McCallister was a member of the Establishment and a paid social advisor, especially to Caroline Webster Schermerhorn Astor, the acknowledged queen of New York society. The text’s epigram is: “One who reads this book through will have as rough a mental journey as his physical nature would undergo in riding over a corduroy road in an old stage-coach. It makes no pretension to either scholarship or elegant diction.” Many accepted this at face value and the book was satirized and panned.
Society As I Have Found It, McCallister’s memoir of the inner circles of New York society. He was a force in society; the man who coined the term “first Four Hundred” to identify “true” members of New York society. *
McCallister’s picnic of “harmony and pleasure.” on Dawfuskie Island, an hour’s sail from Savannah, his native city, required each family to bring baskets of food, wine, and complete table service, enough for ten persons. Servants spread cloths in the shade and served the cold champagne; no other food was mentioned.
In Newport, picnics were popular events, held at his gentleman’s farm a short ride from Narragansett Avenue, the town’s main street. At one picnic, McAllister says that he provided the filet de boeuf piqué, oven-roasted larded beef. Others were asked to contribute champagne, a pound of grapes, or a quart of ice cream. “These little parties were then, and are now, the stepping-stones to our best New York society. People who have been for years in mourning and thus lost sight of, or who having passed their lives abroad and were forgotten, were again seen, admired, and liked, and at once brought into society’s fold. Now, do not for a moment imagine that all were indiscriminately asked to these little fêtes. On the contrary, if you were not of the inner circle, and were a new-comer, it took the combined efforts of all your friends’ backing and pushing to procure an invitation for you. For years, whole families sat on the stool of probation, awaiting trial and acceptance, and many were then rejected, but once received, you were put on an intimate footing with all. To acquire such intimacy in a great city like New York would have taken you a lifetime. A fashionable woman of title from England remarked to me that we were one hundred years behind London, for our best society was so small, everyone in it had an individuality.”
*When Edith Wharton satirized McCallister as old Mr. Jackson the great authority on “family” in The Age of Innocence, only those with a long memory got the jibe.
Featured Image: “Society’s Snobbish Schoolmaster.” Judge Magazine. November, 1890.
See Ward McAllister. Society as I Have Found It. New York: Cassell Publishing, 1890, rpt. 1975