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In 1938, an English widow paid an amateur archaeologist to dig into some small hills on her property, not realizing that they were going to discover the most spectacular and important find in English history. Netflix’ 2021 movie The Dig (dir. Simon Stone, based on the novel of the same name by John Preston) tells the story of this discovery that reshaped the way scholars understand early English history.

The titular dig, as you may know, occurred at Sutton Hoo, and the amateur archaeologist, Basil Brown, discovered a boat burial in southeast England that most scholars agree was probably the last resting place of the early 7th century East Anglian king Raedwald (d.c.624 AD). The boat, the body within it, and virtually all the other organic materials in the grave had dissolved because of the acid soil conditions, but the ghostly footprint of the boat remained, as well as a staggering collection of burial goods, including his sword, shield, and helmet; his scepter; a large hanging bowl and several smaller ones; the lid of a purse; and numerous items of gold and garnet jewelry. The entire contents of the grave were donated to the British Museum and today the collection stands as one of the greatest stars in the whole museum collection.

The Dig

The film opens in 1939 with a widow in her late 30s, Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) hiring the unprepossessing amateur archaeology Basil Brown (Ralph Finnes) to dig into some small conspicuous hillocks in what is otherwise a flat plain of farmland near the river Deben. Although he is an amateur, Brown quickly recognizes that the hillocks are probably Anglo-Saxon burials rather than Viking burials. Pretty initially wants him to dig Mound 1, but he prefers Mound 2, having spotted signs that Mound 1 might have been robbed. But his initial dig finds very little of value and he nearly dies when the mound partly collapses on him.

Once he recovers, Brown agrees to dig Mound 1 and quickly starts finding corroded iron rivets that demonstrate that this is a ship burial. He soon finds the imprint of the boat; the wood of the boat was entirely gone, but it left a clear impression of the whole external structure of the boat (which practical archaeologists are today using to literally recreate the boat). Pretty allows her cousin Rory (Johnny Flynn) to participate, serving as the dig’s photographer.

Word of the discovery spreads and Charles Phillips (Ken Stott), an archaeologist from Cambridge University, arrives. Recognizing the importance of the site, he gets the Ministry of Works to give him control over the dig, despite it being on Pretty’s private property. Phillips proves an officious asshole, demoting Brown to basically just a caretaker, bringings in a group of archaeologists, include Stuart Piggott (Ben Chaplin) and his wife Peggy (Lisa James). Peggy discovers the burial chamber when she accidentally puts her foot through the surface into a void below. An impressive range of artifacts are quickly unearthed, although the only one that gets particular attention is a Frankish coin that definitely proves the grave is a 7th century one rather than a Viking Age one.

Phillips tries to take get the finds transferred to the British Museum, but Brown reminds him that by British law, when a burial site is found there has to be a coroner’s inquest. The coroner declares all the grave goods Pretty’s property, but at the end of the film she chooses to donate them to the British Museum. At the end, Brown wisely fills in the dig site to preserve it for future exploration.

The Dig in The Dig

The film’s depiction of the archaeology is quite reasonable, if a bit oversimplified. The film suggests that the occurred over the course of the summer of 1939 (Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in September of 39 get some attention late in the film). In reality, Pretty hired Brown in 37, he began digging in 38, spending on season on Mound 3 (which is sort of combined with Mound 2 in the film), and then turned to Mound 1 in 39. But the work of the dig is treated pretty realistically. Initially Brown had two men providing labor and the three of thing were literally digging the mounds with their own hands. There was trouble with mounds collapsing, although the dramatic incident where Brown gets buried and nearly dies seems to have been invented.

Brown first found ship rivets in Mound 2, but had to have them identified by Ipswich Museum, so when one of the diggers found one in Mound 1, he immediately understand the significance and began excavating more carefully. When Phillips saw the dig he immediately understood how important the find was, as the film shows, and he quickly pulled strings to get put in charge of the dig. In the film he demotes Brown to basically just taking care of the site, but in reality Brown, not Peggy Piggott, discovered the burial chamber, which wasn’t actually a void–the wood of the structure had entirely rotted away, causing soil to entirely fill the space. He wasn’t permitted to actually excavate the chamber.

Although the film somewhat simplifies the sequence of events and makes Phillips something of an asshole toward Brown in order to create more tension, overall I (speaking as a non-archaeologist) think the depiction of the actual dig is a reasonable one, given the viewer a decent sense of what the project involved. Surprisingly, there is almost no time devoted to the treasures uncovered. We see a couple of pieces of the gold jewelry, including the pouch lid and the sword’s hilt, but the camera barely focuses on them. For a dig famous for the incredible objects that it produced, this is a surprising choice, although it allows the film to focus more clearly on work and the people involved.

The People in The Dig

While the film takes only small liberties with the archaeological details, the same can’t be said for the people. Its depiction of Basil Brown is fairly accurate. He dropped out of school at 12 to help with his father’s farm, but proved remarkably adept at self-education. He earned correspondence degrees in astronomy, geology, and geography, taught himself Latin and French fluently and Spanish, German and Greek less so. He and his wife May are shown living on a small farm, which was true for a period, but by 1938 they had given it up because they couldn’t make a living on it, and he was making a poor living doing paid archaeological work, among other jobs, and by 1935 Ipswich Museum was hiring him for contract work, which is how he was referred to Pretty when she spoke with someone at the Museum about the mounds on her property.

The film takes more liberties with Pretty. In the film, she’s in her late 30s, but in reality she was in her late 50s; the part was written with Nicole Kidman in mind, and had to be tweaked with the much younger Carey Mulligan was cast. She did indeed have a young son, born when she was 47. Her husband Frank had died in 1934, which led her to develop an interest in spiritualism, which the film omits. The film emphasizes that she is in poor health and by the end of the film she’s convinced she will die soon, but that seems to be exaggeration or outright fabrication. She did die 3 years after the dig, but it was from a blood clot that developed after a stroke.

Charles Phillips comes off worse. In the film he is a short chubby man perhaps in his late 50s or early 60s, something of a curmudgeon and bully, and given to making sexist remarks about Peggy Piggott. In reality he was 39 at the time of the dig, a tall, robust man, noted for his politeness and professional demeanor.

Even more problematic are Stuart and Peggy Piggott. In the film, Peggy is a young, inexperienced archaeologist married to the noticeably older Stuart (Ben Chaplin was in his mid-50s when the film was made, while Lily James was in her mid-20s). Peggy admits she is inexperienced, talks herself down, generally lacks confidence, and literally puts her foot through the burial chamber. Phillips jokes about her clumsiness and comments that it’s a good thing Stuart Piggott didn’t marry a piglet. In reality, Stuart and Peggy met in grad school–he was only two years older than she was. She was a highly accomplished young scholar, having participated in several digs, including leading one, and had received two awards for her work half a decade before the dig started. So the film is really denigrating a woman was already an accomplished archaeologist entirely apart from her husband.

Stuart is quite literally disinterested in his wife. In one scene he rejects her very obvious sexual overture and prefers to sleep in a separate bed from her. The film very strongly implies he’s gay or bisexual and hints that he’s having an affair with one of the other male archaeologists. He can’t even remember that his wife prefers to be called ‘Peggy’ rather than ‘Margaret’. His neglect of her leads her to start an affair with Rory Lomax, the handsome young photographer on the dig. At the end of the film, she basically tells him to carry on his affair because she intends to leave him.

Virtually all of this is made up. Stuart was a brilliant archaeologist, being one of the fathers of pre-historic archaeology in Britain, so it is fair to say that Peggy was somewhat in his shadow, but far from being awkward, he was a charming, witty man who also wrote poetry. There is no evidence whatsoever he was gay or interested in men. The couple did get divorced in the mid-50s. The causes are unclear but a major part of it was certainly that their work had taken them to literally different places, so it is likely they simply grew apart, and Stuart was devastated when Peggy chose to leave him.

Peggy’s affair with Lomax is also made up. Lomax was never at the dig site and was not the dig’s photographer. Instead, the real photographers were a pair of female schoolteachers and amateur photographers, Mercie Lack and Barbara Wagstaff, whose careful work had proven invaluable to the project of reconstructing the ship. For those who are interested, their photographs can be seen at the National Trust website.

Much of this romance triangle derives from the film’s source material, John Preston’s novel, in which he admits he made changes for dramatic purposes. The startling thing is that Preston is Peggy Piggott’s nephew, so it’s shocking that he would treat her so poorly.

It seems to me that choice to focus so heavily on the love triangle was made during the adaption of the script because the book rightly contains a good deal of emphasis on the intellectual issues presented by the burial. What was the date of the burial? Who was buried in it? Was it a Bronze Age, Anglo-Saxon, or Viking? These are questions that influence how we can understand what the site can tell us. But the screenwriter apparently decided that this question was too obscure to get much attention and that the audience would find personal drama like Pretty’s declining health, her young son’s friendship with Brown, and the love triangle around the Piggotts more interesting. So the archaeological questions were basically resolved with “these coins are Merovingian tremissises” to get the boring stuff out of the way, and the deeper implications of the burial are explained in one line of dialogue given to Phillips.

It’s a shame, because the film could easily have focused on the intellectual joy of discovery, which is the thing that drives every archaeologist and historian, and found ways to make that joy clear to the audience, a story we very rarely get to see. Instead, we get manufactured melodrama and a story we’ve seen before.

During my long hiatus from the blog, I watched the first two seasons of Netflix’ Shonda Rhimes series Bridgerton. I always intended to write a couple posts about it, but at this point it’s far enough in my rearview mirror that I don’t remember a lot of what I would have said about it, and I don’t have the time or energy to rewatch it. But I do remember thinking about writing a post on the show’s treatment of racial issues. So I managed to find the time to cobble together another blog post.

In the show, Queen Charlotte, the wife of George III, is played by Golda Rosheuvel, a British actress of mixed English and Guyanese descent. How accurate is this as a casting choice? Was Queen Charlotte Black?

The Historical Queen Caroline

No.

Ok, I should say a little more because otherwise this will be my shortest post ever.

Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was born in 1744 to the German Duke Charles Louis Frederick of Mecklenberg-Strelitz and his German wife Elisabeth Albertine. Duke Charles was the son of Duke Adolphus Frederick II and his German wife Christiane Emilie, Princess of Schwartzburg-Sondershausen. Elisabeth Albertine was the daughter of the German Elector Duke Ernest Frederick I and his German wife Countess Sophie Albertine. Charlotte’s ancestors on both sides go way back to medieval German nobility, and pretty much all of her ancestors are accounted for going back centuries. They are all Europeans.

Here’s a portrait of her painted in 1781 by Thomas Gainsborough.

Of course, it’s possible that one court painter might have changed her features or lightened her skin. Court paintings were generally intended to flatter the subject. So here’s a portrait of Charlotte c. 1761 by German painter Johann Georg Ziesenis. Note the Black servant in the lower left-hand corner to get a sense of how Ziesenis depicted a man of African descent.

Because full portraits were intended to be widely seen, they were more likely to flatter the subject than a miniature was, since those tended to be more for private enjoyment. So here are a couple miniatures of Charlotte.

And for further comparison, here’s a pastel drawing of her done by Francis Cotes around 1767, which someone who knew her said was so lifelike, “it could not be mistaken for any other person.”

So it’s pretty clear that Charlotte had very European features and fair skin that different painters depicted as somewhere between pale white (Grimaldi) to white with rosy cheeks (Gainsborough, Collins) to white with a yellow-orange cast (Cotes). Given all this, where did the idea that Charlotte was Black come from?

The earliest evidence that anyone thought she might have African ancestry comes from Baron Stockman, a German physician who arrived at the English court in 1816, two years before Charlotte died. In his private diary he described her as “small and crooked, with a real mulatto face.” But that seems to have been a private opinion of his, not one he is likely to have shared widely (his comments about other members of the royal family are similarly unkind). Stockman appears to have been the only person to ever suggest while she was alive that Charlotte had any hint of non-European ancestry, although Henry Walpole did comment once that her nostrils and mouth were “too wide”, without directly suggesting she had an African appearance.

The first person to seriously talk about the possibility that Charlotte had African ancestry was a German historian, Brunold Springer, in his 1929 book Racial Mixture as the Basic Principle of Life. Brunold felt that Gainsborough’s portrait was inaccurate. He pointed to a description of her as having “broad nostrils and heavy lips”. He also pointed to a 1762 portrait by Scottish painter Allen Ramsay, which shows her a bit differently.

Comparing the Ramsay portrait and the Cotes drawing to the Gainsborough portrait, it is not unreasonable to notice some faint similarity with women of mixed race. It’s not a slam-dunk case, in part because we’d have to assume all the other many portraits of Charlotte were basically Europeanizing Charlotte’s features. But one could certainly make a case for casting a mixed-race actress like Rosheuvel as Charlotte, although Rosheuvel is significantly more dark-skinned that Charlotte seems to have been. 

But it’s worth noting that other than Stockman no one who knew Charlotte ever mentioned thinking she looked bi-racial (at least not in any document that survives today). One might argue that the people around her were simply being discrete, given that Charlotte was a very important and influential woman at the English court, and that’s a fair point. But the argument from silence is generally regarded as either invalid or very weak. We cannot infer from the fact that no one ever said she looked bi-racial that she did in fact look bi-racial but everyone was too polite or discrete to say so.

Eleven years after Springer’s book, the Jamaican anti-racist author JA Rogers, who was writing to refute Nazi claims of a pure white race published his book Sex and Race: Negro-Caucasian Mixing in All Ages and All Lands. Rogers was eager to cite any evidence he could find that various white people had African ancestry, and while he was often right in his claims, he was also often wrong, and his standards of evidence seem to have been very low. He was willing to use medical pseudoscience to make his case, such as the Nazi idea that the width of the nose was irrefutable proof of a person’s racial identity. Rogers used the Ramsay portrait to ‘prove’ that the wide of Charlotte’s nose proved that she was of “the blond Negroid type”.

Rogers also claimed that both Beethoven and Haydn had substantial African ancestry, claims that don’t stand up well, and also asserted on very weak evidence that Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Warren G. Harding were Black (none of these claims are accepted today). Rogers wrote widely in the Black press of his day, which helped spread the notion that Charlotte was a mulatto.

The Madragana Theory

However, it’s a big leap from the idea that Charlotte might have had some features that suggest a woman of mixed race to asserting that she actually was bi-racial. Rogers was of the opinion that there was a great deal of African ancestry in the German nobility, so in his eyes, Charlotte had inherited her supposedly African nose and mouth from her parents or grandparents.

Then in 1997 genealogist Mario de Valdes y Cocom, building on Roger’s analysis, asserted that Charlotte had “unmistakable African appearance” and “negroid physiognomy”. But rather than claiming as Rogers did that African ancestry was widespread in Germany, Valdes claimed that Charlotte had inherited her African features from a distant Iberian ancestor, Madragana bat Aloandro (b.c. 1230), via Margarita de Castro y Sousa, a 15th century noblewoman. Madragana was a concubine of Portuguese king Alfonso III (d. 1279). Madragana’s father had been the qadi (Muslim judge) of the Algarve, the Muslim kingdom in southwestern Iberia that Alfonso conquered in 1249, completing the Portuguese Reconquista. Born a Muslim, Madragana converted and was baptized as Maior Afonso, “Maior [god] daughter of Alfonso”, so that the king was both her lover and her godfather (a highly irregular arrangement that violated canon law). The couple had a son, Martin Afonso Chichorro, who was Margarita’s great-great-great-grandfather. Margarita, in turn, was Charlotte’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother on her maternal grandmother’s side.

Madragana’s ancestry/ethnicity is unclear. A 16th century source describes her as a ‘Moor’, which in English usage at the time would have meant she was Black (Shakespeare’s Othello is a Moor, and his Blackness is a central issue in the play), and this is how Valdes interpreted the term. However, in Iberia, the term more properly refers to those of North African descent, meaning she would have been primarily of Arabic or Berber descent (assuming the 16th century source was correct in terming her a Moor), although Sub-Saharan descent is definitely possible.

Most scholars today seem to feel Madragana was more likely to be a Mozarab, referring to the pre-Muslim inhabitants of Iberia, who were a mixture of Celts, Romans, and Germanic peoples. Many Mozarabic families stayed Christian immediately after the Islamic Conquest in the 8th century but tended to convert over the next several centuries. That means that Madragana probably had some combination of Celtic, Roman, Germanic, Arab, Berber, or as a slightly more remote possibility, Sub-Saharan ancestry.

So, to recap, Madragana is Charlotte’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother on her mother’s side. Valdes claims that because of this, Charlotte inherited enough of Madragana’s presumed African DNA that Charlotte looked like a woman of mixed European and African descent.

Even if we grant his assumption that Madragana was a full-blooded Sub-Saharan African woman, an assumption that is unprovable, the percentage of Charlotte’s DNA that she would have inherited from Madragana would have been minuscule (roughly .78% of her total genetic inheritance, assuming Charlotte only had 1 ancestor descended from Madragana). The idea that less than 1% of her DNA would have had such a strong influence over her facial features is wildly improbable. Given that during her lifetime only one person seems to have felt Charlotte looked “mulatto”, it makes more sense that Charlotte’s resemblance to a woman of mixed-race was simply a fluke of how Ramsay chose to paint her.

Race as a Construct

However, it’s important to remember that what we call race is not actually a biological trait so much as a social construct. ‘Blackness’ is a cultural matter rather than a genetic one. There are genes that dictate skin tone, and straight or kinky hair, and things like nose and lip shape, but there are no genes for racial identity, and it is not possible to identify someone’s race by studying their DNA. Race is just a social agreement that a certain combination of skin tone, hair type, facial features and so on signal a particular race. Ancient Mediterranean society had no concept of race at all, although they were aware that people from “Ethiopia” had dark skin, and Medieval Europe only began developing any sort of concept of race in the 12th century and it was initially far more about religion than biology. For example, in the Middle English romance The King of Tars, the Muslim Sultan of Damascus converts to Christianity and is baptized and when that happens, his skin changes from black to white.

So people are only racially ‘Black’ or ‘white’ to the extent that their culture chooses to identify them that way, and different cultures have defined racial identity in different ways. According to the infamous One-Drop Rule that used to operate in the United States, anyone with a single drop of African blood should have been considered Black; by that standard Charlotte’s .78% share of Madragana’s DNA would make her Black, regardless of what her facial features were like. 18th century Mexican society developed a very complex collection of terms, collectively known as Casta, to categorize people based on the percentage ancestry they had from Europeans, Africans and Native Americans. These are just two examples of how racial identity can vary from one culture to another. By Casta rules, Charlotte was as white as it was possible to be.

