured and refining influences of caste” will in vain crook the pregnant hinges of the knee. The plutocracy will be haunted and humiliated by the undignifying grin of the “proletariat,” incurably and militantly democratic.
And the more excited about itself and eager to show off the plutocracy becomes, the more insistent and imperious will become the inquiry into the origin and the rightfulness of these vast fortunes that are being reaped where their owners have not sown and squandered after the proverbial manner of ill-gotten gains.