Who could write an accurate assessment of social New York better than a celebrated Broadway playwright? Exactly; that is why we were so happy to find this essay by Clare Boothe Luce (1903 – 1987) on just that very topic:
"The Social Registers, which are the official indices of "society" in the large cities of the United States somewhat resemble, in character, Le Bottin Mondain
, Webster's Royal Red Book
of London
, the various Taschenbucher of Europe, with an occasional faint touch of the Almanach de Gotha
and Burke's Peerage
."
"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 during 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."