In response to the question I posed above, was Queen Charlotte Black?, I said no, in part because the percentage of her DNA that might have come from Sub-Saharan Africa was vanishingly small. But more importantly, she wasn’t Black because British and German society in the 18th century didn’t perceive her as Black and therefore didn’t categorize her that way, with the possible exception of Baron Stockman, assuming he meant his comment in a very literal way.

Does Charlotte’s Race Matter?

In one respect, no. The woman is long dead and given that she was universally accepted as being white, it’s really an abstract issue. Perhaps in occasional moments she contemplated her appearance in racial terms, but it seems to me unlikely that she would have spent much time on the issue. She almost certainly had no idea that she was descended from Madragana, so as far as she knew, all her ancestors were white Europeans.

But from the standpoint of modern culture, yes, it does make a difference. The British royal family is descended from her–she is Queen Victoria’s grandmother through her third son Duke Edward of Kent, and the entire royal family today is descended from her (apart from spouses). So the idea that the current King Charles and his sons might have Black ancestry is probably meaningful to some Black people living in the United Kingdom because it reduces the degree to which they are the ‘Other’ in British society. This is probably one reason why Valdes’ theory has gained some traction on the Internet–it represents a small balancing of the scales for some Black people.

However, the point that Charlotte is the ancestor of the current royal family is itself an argument against Charlotte being Black. If you look at her descendants, it’s hard to detect much resemblance to Black people in any of them. So if Charlotte looked bi-racial to a few people in the late 18th century, none of her descendants inherited that quality, although Prince Harry’s wife Meghan is bi-racial (her father is Black), so that their children have a substantial degree of Black DNA (although their pictures suggest it’s not prominent in shaping their appearance at this point).

In all of this, I have to acknowledge I’m a white guy, who views people the way white people do. Perhaps a Black historian who is more familiar with the ways African DNA can manifest might detect features in these paintings and photos that suggest bi-racial ancestry. But from what I can see, the argument for Charlotte’s Blackness is almost entirely without merit.

Blackness in Bridgerton

Regardless of what the historical facts are, I applaud Bridgerton for the show’s choice to find a way to be racially inclusive. One of the primary pleasures of Regency Romance is imagining oneself in a sophisticated world of elegant manners, fancy balls, and clever repartee, and Black people deserve that sort of pleasure as much as white people do. Historical romance as a broad genre has generally been very slow to include non-white people in significant roles, usually reducing the occasionally Black character to background or servant characters (as Gone with the Wind so rancidly demonstrates). When theaters stage Shakespeare, there is a well-established tradition now of color-blind casting, so that one can easily see productions with Black Romeos and Asian Lady MacBeths, which allows performers of color to play the great roles that a century or two ago would have generally been denied them. So I think it’s great that Shonda Rhimes (who is, of course, Black) looked for a way to include Black actors like Rosheuvel in the show.

When I watched the first episode, I initially thought that Rhimes was doing some form of color-blind casting, but that idea was dispelled when it became clear that certain families were Black or white (and indeed color-blind casting probably works better in Shakespeare plays than in contemporary tv shows, because theater in general requires a higher level suspension of disbelief). So it quickly dawned on me that Bridgerton is actually set in an alternate timeline in which George III had established racial equality.

(I haven’t read much about the novels, but I don’t think the novels use this device, so it’s just the series. Someone correct me if I’m wrong. Also, I’m aware that there is a spin-off show about George III and Charlotte when they were younger. I’m not referencing that at all because it’s a separate series and Bridgerton has to be judged on its own merits rather than as part of a cinematic universe.)

Once I realized that the show is alternate history, the show worked a bit less well for me. From a purely historical standpoint, George III lacked the power to establish full racial equality. Slavery was still legal in England until 1772, and the slave trade itself remained legal until 1807. The English crown had lost the ability to legislate by fiat centuries earlier, so to the extent that establishing racial equality was a legal issue, it would have taken an act of Parliament and it’s hard to imagine that there would have been enough votes in Parliament to make such a change. George could have granted peerages to Black people without formal legal reform, so in theory Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page) could have become Duke of Hastings without any laws being changed (or more precisely, Simon’s father could have become a duke that way). But the Bassets would certainly have encountered as great deal of racist pushback had George ennobled them.

Had the show basically established that George’s actions had somehow erased all racial discrimination so that by 1813 British people were basically color-blind, I think that would have worked. While unrealistic given the stubborn persistence of racism in Western culture, it would certainly be reasonable to just say that the fans of Regency Romance deserve the fantasy of a color-blind society so they can enjoy an escape from the thorny problems of race in modern society. Essentially, it would just be a genre convention of the show that requires the audience to suspend its disbelief in order to enjoy the melodrama of Regency Romance. That would have been totally valid approach.

However, (and here I’m working off memory, since I watched the show years ago), part of Simon’s plot line in the first season is a conflict he had with his now-deceased father, which revolved around pressure to be seen as being a Black man who deserved elevation to a dukedom. So on the one hand, racism and the pressure to be ‘good Black man’ are real things in the Bridgerton universe. But on the other hand, all the characters treat Basset as their social superior with no trace of resentment or racial animus. So the show wants us to both overlook the fact that Basset and his mother are Black and yet still recognize the way their Blackness and racism shaped them as people. The show wants to eat its cake and have it too.

And that contradiction created a whiplash that repeatedly knocked me out of the show’s fantasy conceit every time it came up. I kept being uncertain if I was supposed to be viewing Basset as existing within the historical racial dynamic or outside of it. I particularly recall one scene where he is sparring with a lower-class Black friend of his, and the idea of a lower-class Black man daring to box with an upper-class man was so jarring to my ability to treat Bridgerton as a version of early 19th century British society that I stopped watching the show for a while. In the real 19th century society, that lower-class Black man would probably have gotten a brutal beating or worse for raising his fists to an aristocrat. But again, I’m speaking out of memory here, so I’m certainly forgetting key details.

In my opinion, The Gilded Age is doing a much better job of navigating the problem of race in the 19th century. Instead of just hand-waving racial issues away and then bringing them back in for character drama, The Gilded Age acknowledges the racial attitudes white people held in the period and uses minor characters to show those attitudes in ways that allow the viewer to understand the challenges Black people faced at the time while still allowing the central Black characters, the Scotts and the Kirklands, to have story arcs that are not primarily about race. Agnes van Rhijn’s somewhat improbable personality requires a little suspension of disbelief, but only when you really think about it. Obviously The Gilded Age is Historical Drama, not Regency Romance, so the foundational assumptions are quite different, but Bridgerton’s approach just feels clumsy to me.

After my series of posts on The Gilded Age, I was pondering if I have the time to keep posting, and while I was looking over the blog, I discovered a draft post I wrote a couple years ago but inexplicably never managed to put up on the blog. All I needed to do was do a quick edit and it’s ready for posting! So enjoy this. My semester is going to be pretty busy, and unless I find some more drafts I never finished, it may be quite a while before I get back to this blog.

I had some downtime last night between writing lectures and grading exams and I decided to spend it watching Being the Ricardos (2021, dir. Aaron Sorkin), which focuses on one week in the life of Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) and Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) as they work on an episode of their seminal tv show I Love Lucy in 1953 while dealing with multiple problems.

The film’s structure is surprisingly complex. It opens sometime decades later with supposed interviews with three key staff-members on the show: Jess Oppenheimer, the executive producer and show-runner (played by Tony Hale in the 50s sequences and John Rubenstein as a much older Oppenheimer); and writers Madelyn Pugh (Alia Shawkat and Linda Lavin); and Bob Carroll Jr. (Jake Lacey and Ronny Cox). The film cuts to these interviews several times to help provide context for the events of the show. After establishing the context a bit, we cut back to a Monday in 1953 with the cast and crew starting the table read for an episode that will film before a live audience on Friday night. As the story progresses, it periodically jumps back in time to the 1930s and 40s, showing us the evolution of Ball and Arnaz’ relationship, and forward to the interviews with the elderly staffers.

The production of the episode, ostensibly the focus of the story, is really a sort of frame-tale within a frame-tale, because this turns out to be a remarkably difficult week for the couple. The first we see of them, Ball and Arnaz are arguing about a story in the gossip paper Confidential titled “Does Desi Really Love Lucy?” detailing Arnaz’ rumored infidelity to his wife, and over the course of the week, Ball repeatedly presses Arnaz to tell her the truth of the story; despite his assurances that there’s nothing to the story, she just can’t let it drop, and right at the end of the film, Arnaz finally admits he spent the night with a couple of hookers.

But almost immediately after their initial argument, the couple makes up and starts making out, only to hear a radio item on gossip columnist Walter Winchell’s show broadly hinting that Ball is a communist. Ball readily admits to Arnaz (who, as a victim of the Cuban Revolution, is understandably hostile to communism) that she once signed a membership card for the Communist party many years earlier to honor her beloved grandfather, but that she never attended any meetings and she insists that she has already been investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and been cleared. Thus for the whole week, everyone is on eggshells wondering if some newspaper will pick up the story and reveal that Ball is the subject of it. On Friday, the shoe finally drops, and Arnaz is forced to make a public announcement refuting the accusation.

As if that weren’t bad enough, early in the week, Ball tells Arnaz she’s pregnant with their second child. Oppenheimer immediately starts talking about ways to hide the pregnancy, but Arnaz, supported by Ball, insists that the pregnancy be incorporated into the show. The CBS executives refuse because American television in the 50s was profoundly conservative, and Arnaz struggles to convince the powers that be to permit them. Ultimately he goes over their heads by writing to the head of Philip Morris, the show’s sponsor, and getting them to approve the idea. This too gets resolved on Friday with an approving telegram from Philip Morris.

So the film deftly weaves together four issues–the production of the episode, the couple’s relationship issues, the accusations of Communism, and the debate over the pregnancy–and lets them all culminate simultaneously. It’s a clever structure that allows Sorkin to make use of both his interest in behind-the-scenes stories and his gift for snappy dialog.

So how true to the facts is it?

Ball and Arnaz

Kidman does a great job as the legendary comedian. She perfectly captures Ball’s voice (both her normal speaking voice and the one she affected for the show) and she nails Ball’s intelligence, instinct for comedy, and her perfectionism. Early in the table-read she spots a problem with the opening of the episode: Lucy is arranging flowers while Ricky sneaks up behind her and playfully puts his hands over her eyes. This just doesn’t feel right to her. Why doesn’t Lucy hear Ricky enter the apartment when the door is just a few feet behind her? Why does he get angry when she pretends not to know who he is by guessing other names? Everyone else is telling her the gag works well enough, but she insists that the joke is condescending to the audience and untrue to Ricky’s character. Later she obsesses over other details like a flower-arranging gag, and she eventually calls Vivian Vance (Nina Arianda) and William Frawley (JK Simmons) onto the soundstage at 2 am so they can work out some physical gags in a later scene. This was very much Ball’s way of working and it foreshadows her ability to take charge of a production company a decade later when she and Arnaz divorced.

Kidman is less adept at catching Lucy Ricardo. The scenes where Ball is playing her alter-ego fail to capture the comedian’s remarkable gift for physical comedy and the film wisely focuses on tv scenes where Kidman isn’t doesn’t have to do pratfalls, although in one scene, while the writers are spitballing ideas for what will become the Trip to Italy episode, Ball pictures the famous grape-stomping sequence and teases out the gags. Kidman makes the grape-stomping bit work, but it just lacks Ball’s spark.

(As a side note, the film also nicely get’s Ball’s hair color right. In the earliest scenes chronologically, she’s shown as a brunette, and Pugh explains when and why Ball started dyeing it. Ball never shied away from admitting her true hair color. In fact, when Arnaz defended Ball against the charge of communism, he quipped, “the only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and that is not even legitimate.”)

The casting of Javier Bardem is a bit more problematic. Arnaz was Cuban and Bardem is Spanish, and many Cubans found this offensive, since the Spanish colonized Cuba. Bardem does a great job in the role (both Bardem and Kidman got Oscar nominations). He captures Arnaz’ energy and charisma nicely, and does a solid job with Arnaz’ signature song Babalu (which, incidentally, is about the worship of the Santeria god Babalú Ayé, something that was definitely lost on American audiences). But the casting gets one thing very wrong. Bardem is 52, far too old for Desi Arnaz, who was 36 in 1953. When he and Ball got married in 1940, he was 23 and she was was 29; the couple was sufficiently embarrassed about the age difference that their marriage certificate claims both were 26. Indeed, when Ball and Arnaz met in 1939 during the making of Too Many Girls, Arnaz was playing a college football player, a detail the film wisely omits because Bardem is just far too old for the role. Arnaz was a much more classically handsome man than Bardem is and visually, he just feels wrong as Ricky Ricardo, an ambitious young musician trying to make it in New York.

Their Marriage

The film captures many of the issues the couple struggled with during their marriage. They were strongly attracted to each other and, as the show demonstrates, trusted each other’s professional instincts. Arnaz was responsible for the production side of the show while Ball focused more on making the scripts work. After they divorced, she bought out his side of their production company, Desilu Productions, and later commented that that was the moment she discovered just how much work he had been doing. It was a brilliant professional partnership responsible for what many still consider the greatest sitcom of all time (as one of the ‘interviews’ points out, they were drawing a viewership of 60 million–for comparison, one of the top network shows of the 2024 season, CBS’ Tracker, had a viewership of only 17.4 million and the top streaming show, Netflix Squid Game was drawing 27.1 million, and this is in a society that has far more television sets than in the 1950s, but also admittedly more viewing options); the episode when Lucy gave birth to Little Ricky was watched on 3/4 of all television sets in the country. And the show has never been off the air, constantly running in re-runs in Los Angeles and many other markets. It’s easy to see why network executives were so worried about the various issues that come up in the film.

But their home life was less successful. In the decade after their marriage, Ball was largely tied to Los Angeles, where she was starring in the hit radio show My Favorite Husband and making a long string of films that earned her the nickname “Queen of the B-movies”, while Arnaz was touring a great deal with his orchestra (he is credited with introducing conga-line dancing to the United States). That made it hard for the couple to spend time together, and it was one of the reasons why Ball insisted that he be allowed to play her husband on I Love Lucy; it was an opportunity for them to actually spend time together.

They were very much in love; they remained close friends after their divorce, and Ball spoke to Arnaz two days before he died of cancer in 1986. During interviews in later life, whenever the subject turned to the difficulties in his relationship with Ball, he would often begin to cry. But Arnaz was a handsome, charismatic young musician from a culture that really celebrated male sexual prowess and did not particularly celebrate a husband’s fidelity. He drank heavily, gambled a great deal, and womanized a lot. The more successful the show became, the more pressure he was under, and he increasingly sought escape from that pressure in ways that eroded his marriage.

But the show is false when it presents that week in 1953 as the moment Ball finally realized he was cheating on her. The cracks in their marriage had already started to show almost a decade earlier. Already in the early 40s, Confidential ran a story entitled “Desi’s Wild Night Out”, and by 1944, he was routinely not coming home after work. She filed for divorce that same year over his carousing and infidelity, but California law required a 1-year waiting period before finalizing the divorce, and the couple reconciled. Confidential did run a story titled “Does Desi Really Love Lucy?”, but it ran in 1955, not 1953. Ball’s publicist got an advance copy of the story and shared it with them. Ball reportedly took the copy and went into her dressing room. The cast and crew waited tensely to see what her reaction would be, since the couple was famous for their fighting, but she came out, tossed the paper to Desi and said, “Oh hell, I could tell them worse than that.”

So Ball already knew going into the show that Desi was sleeping around, and was hoping the show would bring them closer. She pragmatically waited until the show finished its 7-year run and then filed for divorce the next week. The story in Confidential didn’t land for almost two years after the events of the film, and it doesn’t seem to have had much impact on Ball.

The Pregnancy

When the show started, Ball had already given birth to her daughter Lucie, but she really did become pregnant in 1952 with her son Desi Jr. Whereas the pregnancy comes up third in the film, in reality it was the first of the problems they had to deal with; the accusation of Communism came when she was already pregnant and, as just noted, the Confidential story came two years after that.

In the show, Arnaz winds up fighting both the writing team and the network executives over the issue. Lucy tells the writers and Oppenheimer and Carroll immediately start talking about ways to hide it. Arnaz repeatedly fights with Oppenheimer on the issue and hasn’t yet convinced him before the couple tells the network executives, who are even more hostile than Oppenheimer to the idea of incorporating the pregnancy into the series.

In fact, it was the other way around. They excitedly told Oppenheimer the news and, according to Ball, Arnaz told Oppenheimer that they would have to bring the show to an end. Oppenheimer, who clearly didn’t want to lose an already extremely successful show, was quiet for a moment and then said, “I wouldn’t suggest this to any other actress in the world–but why don’t we continue the show and have the baby on TV?”

Neither the network nor Philip Morris were particularly enthusiastic about Oppenheimer’s idea, but because the only other alternative was cancelling the show, they decided to go along, adding a restriction that today seems laughably prudish–the show would never use the word ‘pregnant’. Instead they would say “expecting” or, in Ricky’s Cuban accent, ‘spectin’. Philip Morris initially demanded that only two episodes could address her pregnancy, but Arnaz wrote a letter to the chairman of Philip Morris arguing that if they were asserting that sort of creative control, they would have to take the blame for any ratings problems the show encountered; in essence, he was threatening that if the pregnancy caused genuine scandal, he would blame Philip Morris for it. Morris caved and let the writers decide how to handle it.

In the film, the chairman of Philip Morris signals his approval by sending Arnaz a telegram saying “Don’t fuck with the Cuban.” In reality, that was an internal memo that circulated within Philip Morris and its advertising agency and Arnaz only learned about it much later.

So, overall, the film is right that the pregnancy was a problem that needed to be addressed, but it gets a big part of the issue wrong (Oppenheimer wasn’t an obstacle), and it didn’t happen in 1953, but in the middle of 1952. Ball gave birth to Desi Arnaz Jr in January of 1953, timing the episode in which Little Ricky is born to coincide with the day she had scheduled her Caesarian section. The American public was deeply invested in the pregnancy story-line; advertising revenue for the birth episode was predicted to top $50 million, and it remains proportionally one of the most-watched television events ever.

