‘Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time' Review: A Wealth of Amusement

Wall Street Journal

3 days ago

America's Gilded Age was a period characterized by massive income inequality between a superwealthy plutocracy (think Astors, Morgans and Vanderbilts) and an increasingly restive workforce. There are obvious parallels to today, including the propensity of the superrich to throw epic parties breathlessly reported in the media.
In 'Glitz, Glam, and a Damn Good Time,' however, Jennifer Wright argues that those late-19th-century parties were about more than conspicuous consumption. They allowed a smart, glamorous extrovert to shed some of the stuffy constraints of her era, acquire a social power that would increase her family's prosperity and be a model for others.
Marion Graves Anthon, or Mamie, as she was known, was a barely literate and rather plain young woman whose family had fallen on hard times. Her only assets were her natural wit and aplomb, but in a twist worthy of Edith Wharton, these were enough for her to snare a suitor who, according to his own family history, had been born 'with a silver spoon in his mouth big enough to be called a soup ladle.' As a young man, Stuyvesant Fish had rejected his patrician father's choice of law as a suitable career and went to work for the Illinois Central Railroad. Mamie enraptured this rather dull, Columbia-educated man, and in 1876 they married. They were a devoted couple. 'He thought she was a hoot,' Ms. Wright tells us, 'and she loved that he was a constantly amused audience for her jokes and adventures.'
The Fish fortune multiplied. But while 'Stuyvesant seemed to sense that railroads were going to be huge,' Ms. Wright suggests that 'Mamie seemed to understand that extroverted, exciting women who loved the spotlight were the future.'