Chef’s Staff—An assistant, a Frenchwoman; two English kitchen maids or “scullions.”
Personal Servants—Valet to the master, a quiet, well-bred, insolent Englishman; valet to the young master, an understudy to the other valet; maid to Madame (French); maid to Mademoiselle (French); valet to the upper caste men-servants (English); valet to the lower class men-servants (English); maids to the servants (three English-Irish); laundress to the servants (English).
Quite a staff—and it does not include Madame’s private secretary, an American, a “gentlewoman,” thoroughly converted to the English system, or Mademoiselle’s visiting governess, a product of ten years’ training in a New York private school for the “young ladies of the upper class,” or extra servants of all kinds that are constantly coming and going. The total monthly pay-roll is never below one thousand seven hundred dollars; often, in the height of the winter season in New York or of the summer season at Newport, it climbs up to two thousand dollars. And, putting the feeding of all these people at twenty dollars apiece a month, which is exceedingly, ridiculously low, the board-bill would be more than eight hundred dollars a month. Then, naturally, all of them are as careless and as wasteful as they dare to be, and, wherever possible, corrupt in the taking of commissions from the “tradespeople.” This means a squandering of more than their wages and board together. But it is indeed a most “modest” establishment—there are at least a thousand in this country far more imposing. Why, our hero has not even provided servants for the servants of his servants! And, as everybody knows, that is always done in a really bang-up, swell, first-class establishment. Also, his liveries, although what the “tradespeople” would call elegant, are not nearly so sumptuous as those of the neighboring establishments.
But, dissatisfied though the servants are, they do their best to keep up appearances and they fight strenuously for the caste system. They are, roughly speaking, divided into five ranks. At the top stand the private secretary, the visiting governess, and the housekeeper. They are almost “gentlefolk”; in fact, they are gentlefolk in abeyance, as it were, like cadets of a royal house which has been kicked out by its unfeeling subjects. Next come butler and coachman and chef. Each admits the right of the other two to high rank, but each feels toward the others as they fancy a marquis must feel toward an earl. Below these high haughtinesses is the main body of servants, with the lowest rank made up of stablemen, scullions, servants’ servants. Each servant fiercely insists upon his own station, and still more fiercely insists upon the lower station of those whom the code of caste has assigned there. And all the servants insist upon the aristocratic principle being enforced from top to bottom of the household. The “master” and his wife, the boy and the girl, know that if they for an instant drop the pose they will be the butt of ridicule and contempt in the servants’ hall.
The effect of this incessant, subtle pressure upon the grown people is strong enough. But they retain some glimmerings of a sane point of view; at times they realize that there is not a little rotten nonsense in their mode of life. But think of the children! They were born into this noisome atmosphere; they are never allowed to breathe any other—for, even when they go away to school, it is to some “select,” “exclusive” institution, or to associate only with the “select” and “exclusive” in the big college. They know no more of the free and national and growing American life than a Mammoth Cave fish knows of the light and the radiant waters of the upper world. They regard Americanism as synonymous with demagoguery and anarchy. And they become sincere and, because of their wealth and display, successful missionaries of the gospel of snobbishness to all the children of the rich and the well-to-do brought into contact with them.
Truly, the service is not the most important item that comes up the back stairs of the fine houses of our plutocracy. The ideas—they are the real item.
English servants do not, as a rule, like to come to this country. Few of the best class, as yet, will consent to give up the splendor and assured aristocracy of England and go to live among a lot of vulgarians, hard though those vulgarians are striving to be worthy of the support of an aristocratic menialdom. Those few of the best who do condescend to exile themselves wear sad faces and show that they keenly feel the humiliation. For they cannot blind themselves to the truth that their masters and mistresses, striving hard to please and to delude, are still not really “ladies” and “gentlemen,” but just Americans. Have they titles? No. Do the common people doff the hat to them? No. Have they “ancestry”? They pretend to have, but the genealogical trees look about as much like real trees as the papier-mâché palm looks like the genuine thing; and Burke’s peerage and the Almanach de Gotha know them not. No, they are not aristocrats, and it pains the aristocratic servants to serve them much as it would pain a first gentleman of the bedchamber to King Edward to get on his knees to some “big nigger” who called himself Emperor of Ashanteeland. The commiseration of all sympathizers with sensitive souls belongs of right to these aristocrats of menialdom in exile.
The great mass of these imported servants, excepting those who come here for the chance to become men and women and to shake off servitude, are a worthless lot, weedings from those perfect English gardens of menialdom. And a hard time their American masters have with them. Insolence, shiftlessness, drunkenness, petty thieving are tolerated to and beyond the most asinine patience; then, one furious day, the housekeeper, under orders from an outraged master or mistress, ejects the whole crew and gets in an entirely new lot. But this revolt of the downtrodden “upper classes” is rare and dangerous and often disastrous. For this servile aristocracy is a close corporation, very limited in numbers and fully awake to its own power over the plutocrats who must at any cost in money, manhood and discomfort have servility and an imitation of the English way of living. Woe, woe, woe unto the plutocrat who gets himself on the imported servants’ black-list! He may have actually to close in whole or in part his vast houses, and to cease from inviting in his hordes of rich friends to see how much more gaudily he is showing off than they are. He may have to call in colored or plain Irish or Swedish servants, mostly women, to save him and his family from the horrors of waiting on themselves. But one shrinks from pushing inquiry in so harrowing a direction.
How long will it be before we have a home-grown menial aristocracy to bolster up and make strong our fashionable aristocracy? It may be longer than one might imagine. The educated people, the lawyers, superintendents, merchants, social, political and financial hangers-on, who serve the plutocracy, fall easily into servile habits. The big corporation lawyer and his family, the fifty thousand dollars a year dummy railway president and his family, eagerly pay court to the great plutocrat, bow and scrape and mould themselves to his and his family’s humors. But the “lower classes” here remain obstinately insolent. They go into plutocratic domestic service only under stress; they act in a manner that exasperates their servility-seeking employers; they leave as soon as they can get any sort of job anywhere. Also, they rouse the soundly sleeping or stunned manhood and womanhood of the imported aristocracy-adoring servants, and so compel the constant recruiting of the ranks of the menial aristocracy by fresh importations.
True, among the mass of our immigrants, almost all from countries where a real caste system has prevailed always, there is a tendency toward a searching after an aristocracy in this country. They miss it; they cannot believe that a land in all its physical aspects like unto the lands from which they have fled should be without what has always seemed to them a natural and necessary part of the order of the universe. But they hunt for this aristocracy not with the idea of worshipping it, but with the idea of destroying it. And hence we find that the loudest angry assertion of the existence of a true aristocracy here comes from those of our democracy-loving citizens who are foreign-born. They see this monstrous pretense rearing itself as imposingly as the true aristocracies of Europe; and they do not pause to distinguish between marble and plaster painted to look like marble. They raise a wild shriek and demand that snickersnees be drawn and that heads begin to fall. A natural mistake, and highly gratifying to our would-be aristocrats. They are not terrified by the uncouth and futile clamors; though to make the thing more realistic to themselves, they sometimes pretend to be. But they are through and through pleased at hearing themselves in seriousness called what they would fain believe themselves to be; and they say delightedly: “At last, the lower classes begin to recognize themselves, and us!”