Who Killed Society?

Who Killed Society?, Cleveland Amory’s survey of the social landscape of America, is written with gentle humour, and often appears to be ever-so-slightly mocking its subjects. But a quick glance at the author’s biography makes it quite clear that Amory takes the subject of Society (always capitalised) very seriously:

“Although Amory is the son of a long line of Boston merchants and Harvard graduates, the Amory family originally settled, in the Seventeenth Century, in Charleston, South Carolina.”

Who Killed Society?, published in 1960, is the third volume in a trilogy Amory wrote about Society, starting with The Proper Bostonians, published 13 years earlier. The front endpapers provide a complete list of the “Four Hundred,” the people who “really mattered,” compiled by Ward McAllister, self-appointed arbiter of New York society, and published in the New York Times from 1892. (Apparently, McAllister himself didn’t matter much after he insulted the entire city of Chicago by advising them “not to frappé their wines too much,” a slight for which he was dubbed a “New York Flunky”.)

“I don’t know just when Society died, or who killed it, or what they killed, but it’s gone all right, and it probably didn’t have much of a funeral either. Even the funerals aren’t what they were. The last one I went to had people in the front pew that I wouldn’t have to my funeral over my dead body.”

Casting his gaze back over three centuries, Amory found that these sentiments were strangely enduring. Writers as diverse as F. Scott Fitzgerald, who considered that New York debutante parties were the rendezvous of “parasites, pansies, failures [and] the silliest type of sophomores,” and United States President John Adams, who wrote on a visit to New York in 1774, “I have not seen one real gentleman, one well-bred man, since I came to town,” agreed, leading Amory to conclude, “people have complained about Society not being what it used to be for some 350 years”.

The reason for this, he states, is simple:

“One presents, as it were, one’s calling card by one’s complaint. For example, to say that present-day Society is fine, great shape, wonderful people, etc. is tantamount to an admission that one has never known better, [leaving one] open to the charge of being newly arrived, or as the French put it, nouveau, parvenu or even arriviste.”

In a chapter titled “Social Security,” Amory gives an overview of some of the more prominent ambitious young women who married for a title, culminating in “that most extraordinary of all title marriages,” that of Wallis Warfield Simpson and the Duke of Windsor.

On 5 June 1935, the unnamed diarist recorded that “Mrs S. is a very déclassé American married to a fourth rate Englishman,” but by 22 March the following year, the couple had slipped further in her estimation, becoming “Mrs. Ernest Simpson & her 8th rate husband”.

She also recorded her thoughts on the famous abdication speech:

“Our X-King did his stuff on a radio farewell — I must say it left us all cold — so cheap & would-be dramatic… ‘The woman I love’ business was nauseating… (Mrs. S. made him add that) She has been at him on the phone from Cannes — still trying to run him — as she did, & made him the world’s biggest goat & failure.”

Part 2 of the book, “Family Circle,” provides detailed histories of the “great family dynasties of America”. This section was less interesting to me, but I may return to it as a reference when reading biographies of prominent Americans.

Who Killed Society? is a detailed and extensively researched examination of a long-gone age.