The Accusation of Communism

Ball was summoned to appear in front of HUAC on Sept 4th, 1953, more than half a year after she gave birth to her son. So the two events did not overlap at all. In a closed door session, she admitted that in 1936, she had signed a membership card for the Communist Party, claiming that she had done so to please her elderly grandfather who was himself a Communist supporter. She had never been an active member in any fashion. She insisted that she had no sympathy whatsoever for the party’s ideals. But this was probably untrue. The California Communist Party’s records list her as a member of the state central committee and a minor Hollywood actress later remembered attending a party meeting at Ball’s home; although she didn’t see Ball at the time, someone at the meeting told her that Ball had gladly lent her home for the party’s use. Ball apparently signed a party member’s running papers for the state assembly.

The committee accepted her claims and promised her that her testimony would stay secret. But two days later the testimony was leaked and gossip columnist Winchell reported a blind item (an item that didn’t explicitly identify who was being talked about) that “the most popular of all television stars” had been questioned about Communist Party membership. The inference that it was Ball was hard to avoid.

The show gets most of this plot line right. There was a discussion with various network and Philip Morris executives about the issue and they concluded it probably wasn’t an issue. But they guessed wrong and a newspaper ran a story directly identifying Ball. Arnaz handled it when he warmed up the audience for the show. Instead of his normal jokes, he directly explained the issue to the audience, talked about Ball’s relationship with her grandfather, and, as already noted, quipped that Lucy wasn’t a ‘red’.

Then the show veers from reality by having Arnaz talk on the telephone in front of the audience with none less than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who assures him and the audience that Ball is “100% cleared”. That didn’t happen. It’s a little hard to imagine Hoover agreeing to do something like that and hard to picture how Arnaz might have made it happen. (In fact, Hoover maintained a file on Ball for years afterward, presumably because he found her testimony as dubious as I do.) In reality, the chairman of HUAC made a public statement hours before the broadcast publicly clearing Ball.

So while the three central plots all happened and are not too far from the truth, they didn’t coincide. Ball and Arnaz navigated them at three separate points. And the episode they are producing in the film, “Fred and Ethel Fight”, is actually an episode from the first season. The episode that Arnaz made his announcement before was a third season episode, “The Girls Go Into Business”. Presumably Sorkin chose “Fight” because it worked better for the themes he wanted to explore in the film. It’s also improbable that the writers would have been discussing Lucy’s Trip to Italy, because that story didn’t run until the 5th season.

The Cast and Crew

I Love Lucy was an ensemble cast, with Fred and Ethel Mertz being integral to every episode. Being the Ricardos captures Vivian Vance and William Frawley quite nicely. Frawley was an old vaudeville song-and-dance man, with a long resumé of supporting parts in plays and films. The role of Fred Mertz had originally been written for Ball’s friend and former co-star Gale Gordon, but Gordon was unavailable for the role. Frawley called Ball and asked for the role. Ball and Arnaz thought he was right for the part (to the extent that they re-conceived the whole character, since Gordon was a much more urbane man than Frawley), but CBS executives were wary of Frawley because he had a reputation as both a difficult actor and a drunk. Arnaz warned Frawley that he would get one screw-up (one version of the story says two); if Frawley ever showed up a second time late for work, drunk, or couldn’t perform as required without a legitimate medical excuse, he would be fired. Frawley never had any serious problems with this and in fact tended to learn his lines quickly after the table-read. He accepted Arnaz’ demands in part because Arnaz wrote a clause into his contract guaranteeing him time off from the show anytime the Yankees made it to the World Series (a clause he was able to make use of 7 times).

The role of Ethel was written for Ball’s friend Bea Benaderet, but like Gordon she was unavailable, and Vance won the part. Vance was frustrated that she was cast as the wife of a man 22 years older than her, and Ball firmly believed that there was only room for one attractive woman on the show, insisting that Vance be dressed dumpily. Ethel’s clothes and bra were a size too small and she didn’t wear a girdle, which was standard for woman during the period, creating the visual impression she was overweight. She had to get a bad dye job and over-perm her hair. While Vance was willing to do this, it dismayed her that the public thought she was so believable as Fred’s wife, and by the end of the series, she was feeling deeply frustrated by how she had to present herself. The film captures this aspect of Vance well, but we’re probably seeing Vance as she was in the later seasons of the show, not as she was in the second season.

Vance and Frawley worked quite well together on-stage, demonstrating a chemistry that made them quite plausible as an old married couple. But in private they intensely disliked each other. Reportedly, they got along well initially, until Frawley overheard Vance complaining about being cast as the wife of a much older man. That infuriated him. From that point on, Frawley frequently referred to Vance as “looking like a sack of doorknobs”, “a bitch”, “a fat-ass” and the like; once when a fan asked him what Vance was like, he described her as “that miserable cunt”. The show captures that side of their personalities well; the first time we see them, they’re arguing before the table-read. But Sorkin’s script substantially tones down Frawley; the real man was given to frequent swearing, was widely seen as unpleasant and a misogynist, and while he never let his drinking interfere with his performance on the show, he drank very heavily. He was known for fighting with his co-stars for much of his career; he once got fired from a Broadway play for punching Clifton Webb in the nose.

Oppenheimer, Pugh, and Carroll were the core of the writing staff (and up until its 5th season, they were the totality of the writing staff). Oppenheimer created My Favorite Husband as a radio show and met Ball when she landed the lead. Pugh and Carroll were already writing partners (but not romantic ones) when they submitted a script to Husband, and the show hired them both. That trio worked on Husband for 2 1/2 years and then Ball brought them all over to Lucy; although Oppenheimer left the series partway through, Carroll and Pugh wrote on every episode.

The network was initially highly resistant to Ball’s demand that Arnaz play her husband; they insisted that the American public wouldn’t believe that an ‘all-American girl’ like Ball would have married a Cuban, ignoring the obvious fact that it was both true and already well-known. Ball hired Pugh and Carroll to write a stage act that she and Arnaz would perform as part of his touring show. Audiences loved it so much that the executives were convinced to greenlight the show.

Pugh was more than just a simple writer of jokes. She was in many ways Ball’s stand-in in the writer’s room. She had a keen eye for physical comedy and because she and Ball were about the same size, she would do many of the stunts first to make sure that they could be done safely. As Carroll explained, “We’d wrap Madelyn in rugs and strap her into swivel chairs and hang her out of windows, and she came through nicely. So I said, if it works for Madelyn, it will work for Lucy.” One gag involving a unicycle got cut when Pugh ran into a wall and seriously hurt her head.

As the stunt was mapped out, Pugh would then type up the script with highly-detailed step-by-step instructions in boldface for how the stunt was to be done, including details such as what expressions Ball would make. Ball began calling these descriptions “the black stuff” and followed them meticulously. Thus Ball’s clowning owes a great deal to Pugh’s insights into what would work.

Little of that gets into the film, which generally attributes the clowning purely to Ball’s genius. Instead, in one scene Pugh is depicted as a feminist, seeking to make Lucy Ricardo more intelligent and more adult, which Ball finds mildly insulting, although Pugh points out that Lucy Ricardo literally wails like a baby in some episodes.

None of that seems true. Pugh was something of a ground-breaker, being one of the first women allowed into comedy-writing rooms, but she seems to have been very casual about it. The birth of American Second-Wave Feminism wouldn’t really happen until Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963, so it’s unlikely that Pugh self-consciously saw herself as fighting for women. Nor was Ball a feminist, even at the end of her life. She freely admitted that she had fought battles in the workplace, but she rejected the need for ‘women’s liberation’, insisting that she had always felt liberated. It has only been in retrospect that scholars have identified Ball (and her alter-ego) as important figures in the history of women’s rights, pointing out the way that Ball’s comedy simultaneously affirmed and subverted notions of the submissive housewife and that Lucy Ricardo embodied the 50s housewife’s yearning for a more meaningful life beyond domestic chores.

Oppenheimer, incidentally, invented the in-lens teleprompter, first used on Lucy.

Other Details

The show only briefly calls attention to it, but Arnaz was a seminal figure in the development of television. In 1951, sitcoms were filmed on soundstages with a single camera and no audience. A scene would be filmed multiple times with the camera in different places to catch different aspects of the scene, and jokes would be underscored with a laugh track. But Ball felt that she worked best with a live audience, like she had with Husband. Arnaz therefore pioneered the idea of filming before a live studio audience. This was much harder to do than it sounds, because soundstage fire codes made it difficult to have space for an audience, and the presence of the camera would make it harder for the audience to see the stage. Arnaz went to considerable trouble to figure out how to square that circle, positioning the audience on elevated risers to allow them to see over the cameras and figuring out how to fit that with the fire codes. Thus he basically created the live-audience television sitcom.

But all of that created its own problem, because union contracts meant that the crew couldn’t be a standard movie crew under this arrangement. Arnaz therefore had to repurpose the company that handled his touring shows into one of the earliest television production companies, Desilu Productions, named for him and Ball; Desilu was the leading American production company throughout the 50s and into the 60s. As a result, Arnaz was extremely budget-conscious because he was the one signing the checks. He concluded that a three-camera set-up would work better because a scene could be filmed in a single take rather than multiple ones (which saved money) and it had the added benefit of keeping the script fresher for the audience, who would often be seeing each scene only once and would therefore laugh more. He didn’t invent the three-camera set up, contrary to what is commonly said online, because it was already being used on Amos ‘n’ Andy, which started filming the same year as Lucy, but he demonstrated how it could practically work, laying the groundwork for much of modern sitcom filming.

His budget came from CBS. They were initially leery of him until early in 1952, when he informed them that they had accidentally over-budgeted the show by $1 million, which he discovered because he had been keeping such a close eye on the books. That admission won him the support of the network and helps explain why they were willing to trust him when the pregnancy issue came up.

CBS had contracted for 39 episodes a season. Lucy’s pregnancy forced them to cut the season short. But the network stations had to have something to broadcast to replace the missing episodes. So Arnaz offered them old episodes, thereby inventing the concept of the re-run, which was only possible because their contract gave Desilu ownership of all the footage. Thus Arnaz also basically laid the groundwork for syndication, which made him and Ball even wealthier than the show was already making them.

Arnaz was also the first Latino to star in a network television show, and in that sense he is a highly important figure even if he is not today considered very noteworthy as an actor. While his Cuban identity was sometimes a source of humor on the show, mostly in the form of his accent and his tendency to switch into Spanish when he was agitated, the show avoided most other stereotypes about Latinos and treated him with great respect (his character in the show is a successful performer and businessman) and Ricky is unquestionably in charge of his household. Unlike most ‘Latin lovers’ in film and tv at the time, Ricky Ricardo is not a womanizer or sleazy and it is clear that the character is absolutely devoted to his wife, despite her tendency to exasperate him. The show also avoids the ‘greasy’ and lazy Latino clichés, both of which were common in the 50s. He was thus a groundbreaker both on and off-screen.

Ball herself was more than just a sitcom pioneer. After Lucy ended its run, she bought out Arnaz’ share of Desilu and became the first women to head a tv production company and one of the most powerful women in television. She joked that when she started calling all the shots in business deals and production meetings, the men started adding an S to her last name. Ball was particularly responsible for helping establish the most successful tv franchise of all time when she picked up Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and stood with it in the face of repeated network skepticism.

The film occasionally uses anachronistic language; for example at one point Ball accuses Arnaz of ‘gaslight[ing]’ her, despite the fact that the term only really entered in the language in the last decade or two. More seriously, Arnaz describes the pregnancy storyline as “an arc”, using a term that only began to emerge in the 1990s, because it was only in the late 80s that tv shows other than soap operas began to have stories that continued from one episode to the next. Sitcoms had a ‘situation’ that always began and ended with the status quo regardless of what upheavals might occur during the episode. Characters did not evolve and change as time went on because doing so would disrupt the situation, although characters might come and go from the cast when necessary. In fact, Lucy’s pregnancy storyline may be the first use in sitcoms of what we today call a story arc.

(I say ‘may’ because the first sitcom ever, Mary Kay and Johnny, did incorporate the [married in real life] couple’s pregnancy into its story at least in the sense that there were references to Mary Kay being pregnant and one episode featured Johnny in the waiting room while Mary Kay gave birth off-stage. How much the pregnancy was an actual plot point in the 15-minute episodes I’m not clear on.)

Overall, Being the Ricardos captures a lot about Ball and Arnaz and their famous show. The story it tells is strongly rooted in fact, even if it massages the timing of events a great deal, and it captures the personalities of the ensemble cast nicely. It really reminds us why we all love Lucy.

Want to Know More?

Being the Ricardos is available on Amazon.

If you want to learn more about Ball and Arnaz, Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz is a good place to start.

As I wrap up my last post on HBO’s The Gilded Age, I had a couple random details from the show that aren’t enough for a whole post, so I’m just going to toss them out here.

Stamford White

In the first season, when the Russells have just moved into their new mansion, their architect Stamford White appears in a couple of scenes as a minor character, played by John Sanders. This is a very nice historical touch. The real Stamford White was just beginning to make a splash as an architect in 1883. Like a lot of architects in this period, he had no formal schooling but had served a 6-year apprenticeship to an established architect, and then he spent a year and a half touring Europe, learning about the latest styles. When he returned, he formed a new architectural firm with two other young architects, McKim, Mead, and White, which operated on the principle that they would attribute all their work to the three of them jointly rather than claiming individual credit for their projects.

By 1884, White was getting commissions from prominent New Yorkers, designing churches, office buildings, mansions (including one for Mamie Fish), public buildings (including Boston Library), and perhaps most famously the New York Triumphal Arch at Washington Square. He designed the second Madison Square Garden building (which was torn down in the 1920s). Thus George and Bertha are positioned as one of White’s early patrons, and the show is subtly suggesting that their mansion was a reason that White’s career really took off.

But White had a dark side that the show doesn’t even hint at. Although he married in 1884, at some point he seems to have joined an underground sex club that catered to wealthy New York City men. He groomed vulnerable teenage girls for sex, helping them out financially, using his considerable personal charm to win their trust, and then pressuring them or seducing them into providing sex. Mark Twain, who knew White, eventually claimed that White’s activities were widely-known in New York society.

In 1901, White began a relationship with Evelyn Nesbit, a 16-year-old chorus girl and sometime model. With White’s help, Nesbit was able to establish herself as a model and artistic muse; she became one of the key models for Charles Gibson’s famous ‘Gibson Girl’ fashion ads. At the height of her career, she was perhaps the most famous model in the United States, earning $10 a day (roughly $300 in modern dollars). White invited her for dinner multiple times, always with her mother present, so when her mother was out of town one evening, his dinner invitation seemed innocuous. After dinner, he asked her to change into a kimono. Based on what Nesbit later said publicly, White appears to have drugged her, because she awoke naked in his bed several hours later, alongside him, and blood on the sheets demonstrated that she was no longer a virgin.

About the same time, Nesbit became involved with Henry Kendall Thaw, the son of a Pittsburg railway magnate and brother of Alice Thaw, whom we met a few posts back when British aristocrat George Seymour blackmailed her at the wedding altar. The two became romantically, and in 1903, Nesbit underwent “emergency surgery for appendicitis” in Europe, which many have suspected was actually an abortion for what might have been actor John Barrymore’s child. (It’s also possible it was Thaw’s child, since as we’ll see, there’s at least a little reason to suspect Nesbit was lying about her sexual history.)

Thaw was obsessed with female virginity; on a trip with Nesbit in Europe he took her to multiple churches devoted to virgin saints. Thaw proposed but Nesbit declined, realizing that she would need to explain to him why she wasn’t a virgin. But in 1905, she finally relented and the two were married. When he learned of what Nesbit claimed White had done to her, he immediately began trying to ruin White’s reputation. Thaw, who was a morphine addict, developed a delusion that he was being followed by thugs White had hired, although White seems to have been largely unaware of Thaw’s obsession with him.

In June of 1906, the Thaws attended a musical review at Madison Square at which White was present. During the finale, Thaw drew a pistol and fatally shot White from two feet away., shouting that White had ruined his wife and then abandoned her. This resulted in a scandalous murder trial at which Nesbit’s claim of being deflowered by White became headlines in what the press declared “the trial of the century”. White’s reputation was destroyed as a result of the trial. Thaw’s mother (who had brokered the deal that preserved Alice’s marriage and reputation) deployed an army of experts to argue that Henry was only temporarily insane, because she was afraid that the Thaw family’s history of mental illness would become known. Mrs Thaw paid Nesbit a very large sum of money to provide testimony favorable to Henry (which is why I referred to what White did her as Nesbit’s ‘claim’–it’s easy to see that Nesbit had multiple reasons to lie on the stand and blame the victim, as well as to misrepresent the facts to her husband).

There were two trials. Because of the sensational nature of the crime, the first jury was sequestered, the first time such a procedure was ever used in an American courtroom. The jury deadlocked 7 to 5 for White’s conviction. A second trial resulted in Thaw pleading temporary insanity; he was found not guilty but was involuntarily confined in an asylum for the rest of his life. He escaped from the asylum in 1913, fled to Canada, was extradited, but declared sane in 1915.

This whole scandal was eventually fictionalized in the 1955 Hollywood movie The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (titled after a swing White had in his apartment) with Ray Milland as White, Joan Collins as Nesbit, and Farley Granger as Thaw.

T. Thomas Fortune

One of the recurring characters in Peggy Scott’s (Denée Benton) plot lines is T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones). Fortune is in fact a significant figure in Black history, although one who is less-well-known today. Born into slavery in Florida, after the Civil War, Fortune received a literate education and worked as a printer’s apprentice in Jacksonville. From 1876-79, he worked at a newspaper in Washington, DC, and then moved to New York City. He initially worked as a printer but quickly began working as a journalist as well. In 1880, he became the editor of The Rumor, which eventually changed its name to The New York Globe. The Globe folded in 1884 after Fortune got into a dispute with its publisher, and he quickly opened up the New York Freeman, where he soon became the most prominent and influential Black editor in the country. As a journalist and editor, he helped raise the standards for Black journalism on a national level.

In addition to publishing newspapers, Fortune also became an important author on Black civil rights, publishing 20 books and pamphlets. As part of the National Afro-American Council, he worked with Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, and Ida B. Wells (who has been cited as a partial inspiration for Peggy Scott’s work as a journalist). Fortune was a proponent of Black self-help and was a vocal champion of Black education (as the show demonstrates with the visit Fortune and Peggy pay to Tuskegee in the second season). Whereas Frederick Douglas argued that Black people should support the Republican Party whole-heartedly, Fortune was more skeptical of Republicans, criticizing them for being almost as corrupt as the Democratic Party at the time. He reluctantly supported Grover Cleveland in 1884, but after that began flirting with supporting the Democrats, which drew furious criticism from Douglas. By 1890, Fortune abandoned the Democrats and became a strong supporter of the Republicans, campaigning for McKinley in 1900. He was a prominent voice in nearly every major debate taking place within the Black Community between the mid-1880s and the early 1920s and is thus an important figure in the emerging Civil Rights movement.

