Names of the New York Social Register

Public domain image of Clare Boothe (Brokaw) Luce, American editor, playwright, social activist, politician, journalist, and diplomat

American Society and Near Society

THE Social Registers, which are the official indices of “society “ in the United States somewhat resemble, in character, Le Bottin Mondain of Paris, Webster's Royal Red Book of London, the various Taschenbücher of Europe, with an occasional faint touch of the Almanach de Gotha and Burke's Peerages.

The New York Social Register for 1931 contained about thirty-five thousand names, an increase of fifteen thousand over the Social Register of 1914; and the fourteen social registers of the largest American cities contained more than one hundred thousand names an increase of over fifty thousand names dur ing the same length of time..

These figures are particularly remarkable when one considers that the social register of exactly one hundred years ago, Longworth's New York Directory, boasted exactly eighteen names. (They were, even in those days, “important” ones, and, with few exceptions, they have continued to figure prominently in the annals of American society: Astor, Brevoort, Bleecker, De Rham, DePeyster, Halleck, Irving, Livingstone, Brockholst, Rhinelander, Roosevelt, Rutgers, Schermerhorn, Suydam, Stewart, Taylor, Vanderbilt, Van Rensselaer.)

The present Society census therefore shows an increase of ten thousand percent, which is to say that the efflorescence of American society has outdistanced every other phenomenon of that phenomenal country. Not even the population itself has kept step with the growth of the beau monde. From being practically nonexistent a hundred years ago, it now blooms like the green bay tree throughout the country.

The average foreigner would deduce, from these figures, that the development must be a superficial, and not a profound, one. He cannot believe that a delicately integrated society, founded on birth and kept alive by breeding– even with due consideration of the usual intravenous injections of money– could evolve at such a rate. He is correct. As a matter of fact, authentic New York society of today is still fairly represented by those eighteen names of a hundred years ago, with the addition of perhaps two or three hundred other names– a normal enough increase. – Clare Boothe Brokaw, 1932

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