The date of the first Dancing Assembly of Philadelphia is precisely fixed as 1749.
It is remarkable that two such exclusive and elective balls, bound by such rigid rules, and so opposed to new members, should exist so long in the whirling change of American life.
In Europe limited subscription balls have not continued. Almach’s in London was the most famous, but it was swept out of existence by the rising tide of wealth and new people.
The Patriarchs’ of New York, while being governed by the same rules, and of the same character as these two existing balls, was not of great age, and was abandoned years ago without a murmur by a society that had outgrown anything so provincial as the subscription ball.
The St. Cecilia Society has continued its dances since the beginning, but the Philadelphia Assemblies were discontinued through the Civil War.
Many have prophesied the dissolution of both societies, but no one has seriously considered it. That these two balls continue to exist under the present status of society, with its moneyed kings buying admission everywhere, is a curious and contradictory phase of American life.
The fact that it is as difficult to enter each of them now as it was in the latter half of the eighteenth century is never comprehended by the newly rich or by the other millions of Americans who have not come in contact with the aristocratic exclusiveness of these two social institutions.
The St. Cecilia is more exclusive than the Assemblies for the reason that Charleston has had her social lines arranged since the first century of her existence. Wealth, power, genius, ambition, in a great horde are not knocking at the doors of that ultra-refined Carolina city for admission; but in a great city like Philadelphia unknown men become captains of industry overnight, and their wives wail for admission into the most fashionable function.
Tales that are told in broad social centers like New York, London and Berlin, of the exclusiveness of these two dances, are laughed at as the exaggerations of those with a gift greater for narrative than for fact.
In Charleston, when the St. Cecilia was begun, many years before the Revolution, the first subscription list almost settled the question of admission for the following centuries. On it were names more powerful in the seats of the nation’s mighty then than now.