The show portrays Fortune as becoming infatuated with Peggy, despite the fact that he was married, and in season three he almost gets into a fistfight over Peggy with Dr. Kirkland at a train station. I’m unclear how consistent this depiction is with fact. In the early 1900s he became estranged from his wife and he developed a drinking problem. He also struggled with mental illness later in life. So at least broadly speaking, the depiction of Fortune as being willing to commit adultery with Peggy and being extremely jealous of Dr. Kirkland is plausible.

The Brooklyn Bridge

One of the fun side-plots of the series is the second season storyline involving the Brooklyn Bridge, in which Larry Russell (Harry Richardson) is tasked by his father with managing issues around the Brooklyn Bridge. Larry eventually figures out that the architect in charge of the project, Washington Roebling, is too ill to oversee the work and that in reality his wife Emily (Liz Wisan) is functionally in charge of the whole project, despite the fact that women were not trained as engineers in this period. Larry arranges for Emily’s contribution to the Bridge to be publicly acknowledged.

There’s a substantial core of fact here. A respected architect, John Roebling, was commissioned to build the Brooklyn Bridge (having just built the Cincinnati-Covington Bridge, at the time the longest suspension bridge in the world). John appointed his son Washington as assistant engineer, but John died in 1869 from tetanus after an accident at the construction site, and Washington took over as chief engineer.

Construction of the underwater support pylons for the bridge required the use of pneumatic caissons in which the workers would labor. The caisson was uncomfortable for the workers, and over the course of the project, 20 men died from decompression sickness (“the bends”, although at the time it was known as ‘caisson disease’). To help keep up worker morale, Washington spent more time in the caissons than any of the workers, and as a result he contracted decompression sickness by 1870. He never fully recovered and was left bedridden until the end of his life. Washington’s wife Emily took on the role of intermediary, transmitying her husband’s directions to the various crews working on the Bridge. As the work progressed, Washington essentially taught Emily engineering, giving her a strong working knowledge of materials analysis, stress analysis, cable construction, and a variety of other key issues that she needed to understand in order to complete the work. As a result, Emily was able to informally take over many of her husband’s duties as chief engineer, overseeing the construction crews, negotiating with politicians. She did this to such an extent that people began to suspect that she had actually designed the bridge.

By 1882, Washington’s absence had become so obvious that there were discussions about removing him as chief engineer. Emily lobbied hard to keep her husband in his position, and she was eventually successful. In the show, Larry’s the one who figures this out while everyone else had been successfully hoodwinked, but this misrepresents the situation. The Roeblings don’t seem to have really tried to hide what was going on.

When the Bridge was opened in 1883, prior to the opening ceremony, Emily rode across the Bridge in a carriage alongside President Chester Arthur, carrying a rooster as a sign of victory. During the opening ceremony, Abram Hewitt, New York’s representative in Congress, acknowledged Emily’s crucial role by saying “The name of Emily Warren Roebling will…be inseparably associated with all that is admirable in human nature and all that is wonderful in the constructive world of art.” He went on to declare the Bridge “an everlasting monument to the sacrificing devotion of a woman and of her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred”.

Although the show strongly suggests that Emily was the true designer and builder of the Bridge, that exaggerates the facts somewhat. Emily was crucial to the building of the Bridge, but Washington continued working on the project within the limits of his illness and it’s probably most fair (from what I have read) to regard the bridge as a collaboration between the Roeblings. Her contribution was acknowledged at the time, but has generally been forgotten since then.

The Depression of 1882-1885

You wouldn’t know it, but the show is set in the middle of the third worst depression in American history (behind only the Great Depression and the Long Depression of 1873-79). The period from ’79 to ’82 was a boom period driven by the expansion of the American railroad network, which opened up all sorts of new possibilities for the movement of goods and products. It also benefitted from a strong balance of trade that made the money supply larger, thus enabling credit and investment. But new railroad construction declined by nearly 50% between ’82 and ’83, which caused a decline in iron and steel production. Competition between railroads (as well as fighting between Gould and Vanderbilt) created further problems and discouraged investment.

Then in 1884, a banking crisis erupted. Europe lacked sufficient gold supplies and drew gold out of the US, forcing New York banks to sharply curtail investments. Ulysses S. Grant’s son, Ulysses Buck Grant, formed a brokerage partnership with Ferdinand Ward, Grant and Ward. Ward proved to be a terrible investor and resorted to altering the books to make it look as if his investments were making money. Eventually he set up a Ponzi scheme to pay his investors; he also took out a loan from the Marine Bank, which in turn took out a large loan from New York City.

But in April of ’84, New York City withdrew its deposits from Marine Bank, which forced Marine Bank to call in its loan to Grant and Ward. Grant and Ward immediately failed, revealing Ward’s crimes, and Marine Bank collapsed as well. Ward eventually served 6 years in prison, during which his wife arranged from her family money to be put in a trust for the couple’s son. After he got of prison he tried unsuccessful to kidnap his son from the custody of his wife’s family.

Around the time that Grant and Ward failed, it was discovered that the president of Second National Bank had embezzled about $3 million and fled to Canada, causing a severe run on the bank until the president’s father stepped in to shore up the bank. Additionally, a rumor circulated that the president of the Metropolitan Bank had arranged to borrow money from it to invest in railroads; the rumor proved untrue but it nearly triggered the collapse of that bank as depositors pulled their money out and the bank temporarily closed. This caused a collapse in confidence in a series of other banks in New Jersey and Pennsylvania that were connected to Metropolitan. All of this caused credit to become even more scarce. The panic gradually subsided when an outside organization audited the Metropolitan Bank and declared it solvent. By 1885 the depression had ended.

If you listen closely to the discussions of loans and investments that George Russell (Morgan Spector) is involved in, you’ll hear these banks being mentioned and there’s a reference in season three to Grant and Ward and Marine Bank failing (which means that season 3 is actually set in 1884). Since the show is not really about the economics of the Gilded Age, none of this gets much attention, but it’s still a nice touch.

As I noted at the start of this post, this is the last post I’m going to do on The Gilded Age. Overall, I think the show does a decent job of trying to capture the elite side of Gilded Age New York, especially with Peggy Scott’s plot lines allowing the show to explore the lives of Black people at the time. George and Bertha are reasonable stand-ins for William Kissam and Alva Vanderbilt, albeit a little toned down and nicened-up to fit Julian Fellowes’ conviction that rich bastards are actually decent human beings. Everything always ends nicely for everyone, which is most definitely not the case during this period (and honestly, Fellowes truly sucks at plotting–almost major crisis gets resolved within the following episode, so there’s rarely any lasting dramatic tension). But I’m the Historian who Goes to the Movies, not the Screenwriter who Goes to the Movies, so I’ll just stick to my lane and say that the show could be a lot worse as a depiction of its time period, and I’m glad it’s drawing attention to a period most Americans are woefully unaware-of.

The late 19th century in America is not often depicted in film or television (in contrast to the Late Victorian Age in Britain, which is a pretty popular setting), and even more rare is any depiction of the position of Black people in the post-Reconstruction era. So I really like the fact that The Gilded Age has chosen to put a Black woman, Peggy Scott (Denée Benton) right at the center of the show. The friendship she strikes up with the white Marion Brook (Louisa Jacobson) allows the show to first incorporate Peggy into the Van Rhijn household and then bring in first her parents Dorothy (Audra Scott) and Arthur (John Douglas Thompson), and then in the 3rd season, a wider Black community in Newport and New York.

When he was developing The Gilded Age, Julian Fellowes had the good sense to recognize that he couldn’t write a story about Black people without collaborating with Black writers. His co-showrunner and executive producer Sonja Warfield is a Black woman, the show’s other executive producer Salli Richardson-Whitfield is a Black woman, and the show’s historical consultant, Erica Dunbar is Black woman who is an expert on the Black elites in the 19th century. Their influence makes the show far stronger than Downton Abbey in terms of how plausible it is as a depiction of the era.

There was so much I want to say about this subject that I had trouble making this into a post that flows well. I probably ought to have made this two separate posts, but this is already my 5th post on the show, and I have at least one more. So please forgive the choppiness of it.

The Black Elites

The period after the Civil War was a period of enormous change and opportunity for many Black people, especially for those who had formerly been enslaved. Many newly-freed Black people moved northward either to pursue opportunities or to escape the racism and harsh legacy of slavery or simply because they were free to go where they wanted. Some were able to take advantage of the work opportunities provided by the growing Industrial Revolution or the access to formal education to advance themselves socially and economically. This is obviously a massive historical issue, and I’m far from an expert in it, so I’m just going to focus on stuff that’s directly relevant to what we see in the Gilded Age.

White society, by and large, tended to view Black society as an undifferentiated group, without any meaningful class distinctions within it. And in fact, white periodicals actively ridiculed the idea, mocking the notion that Blacks could demonstrate the wealth, refined manners, and sophisticated social events of the white elites.

This bothered a lot of Black people, who were keenly aware of a class hierarchy that operated within Black society. They recognized a large lower class who engaged in manual labor of various sorts, a small but growing middle class of educated professionals and small business owners, and a tiny upper class who enjoyed real wealth. Those higher up the Black hierarchy naturally disliked being lumped in with people they considered beneath them, but unfortunately white racism generally trumped Black class and wealth (and sadly often still does).

This upper class included the small number of Black millionaires, people like Jeremiah Hamilton (d.1875) who made a fortune in real estate and insurance fraud, lost it all in the crash of 1837, evaded a New York lynch mob during the draft riots in the city during the Civil War, and managed to leave about $2 million (around $250 million in modern dollars) when he died. Mary Ellen Pleasant (d.1904) inherited modest wealth from her husband, moved to San Francisco and invested in real estate and mining to enormous success; she was an active abolitionist before the war and helped fund John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. Robert Reed Church (d.1912) became quite rich in Memphis after the War by investing in real estate and various businesses. Madame CJ Walker (d.1919) made a sizable fortune in New York City through a beauty products and hair care business; she has often but incorrectly been said to be the first Black millionaire, probably because previous Black millionaires had been less high profile. O W Gurley (d.1935) founded the Greenwood district of Tulsa, OK, turning it into the ‘Black Wall Street’ until it was destroyed during the 1921 Tulsa Riot. James Lewis (d.1914) was the son of a white plantation owner and a slave concubine. After the Union captured New Orleans during the Civil War, he raised the first regiment of Black soldiers to serve in the Union army, the Free Louisiana Volunteer Native Guards. His wife Josephine came from a free Black slave-owning family. After the war, he was prominent in Republican politics and held a series of appointed offices in New Orleans and finished his political career as federal Surveyor General to Presidents Roosevelt and Taft.

Blanche Bruce deserves special mention. Bruce was born into slavery in Mississippi as the son of his mother’s legal owner. Somewhat uncommonly, Bruce’s father raised him in a degree of considerable equality with his legitimate son, allowing them to play together and arranging for Blanche to get the same education his half-brother received. Accounts differ about how he achieved his liberation from slavery, but he studied at Oberlin College in Ohio for two years. During Reconstruction, he moved back to Mississippi and purchased a plantation in 1868, and from that point on he was first appointed and then elected to various political offices, in large part because newly-enfranchised Black men were able to out-vote white voters. In 1874, Bruce was elected to the US Senate, making him the second Black person to hold office in the Senate (the first being Hiram Rhodes Revel, who was elected in 1870 for a single year, the office being vacant at the time because of the Civil War. Whereas Revel only held office for a year, Bruce served a full term and then stepped down, but remained in Washington DC where he became the unquestioned center of elite Black society in the city. He continued to be a force in politics until his death in 1898. While Bruce was not the wealthiest Black man in Gilded Age America (his net worth was only around $150,000, a still quite considerable sum at the time), he was probably the Black man with the highest social status in the whole country, thanks to his elected office.

However, while some talented Black men and women were able to build impressive fortunes through hard work and a good eye for business, and a few won election to high state or federal offices, it’s important to note that the number of Black millionaires was minuscule and their fortunes did not approach those of the Robber Barons. They generally started out with fewer resources and often lacked the access to political power that enabled men like Jay Gould to break the rules; recently-freed slaves lacked any sort of generational wealth. Open racism was widespread, even among liberal-minded whites; even former abolitionists could be quite racist. Racist attitudes meant that many business doors remained closed to Black entrepreneurs, bank loans were hard to come by, and some encountered various forms of violence, up to and including lynching and riots (as particularly evidenced by the Tulsa Riots in 1921). Even the wealthiest Blacks still encountered issues of segregation, and as The Gilded Age shows, the vast majority of high society balls and dinners would have been segregated affairs.

The majority of the Black Elite would have been middle class, making their fortunes as doctors, lawyers, or businessmen running modest shops or service companies such as funeral homes or clothiers. Smaller numbers might own factories or shipping companies, but these would have been of very modest size compared to the companies headed by the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. The most socially prominent Black men in New York City in this period were James W. Mars, who was a caterer by profession, and Charles H. Lansing, who held a white-collar job in the Brooklyn Water, Power, and Electricity Department. Their social occasions defined “the Black 400” In 1890, it was calculated that the wealth of the 20 richest Black men in Baltimore totaled around $500,000, with the richest having about $75,000. In 1910, WEB Dubois estimated that ten or fewer Black men in New York City owned more than $50,000 each.

Scholars have offered a variety of terms for this group: the Black Elite, the Colored Aristocracy, the Black Bourgeoisie; the Black 400, the ‘Upper Tens’ and ‘best society’ were common terms among Black authors in the Gilded Age. Black society was, as already noted, highly conscious of the social hierarchy within their community and discussed the issue quite frequently in newspaper articles and the like. Upper class Blacks often divided themselves into the Old Families, who had been free and enjoyed some wealth prior to the Civil War, and the New Families, whose members were often former slaves and those who had risen out of poverty after the Civil War. The Gilded Age does a nice job of showing this. The Scotts are a New Family, since Arthur had been enslaved and has made his money as a successful middle class pharmacist, whereas the Kirklands, especially Elizabeth (the wonderful Phylicia Rashad), are proud of their Old Family ancestry, which traces back to the American Revolution.

One white author in Baltimore, writing with surprise about the complexities of the Black social hierarchy said, “Colored society has rules as strict as the laws of the Medes and Persians. It is full of circles and each succeeding circle holds itself proudly above the one just below it. A colored aristocrat is one of the most perfect pictures of conscious exclusiveness that the world has ever known.” When James Lewis died, the New York Times remarked, “Lewis was an aristocrat of his race and was not disposed to associate on terms of equality with the mass of his people. He held himself, in a measure, aloof from them, even while working zealously for their betterment.” Elizabeth Kirkland would clearly approve.

The Black Elites were highly conscious of the fact that white society could easily mistake one of the Black 400 for “the most degraded and brutal element of their race”, as an author of the time described working-class Black people. Because of that, the Black Elites put a very heavy premium on two things that could potentially distinguish them from working-class Blacks, education and manners. They wanted their sons to attend Harvard or Yale or one of what would today be called Historically Black Colleges. They wanted their daughters to be literate and cultured; Agnes was deeply impressed by Peggy’s handwriting because that small detail suggested she was well-educated and disciplined. They hosted literary salons and hosted visiting authors, in part to advertise the education. Many saw Black access to education as a crucial issue for the social advancement of Black people, and as the show demonstrates in one plot line, they often organized to fight for it.

They also insisted on a very rigid application of manners, dress, and social etiquette. These things excluded most lower class Blacks very intentionally, because the Black Elite were afraid of being lumped in with them, and this very nebulous issue of ‘good manners’ was an attempt to signal to the white elites that they were part of the same group because they shared the same values. Understandably, lower-class Blacks often disliked such exclusionism and often complained about it in the Black press.

The Van Rhijn Family

Early on the show establishes a complex history for the Van Rhijn characters Agnes (Christine Baranski), Ada (Cynthia Nixon), Oscar (Blake Ritson), and Marion. Agnes and Ada had an older brother Henry who is newly deceased in the first episode; their father was a Pennsylvania Brook who married into the Knickerbocker Livingston family. Their father, thus far unnamed, was wealthy but also surprisingly liberal for someone whose daughter is as socially-conservative as Agnes. He was a patron of the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, the first college established in the United States for Black people (it eventually relocated and became Cheyney University today). So it’s likely that he was abolitionist, although the show never explicitly says this. The father being an abolitionist might explain why Henry served as a general in the Civil War.

As Agnes presents it, she was raised to consider treating Black people as equals as an issue of courtesy rather than one of political identity; she doesn’t present herself explicitly as an abolitionist or a supporter of the advancement of ‘colored people’ (as Black people were politely termed in this period). She treats the Scotts and Dr Kirkland with reasonable politeness, being essentially disinterested in the fact that they are Black rather than white (or perhaps interested enough to use their presence as an opportunity to demonstrate her good manners and breeding). She’s clearly proud of the fact that her father patronized the Institute for Colored Youth and hires Peggy to serve as her secretary based to some extent on the fact that Peggy attended the Institute and has impeccable penmanship.

While Agnes is a rather improbable combination of traits–conservative, rigidly interested in maintaining proper social hierarchy, skeptical to social reform movements, but somehow not overtly racist in any way–her attitude toward Black people is necessary for the show to work. It provides the foundation for Peggy’s story and it allows Peggy to be in regular contact with Marion, building the friendship that unites to the two social worlds of the show. Thus while it is unlikely that many such women like Agnes actually existed in this period, I think we just need to accept the idea that she could have.

Racism

The show positions racism as a characteristic of bad people. Whites who reject Black equality are basically villains in the narrative, which makes sense given that the show wants to appeal to both white and Black viewers and fit contemporary views. The Van Rhijn’s maid Bridget (Taylor Richardson) briefly expresses discomfort with having to live alongside a Black woman, but she quickly sheds that and accepts Peggy. The only villain in the house is Mrs Armstrong (Debra Monk), who regularly demonstrates that she’s racist while not quite saying so, and Agnes eventually puts her in her place by making it clear that she will fire Armstrong if Armstrong continues to make trouble for Peggy.

Elsewhere in the show, the show doesn’t shrink from demonstrating the racist attitudes of the period, usually in small ways. Peggy travels in the last car of the train and has trouble getting a carriage in the first episode. Later in the season when she and her father are having a conversation on the sidewalk a white couple stops and silently waits for them to move out of the way rather than simply stepping around them. When Peggy visits a white shop with Marion, it’s clear she’s not welcome there and is eager to leave, when Marion is entirely oblivious to the manager’s disapproving looks. Peggy gets a story accepted, but the publisher wants her to make the main character white, and insists she not reveal her identity as a Black woman because her readers wouldn’t accept it.

