Social Register

It was historically a directory of "old money", well-connected families from the Northeastern United States. In recent years, membership has diversified both in the geography and ethnicity of those it lists.

History

In antebellum New York City, the social elite was still a small enough group that no formal method of tracking individuals was necessary. With the advent of the Gilded Age, fashionable ladies began the practice of leaving calling cards at the homes of other notable women whom they visited. These cards would be cataloged into "visiting lists".

In 1887, Louis Keller, a newspaper society columnist and golf promoter, compiled the names of those on the visiting lists of the most prominent New York women into a published volume titled the Social Register. Inclusion in the registry was done under the supervision of an anonymous advisory committee, composed of some of those listed. This first edition of the Social Register listed more than 5,000 people, most of whom were descended from early American settler families. Joseph Pulitzer was the only Jew to be listed, and people from new money were generally not included. The register, it has been noted, was very much a product of Gilded Age excess.

By World War I, the Social Register had expanded into a multi-volume annual which included listings of Society members in 26 U.S. cities. Following Keller's death in 1924, the Social Register passed to several of his heirs. In 1926, a single city edition cost $6.00 ($103.00 in 2023) and the full set of American editions cost $50.00 ($861.00 in 2023).

A 1973 column in The New York Times about that year's Social Register observed that – unlike males listed – the volume did not list the universities attended by females, unless they were students: "The fact that Mazie Cox is a 1967 graduate of Smith is not mentioned, although pains are taken to indicate that she is a member of the Colony Club, the Daughters of the Cincinnati and the Colonial Dames of America." It also noted that married women who chose to retain their maiden names would be listed under the surname of their husband regardless.

In 1976, the Social Register was acquired by Malcolm Forbes. In 1977, he re-consolidated the various city books back into a single volume for the whole of the United States. A study of the 1988 Social Register found that approximately 10 percent of those listed resided in New York City's Manhattan, with the Upper East Side zip code of 10021 hosting the greatest concentration of listed persons.

The Forbes family retained ownership of the Social Register until 2014, when it was sold to Christopher R. Wolf, a "longtime, listed member".

Significance

Inclusion in the Social Register has historically been limited to members of "polite society", members of the American upper class and The Establishment, and/or those of "old money" or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) families, within the Social Register cities. According to McNamee and Miller: "the acronym WASP... is exemplified by the Social Register, a list of prominent upper-class families first compiled in 1887... There is great continuity across generations among the names included in these volumes."

The cities included are Newport, Rhode Island; Baltimore; Boston; Chicago; Cleveland; Los Angeles; New York; New Jersey; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Portland, Oregon; Providence; San Francisco; Seattle; St. Louis; and Washington, D.C.; as well as ones for "Southern Cities". In European countries, similar directories for the perceived upper class, such as Burke's Peerage and Landed Gentry in the United Kingdom, or the Carnet Mondain and High Life in Belgium, have been published for centuries.

According to the Robb Report, inclusion in the Social Register "bespeaks old money, Ivy League, trust funds, privileges of birth, fox hunting, debutante balls, yachting, polo, distinguished forebears, family compounds in the Adirondacks, and a pedigree studded with 19th-century robber barons".

However, while inclusion in the Social Register was once so important for members of Society that, according to Brooke Astor, "if someone wasn't listed, you just didn't know them", by the late 1990s its influence had seriously waned. In 2002, journalist Tom Wolfe said that he no longer heard regular reference to the Social Register and opined that the "world of social luster has been so overshadowed by celebrities that it doesn’t have any kick anymore".