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Levering, Albert, 1869-1929

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The diversions of high society

The diversions of high society

A large crowd of men and women, all wearing formal evening clothes, and the women draped with stunningly sparkling jewels, are at a ball given by “Mrs. Gaster.” Caption: Central office at Mrs. Gaster’s Ball.

Comments and Context

Puck magazine and others, especially as the Muckraking Era dawned, criticized the excesses of the wealthy society denizens of the Conspicuous Consumption class. In fact the Gilded Age — the term having been applied by the eponymous, scathing novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 — was dying. Its gaudy death throes were exemplified in ostentatious events like the ball depicted by cartoonist Albert Levering. The “400,” the exclusionary term coined by the social arbiter of the wealthy in the 1880s in his Social Register, was more commonly seen by the public as the Idle Rich, and worse, instead of model citizens.

One of the most famous parties of the era was given a dew weeks before Levering’s blistering portrayal was published. One of society’s most frivolous moguls was the 29-year-old heir of the Equitable Life Insurance fortune, James Hazen Hyde (1876-1959). Newspapers and magazines — and magazine cartoonists, as here — were agog at the obscene display of jewelry and trappings of privilege.

The diversions of high society

The diversions of high society

A high society auction is being conducted in a circus-like atmosphere where spouses are unloading their unwanted partners for various reasons to the highest bidder. On the left, a lecherous old man, wearing top hat and tails, is peering at a young woman and her daughter. The woman wears a leash which is held by her smug, well-dressed owner. On the right, in a small crowd, a man appears to be offering a bid. Other commodities are available for inspection in little stalls in the background. Caption: The matrimonial mart.

Comments and Context

For almost two decades, Puck had been a magazine of politics, commentary, humor, cartoons, and reform. But in the very first week of 1905, it transformed into a journal that embraced elements of radicalism; perhaps not revolution, but radical reform prescriptions for the American body politic, and with a sense of urgency.

Even indirectly, President Roosevelt was at the center of this shift. An appetite for social and industrial justice overtook other magazines, literature, newspapers, social agencies, and Congress, at least in the House of Representatives. Whether Roosevelt ignited such insurgency, or rode it like one of his new stallions, he associated himself with its impulses in a program known as the Square Deal.