Occasionally the racism becomes more explicit and threatening. In the second season, when Peggy and T. Thomas Fortune (Sullivan Jones) are visiting the Tuskegee Institute (which was just two years old at the time of the show), they wind up having to flee a lynch mob. In the third season when Peggy gets sick, Agnes’ doctor arrives and then refuses to treat Peggy because she’s Black, which sets the stage for Dr Kirkland (Jordan Donica) to treat her. He also treats George Russell (Morgan Spector) after he’s been shot, saving his life. The white doctor who arrives is initially skeptical that a Black man could successfully treat the injury but reluctantly admits he’s impressed with Kirkland’s skill as a surgeon.

The Russells never explicitly demonstrate any sort of racist attitudes or assumptions. Although they don’t socialize with Black people at all, Bertha (Carrie Coon) shows no hesitation to accept Dr. Kirkland’s assistance when George (Morgan Spector) is shot, and after George has recovered, he graciously gives Dr Kirkland a very substantial check as a way to demonstrate his gratitude (yet another example of Fellowes’ tendency to have rich people be thoroughly decent despite all probability). All that we know about the Russells’ backgrounds is that Bertha grew up in a poor Irish family. In the 1840s, Irish immigrants and Black people often lived in the same neighborhoods and were initially allies against the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant establishment, to the point that the N-word was often thrown at the Irish, who weren’t considered ‘white’ by the standards of the day. So perhaps the Russells simply emerged from an environment where they are used to interacting with Black people as rough equals.

Although the Russells never do anything explicitly racist, it’s noticeable that the Russell household is not seen is entirely white; none of the below-stairs maids, cooks or footmen are Black. Bertha’s hiring criteria clearly include whiteness, but the show never calls any attention to it.

I rather like that both Marion and Agnes get uncomfortable lessons about racism. Marion is shocked to discover that Peggy’s parents are a well-to-do middle class family and she embarrasses herself by trying to give them old shoes as an act of charity. Agnes wrongly assumes that her social clout will be enough to get her doctor to treat Peggy’s illness. That latter incident is a particularly good lesson about the nature of privilege, because she assumes that her privilege would enable her to simply push aside her doctor’s racism and she seems rather chastened by how events actually play out. Although she’s been raised to treat Black people with respect, it’s clear that Agnes hasn’t actually socialized with them and has little sense of the social challenges they encounter.

Newport

Newport’s Black community plays an important role in the 3rd season. The history of the Black community in Newport goes back to at least the Revolutionary War, and probably earlier. Newport, like Providence, was an important center of the slave trade, so much so that the slave trade continued in Newport to some degree even after it was banned in 1807; at one point around 700 Rhode Islanders were running slave ships to Africa as part of the Triangular Trade. It was also one of the first centers of abolitionism, thanks in part to a small community of free Black people who became politically active in the late 18th century. One branch of the Underground Railroad ran through Newport. In 1780, the Free African Union Society was established there, a mutual aid society for those of African descent, part of a network of such groups across the major cities of the Mid-Atlantic and New England regions, and while Newport was much smaller, it functioned as an important center of Black society.

Even before Ward McAllister and other New Yorkers were vacationing in Newport, there was a small but thriving Black middle class, with families like the Downings and the Van Hornes. Thomas Downing, whose father made a decent living providing oysters to New York City, built a hotel in Newport and, after it burned down, built a small business district known as the Downing Block.

The Free African Union Society founded its own Congregationalist Church in 1824 and in 1865 it began to employ Rev. Mahlon Van Horne, who in the 1880s became the first Black person elected to the state legislature. He capped his career as a diplomat under President McKinley. His son Alonzo graduated from Harvard’s medical school and became the state’s first Black dentist. Mahlon and Alonzo are pretty clearly the models for Rev. Kirkland and his son William.

By the 1870s, Wade McAllister was beginning to popularize Newport as a vacation spot for the New York elites. People with money meant people interested in purchasing various services, and Black Newporters were well-positioned to meet some of that need. Mary Dickerson was a dressmaker who was able to open a dress shop on fashionable Bellevue Avenue, where many of the most important mansions were located. I’m not clear on the extent to which she had a white clientele (since dressmaking required the dressmaker to be in relatively intimate contact with the client’s body, which many racist New Yorkers would have been troubled by), but she was extremely successful, eventually owning a total of seven different properties, as well as three more she inherited from her husband, and she became an important philanthropist, helping fund various clubs for Black causes. She was particularly involved in the fight for women’s rights and worked closely with Josephine St Pierre Ruffin, a Black Boston feminist and the first Black woman to publish a newspaper, Women’s Era.

As the show demonstrates, the Newport social scene was very heavily segregated. The white elites generally kept the Black elites at arm’s length, and while they might seek services such as dressmaking from them, they did not invite Black people to their balls and picnics, except perhaps as servants. So the various scenes at the Newport Casino (which were actually filmed at the restored Newport Casino) are accurate in being lily-white.

The finale of the third season nicely contrasts two balls, one hosted by Bertha Russell for the white elites and another (whose host I think I missed) for the Black elites, driving home the point that the Black elites engaged in virtually the exact same cultural activities as the white elites. My only real quibble is that the Black ball is held at a very sizable mansion the way the white ball is; I’m skeptical that someone in the Black elite might have owned a Newport mansion quite that large (but I’m very willing to be proven wrong if anyone has evidence). Because the Black elites were mostly middle class professionals like ministers, doctors, and the like, and the number of Black millionaires was tiny, I doubt very many Black people owned such a large residence. (And in fact, those scenes were filmed at what was once a Vanderbilt mansion.)

Colorism and Respectability

Another thing I like about The Gilded Age’s treatment of Black society in this period is the way the show explores the complexities of the Black social hierarchy. Elizabeth Kirkland regularly reminds people that her family has been free since the Revolution, and she subtly indicates that the fact that Arthur is a former slave means he’s automatically beneath her, despite being a successful businessman and pharmacist. It’s not entirely clear where the Kirkland money comes from; her husband is a minister, but that alone cannot explain the impressive house they own in Newport, so previous generations of Kirklands were clearly either very successful farmers or more likely businessmen.

This hostility to families of former slaves was quite widespread among New York’s Black Elites, who tended to be scornful of the more recent Black arrivals from the South. The New York Black Elites did not celebrate Emancipation Day and preferred to forget, as much as they could, that Black people had ever been enslaved. Instead they liked to trace their ancestry back to Dutch and English colonial settlers, viewing themselves as Knickerbockers (although white Knickerbockers would have certainly not considered them as such).

Overlaid on the issue of slave vs free ancestry is the question of skin color. For those unaware of the issue, colorism is discrimination that often emerges in racial and ethnic minorities over the perceived value of skin tone. In the US (but also in other areas such as India), among Black people lighter-toned skin was generally deemed superior to darker, more chocolaty tones. Fair skin tones have traditionally been presented as being more beautiful, in part because they make it easier to aspire to white beauty standards and to pass more easily in white society. The Kirklands are very fair-skinned; when Rev Kirkland first appeared, it took me a moment to realize he wasn’t played by a white actor, whereas the Scotts have a much darker skin tone. Arthur, who is generally the Black character most willing to notice and confront racism, immediately recognizes Elizabeth’s colorism.

It’s nice that the show is willing to explore this important nuance of historical Black culture. It demonstrates the complexity of the Black experience in the post-Reconstruction period, and it resists a simplistic tendency to assume either that slavery’s influence vanished in 1865 or that all Black people stood in constant solidarity with each other in the struggle for equality. Elizabeth Kirkland is generally quite conservative, opposing women’s suffrage in favor of traditional ideas that a woman should focus on her family (an attitude she shared with many white women as well).

One possible model for Elizabeth is Josephine Bruce, Blanche Bruce’s wife. As a senator’s wife, she was in the unusual position of regularly receiving the wives of important white politicians (Thursdays were her ‘receiving’ days), she frequently hosted dinners and balls that were very well-spoken of, and she and her husband were frequent visitors to the White House in the mid-1870s. But letters in the Black press of Washington DC sometimes comment negatively about her perceived snobbery, especially since when Blanche had been a bachelor he had been willing to socialize with Blacks further down the social hierarchy, leading to suggestions that Josephine was driving him to become more elitist. But the moment the Democrats returned to power in 1877, the Bruces were pushed out of white society, especially after his term in office ended.

And in fact, 1877 marked probably the high-point of race relations in the 19th century. The 1880s saw what one historian described as “the withering hope” of Black Americans, as the progress that Blacks had made during Reconstruction began to be rolled back, such as in 1883, when the Supreme Court overturned the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and Jim Crow laws were beginning to disenfranchise Blacks in the South. Thus The Gilded Age is set during a time when Black Americans were losing ground relative to whites, a fact the show once or twice alludes to doing some of the scenes when female reformers discuss politics.

Elizabeth values ‘respectability’. This concept was extremely important to the middle class in the late 19th and early 20th century, regardless of race. The middle class to a considerable extent rose up out of the working class (as the Russells appear to have done based on what we know about them). The upper class did not ‘work’ but the middle class did, which meant that the middle class might be confused with the lower class, even though the middle class did not do manual labor like factory work but rather educated labor such as medicine, law, ministry, engineering, and so on. Respectability was a cultural tool that the middle class used to demonstrate it was different from the lower class.

Respectability required one to demonstrate self-control and restraint. This included proper etiquette, refined speech, not over-indulging in food or alcohol (at least not in public), restraining one’s sexual behavior, restraining one’s body with proper clothing, a graceful walk, and so on. So Elizabeth seeks to police William’s relationship with Peggy, whom she dislikes for reasons of class and colorism, and Elizabeth is eager to exploit the gossip that Peggy had a child out of wedlock and abandoned it, because such a past demonstrates a profound lack of respectability on Peggy’s part and confirms Elizabeth’s suspicions that as a former enslaved man, Arthur and his family lack proper self-restraint. Although Peggy’s backstory is a bit contrived for the sake of melodrama, Elizabeth’s response to news about Peggy’s past is entirely plausible in the context of Gilded Age society.

In fairness to Elizabeth, the racism she likely encounters from white society would seize on a scandal like Peggy’s backstory to deem the Kirkland family unrespectable. Although we don’t see how she interacts with white people and we don’t get much sense of what her longer-term ambitions for her family are, she must certainly know that white elites would certainly use a scandal like unwed motherhood to push the Kirklands down a rung or two. And her snootiness toward the Scotts and others she considers ‘beneath her’ is partly due to an awareness that her position in American society is precarious, simply because she’s Black. Her efforts to maintain a clear distinction between the Kirklands and the Scotts is in part a symptom of the struggle Blacks had to generate a clear sense by whites that they could be respectable. The show doesn’t explore this facet of the issue in any real degree; the dressing-down Elizabeth receives from Rev. Kirkland in the last episode of the season is really focused on the idea that she’s just being uncharitable, not that there is a lot at stake for the family in terms of its position in the wider white community.

Elizabeth has clearly drilled exquisitely good manners into her son, precisely because it is a way to demonstrate her family’s respectability. Oscar’s rather louche style–his red eye glasses and his tendency to lounge sideways on the furniture–could not be tolerated in Elizabeth’s family the way Agnes can quietly tolerate it because the Van Rhijns have cultural capital to squander while the Kirklands need to carefully shepherd theirs, aware that it could be lost quite easily.

One of the reasons that I like the show’s treatment of Black society is that it’s a good antidote to Julian Fellowes’ tendency to celebrate the elites as being worthy people simple because they have a lot of money. The third season plot line around the Kirklands and Elizabeth’s dislike of the Scotts feels real to me, the sort of thing that might actually have happened, and the show’s willingness to acknowledge racism as an issue that couldn’t simply be ignored even by Agnes van Rhijn stands in strong contrast to Downton Abbey’s rather bloodless celebration of British aristocrats.

Nathan Lane’s Ward McAllister plays a secondary but still important role in The Gilded Age, so I thought that this rather interesting guy deserved his own post.

Who was Ward McAllister?

Samuel Ward McAllister was an entirely real person, and the show’s depiction of him is reasonably accurate for the most part. He was born into a Southern family that had been attorneys for two generations. He was related to Julia Ward Howe, the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, and he was distantly related by marriage to the Astors of New York. His family was not rich by any means, but they were able to afford to spend their summers in Newport, RI, where many Southerners liked to vacation to escape the summer heat.

After studying law at Harvard, he spent some time in California during the Gold Rush, where his father had opened a law firm. But it seems likely that he was already craving a more cosmopolitan life than California could offer. Prior to working in California, he had moved in with an elderly relative in New York City, hoping that he would inherit her estate. When she died, he only received $1000 (around $40,000 today); he reportedly spent the whole sum on a single set of evening dress, because he knew that if he looked the part, elite society would assume he had inherited a great deal more. (I am, however, skeptical that he could actually have spent that much money on one man’s suit in pre-Civil War New York, unless there was a LOT of jewelry and accessories associated with it. Men’s clothing was far more understated by the late 1840s, whereas women’s clothing could be much fancier, as the show demonstrates.)

In 1853, he married a woman named Sarah Gibbons, who had more money than he did, but who seems to have been very poorly suited to him in other ways. She was extremely reclusive and did not attend society events at all; in fact when he died, she didn’t even attend his funeral service (although whether that tells us more about her distaste for public events or her husband I don’t know). He used her money to go on a tour of Europe, and this event was life-changing for him. He seems to have had an impressive ability to absorb matters of etiquette and social practice, and he returned from the trip probably the leading American expert on European etiquette and dining practices.

His real rise to social prominence happened in the early 1870s. New York in the post-Civil War era was a society in flux. The old Knickerbocker elites were beginning to be eclipsed in business and political life by the Robber Barons and politicians like Boss Tweed, who excelled at organizing the new Irish and Italian immigrants as voting blocs. The Civil War had shaken up American society, pulled down the old Southern landed aristocracy, and created an opening for a new social system. In Europe, social rules were largely set by the courts of the various monarchs, but the United States lacked anything comparable.

Ward McAllister was well-placed to act as the arbiter of social manners because of his deep knowledge of how Europeans did things. But he lacked the wealth and social connections; he and Sarah lived in a very modest house quite unlike the mansions of the rich, and he certainly didn’t have the resources to throw elaborate balls. His distant cousin by marriage, Carolina “Lina” Astor had exactly those things, but she needed someone to guide her. So they were a perfect pair to restructure New York’s elite society in a way that aped European high society (which is one reason why opera was such an important concern for the Knickerbockers). Mrs Astir led New York society and held a kind of court, and he advised her and acted as something of an enforcer, gossiping about faux pas and vulgar behaviors and poorly-executed parties as a way to make clear what the social rules were. A lot of the complex social protocols that you see in the show (the use of calling cards, the rules about who is announced by what name, the elaborate table settings and complex dining manners, the fashion rules) are really the product of Ward and Lina’s efforts.

The Society of Patriarchs

In 1872, McAllister, along with three wealthy Knickerbockers, founded the Society of Patriarchs, an exclusive social club of 25 (later 50) men who mostly represented Old New York money, although it also included J. Pierpont Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt II, both New Money, and August Belmont, a Jewish financier, diplomat, and eventual chairman of the Democratic National Committee (today he’s mostly remembered as the man who founded the Belmont Stakes, the third race in the horse-racing’s Triple Crown). The Patriarchs were intended to represent the men who had the true esteem of society.

In 1885, the Society began hosting an annual Patriach’s Ball. Each member was entitled to invite 9 guests (4 women and 5 men), which meant that invitations were hard to get and highly sought after. The Ball received considerable newspaper coverage, and it wasn’t long before it was inspiring imitators; the wives of the Patriarchs began hosting the Assembly Ball. The Patriarchs also informally policed each other’s choices, discouraging behaviors that they considered vulgar or overly-friendly to the lower classes. Lina Astor was invited to ‘advise’ the Patriarchs.

McAllister was one of the early New York proponents of vacationing in Newport. The Southerners no longer came up in the summer, thanks to the destruction of the Civil War, which created an opening there, but he remembered it from his childhood and bought a small farm there. He couldn’t afford to throw large balls and lacked the space to do so, but he could invite small groups to picnic with him, thereby helping make himself a social arbiter and drawing attention to Newport. Thus a lot of ‘the Newport season’ was his creation, and by the 1870s, everyone was buying or building ‘cottages’ in Newport (basically summer mansions).

The 400

McAllister and Astor together created the idea of the 400, New York’s social elite. Reportedly, the term was created when McAllister remarked to a journalist that “there are only 400 fashionable people in New York”. These were the men and women who really mattered, the taste-makers who belonged in high society balls and exclusive Newport picnics. The number is sometimes also linked to the supposed capacity of Mrs Astor’s ballroom. But the number 400 turns up elsewhere as well–the maximum capacity of Delmonico’s restaurant and so on.

In the 1880s, the 400 were the definitive group of New York high society, and the number became symbolic; journalists used the term to refer to high society collectively, and other cities began to develop their own 400s. Balls might intentionally be decorated with 400 roses and things like that. But in the 1880s, the term was intentionally vague–there was no definitive list of who the 400 actually were. In theory they included only those who had three generations of wealth, a rule that excluded most of the Robber Barons, who tended to be first-generation money. But McAllister could not claim a truly moneyed ancestry, and he was still considered part of the group, and Alva Vanderbilt’s husband came from generational wealth, but she was not accepted until 1883.

“Calling” played an important role in all this. Society women stopped by to visit. In some cases they just dropped off their card, as a signal that they intended to call again later, but more commonly they waited as the butler took the card in to the lady of the house, who could decide if she wanted to receive the visitor; generally there were particular hours of the day during which this happened. As the show demonstrates, the butler could also be instructed that the lady of the house “wasn’t home” or “was indisposed” when particular callers came by. The truly powerful women in society were not called on uninvited. One had to wait for them to call, which was a signal that the new woman was being accepted into society. This is why Bertha’s trick with Carrie’s invitation to Gladys’ debutante ball worked; she was forcing Mrs Astor to call on her.

