Wealth, Power and Status in Dupont Circle During the Gilded Age

The center of Dupont Circle neighborhood in the northwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. is the intersection of three of the city’s grand avenues: Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire. What began as one of the many squares drawn on Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for the city of Washington—intended as a public park where three of the city’s at the time nonexistent major avenues were to intersect—became a concentration of wealth, status and power that was not equaled in any other nineteenth century American city.

The Dupont Circle neighborhood was born from the post–Civil War economic boom, the corruption of the
early 1870s territorial government of Alexander “Boss” Shepherd, a few slightly corrupt politicians and silver miners and many relatively honest wealthy people. To understand the history of Dupont Circle is to understand the socioeconomic class structures in the city during the second half of the nineteenth century that influenced the neighborhood’s rapid growth.

Washington, D.C.’s oldest social set was composed of its permanent residents, nicknamed the “Antiques” by Mark Twain, and was later known as the “Cave Dwellers” on account of its exclusiveness. Mainly from landed, slave-owning southern Democrat families, the early Cave Dwellers could trace their heritage in Washington back to the first political administrations in the capital, namely those ranging from John Adams to Andrew Jackson. Its members never strayed far from their geographic home base—the area immediately around Lafayette Square in front of the White House or just north of the square in the blocks between H and K Streets Northwest. The area still has architectural artifacts from the early days of the Cave Dwellers, such as the homes of Stephen Decatur, Dolley Madison and Benjamin Ogle Tayloe.

In contrast to the permanency of the Cave Dwellers, Washington’s official society’s time in the city was seasonal, and its presence in the city mostly followed the congressional season. A position in official society was automatic with a presidential appointment, congressional election or diplomatic posting to Washington. It was composed of the president and his family, members of the Supreme Court, members of the president’s cabinet, elected officials and the foreign diplomatic corps. Becoming a recognized social phenomenon during the administration of Ulysses S. Grant, official society was hierarchical, with the highest status given to those who, due to their particular positions in the government, spent the most amount of time in the city during the year; thus, presidential cabinet appointees and Supreme Court members, who spent the better part the year in town, ranked high in the hierarchy and representatives, who spent the least amount of time in the capital, were among the lowest ranked. While living in Washington, members of official society tried to live as close to the Cave Dwellers as possible, and those who remained in Washington after their terms and appointments expired often became recognized as Cave Dwellers themselves.

After the Civil War, when Washington, as well as the nation, had turned Republican, members of  residential society whose southern plantations had been devastated by the war, either left town or disappeared from public life.  Those who remained were seldom seen and were mostly known only to one another, truly earning the appellation of Cave Dweller. But they would still resurface occasionally to show disapproval of the newcomers and their social mores or when a daughter or granddaughter needed a cotillion to be introduced to society. Their acceptance of outsiders, usually in the form of an invitation, while rarely given, became the ultimate social prize.

A new social set began to appear in Washington immediately after the Civil War that was composed of high-ranking military officers. They followed the great Union generals like Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan to Washington to fill the many new, high-paying bureaucratic positions in the War and Navy Departments that were being created in the rapidly growing federal government. With solid government incomes or family fortunes of their own, they could stay the course in the neighborhood through the financially troubled 1870s. The new military set mixed easily with the both the Cave Dwellers and official society.

The Gilded Age, which started after the Civil War and lasted about three decades, was a period of rapid economic growth in the United States, especially in the North, with industrialization and railroads, and in the West, with silver and gold mining. With the dawn of this era also came a new government in Washington, D.C., and an opportunity for fortunes to be enriched in real estate in a city with an exploding population and with the significant improvements under Alexander Shepherd’s controversial board of public works programs in the early 1870s.

With Alexander Shepherd’s city improvements in place, the nouveau riche of the Gilded Age began to view Washington as an acceptable social destination and started to slowly invade the city, seeking to take advantage of its more temperate winter climate and its open-door social policy. The seasonal transience of official society allowed these newcomers to slide in with the start of the next congressional season and reinvent and establish themselves as members of high society—a privilege they were not afforded in their home cities due to their self-made, rather than inherited, fortunes.

Mark Twain's Patrick and Mrs. O'Riley (The
Gilded Age, 1873) Image: Public Domain

Mark Twain took a particularly strong dislike of the post–Civil War nouveau riche, nicknaming them the parvenus, a corruption of the French parvenire, “to arrive.” In Mark Twain’s 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, the “Aristocracy of the Parvenus” was embodied by the Patrick O’Riley and his family. O’Riley had made his fortune selling enormously overpriced shingle nails to a corrupt city government official, modeled after Boss Tweed. After touring Europe and learning to speak English with a foreign accent, O’Riley and his wife arrived in Washington, now as the Honorable Patrique and Lady Oreillé, and ready, in their minds, to take their new place in society.

The parvenus continued to grow in number and wealth for the next thirty years, building palatial homes in Dupont Circle until there was simply no more land to be had. With their strength in number, they finally became their own recognized social class, known as the “smart set,” defined not by a lack of birthright or the origins of their money, but as those whose reasons to be in Washington were purely social. Now able to mix with official society, though never with the Cave Dwellers, their money finally bought them what 

Garden party at the British Legation- the most elite of 
Dupont Circle's social venues in theGilded Age. 

they were seeking. Still, Washington’s smart set took its cues from New York’s smart society, of which many thought that Washington’s was a mere subset.

One social tradition that developed at the beginning of the Gilded Age was the social “season.” This season stretched from mid-November until the end of Lent and marked the time that official society and the smart set returned to Washington. Over the roughly twelve weeks of the winter season, social life for the smart set consisted of a grueling marathon of balls, receptions, parties, dinners, musicales and other activities. Following New York’s social calendar, the month of December was the month for coming out receptions and balls for daughters to be introduced to society. Activities during Lent tended to be less publicly ostentatious and offered a means to quietly close the season.

Summers would be spent in any number of acceptable locations—namely, Bar Harbor, Newport and the European capitals—and almost never back in the city from which one originally came, unless it was to settle family business. By the 1890s, the smart set had broken into cliques based on where they chose, or were invited, to spend their summers. Newport remained the prime destination for many, as it allowed them to mingle with New York society. The Cave Dwellers rarely left town during the summer season, quietly suffering through the city’s heat while scornfully watching the rest come and go.

Lavish dinner parties replaced the more intimate gatherings of the Cave Dwellers.

Most of the grand mansions built by official society and the smart set in Dupont Circle were concentrated directly around the circle and along Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire Avenues. Today, only two of the grand winter palaces of Dupont Circle’s elite still stand directly on the circle itself: the Patterson mansion at 15 Dupont Circle and the pie-shaped Wadsworth mansion at 1801 Massachusetts Avenue. Not far off the circle along Massachusetts Avenue to the west, a few more still survive, including  the mansions of James Blaine, Thomas Walsh and Mary Townsend. Many are now homes to organizations, office buildings and embassies. These buildings, along with many of the less grand houses that have remained as private residences, as well the middle-class homes that were filling in the quiet, tree-lined streets around Dupont Circle at the same time that the palaces were being built, still hold some of the flavor and lure of the neighborhood’s golden era.

Adapted from the introduction to A History of Dupont Circle: Center of High Society in the Capital.  Copyright (c) 2014. Stephen A. Hansen.  All rights reserved.