Social Register

File:Biltmore_Estate.jpg. Pictured is the Gilded Age mansion Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina.]]

In antebellum New York City, the social elite was still a small enough group that no formal method of tracking individuals was necessary.{{cite book|last1=Montgomery|first1=Maureen E.|title=Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton's New York|date=2016|publisher=Routledge|isbn=978-1134952861|page=238}} 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.{{cite news|last1=Winship|first1=Frederick|title=Social Register Marks 100 Years of Listing Everybody Who's Anybody|url=https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-02-11-vw-42230-story.html|access-date=May 6, 2018|work=Los Angeles Times|date=February 11, 1988}}{{efn|A Social Register, published by Keller for Newport, Rhode Island, preceded the New York edition by one year.{{cite book|last1=Higley|first1=Stephen|title=Privilege, Power, and Place: The Geography of the American Upper Class| date=1995|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield|isbn=0847680215|pages=29–30}}}} 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 {{USDCY|6|1926}} and the full set of American editions cost $50.00 {{USDCY|50|1926}}.{{cite book|title=1926 Social Register: Southern California}}

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."{{cite news|last1=Robinson|first1=Ruth|title='74 Social Register Has Few Surprises|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1973/12/05/archives/74-social-register-has-few-surprises-not-in-new-edition.html|access-date=May 6, 2018|work=New York Times|date=December 5, 1973}} 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.{{cite news|last1=Morin|first1=Richard|title=America's Social Elite Still Love New York|url=http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1995/aug/06/americas-social-elite-still-love-new-york/|access-date=May 6, 2018|work=Spokesman Review|agency=Universal Press Syndicate|date=August 6, 1995}}

The Forbes family retained ownership of the Social Register until 2014, when it was sold to Christopher R. Wolf, a "longtime, listed member".{{cite news|last1=Kelly|first1=Keith|title=Forbes sells directory that catalogs Old Money families|url=https://nypost.com/2014/11/01/forbes-sells-directory-that-catalogs-old-money-families/|access-date=May 6, 2018|work=New York Post|date=November 1, 2014}}

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." {{cite book|author1=Stephen J. McNamee|author2=Robert K. Miller|title=The Meritocracy Myth|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-9AUI0CJ5eIC&pg=PA63|year=2004|publisher=Rowman & Littlefield|page=63|isbn=9780742510562}}

The cities included are Newport, Rhode Island; Baltimore; Boston; Chicago; Cleveland; Los Angeles; New York; New Jersey; Philadelphia;The Philadelphia volume included Wilmington, Delaware. Pittsburgh; Portland, Oregon; Providence; San Francisco; Seattle; St. Louis; and Washington, D.C.; as well as ones for "Southern Cities".examples may be found in [http://digital.library.umsystem.edu/cgi-bin/Ebind2h3/umsl7?seq=2 Page 2 of the 1925 Social Register of St. Louis, Missouri] 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".{{cite news|last1=Smith|first1=Jack|title=The Membership You Weren't Allowed to Talk About Is Now Open to New Recruits|url=http://robbreport.com/lifestyle/sports-leisure/the-membership-you-werent-allowed-to-talk-about-is-now-open-to-new-recruits-2771295/|access-date=May 6, 2018|work=Robb Report|date=January 8, 2018}} In its heyday, the name Social Register became a "kind of shorthand for the Wasp establishment".{{Cite news |last=Widdicombe |first=Lizzie |date=2012-03-19 |title=Original |url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/26/original |access-date=2025-07-10 |work=The New Yorker |language=en-US |issn=0028-792X}}

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".{{cite news|last1=DiGiacomo|first1=Frank|title=The Forbes Family is Scaling Back Social Register|url=http://observer.com/2002/06/the-forbes-family-is-scaling-back-social-register/|access-date=May 6, 2018|work=New York Observer|date=June 17, 2002}}

File:Social_Register_1920.png

Printed editions of The Social Register have long been bound in black with pumpkin-colored lettering.

A person's listing in the Register generally includes contact information, schools attended, and the social and country clubs to which he or she belongs.{{cite news|last1=Allison|first1=Sargent|title=The Social Register: Just a Circle of Friends|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/21/style/the-social-register-just-a-circle-of-friends.html|access-date=May 6, 2018|work=New York Times|date=December 21, 1997}} Many institutions and organizations are cited repeatedly using an extensive system of abbreviations (e.g., "P" for Princeton University, "BtP" for the Bath and Tennis Club of Palm Beach, Florida).