Another trick Alva Vanderbilt pulled in 1883 was to throw a massive costume ball; the guest list was reportedly 1,000 people, which absolutely dwarfed Mrs Astor’s annual ball, but the newly-constructed Vanderbilt ‘Petite Chateau’ on Fifth Avenue could handle that. New York society was abuzz for weeks with discussions of what sort of costume various guests would wear, thereby creating a huge buzz. That meant that Mrs Astor and her family could not afford to miss this ball. By the time the ball happened, the police were having to control the crowd that formed outside the Petite Chateau. This is the ball I mentioned in my first post–the one where Alice Vanderbilt’s dress was wired for electricity, and it’s the ball Gladys’ debutante ball was modeled on. As a result, by the end of 1883, Alva was part of the 400 despite Mrs Astor’s best efforts to keep her out.

McAllister’s Downfall

Although McAllister wielded a lot of influence, he was not necessarily a popular man. Those he snubbed or gossiped about understandably disliked him, and it must have been quite noticeable to many that the “Autocrat of the Drawing Room” (as he was nicknamed) didn’t actually have the wealth or ancestry that the 400 were expected to have. He wrote articles in the New York press commenting on social matters, and that too earned him enemies.

Things began to come to a head at the so-called ‘Fish Ball’ in 1889, when Mamie Fish threw a dinner at which there was not enough wine and the chef chose to serve a white wine sauce with one of the dishes. McAllister later sniffed that it should have been a brown sauce. Fish retaliated by excluding McAllister from leading a quadrille at a later ball at which President Benjamin Harrison was expected to dance; Harrison dropped out and Fish blamed McAllister

Fish was a major rival of Mrs Astor’s. She had a quick wit and was famous for greeting guests with witty insults; “Make yourself perfectly at home, and believe me, there is no one who wishes you there more heartily than I do” is one of her better zingers. Her parties were more outrageous than Astor’s, which tended to be more formal affairs at which Mrs Astor held court seated on a couch. There is a dubious story that she once gave a party in honor of a pet monkey at which the monkey got so drunk that it proceeded to climb into a chandelier and throw light bulbs at people. At another, guests were given peanuts they could feed to an elephant as they danced past it. Her parties were often staged by Harry Lahr, who was emerging as a rival to McAllister. (Lahr, incidentally, married for money, telling his wife on their wedding night that he didn’t love her but would treat her with affection in public.) So when Fish started to exclude McAllister, it was a way of hitting at Astor. Fish was only in her early 30s at the time The Gilded Age is set, and so would have been a much younger woman than the actress who plays her, Ashlie Atkinson.

McAllister chose to respond to Fish’s accusation in 1890 by writing Society as I Have Found It. (Note that in The Gilded Age, the book is published half a decade too early and without the context of his spat with Fish.) The book was a gossipy memoir about New York’s high society, filled with anecdotes that allowed McAllister to paint himself in a good light, but without actually naming names. But many New Yorkers recognized who these stories were about. Embarrassed about the gossip and pointed critiques of their taste, and incensed that McAllister would do something as vulgar as tell indiscrete stories, the book catalyzed the already-negative attitudes toward McAllister, and people began to exclude him from society events (although not Mrs Astor initially). The following Patriarch’s Ball was poorly-attended; even Mrs Astor found an excuse to not show up.

Writing Society as I Have Found It was a mistake, but McAllister was clearly worried that Mamie Fish’s exclusion of him from her parties was a sign that he was already losing his clout and the book was an effort to re-assert his indispensability. Instead, the publication of the book made him look bad, and Town and Country magazine began calling him “Mr McHustler”.

But he wasn’t totally shunned the way the series seems to suggest. He was invited to write a regular newspaper column commenting on New York society, and in 1893 he was offering advice to Chicago hostesses on how to host Europeans during the Columbian Exposition. In 1892, he published a definitive list of the 400 in the New York Times. Despite the traditional number, it only offered 265 names (if you’re curious, you can find it here). He left a number of people off it in what can only be an intentional snub, including Alva Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and JP Morgan. The list accelerated the decline of his reputation, earning him the nickname “Mr. Make-a-Lister”.

But even when he died, his funeral at New York’s Episcopal cathedral was still a major society event; Cornelius Vanderbilt II acted as a pall-bearer. However, by that time, things were changing. The last Patriarch’s Ball was held two years later and the Society of Patriarchs disbanded soon afterward out of general disinterest. Mrs Astor was beginning to retreat from society because of poor health. Harry Lahr had stepped in McAllister’s role as the organizer of fashionable parties. The growth of private ballrooms meant that exclusionary balls were no longer the social force they had been, and the younger generation wanted a more open, less rule-bound society. The Knickerbockers had lost much of their real power to the Robber Barons.

And in 1896, Alva Vanderbilt scandalized the 400 by divorcing William Kissam Vanderbilt on grounds of adultery. It was a shocking thing to do, and it threatened her social ruin. But not only did she push through with it against the advice of her lawyer (winning a $10 million settlement plus several mansions), but she was also determined to not let it break her position. This is the context for her choice to push her daughter Consuelo into a marriage with the Duke of Marlborough against Consuelo’s wishes. The marriage was such a massive social event that it enabled Alva to keep her dominant position in society. Alva’s divorce opened the door to the possibility of other divorces and within a year a number of other women among the 400 had divorced their husbands because their marriages had been miserable. Alva actually boasted about being a trailblazer for divorce.

So Ward McAllister’s death was not exactly the end of an age, but it was one of several signs that the cultural rules of the Gilded Age were beginning to collapse. Agnes van Rhijn would undoubtedly have had something very trenchant to say about it all.

One of the plot lines of Season 2 of the The Gilded Age is ‘Maud Beaton’ (Nicole Brydon Bloom) scamming Oscar (Blake Ritson) of the van Rhijn money, bringing him and Agnes (Christine Baranski) to the brink of ruin. This is worth a post. There were quite a few scammers who targeted everyday men and women, but I’m going to focus on a couple who targeted the elites.

Scams in the Gilded Age

Scams and confidence games have long been popular with criminals. Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel Moll Flanders details 18th century confidence tricks the heroine pulls at various points (including passing herself off as more wealthy than she is so she can marry a rich husband, only to find out that he’s done the same thing to her), and Maud Beaton (or whatever her real name is) bears more than a passing resemblance to the recent story of Anna Delvey.

But I think the Gilded Age in America (and its European counterparts) was a period particularly vulnerable to such tricks. Gilded Age society placed a very heavy emphasis on ‘respectability’, which required one to dress in a certain way and display a proper knowledge of etiquette and elite cultural values as visible signals that one belonged in the elites. While this was meant to gate-keep elite society by keeping out the riff-raff, it meant that criminals who were able to follow those rules could potentially pass as members of the elite, and elites tended to be over-confident about their ability to spot wannabes. The elites also relied on the assumption that other people had vetted their new acquaintances, so once a scammer had fooled one member of the elite, they could then rely on that victim to vouch for them to new people.

Additionally, industrialism had caused a significant movement of population into the cities, which were larger and more anonymous than they had been half a century earlier. That anonymity allowed confidence artists to ply their trade more freely. Industrialism was also regularly producing people like George and Bertha Russell, formerly lower class folk who through smart business dealings were able to rise to the top tiers of wealth. That meant that the idea of a wealthy stranger one had never heard of was more plausible than in times past.

So once Maud has gotten one person to trust her, she can count on them legitimizing her to others. All she needs is a convenient cover story to explain why they haven’t met her before (for example by claiming that she “moved to Paris” to grieve for her dead mother) and an ability to drop clues that will get them to assume things she hasn’t actually demonstrated (in this case the suggestion that her mother was from the Old New York Stuyvesant clan coupled with hints that she’s actually the illegitimate daughter of Jay Gould). Because the elites gossiped endlessly as a way of talking about things that couldn’t be spoken of openly (such a bastard children), Maud knows that she can just drop clues that will eventually leave her in a position to scam someone out of money.

Lord Gordon-Gordon

One real-world example of this was ‘Lord Gordon-Gordon’. His real name was John Crowningsfield, and he seems to have been born around 1840 as the illegitimate son of a clergyman from northern England. He would ingratiate himself with someone, make small but slowly escalating requests of them, and then use them to get introductions to more important people. He employed a young boy as a valet to strength his imposture. In 1868, he presented himself as Lord Glencairn to a London jeweler to cheat them out of £25,000. By 1870, he owed more than £100,000 in debts, so ‘Glencairn’ just disappeared.

In 1871, he surfaced in Minnesota, claiming to be Lord Gordon-Gordon, supposedly a member of the Campbell clan of Scotland seeking to acquire land to send Campbell tenants to live on and the heir of the Earl of Gordon. To support the scheme, he deposited about $40,000 in a Minnesota bank, probably the leftover money from his time as Lord Glencairn. He approached an official of the Northern Pacific Railway which was looking to find investors, and suggested that they could work together to expand westward. The railroad paid his expenses and provided him with a letter of introduction when he said he needed to go to New York.

Using that letter, he targeted Jay Gould, who at that time was engaged in a struggle with Cornelius Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railway. Gordon Gordon claimed to represent several European stockholders who could support Gould and who thought the board of Erie needed to be replaced. Gould was planning to do something similar, and worried that this supposed consortium of European stockholders would be him to the punch. So Gould frantically visited Gordon-Gordon at his hotel and proposed a deal where the consortium would own the railroad but he would appoint the board. Gordon-Gordon let Gould gradually ‘convince’ , but stipulate that he needed half a million dollars in cash and securities to hold as proof of Gould’s good faith; once the deal went through, that would all be returned to Gould.

Gordon-Gordon started selling the shares, and Gould spotted it on the stock exchange. Gould sued him and had him arrested for fraud. Gordon Gordon gave the name of several of the Europeans that he supposedly represented. While his references were being checked, Gordon-Gordon fled. Gould offered a reward and sent detectives to Europe, where they discovered the Lord Glencairn identity, but they couldn’t find the man himself, because he had actually gone to Canada.

Gordon-Gordon’s whereabouts are unknown for a year, until he surfaced in Manitoba, where he had persuaded the Canadian government that he was planning to buy a lot of land in the area, presumably as a repeat of the scam he pulled in Minnesota. Gould unsuccessfully tried to persuade the Canadian government to extradite Gordon Gordon, so he sent a group of men from Minnesota (including three future members of Congress) to kidnap Gordon-Gordon. They succeeded, but were apprehended by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police as they attempted to cross over into the US. This caused a major international incident during which the Governor of Minnesota contemplated invading Canada. While this was getting sorted out, Gordon-Gordon was released and disappeared for a while.

Gould was unable to secure Gordon-Gordon’s extradition to the US, but the London jewelers were able to arrange his deportation to England for trial. He was found in Manitoba, but asked the arresting officers to let him go back into his house for his cap. Instead of getting his cap, he fatally shot himself.

Although I haven’t seen any other commenters citing Lord Gordon Gordon as an inspiration for Maud Beaton, the con itself–getting an investor to invest in a fake deal–is similar to what we see happen in the show.

Cassie Chadwick

Another major inspiration for Maud Beaton was Cassie Chadwick, although Chadwick’s con was quite different. Chadwick was born Elizabeth Bigley in Canada. In 1873, at 16, she was arrested for trying to con a prosperous farmer, but a year later she was in Toronto, passing herself off as an heiress, although her con fell apart and she fled to another Canadian town, where she was arrested for passing forged promissory notes. She was found not guilty by reason of insanity. She moved to Cleveland, where she operated as a psychic for several years and went through four husbands, slowly working her way up the social ladder. She attempted to enter Ohio high society but was never able to find acceptance.

In 1897, she began her biggest and most successful scheme, which involved pretending to be the illegitimate daughter of Robber Baron Andrew Carnegie. She did this by persuaded a lawyer named Dixon to take her to Carnegie’s residence in New York, where she pretended to be checking references for a servant; the fact that she stayed in the house convinced Dixon that she had a connection to the household. When she returned to the carriage, she ‘accidentally’ dropped a forged promissory note from Carnegie, thereby convincing the mark that Carnegie was funding her. This allowed her to tearfully admit she was Carnegie’s illegitimate daughter; Carnegie was supposedly guilt-wracked over his infidelity and therefore willing to give her substantial amounts of money and that she was going to inherit $400 million when he died.

Dixon helped her get a safe-deposit box for the fake promissory note, and then started leaking this information to Ohio banks, which enabled Chadwick to borrow enormous sums of money from various banks. Over the next 7 years, she wracked up $2 million in debts (around $70 million in today’s dollars) to various banks. The banks were charging a usurious rate of interest and therefore couldn’t admit what was going on. She also forged securities from Carnegie to strengthen her scheme, and forged banknotes signed by the president of an Ohio bank. But in 1904, she borrowed $100,000 from a Massachusetts banker who eventually discovered that she had numerous other outstanding loans, and he tried to call her loan in. An investigation of her securities revealed they were fake, and she was arrested; when she was apprehended, she was found to be wearing a money belt with $100,000 in it. One of the banks she owed money to went under, and she was successfully prosecuted for conspiracy to bankrupt the bank and conspiracy against the government. She was sentenced to 14 years in prison, where she died three years later. Chadwick is considered the most successful female con artist (in terms of how much money she stole) and, until Bernie Madoff was often cited as the most successful con artist of all time.

Chadwick’s con clearly has similarities to Maud Beaton’s con in that both women were hinting they were the illegitimate daughter of a Robber Baron. But whereas Chadwick was using the expectation of an inheritance to take out loans, Beaton’s actual con doesn’t really depend on her supposed relationship to Jay Gould; it simply serves to persuade Oscar that she was a wealthy woman, which sets him up for Mr Crowther’s scam, which gets Oscar to invent the van Rhijn fortune in a railroad company that doesn’t exist. So Maud herself isn’t actually running the con the way Chadwick was, and she’s not borrowing money from anyone. Whereas Maud moves effortless in New York high society, Chadwick was apparently not very good at getting people to like her, and her scam was entirely predicated on the greed of various bankers eager to change illegal amounts of interest.

George Francis Alexander Seymour, 7th Earl of Hertford

George Seymour was rather different from Gordon-Gordon or Cassie Chadwick, in a number of ways. Unlike them, he wasn’t generally pretending to be something other than a British noble, but that doesn’t mean he was honest. He’s not an inspiration for anything in the show (so far), but his story is just too good to pass up. He was a descendent of Edward Seymour, Earl of Somerset, best know as Lord Protector to young king Edward VI in the mid-16th century.

Alice Thaw was the daughter of William Thaw Sr, one of the 100 richest men in America during the Gilded Age, thanks to owning one of the most important railroad companies. His daughter Alice, who was 9 when he died, stood to inherit around $10 million when she became a full adult. Her mother Mary Sibbert Copley was an heiress in her own right, and in 1903, her brother Harry met George Seymour, a British noble. He stayed with Mary for two weeks and met Alice, who was 23 at the time. He proposed almost immediately, and it was agreed they would marry two months later. The couple were widely celebrated by journalists, who discretely chose to not mention that Seymour kept asking them to borrow money from them.

The wedding, which took place in Pittsburg, was the event of the season, with the church surrounded by 5,000 curious onlookers; the crowd was so dense it took Alice 10 minutes to get into the church. Alice and Mary entered the church and then got word that Seymour was outside, refusing to enter the church unless they agreed to immediately transfer $1 million dollars to his personal bank account. Faced with the threat of a very prominent humiliation, they agreed and the wedding went ahead. The couple soon moved to England, where the marriage began to go wrong (or perhaps continued to go wrong, given that it started with extortion). He was reportedly furious when he learned that most of Alice’s wealth was sheltered in a trust that paid out twice a year.

Seymour did not get along with his wife, and according to her never consummated the marriage. Alice gradually learned that Seymour had had quite an unconventional life before she met him. In 1895, his family had sent him to Australia because he was causing scandal in England. In Australia he toured under the stage name ‘Mademoiselle Roze’, dancing in women’s clothes. He eventually settled down and tried his hand at farming sugar cane and bananas, but treated his workers so badly they sued him. He also threw wild all-male house parties where he danced in butterfly wings and a skirt. He seems to have been run out of Australia in 1897.

He was hired by Charles Frohman, a theater impresario who helped many important actors get their start, include Ethel Barrymore and Billie Burke. (Frohman’s most successful play was the original production of Peter Pan, but that was after Seymour’s time with him.) In Frohman’s company, he used the name Eric Hope and claimed that he was a silent movie star. But by 1903, he had apparently stopped performing and had resumed his old name.

In 1908, Alice sued for divorce and was able to get the marriage annulled on the grounds that it had never been consummated; the court found that Seymour was incapable of consummation. It also ruled that the money he had extorted in 1903 should be returned to Alice. Alice in later life became an important philanthropist, being very interested in botany and the struggle for women’s suffrage.

Seymour’s story is rather more sordid than Duke Hector of Buckingham’s. Hector is at least open with the Russells that he needs money. But it’s a good example that when there are huge sums of money in play, some people will inevitably try to get that money by less-than-honest means.

Incidentally, Thaw’s brother Harry was quite an erratic character as well. We’ll run into him again in a later post.

Is Oscar a Scammer?

No. Oscar’s story is rather different. He is not setting out to commit crime or take other people’s money dishonestly. Up until Maud scams him, he has money, and with John Adams help he’s able to start rebuilding his financial position. But he clearly recognizes that Old Money money is not really comparable to New Money money, and he’s trying to find a wife who can give him that. He initially targets Gladys and then Maud Beaton and by the end of season three he’s setting his sights on Mrs Winterton, who, like him, found a way to marry rich. Bertha seems to recognize that he’s more interested in Gladys’ bank account, because that’s something that happens in high society. So Oscar is playing within the system rather than trying to cheat it. He’s not planning to drain Gladys’ bank account and flee the city.

But he’s not being entirely honest. He suggests to Gladys that he loves her, when he acknowledges to John that he’s really just interested in her money. So rather than pursuing a love match, he’s making pragmatic choices, acknowledging that he can’t actually marry the person he loves, because being homosexual is largely unacceptable in 19th century society.

I think some viewers see Oscar as being a scammer because he knows he’s gay but is pursuing women. But that’s an anachronistic view of the story. In 1883, the word ‘homosexual’ was only 15 years old, having been coined in a private letter in 1868. By the time of the show, a small group of European intellectuals were using the word and were beginning to create the idea of sexual orientation, theorizing that some men are naturally attracted to men rather than women. But outside that group, very few people would have thought of sexuality as a key marker of personal identity, the way we generally do today. Oscar seems to have accepted that he prefers sex and romance with men, but I don’t think he seems himself as being ‘gay’, simply because that isn’t a conceptual option for him. So he’s not ‘pretending to be straight’, because there’s no notion of straightness as an identity. It’s just what everyone thought to be.

