Perspectives

BENEFIT SOCIETY

The Bradley Martins were relative upstarts in New York society, having only in their generation escaped Troy, N.Y., the celluloid capital of the world, thanks to a fortune amassed by young Martin’s father.

Of the many lavish, ridiculous society parties of the era — such as one thrown by Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish for her friend’s dogs or another in which a small pet monkey was introduced as a Corsican prince and seated at her family’s table — none outshone the Bradley Martin Ball.

Dixon Wecter, the historian of society in America, describes the conception of the party in Cornelia Martin’s generous imagination: “One morning at breakfast during the winter of 1896-97, Mrs. Bradley Martin, reading of depressed conditions and the sufferings of the poor, suddenly decided to have a fancy-dress ball ‘to give an impetus to trade.’” As she pursued this noble demonstration of the trickle-down rationale of capitalism, her project grew “grander and grander,” Wecter tells us, “until she ended by stimulating trade to the extent of $369,200” — or, according to the Consumer Index from 1800-2006, approximately $8,624,245.20 in today’s dollars.

The jewelry, the exotic textiles, the cloths of gold and the suits of armor, the ostrich, peacock, and eagle feathers that went into the costumes, hair-dressing, and flower-arranging for the Waldorf ballroom; the toil and imagination that went into the dinner; the last-minute anxiety of the guest list (“James Van Alen Cannot Go,” gasped a headline in The New York Times) — every socio-sensuous detail of the ball was run down by a horde of U.S. and European reporters whose like would not be seen again in America until O.J. Simpson’s trial.

The aftermath was as world-stunning in its way as the run-up to the party itself. Overnight, the very masses that had salivated over the Martins’ pot-latch display of their wealth abruptly rounded on the hapless couple with all the age-old epithets of lower-class resentment, malice, spite, and rage against the rich.

Even in pulpits from which for years ministers had oozed the virtue — no, the sanctity—of the pursuit of wealth cautiously demurred and unctuously recalled Jesus’s puzzling metaphor of the camel and the eye of the needle. The uproar was so loud and threatening that the wretched Bradley Martins were obliged to flee into exile in Europe, where societies seemed (only for the moment, alas) more forgiving of the monstrous inequities in the distributions of wealth.

Soon the country went through the Depression, which shamed the plutocracy into sharing power, and then through World War II, which provided millions with a crash course in the egalitarian spirit of democracy.

This comity between the rich and the rest endured until the late 1980s when, prompted by the ludicrous Steinberg party in the Hamptons and Malcolm Forbes’ brief colonization of Morocco with hundreds of his best friends and subscribers, soothsayers began to bleat warnings of Bradley Martin Balls to come. In the meantime, the oil crisis alerted the business-managerial classes to the downside of globalization, a refreshed Republican Party wafted to political dominance by Southern-white status terrors visà- vis blacks and the financial and corporate elites became convinced that “greed is good.” The stock market, too, with all its thrilling rhythms, risks, and pay-offs, approached its triumph over the dreary drama of paycheck, credit card, and mall at the center of our economic imagination.

By the end of the century, the monetization of America was complete; all assets—political, financial, priestly—were at play in the markets of the world. For an apotheosis of the human winners of this game, the only requirement was a good chance at staying on top forever. The faux election of 2000 gave it to them at the hands of George W. Bush: tax cut after tax cut on income, capital gains, and estates. Even the ancient rule against perpetuities (forbidding perpetual passage of family wealth from generation to generation, forever) has been thrown out.

So then, with general arrangements now in place to ease the very rich into a near-permanent state of omnipotence, what can bring us relief from this tyranny? Another Bradley Martin Ball?

Not a chance. First, no tarantellas are being danced before the mob these days. Second, stupendous displays of wealth at parties have been collectivized; “socialized” is perhaps a better word. Finally, the trickle-down theory has been reconstructed as something pre-capitalist: almsgiving.

Cynics say about big parties—benefits—that the object of charity is a ruse, that such parties are for networking, for displays of fashion, for political and business plotting, to give idle trophy wives something to do with their afternoons, for having a luxurious good time.

The charges are true, to a degree; the “good time” is flatly untrue: most members of the rich class loathe having to attend, as indeed would anyone else who wasn’t a professional pickpocket. No, today’s big parties are what they say they are: collective activities for the raising and giving of alms, certainly not to the poor but to the worthy guardians of our greatest and unfathomably needy institutions of art, education, and disease. No matter how cost -ineffective benefit parties may be, they will never arouse the pulpit-pounders, the editors, and the lowly masses to the orgy of envy that they so enjoyed following the Bradley Martin Ball.

What would it take? Perhaps only a Depression of the kind that many pundits see coming at us right this minute.