As of 1917:{{cite web|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=c5JIAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA19-IA4 |title=Social Register, Summer 1917|date=1917 }}

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• New York City
• Washington, D.C.
• Philadelphia and Wilmington (Delaware Valley)
• Chicago
• Boston
• Providence
• St. Louis
• Pittsburgh
• Cleveland
• Cincinnati and Dayton
• Saint Paul and Minneapolis
• San Francisco and Oakland
• Seattle
• Portland (Oregon)
• Baltimore
• Buffalo
• New Orleans
• Southern California, chiefly Los Angeles and Pasadena
• Richmond (Virginia)
• Charleston
• Atlanta
• Savannah
• Augusta (Georgia)

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Subsequent years offered guides for Detroit and New Haven, Connecticut.

Traditionally, wealth or fame have been insufficient for inclusion in the Social Register. Kim Kardashian and Gloria Vanderbilt were never listed and Donald Trump, prior to his election as President of the United States, was not included. A 1985 article reported that "enrollees need plenty of green (money), blue (blood), and lily white (reputation)".{{cite news|last1=Smith|first1=Martha|title=Cleaning House At Social Register -- High Society Can't Pass (blood)|url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/1985/02/08/cleaning-house-at-social-register-high-society-cant-pass-blood/|access-date=May 6, 2018|work=Chicago Tribune|agency=Scripps-Howard News Service|date=February 8, 1985}}

Listing in the Social Register has typically been through birth: Children born to a person listed in the Social Register are added. Persons are permitted to apply for inclusion in the Social Register. Such applications require letters of sponsorship from five persons already listed, followed by vetting from the advisory committee. In 1997, a spokesman for the Social Register{{'}}s then 25-member advisory committee described the criteria by which a person might be added to the directory. The committee, he said, asked themselves, "Would one want to have dinner with this person on a regular basis"?

The President of the United States and Vice President of the United States are, by custom, always added.{{Cite magazine | last1=Widdicombe | first1=Lizzie | title=Original | url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/26/original | magazine=The New Yorker | date=March 26, 2012 | access-date=May 6, 2018}}

Reasons for removal from the Social Register have traditionally been opaque.{{cite book|last1=Mills|first1=C. Wright|title=The Power Elite|url=https://archive.org/details/powerelite000mill|url-access=registration|date=1956|publisher=Oxford University Press|pages=[https://archive.org/details/powerelite000mill/page/55 55]-57, 72, 74, 80}} In the early 20th century, historian Dixon Wecter observed that those excluded tended to be persons unfavorably reported upon in the press and that, as long as one's private life "keeps out of the [newspaper's] columns" the risk of exclusion was low.{{cite book|author=C. Wright Mills|title=The Power Elite|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=J1ISDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA56|year=2000|page=56|publisher=Oxford University Press, USA |isbn=978-0-19-513354-7 }}

A Social Register spokesman reported, in 1985, that elderly persons who failed to remit the questionnaire sent to listed persons by the register for eleven consecutive years were removed. In addition, someone who married a person who was not, themselves, listed in the Social Register might have been dropped.{{Cite web|title=CLEANING HOUSE AT SOCIAL REGISTER -- HIGH SOCIETY CAN'T PASS (BLOOD)|url=https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1985-02-08-8501080213-story.html|access-date=2022-01-06|website=Chicago Tribune|date=8 February 1985 |language=en}} On the other hand, a 2018 article indicated that marriage to a listed person would "automatically [bestow] membership on the lesser-pedigreed spouse".

As of 1988, about 35,000 individuals were included in the Social Register. By 2014, this number was reported to be approximately 25,000.

• The 1934 film Social Register presented a fictitious look at the lives of persons on the Social Register.

• Debrett's
• Libro d'Oro
• Powerlist
• Kulavruttanta
• The Four Hundred (1892)

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• [https://archive.org/details/socialregisterl00usgoog Social Register Locater 1916], an index showing in which local edition each listed person could be found
• [https://archive.org/search.php?query=%22social%20register%20%22 35 Social Registers from major US cities early 20th century; online free]
• The Social Register of Canada, volume I (1958), and subsequent volumes 2 (1959), and 3 (1961), The Social Register of Canada Association. Montreal, Canada

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Category:1887 establishments in the United States

Category:Social institutions

Category:Social class in the United States

Category:Books by type

Category:Upper class culture