It’s also worth pointing out that the show offers other examples of people marrying for money rather than love. Agnes appears to have married Mr. van Rhijn because her brother’s spendthrift ways put her and Ada at risk of poverty. So Oscar’s mother married for money because marrying for love was not a practical option for her, and it seems to have made her a rather cynical woman. Gladys is practically sold to the Duke of Buckingham. Marion’s first suitor was clearly interested in her as a form of social climbing, not love. Although marrying for love was becoming an increasing ideal in late 19th century America, marrying for money had not yet become disreputable the way it is today.

Oscar, however, as a homosexual, recognizes that he has to hide what he does with men, because sex with other men is a crime as well as being socially unacceptable, and consequently he operates on the edge of the demimonde, the criminal underbelly of New York society, simply because he has to. In the third season he goes drinking at a bar, tries to hook up and instead gets robbed and beaten, something that has often happened to gay men seeking companionship or sex at the time (and still does, to a lesser extent).

He clearly becomes emotionally interested in Maud Beaton, because despite being furious with her over what she’s done, he ultimately finds it in himself to forgive her and help her leave New York City, and the only reason I can see for that choice is that he has sympathy for her, recognizing that she has been dealt a bad hand the way he has been by being born into a society that won’t accept his attraction to men.

But I find myself wondering just how honest Maud Beaton is with him when he catches her at the Haymarket. She tells him a sob story, but is any of it true? The show doesn’t give us any clues, but my guess is no, she’s playing him again. The successful con women of the late 19th century were very good at playing on men’s sympathies, persuading them to “help a woman down on her luck”. She’s in a tight situation; Mr Crowther has abandoned her instead of splitting the take with her and she’s been reduced to prostituting herself. So she tells Oscar that she owes the owner of the Haymarket money and he quickly helps her leave town and gives her a hundred bucks to boot. That’s exactly the sort of thing a 19th century con woman would have done.

The central plot of Season 2 is the struggle between the Knickerbockers (Old New Yorkers) and the New New Yorkers over access to a rare and socially precious resource, opera boxes. Allowing for the fact that the show’s narrative focuses on the fictitious Bertha (Carrie Coon) and George (Morgan Spector) Russell, and culminates with the decision of a fictitious duke to choose one opera over the other, the show’s depiction of the Opera War is broadly accurate. But it’s a fascinating event in New York history, so I thought I’d make a post about it.

Opera in Nineteenth Century Culture

Modern Americans don’t give much thought to opera, which has a small but devoted following, mostly among more culturally-minded Middle and Upper class people. But in the 19th century, opera was a much more socially-important art form. It was the more high-brow form of popular music (as opposed to more low-brow popular music that took the form of bar songs, minstrelsy, and the like). Going to the opera was a bit like going to a rock concert today–it was a form of entertainment that cut across all social classes, although opera was a bit less popular with the working class in the United States than it was in many parts of Europe. Like modern rock bands today, opera composers and singers, especially female singers, were household names, and people flocked to see new operas; catchy arias became popular stand-alone songs and tunes. (A couple famous Looney Tunes shorts involve Bugs Bunny spoofing popular operas, a gag that wouldn’t work if opera were not well-known to the working class at the time.) And remember that in an age before recording, if you wanted to see or hear a performance, you had to see it live. Theater and opera filled the niche now occupied by movies and tv shows.

Among the rich, however, opera was more than just an entertainment. The opera was a place to see and be seen, to track and display fashion, and demonstrate cultural competency through an appreciation of the canon of opera. It was even more important for the nouveaux riches of the Gilded Age, because it allowed men and women who had more humble social origins to demonstrate that they had arrived, they appreciated high culture, and they had money. So attending the opera was a form of conspicuous consumption, albeit not on the same order as throwing a massive ball or a building an urban mansion.

And understandably the Knickerbockers wanted to use their control of cultural institutions like the Academy of Music to keep out the vulgar industrialists by exercising a strangle-hold on who had access to opera boxes. Opera boxes were the most visible and high-status way to attend the opera. They physically elevated those inside the box over the masses who had row seats, they made those in the boxes extremely visible to everyone else, and they were literally gate-kept by ushers, which allowed the owners to decide who to let in or keep out, thereby allowing the owners to signal who was in or out of high society.

New York Opera before the Academy of Music

The New York Academy of Music was built in 1854. There had been two previous opera spaces in the city. The Italian Opera House had been built in 1833 to house a specific opera company, but had folded just two years later. The Astor Opera House (named for Astor Street, where is was built, not directly for the Astor family) was opened in 1847, but it struggled, going through three managers in its first three years. This space was intended to be more socially exclusive than other theaters of the time. In place of benches, it featured more pricey upholstered chairs, the 500 cheap-seat benches were up in a loft only accessible by a narrow staircase, and there was a dress code that required evening dress and kid gloves.

But on May 10th, 1849, the Astor Opera House was the center of the Astor Place Riot, which erupted when the Astor hosted William Charles Macready, the foremost British Shakespearean actor of the day, in a performance of Macbeth. Macready’s arch-rival (at least in the American mind) was Edwin Forest, the first great American actor, also known for his Shakespearean work, and Forest was also giving a performance of Macbeth at the nearby Broadway Theater. Three nights earlier, Forest’s supporters had disrupted Macready’s play by throwing eggs, produce, and chairs, and Macready was only narrowly persuaded to return to the stage on the 10th. That night, Forest’s followers planned to light a fire during the performance, but the Astor’s management was able to catch most of them before they entered the building. Then a full-scale riot erupted outside, the New York militia opened fire, causing numerous injuries and fatalities, and another riot occurred the next night. The Opera House sustained some physical damage, but it also acquired a reputation as the “Massacre Opera House” on “DisAstor place”, and it was shuttered partway through the next season.

The Academy of Music

The New York elites still wanted an opera house. So in 1852, shipping magnate and former US Congressman Moses Grinnell formed a stock-holding corporation to fund the construction of what became the Academy of Music. When it opened in 1854, it was the world’s largest opera house, with 4,000 seats. Recognizing that the overt elitism of the Astor Opera House had helped alienate it from the New York population, the Academy was less overtly elitist. The general seating was relatively cheap and affordable and it only had 18 boxes.

However, unlike most modern high arts spaces, which are generally organized (so far as I know) as a non-profit whose primary function is to host an opera company or an orchestra regardless of how profitable that is (and therefore may have to conduct fundraisers or employ other devices such as subscriptions to maintain their viability), the Academy of Music was from the start a for-profit venture intended to earn money for its stockholders. It hosted opera as its most elite activity, but it also acted as a theater, an exhibition space, and even an auditorium for sermons and political rallies. Most infamously, it hosted “French balls”, where the wealthy could mingle in masks with prostitutes. One such event involved 4,000 paying guests and, if indignant newspaper reports are to be believed, involved open sexual activity. Rather than being an opera company itself, the Academy of Music simply hosted opera companies put together by outside opera impressarios who came in for a season, hiring the best talent they could afford to perform.

Because the Academy had only 18 boxes, they were at a premium, and were controlled by those with generational wealth, namely the Knickerbockers, who passed them on parent to child. They used their stranglehold on this key social resource to exclude the nouveaux riches industrialists, who could only get access to them as invited guests of a box-holder. By the 1880s, the industrialists were offering upwards of $30,000 (more than a million in today’s dollars) to buy a box from a current holder, but none of the Knickerbockers were willing to sell. As Edith Wharton, the great novelist of Gilded Age society wrote in her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence:

“The world of fashion was still content to reassemble every winter in the shabby red and gold boxes of the sociable old Academy. Conservatives cherished it for being small and inconvenient, and thus keeping out the ‘new people’ whom New York was beginning to dread and yet be drawn to.”

Eventually, out of sheer frustration at this exclusion, a group of 22 men gathered at Delmonico’s (one of the elite restaurants of the day) and formed a new corporation, which like the Academy, was a stockholder driven body. The spur for this action is widely thought to have been Alva Vanderbilt (wife of Henry Kissam Vanderbilt, the richest man in America at the time), who was furious when she was thwarted in her ambition to take a box at the Academy. Alva was the most aggressive of the Robber Baron’s wives, and in many ways she is the model for Bertha Russell, absolutely determined to break into high society, and in some ways George Russell is modeled on her husband Henry, who was more than willing to spend money on his wife’s ambitions.

(Incidentally, the whole season 1 plot line with Gladys’ debutante ball is directly lifted from a ball that Alva held in 1883, complete with the maneuver to exclude Carrie Astor because her mother Lina had never called on Alva. The trick that Alva pulled was a bit more clever than the show’s version. Alva claimed that because Lina had never called and left her calling card, she didn’t have an address to send Carrie’s invitation to, a ludicrous idea but one totally in keeping with the etiquette of the time. The show also omitted the most astonishing detail–Alice Vanderbilt’s dress was wired for electricity and had thousands of glass beads that lit up!)

These first subscribers included Henry Vanderbilt and his older brother William, but also Jay Gould and members of the Morgan and Roosevelt families, among the best known names. Within 10 days, 60 of its 70 boxes had been claimed. When August Belmont, the president of the Academy, learned about the project, he tried to preempt it by offering to build an additional 26 boxes, but their position would have made them less prestigious, and one imagines that Alva was irritated enough that she wanted to flex her clout, so Belmont’s offer was rejected.

The Climax of the Opera War

The Academy of Music contracted with probably the biggest opera impressario of the day, Col. James Mapleson, for their 1883 season, and he hired Adelina Patti, the most famous singer in the world and still today considered one of the greatest sopranos of all time. She commanded a fee of $5000 a performance (more than $140,000 in today’s dollars), contractually required to be paid in gold at her dressing room before the performance. Mapleson claimed she had trained a parrot to say “Cash! Cash!” whenever he entered the room.

(While Patti’s fee is astounding, late 19th century opera stars made all sorts of wild demands. The divas were expected to display elaborate clothing and expensive jewels, and the impresarios generally had to bear the cost of that. Some of the greatest singers even demanded plot changes or insisted on inserting their favorite arias into whatever opera they were performing. In one incident, the American soprano Minnie Hauck was so incensed with the way her tenor had improvised during an aria, the two got into a wrestling match during the scene and the tenor tried to throw Hauck into the orchestra pit.)

The new Metropolitan Opera had contracted with Henry Abbey (the former manager of Edwin Booth’s theater), who had never organized an opera company before. He was able to hire Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson, who was one of Patti’s few equals as a performer at the time. He was able to lure her away from Mapleson’s Covent Garden company with an offer of $2000 a night. He wisely chose to open the season with Gounod’s Faust, which was extremely popular at the time, and Nilsson had in fact debuted the role of Marguerite when Gounod premiered the full version of the opera back in 1869. (In the show, Abbey is subsumed into the character of Mr Gilbert, who is presented as both the man constructing the building and the man organizing the season, which as already noted isn’t how opera worked at the time.)

The opening night at the Met was a success; Abbey’s production brought in a very solid box office, but it was not sold out. Nilsson’s performance was considered labored and her tenor, Italo Campanini, was considered to be past his prime, and the first two acts received only sporadic applause. The newspapers seemed more interested in the who’s who in the boxes than in the performance itself, and the building itself received mixed reviews; many of the side boxes had poor sight-lines, an issue that remained until the building was replaced in 1966. Mapleson commented “they say one can neither see nor hear”, although he wasn’t exactly unbiased, and he mocked the building’s facade, calling it “the yellow brewery on Broadway”, an insult that stuck to the building permanently.

At the Academy, the Covent Garden company did not perform a whole opera, but rather selections from a half-dozen operas that allowed Patti to show off her talents, including Aïda and La Traviata. I haven’t been able to find any discussion of how she was received that night, but it certainly didn’t harm her career or reputation at all. However, the fact that she had sung entirely in Italian was old-fashioned; audiences of the day were becoming more receptive to German and French, and so it is likely that the program was not seen as particularly daring or well-thought-out. (In season 3, Bertha and Gladys briefly discuss the merits of Italian opera vs German and French ones, preferring Italian as “more romantic”.) Mrs. Astor, perhaps sensing a defeat, arranged to be out of town that night and so did not actually attend the opening night at the Academy.

Thus, neither side actually ‘won’ the opening night, so far as I can see, except that the fact that the Metropolitan opened at all was a triumph over the Knickerbocker desire to exclude the vulgar industrialists. There was no English duke to dictate which side had won, and so in that sense The Gilded Age has exaggerated by showing Alva Vanderbilt Bertha Russell definitively triumphing when no such thing happened.

The Aftermath

What is more important than the opening night is what happened afterward. While opera was an important cultural factor in New York City, there wasn’t enough of an audience to support two rival opera houses, especially since the Met’s tickets were overpriced for what the market would bear and there were many empty seats. Both Abbey and Mapleson ended their season badly in debt. Abbey was forced to bear the cost of sets and costumes for a whole season of operas, whereas Mapleson’s season, because it was staged around selections from operas rather than whole ones, was cheaper to produce. But Patti was staggeringly expensive. Abbey closed the season with a $600,000 loss (around $3.8 million in today’s dollars) and he surrendered his tenancy at the Met.

Mapleson, as suggested above, was not changing with the tastes of the time, since his company continued performing entirely in Italian, whereas the Metropolitan Opera’s program over the coming seasons was more reflective of contemporary tastes. And that seems to have made all the difference in the long run. In the next few years, the Met established itself as the dominant opera house, while the Academy slipped rapidly. In 1886, the Academy cancelled its opera season entirely. Two years later, it began to offer vaudeville and cheap melodramas instead, a much more low-brow form of entertainment that demonstrated that the Academy had lost its spot as the pinnacle of New York City’s social life. In 1887, Mapleson was forced to declare bankruptcy and lost the Covent Garden company. His last attempt at a New York season, in 1896, was a disaster. Abbey, in contrast, was able to return to staging opera at the Met in 1891 and continued to do so until his death in 1895.

And Alva Vanderbilt got what she wanted. Not only did she have a box at the rising opera house, but Mrs. Astor gave in and began to receive her. That party I mentioned before–the one Gladys’ debutante ball is modeled on–actually happened a few months after the premier at the Met, and in some ways it marked the breaking open of the 400 to the Vanderbilts and other New New Yorkers.

So overall, The Gilded Age gets this right. It substitutes Bertha for Alva Vanderbilt, and it presents the opening night as more definitive than it was. It also imagines a moment when the Met’s building project was in danger of running out of money, which never happened, but I suppose the show needed a bit more drama. The conflict between Bertha and Mrs Winterton over who will get the center box is also fabricated, since neither woman actually existed. But overall, the show even gets most of the details right, including having Christina Nilsson singing Faust.

So the Historian is going back to the movies, or at least to the tv shows. I’ve been extremely busy and I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for further reviews, but I’ve been watching Julian Fellowes’ HBO’ series The Gilded Age and felt like I needed to write about it.

The Gilded Age is set in in the early 1880s in New York City at a time when the Industrial Revolution is in full swing and New York society is being transformed by the rise of the Robber Baron captains of industry. The show focuses on two households, that of the widowed Agnes van Rhijn (the always fabulous Christine Baranski), her spinster sister Ada (Cynthia Nixon), and their niece Marion (Louisa Jacobson), the daughter of Agnes and Ada’s estranged and now deceased brother, along with Agnes’ son Oscar (Blake Ritson), a rake and closeted homosexual. The Van Rhijns represent ‘Old New York’, the Anglo-Dutch elite who have dominated the city since the pre-Revolutionary period.

The other household, located just across the street, belongs to the Russells. George Russell (Morgan Spector) is a Robber Baron whose exact business is vague but involves railroads and steel mills; in the third season he is working to build the first transcontinental railroad (in fact, the Pacific Railroad already earned that honor in 1869). His wife Bertha (Cassie Coon) is determined to break into New York high society. Her son Larry (Harry Richardson) and daughter Gladys (a strikingly dull Taissa Farmiga) struggle under Bertha’s dominant hand. The Russells represent ‘New New York’, the nouveau riche industrialists who were transforming the American economy and beginning to assert control over both the city and its upper class society.

A third strand of the series focuses on Peggy Scott (Denée Benton), an ambitious young Black woman who aspires to be a journalist and novelist but serves as Agnes van Rhijn’s personal secretary. Peggy allows the series to explore a subject rarely depicted in cinema or tv, namely the emerging Black middle class in the late 19th century, as well as the widespread racism of the period and the various concerns of urban Black society in the post-Reconstruction era.

The series is in many ways just an American version of Fellowes’ Downton Abbey, which is itself really just an updated version of Upstairs, Downstairs. Attention is given to both the families in these households and their below-stairs servants. It demonstrates Fellowes’ trademark interest the lives of the rich and his obsession with the intricacies of table settings (which get a good amount of attention in multiple scenes across multiple seasons). There’s also a strong focus on women’s clothing, with female characters having frequent dress-fittings and showing off the highest fashions for the 1880s.

The show is set at a moment when power was really shifting in America. Prior to the Civil War, wealthy land-owners tended to dominate society, especially on the East Coast. But the Civil War broke the back of the Southern land-owners and the Industrial Revolution was doing the same thing in the North. So in New York City the Anglo-Dutch Old New Yorkers were beginning to lose out to the titans of industry, whose businesses were beginning to generate vastly larger incomes than the Old New Yorkers controlled.

The Gilded Age was the first era of conspicuous consumption, when status was marked not only by having wealth but by being seen to have wealth. The flaunting of wealth was central to the maintenance of social standing. The palatial residences built in New York and Newport, the large balls with exclusive guest lists, the armies of footmen and other servants, these were tools that the rich used to prove they were rich. The New York elite were collectively known as the 400, from Ward McAllister’s claim that there were only 400 fashionable people in New York society (although it was also supposedly the number of people who could fit into Lina Astor’s ballroom). So the people who were used to a more restrained display of wealth were suddenly being confronted by the nouveau riche for whom showing off wealth was a way to prove they had really made it. So The Gilded Age is set at the moment when the some of the Robber Barons were beginning to truly overtake the Old New Yorkers and worm their way into the 400.

The Robber Barons

George Russell (and his entire family and household staff) are fictitious, but most commentators on the show suppose that the character is based on Jay Gould, a railroad magnate and financial speculator who was one of the earliest of the Robber Barons. Gould worked his way up from bookkeeper and land surveyor to investing in a tannery and ice harvesting, and then into investing in railways. Over his lifetime he various attempted but failed to take over the Erie Railroad and did take control of the Union Pacific, Western Pacific, Missouri Pacific, and Denver and Rio Grande Railroads; at one point he owned one ninth of all the rail track in the United States. He also owned the Western Union telegraph company.

