New York Society
McAllister wrote that after his marriage in 1853, he bought a farm on Narragansett Bay, planted trees and left for a three-year journey throughout Europe's great cities and spas—Bath, Pau, Bad Nauheim, and the like—where he observed the mannerisms of other wealthy Americans and titled nobility, returning to New York with his wife and two small children on October 15, 1858. Using his wife's wealth and his own social connections, he sought to become a tastemaker amongst New York's "Knickerbocracy", a collection of old merchant and landowning families who traced their lineage back to the days of colonial New Amsterdam. Above all in his life was his desire for social recognition by what he termed the Ton, i.e., the cream of society.
Although purported to be an index of New York's best families, McAllister's list was suspiciously top-heavy with nouveau riche industrialists and his southern allies, seeking a new start in the nation's financial capital after the American Civil War. He referred to his patroness, Caroline Astor as his "Mystic Rose". He was also an early summer colonist of Newport, Rhode Island, and was largely responsible for turning the town into a Mecca for the Gilded Age, which made him a society darling.
Among the undesirables McAllister endeavored to exclude from the charmed circle of the Four Hundred were the many nouveau riche Midwesterners who poured into New York seeking social recognition. In 1893, he wrote a column about the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in which he urged that if Chicago society hostesses wanted to be taken seriously, they should hire French chefs and "not frappé their wine too much". The Chicago Journal replied: "The mayor will not frappé his wine too much. He will frappé it just enough so the guests can blow the foam off the tops of the glasses without a vulgar exhibition of lung and lip power. His ham sandwiches, sinkers, and ... pigs' feet, will be triumphs of the gastronomic art."
McAllister's downfall came when he published a book of memoirs entitled Society as I Have Found It in 1890. The book, and his hunger for media attention, did little to endear him to the old guard, who valued their privacy in an era when millionaires were the equivalent of modern movie stars.
