Gilded Age Strenuous Etiquette of Newport

Leisure for most of us is a thing to be enjoyed. Leisure at Newport is a thing to be displayed. Toil is tiring, is the experience of most of us. We desire to find a place where we may idle away a few weeks, refresh our brains recruit our energies, and enable ourselves to return with new vigor to our work again. Toil is ignoble, is the Newport idea: let us employ ourselves in showing that we need not engage in it…

NEWPORT LIFE STRENUOUS –

Society Women in Vacation Having Anything Except Best

It is not difficult to understand why women who have passed the summer at Newport are readily to be distinguished far into the winter by their fagged look. The season is yet young - the more exciting round of balls and cotillions has not indeed begun - but already the faces of the women bear unmistakable lines of weariness which the arts of our army of masseuses cannot quite obliterate. 

Young girls not yet out - but who, nevertheless, are ever present and most popular at dinners, dances and doings of all sorts - are already wearing the faces of debutantes at the end of their first season. One or two of them are very lovely, but, it must be owned, are years too old in manners and in looks. It is commonplace to say that life in Newport is so formal that it affords no rest. It is really surprising, however, to reflect how completely the true vacation idea has been inverted. It is not merely that the notion of rest has been lost sight of; it has suffered a curious inversion.

Leisure for most of us is a thing to be enjoyed. Leisure at Newport is a thing to be displayed. Toil is tiring, is the experience of most of us. We desire to find a place where we may idle away a few weeks, refresh our brains recruit our energies, and enable ourselves to return with new vigor to our work again. Toil is ignoble, is the Newport idea: let us employ ourselves in showing that we need not engage in it.

This is the philosophy that explains, as its unconscious working has brought into being, the various phenomena of Newport ostentation of dwelling and dress that is so overwhelming to those unfamiliar with it, and over which visiting foreigners exclaim as over one of the wonders of the universe.

There is no place where so large a portion of the day may be passed in public at the casino, on the avenue and on the beach -though the latter by a classic fiction is supposed to be private. (Its mere semi-publicity has lately interfered sadly with the popularity of Bailey's.) The great houses stand but a little way from the streets and are open at all times to an inspection which would be intolerable to a European.

And yet it is considered well here to keep the proofs of unobserved leisure in constant evidence also. Etiquette, which at such other resorts as are truly vacation places, is neglected to the greatest extent compatible with ordinary respectability, is here carried to the utmost extreme. The exact proprieties of dress, equipage, cards and calls are insisted upon. It is a common bore, which, while confessed on every hand. is notwithstanding strictly observed.

The idle folly of it stands out with great distinctness in a place like this. where it might be expected all possible fromality would be dispensed with in the interest of real comfort and enjoyment. The fact that formality 's nowhere carried further shows the real purpose of life. –New York World, 1902

🍽️Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber of The RSVP Institute of Etiquette, is the Site Editor of the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia

Gilded Age Newport History

By the 1860s, it was not fashionable to stay at a Newport hotel for the season: one must own or rent a cottage. Most of the bigger hotels closed while more cottages were being built. Due to the Civil War, the Southern contingent at Newport was depleted and cottagers hailing from New York and Boston dominated summer society. —From the Newport Preservation Society’s “Newport Mansions,” with intro by David Chase, 1995

The most imposing “cottage” erected in the ‘50s, Chateau-sur-Mer, is an Italianate stone villa constructed by a New Yorker, China-trade merchant William S. Wetmore. It was the setting for the first of Newport’s spectacular parties - a fete champêtre Wetmore hosted in 1857 to which he invited 3000 guests.

By the 1860s, it was not fashionable to stay at a Newport hotel for the season: one must own or rent a cottage. Most of the bigger hotels closed while more cottages were being built. Due to the Civil War, the Southern contingent at Newport was depleted and cottagers hailing from New York and Boston dominated summer society.

In stating this, however, one must not lose sight of the fact that Newport attracted not only America's financial elite, but many of its most gifted artists and writers, diplomats, politicians and jurists, historians, educators, scientists and engineers, architects and collectors. The literary set, led by Julia Ward Howe. gathered at Newport in the summer. Even that colorful writer of Wild-West tales, Bret Harte, spent time in genteel Newport.

For those disinclined to partake of witty theatricals and bookish conversation, the Newport season was very much a season of sport. Both men and women enjoyed riding, coaching, tennis and croquet. Archery was a women’s sport. Fishing, sailing, polo and golf were men’s sports. Swimming was enjoyed by both sexes, but generally not together.

Newport cottages of the 1860s, ‘70s and early ‘80s were large, comforable and oriented to the out-of doors. In 1879, willful, ill-tempered James Gordon Bennett, Jr.- a yachtsman and rake and the owner of the New York Herald — built the Newport Casino op posite his Bellevue Avenue cottage as a place where people might visit, dine, hear band concerts and play tennis. The Casino was an instant success and remained a center of cottagers’ daytime activities for decades. The work of New York architects McKim, Mead & White, it established a vogue for informal, shingle-clad resort architecture inspired by the con temporary British Queen Anne style and American Colonial buildings. Within five years, however, an entirely different taste took over. Grand new cottages were built, hieratic and palatial in scale, and it was to be the very same McKim, Mead & White, and even more so Richard Morris Hunt, who would set the pace in designing princely residences. Their celebrated “cottages” of the late 1880s, ‘90s and early 1900s make Newport the place in America to experience the Gilded Age.

The rush to opulence began with a series of very large, late Gothic stone houses at Newport. They were quickly overshadowed by a residence designed by Richard Morris Hunt and built by William K. Vanderbilt, as an anniversary present for his wife: Marble House, true to its name, is a Neo-Classical pavilion clad in shimmering white marble and decorated with a profusion of richly tinted marble veneers, mantels and ornaments, set off by gold fit tings and trim. It is like an enormous, beautifully crafted jewel box, miraculously set down on a cliff by the sea. After the Civil War, a great many American fortunes, like the Vanderbilts’, had grown to Medicean proportions, and the proud possessors of these for tunes, familiar with both European society and Euro pean standards of domestic magnificence, set out to build on the Medicean model.

Marble House was soon eclipsed by The Breakers, summer home of W.K. Vanderbilt’s older brother, Cornelius II. The Breakers, again the work of Hunt, has never been surpassed. From an architectural stand point, nonetheless, several large later cottages, though less sumptuous, are equally interesting. The best of these are McKim, Mead & White’s Rosecliff and Horace Trumbauer’s The Elms. Summing up Newport at the turn of the century, a British visitor wrote to the Evening Mercury of Liverpool, “No words can convey an idea of the marvelous spectacle of well and graciously and artistically applied wealth which has harnessed to its aspirations the greatest architectural art of the country... The result is such a combination of natural and contrived beauty, open for the enjoyment of all, and cannot be seen on such terms anywhere else in the world.”

The particulars of Newport cottage life changed little between the 1890s and the 1920s. These were the halcyon years of the leisured class. But the tempo and formality changed substantially.

Although, in a sense, the Newport scene of popular imagination died with the Great Depression, it lives on and is perpetuated in the incomparable legacy of landscape and architecture which survives from the Gilded Age, from the earlier nineteenth century, and from the days of Newport's Colonial prosperity. To see Newport today —to visit the Point, Bellevue Avenue, Ocean Drive and Cliff Walk, to enter Hunter House or The Breakers or one of the other museum houses - is to come face-to-face with a unique and living heritage. — From the Newport Preservation Society’s “Newport Mansions,” with intro by David Chase, 1995

🍽Etiquette Enthusiast, Maura J. Graber, is the Site Editor for the Etiquipedia© Etiquette Encyclopedia