Gould was a deeply unscrupulous man. During a struggle against Cornelius Vanderbilt, Gould aggressively manipulated the currency market by trying to corner the gold market, triggering the Crash of 1869. He was involved in New York’s Tammany Hall machine of the late 1860s and 70s, funneling money to William “Boss” Tweed in return for political favors, and at one point he made Tweed a director of the Erie Railroad; when Tweed was arrested, Gould paid his $1 million bail. He bribed President Grant’s brother-in-law to get inside info on government gold sales. When Vanderbilt tried to buy up Erie Railroad stock to seize control of it, Gould simply issued more stock, and when he was arrested for this, he bribed key New York legislators to change the law. At one point during this scheme, he and two accomplices holed up in a New Jersey hotel and stationed armed guards at all the entrances to ensure he wasn’t arrested. When a conman scammed him for an enormous sum of money and then fled to Canada, a group of his supporters caused an international incident when they attempted to kidnap the conman and bring him back to the US; the governor of Minnesota nearly invaded Canada until President Grant got involved and calmed things down. When Gould acquired the struggling Union Pacific Railroad in 1874, his first move to make it more profitable was to slash the pay of his Chinese labor force to less than a dollar a day.

George Russell is, in true Julian Fellowes fashion, a water-downed version of a Robber Baron who never does anything actually illegal. Whereas Gould walked into the New York State capital with a literal suitcase full of money with which he bribed people, the worst thing Russell does in the first season is offer New York City councilmen an opportunity to buy when his stock is low because they know the stock price will go up after they pass a law allowing him to build Grand Central Terminal (which was actually built by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1869). When the councillors screw him over by selling their stock and then revoking the law to drive the stock price down so they can buy again, Russell buys up all the stock so they find themselves owing money for their purchases (a scheme that I don’t think actually makes sense, but let’s not worry about that).

In the second season when Russell has to deal with striking steel mill workers in Pittsburg, instead of letting soldiers open fire on them (in an event loosely modeled on the Pittsburgh Homestead Steel Works strike in 1892, when strikers got into a battle with Pinkerton agents), he ultimately chooses not to allow the soldiers to open fire and instead signs a deal with the strikers that will give them several of their demands. As Russell explains to one of his employees, it was only a 6-month contract, by the end of which the union workers will be too divided to effetely stop him from cutting wages again. But we never actually see Russell cut the wages, and instead we’re left with the impression that Russell is a decent man who values the lives of his workers, something that the Robber Barons generally didn’t.

Also in the first season, one of Russell’s trains suffers an accident when an axel breaks and the car derails, killing five and injuring many others. This might have been inspired by the 1833 Hightstown Rail accident, where a car derailed because of a broken axel, killing two and injuring 21 (including future Robber Baron Cornelius Vanderbilt and former president John Quincy Adams); the Hightstown derailment was the first fatal train accident in American history. In the show, the accident is caused by substandard parts, and for a while it looks like Russell might stand trial, but in fact it turns out that one of his employees was embezzling money and using cheap parts to build the train.

So, as in Downton Abbey, Fellowes indulges a fantasy that the rich and powerful will actually act in moral ways, instead of the exploitative ways they actually demonstrated historically. Russell is not so much a Robber Baron as an aggressive businessman. He never does anything that would really make him seem greedy and exploitative.

The Duke of Buckingham

One of the central plot lines of the third season involves Bertha scheming to marry her daughter Gladys to Hector the Duke of Buckingham (Ben Lamb). Throughout the show, Bertha ruthlessly controls Gladys’ life because Bertha “wants the best for Gladys”. This plot line is based on the life of Consuelo Vanderbilt, granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, who felt victim to her brutally-controlling mother Alva. Alva forced Consuelo to wear a steel rod in her clothes to give her good posture, she beat Consuelo with a riding crop when she was unhappy with her daughter, and she gave her little choice in what clothes she wore.

Alva set her sights on Charles Spencer-Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, who was nearly bankrupt. In exchange for railroad stock with $2.5 million (nearly $100 million in today’s dollars), in 1895 the duke got an unwilling bride who had to be locked in her room to prevent her eloping with the man she actually loved and who was reportedly weeping behind her veil at the altar. The couple were unhappy, with Consuelo taking several lovers (one of whom may have fathered her second son), and they shocked society by formally separating in 1906 and divorcing in 1921.

In the show, Bertha is not physically abusive of Gladys but does routinely control her clothing and in the first season frequently refuses to let Gladys go to social events. She and George undermine Gladys’ efforts to socialize with men (including Oscar van Rhijn, who is very explicitly hoping to marry her for her money and as a respectable cover for his homosexuality). Bertha orchestrates the sale of her daughter to the fictional Duke of Buckingham, and like Consuelo, Gladys is crying at the altar.

But unlike Consuelo, things turn out better. Hector turns out to be a better match for Gladys than he initially appeared, and with a little encouragement from Bertha, Gladys manages to win his heart. By the end of the season, Gladys and Hector are well on their way to being happily married, and Bertha’s drive to have a duchess for a daughter turns out to have been a good idea. So once again, Fellowes waters down the actual historical unpleasantness so that his characters won’t actually have to do anything cruel.

George and Bertha’s excesses are to a very considerable extent redeemed by the fact that they very sincerely love each other. Although they quarrel (especially in the third season), they frequently kiss and the show implies that they have a healthy sex life. When Turner undresses and climbs into George’s bed in her bid to seduce him, he indignantly gets out of bed and orders her to leave his room. When Gladys eventually hears about the incident, it’s clear that she’s deeply upset by the idea of her husband having an affair and rightfully angry that he didn’t tell her about it when it happened. They are the only couple in the show who unreservedly show affection for each other and George never attempts to force sex on Bertha, always letting her invite him into her bed. They are in that sense an ideal 21st century married couple. whose relationship is rooted in mutual respect; they’re equal partners in their project to dominate New York. The result is that they are very much the heroes of the show, despite their occasional flaws, and their triumphs over their various opponents are positioned as good things the viewer should sympathize with. (In reality, George would have been far more likely to seduce one of the maids in his household than vice versa.)

Extremes of Wealth

The Gilded Age was probably the moment of maximum disparities in wealth. Although the average American income rose from $380 in 1860 to $584 in 1890 (an increase of 59%, thanks primarily to industrialization), the wealth at the top increased vastly more than the wealth at the bottom. In 1897, 4,000 families controlled as much wealth as the other 11.6 million American families combined. And to a very considerable extent, it was the backbreaking, dangerous, exhausting labor of those 11.6 million that was generating the wealth of the 4,000.

True to form, Fellowes has little interest in acknowledging this basic fact, because it would complicate viewers’ pleasure in seeing the ostentatious wealth the Russells throw around. In the first season, the only real glimpse of the squalid life a majority of New Yorkers were living at this time comes in a single scene when Mrs Armstrong (Debra Monk), Agnes’ bitchy ladies’ maid, goes home after work. We see the unkempt but comparatively spacious apartment she and her elderly mother live in, although the focus of the scene is mostly on showing viewers why Mrs. Armstrong is such a sour person.

In the second season, there is more attention given to Russell’s predatory attitude toward his Pittsburgh steel workers. In one scene, he visits the home of one of his workers and meets the man’s wife and four young children, the oldest of whom has just started work in the steel mill. But the home is probably a bit larger and cleaner than most steel workers would have enjoyed at the time. Various scenes devote some dialog to the workers’ demands, the unsafe nature of the mills is mentioned in passing but never actually demonstrated, and the workers are shown organizing and striking. But although the show acknowledges that Russell is being predatory toward his workers, Russell ultimately finds his conscience and gives his workers temporary concessions, and he takes a great deal of heat from his fellow captains of industry for doing so, who declare that he’s betrayed them. The overall effect is to downplay Russell’s culpability; he’s not really that bad compared to the other industrialists.

The servants are all basically happy and generally accept their subservient status. Mrs Van Rhijn is positioned as a good employer once you get past her acerbic tongue and occasional pettiness. When she learns that Jack (Ben Ahlers) needs money to apply for a patent for his new alarm clock, she gives him $5 (a substantial sum in 1883, and third of what he needs). At one point she threatens to dismiss Armstrong, who responds with near panic, but Agnes is simply making it clear that she is serious that she wants Armstrong to stop harassing Peggy. When Jack eventually receives the staggering sum of $300,000 for his invention, he actively wants to stay a servant and Agnes has to force him to leave.

Among the Russells’ household, the various servants are a bit more ambitious, but their ambitions are mostly confined to getting the best employment they can. Adelheid (Erin Wilhelmi) simply wants to rise from parlor maid to ladies’ maid. Monsieur Baudin (Douglas Sills) has passed himself off as French to get employment as a chef. Only Turner (Kelley Curran), Bertha’s ladies’ maid, is truly unhappy in service. But she’s presented as a villain who schemes to seduce George and then in later seasons to get revenge on Bertha for dismissing her. The storylines involving the servants are mostly about romantic or family matters. When anything would threaten their employers’ positions, they eagerly work together to help deal with the problem. None of the characters ever espouses Socialist ideas, even though those were becoming quite widespread in this period, and they rarely express any sort of dissatisfaction with their employers.

The message here is clear. The elites old and new deserve to be in charge and can be trusted to do the right thing and those downstairs are mostly satisfied with their place in life. It might be worth pointing out here that Fellowes is actually Baron Fellowes and sits in the British House of Lords as a member of the Conservative Party; his wife was passed over for the title of Countess Kitchener because of British rules of inheritance which exclude daughters from inheritance of peerages.

One of the reasons I stopped posting during Covid was I got busy right in the middle of a two-part review of The King (2019, dir. David Michôd), a movie I rather disliked. I did the initial review, but I knew I needed to post a review of its battle scene, but after a couple months had passed, I couldn’t recall the scene clearly enough to review it from memory and the prospect of watching it again discouraged me from doing it; the Covid stress was bad enough without compounding it with a crappy movie. But I finally had the right combination of time and mental health to make myself rewatch it. And hey! It’s exactly as crappy as I remembered it being!

If it’s so crappy, why did I feel I needed to review it? Well, it’s about the battle of Agincourt, which has the distinction of being one of the very few medieval battles to be depicted in film three times. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another medieval battle depicted on screen three times, but I’m betting there have been at least three treatments of the battle of Hastings or the battle of Hattin that I haven’t seen. And that just seems to merit a post.

The Historical Agincourt

Since I’ve already discussed this battle in detail, I’ll just let you read it here if you need to. But I’ll summarize. In 1415, Henry V launched an invasion of northern France. After capturing Harfleur, he marked east, encountering a good deal of rain, and his men began to get sick, so he aimed for Calais with the intention of returning to England. But the French, knowing his army was weak, chased him down at Agincourt.

Knowing that he was seriously outnumbered and his men were weak, Henry adopted a very defensive position between two woods, organizing his men into a line in which his men-at-arms (cavalry dismounted to fight on foot) were either flanked by or interspersed with his longbow men. After some initial exchange of arrows (which the French probably were on the losing end of), the French cavalry charged but got repulsed by arrow fire. The French infantry advanced, but took high casualties because of the longbows. They lost formation and got slowed down by the muddy field, the retreating casualties, and the mounting bodies. The nature of the field channeled the French into an increasingly tight zone where they were unable to fight effectively against the English infantry. The English victory was sealed when the longbow men put away their bows and joined the attack using knives and hatchets.

The result was one of the most lopsided victories in medieval history. The French suffered something between 4 and 10,000 casualties, while the English suffered only about 110 casualties.

The King‘s take on Agincourt

In the film, Henry (Timothee Chalamet) is advised by one of his nobles to not confront the French because the English forces are sick and outnumbered. But Falstaff (Joel Edgerton) proposes a bold plan. The field at Agincourt will be very muddy once it rains overnight (which he knows it will because his bad knee always aches before rain) and the mud will neutralize the French advantage of numbers. So he suggests that instead of fighting on horseback, the English should dismount and fight on foot (a plan so novel the English have actually been doing exactly that for several generations). But the French won’t just advance onto the field on their own, so he suggests that a small force of men be advanced to draw the French into attacking them. Then, when the mud fouls their charge, the rest of the English forces, which have been hidden in the forests on either side of the field, will charge in at their flanks.

Henry agrees to this gamble and, as predicted, it rains overnight. Because the men who are first advanced will essentially be making a suicide maneuver, Falstaff declares his intention to lead them, which Henry dislikes, but Falstaff persuades him that it’s the best option, and makes Henry promise not to make the follow-up attack until the French troops are fully committed. Henry meets with the Dauphin (Robert Pattinson) and offers to fight in single combat rather than a full pitched battle, obviously trying to keep Falstaff alive. The Dauphin rather strangely suggests this means Henry is a coward and as a result the battle goes ahead.

And it plays out roughly as Falstaff had planned. Falstaff leads a force on foot into the muddy field. The French make a very slow charge on horseback, not using lances but swords, and the English arrow-fire forces them to speed up. They slam into Falstaff’s unit, who, despite being substantially armed with pikes, make no effort to use the pikes to break the cavalry charge, even though that’s one of the main reasons to use pikes. As predicted, the mud bogs everyone down and the fight completely loses its organization (because cinematic soldiers can’t ever keep their ranks tight).

The French advance their reserves into the fight and the Dauphin gets into the battle as well. The English continue firing their arrows, mostly at the advancing cavalry, and then Henry launches his flanking maneuver. Then there is a long battle montage that focuses a lot on how muddy and vicious the fighting is.

Then the Dauphin shows up and offers Henry single combat. Even though the Dauphin is fresh to the fight and Henry is exhausted, Henry accepts, but the Dauphin embarrasses himself by slipping in the mud so much Henry just lets his men swarm the Dauphin. Logically the thing to do would be to either let his men kill the French prince or take him captive, but it’s unclear what finally becomes of the prince. Henry finds Falstaff dead and has a brief cry, and then walks off the field as men kneel before him. He’s asked what to do with the captives and orders them killed, a detail that is historically accurate, except that Henry made the decision during the battle, not after it; it’s also in Shakespeare, but almost always cut because it makes Henry look bad.

The first thing to note is that this bears only a casual resemblance to the historical Battle of Agincourt. The French did indeed make a charge into a muddy field and get bogged down and they did indeed lose the battle. Henry did fight in the battle. Beyond that, however, it’s mostly fantasy. Falstaff wasn’t a real person and therefore couldn’t lead anyone into battle, and the English did not advance their forces first; the French changed and got bogged down and then eventually the English advanced. The French forces seem to be entirely cavalry; there’s no crossbowmen and while there are some infantry, they don’t seem to fight. The Dauphin was not present at the battle and Henry never made any offer to fight a single combat. There was no English flanking maneuver, unless you count the longbow men getting involved after they couldn’t continue arrow fire because the English troops were in the melee.

Additionally, this version of Agincourt is rather improbable for a couple reasons. First, if the English had advanced a force on foot, the French would probably have done the logical thing and used crossbows to cut them down, rather than charging into battle. So this battle requires the French to be too impatient to do the obvious thing. A second problem is that in order to flank the battlefield, Henry would have to get his men fairly close to the French position without being spotted, which requires the French to have not sent out any scouts into the forests to watch for such maneuvers. That’s a pretty basic mistake, again not impossible, but unlikely. Falstaff’s proposal is basically a suicide mission, and that sort of thing seems to have been generally uncommon in medieval warfare. So while the King‘s version of Agincourt is a battle that could have happened in the 15th century, it’s a pretty unlikely one, since it requires the French to be fairly stupid about one of the things they were famous for.

How does it compare to the other two screen version of Agincourt?

The King‘s Agincourt bears virtually no resemblance to Olivier’s 1944 version. Olivier’s version very heavily emphasizes the French cavalry charge, turning the charge into a truly great moment of cinema in which the pace of the music beautifully mirrors the pace of the charge. The emphasis is on the gallantry of the charge and the actual fighting is reduced to a crowd of knights milling around in a mass and some English archers leaping out of trees onto cavalry that is inexplicably riding through the woods.

Michôd’s scene draws more heavily off on Branagh’s 1988 version. The field is muddy, and the extended melee scene has the same tone, with lots of slow footage of men fighting brutally, punching each other, falling in the mud, and so on. Both convey a very strong “war is hell” feeling, and neither tries to glorify the fighting at all, in contrast to Olivier’s version which was filmed at the end of World War II and made for audiences who already understood how horrible war could be and therefore wanted to see something glorious and uplifting. While Michôd certainly isn’t copying Branagh, I think Branagh’s influence is still there. Frankly, Branagh’s version is far superior, both in terms of its plausibility and as cinema; the music hauntingly underscores the mayhem in a way that still affects me when I think of the film. It’s a far more emotional scene, in part because Branagh took the time to develop the secondary characters enough that we care when we see them die, whereas The King is almost entirely focused first on Falstaff and then on Henry. (Michôd also admits that he ripped off a scene from Game of Thrones, supposedly unintentionally.)

So if I had to rank the three scenes in terms of accuracy, it would be Branagh on top, Michôd second, and Olivier third. Michôd’s battle does at least make sense even if it’s improbable, whereas Olivier’s just looks silly today (but, in fairness to Olivier, stunt work was a much less developed and most of his extras were amateurs hired because they owned a horse). Ranked in terms of cinema, it would be Branagh, Olivier, then Michôd.

Overall, Michôd’s film is, in my opinion, just a fairly all-around miss. There is nothing I like about it at all, and I disliked watching it enough that it made me put this blog on hiatus for 18 months (well, ok, Covid was a factor too, but still…). For me, the battle is actually the highpoint of The King, and that’s saying something. If you want to see the story of Henry V well-told, rent Branagh’s brilliant film and savor its wonderful cast, masterful interpretation of the play, and Shakespeare’s glorious language.

Want to Know More?

Henry V has been the subject of a lot of popular biographies. One of my rules is that I won’t read historical works by journalists or ‘popular’ historians like Desmond Seward or Alison Weir because they tend to really irritate me with their superficial readings of the documents and facts. I haven’t seen a bio of Henry that I thought was really excellent yet, but John Matusiak’s Henry V (Routledge Historical Biographies)is fairly solid.

There are a variety of books on the battle of Agincourt, some of rather dubious value. It’s such a famous battle that it attracts a lot of writing by military enthusiasts, who are often former soldiers who think that because they know what modern warfare is like, they automatically can generalize to medieval warfare. Probably the best recent book is Anne Curry’s Agincourt: A New History. Curry is arguably the world’s expert on Agincourt and she makes good use of administrative records as well as the traditional narratives of the battle.