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AI slop is littering your feed and spreading misinformation, so WIRED’s here to set the record straight. Join Historian Carl Raymond as we fact check the internet, Gilded Age edition.
Check out more from Carl Raymond and The Gilded Gentleman History Podcast:
@carlthegildedgentleman
https://thegildedgentleman.com/
Check out more from Carl Raymond and The Gilded Gentleman History Podcast:
@carlthegildedgentleman
https://thegildedgentleman.com/
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00:00I hate this video so much. The streets just weren't that clean. That's really bad. I hate that image.
00:07I'm the host of the Gilded Gentleman podcast. Let's fact check some AI slop.
00:15Let's watch the first video.
00:18You think you'd survive the Gilded Age? Girl, let me show you something.
00:23In the Gilded Age, no one referred to each other as girl. I would have buttons.
00:29Gloves, a hat, and a vial of self-confidence. Retail therapy. Oh, you have no idea.
00:36This was the thing about buying coke at the department store. Like, what is this? This is like twisted.
00:41While certainly there were some questionable substances that were sold out there,
00:45I have never seen any evidence of something like this actually being sold in a major department store.
00:52So where you shopped in New York in the Gilded Age, well, that told you a lot about who you
00:55were too.
00:56The stretch of Broadway from Union Square up to Madison Square was called Lady's Mile.
01:03And that's where some of the most famous retailers that we've even come to know today were located.
01:08Near Union Square, you had Tiffany & Company. You also had Lord & Taylor and Brooks Brothers.
01:14Now, this was called the carriage trade, which means that it catered to ladies in carriages.
01:20You would arrive in your carriage, you would do your shopping, and then you would pile your packages into your
01:25carriage, and off they would go back home.
01:28Two streets over on 6th Avenue, that was for another class of clientele, because that's where in the early 1870s
01:36they built the elevated rail trains.
01:38And some of the early, what we would call today, big box retailers were these big cast iron palaces.
01:45All the big windows where all the wonderful offerings were merchandised were up on the second level, because that's where
01:53the level of the trains were.
01:54So as you went by on the train, you could look out the window and find the next purchase that
01:59you wanted to buy.
02:00The idea of a department store was a brand new concept, that you could buy so many things in one
02:07place.
02:08And what's even more interesting about that is women could go shopping by themselves, and that gave women a sense
02:15of agency and power.
02:17They didn't need their husbands, and they didn't need a chaperone.
02:21Darling, it's 12 pounds of silk, six cracked ribs, and not even a single pocket.
02:27Now that's interesting here, she talks about how tight the corsets were.
02:31That's pretty true.
02:32The perfect shape for a woman was often this hourglass where you were singed in.
02:37But one of the things you have to remember is what those corsets were made of.
02:41Some of them were made of whale bone or other natural fibers that actually gave and allowed you to have
02:49a more comfortable fit.
02:51My nanny seeds the baby beer and tells it to man up. I don't ask questions.
02:56In the Gilded Age, no one told anyone to man up.
03:00Yeah, they probably like rubbed their kids' gums with whiskey. I think my mother did that.
03:05Memorized 14 forks and 37 rules. Still forgot how to chew in front of rich people.
03:12When you went to a dinner party in the Gilded Age, it was not about having a good time.
03:17If you were new in town and someone important invited you to a dinner, that was a test to see
03:23how you managed all the glasses, all the forks.
03:27And if you failed, you would not be admitted into society.
03:31Sometimes people got really stumped. One of my favorite stories is the finger bowl.
03:38The little crystal bowls with a little bit of citrus where you would dab your fingers, clean your fingers between
03:44courses.
03:45Some people who didn't know what they were doing drank them. They failed.
03:49The doctor removed my appendix in a back room. He said I was too dramatic the whole time.
03:55The inference here that there was no anesthesia is not 100% correct. Things like chloroform were used. It would
04:02put you out. Sometimes way out.
04:05I really hate this video. Next.
04:08We are in New York City, the explosive electric heart of the richest nation on earth.
04:13America has just clawed its way out of the Civil War.
04:16In 1900, the Civil War had been over for 30 years. Here we have some clearly computer generated imagery that
04:23doesn't really begin to capture the spirit at all of the time.
04:27And transformed in a single generation into an industrial colossus. Railroads stitch the continent together.
04:34So here we see what's representing an oil refinery. And let's remember the great oil fortune creator of Standard Oil
04:41was Rockefeller.
04:43And a tiny handful of men, the so-called robber barons, have seized control of it all, amassing the largest
04:48private fortunes in human history.
04:50One of the things that I'd really question here is this gentleman, handsome though he is, looks very, very modern.
04:56If you look back at the images of many of the robber barons and the late Gilded Age tycoons, they
05:01all had facial hair, mutton chops, long beards.
05:05And here we have a very modern look.
05:07You wake in your mansion on Fifth Avenue on the stretch they call Millionaire's Row.
05:12Fifth Avenue, certainly in the area around St. Patrick's Cathedral going up to Central Park, was the home to many,
05:18many, many famous Gilded Age families.
05:21I'm not even sure that's New York. But anyway, never mind.
05:24It is not a house. It is a French chateau, or an Italian palazzo, or a Loire Valley castle.
05:31Oh, that's really bad. So here we have an example of a supposed Fifth Avenue mansion.
05:36Well, it's reflecting the French style, all right, but completely wrong.
05:42This is actually representing the great French chateau of Chambord in the Loire Valley.
05:48No mansion on Fifth Avenue ever looked like this. That's really bad. I hate that image.
05:54Ripped from Europe stone by stone and reassembled in Manhattan by the most fashionable architects in America.
06:00I think it's a misrepresentation to imply that mansions were torn down in Europe and then reassembled over here.
06:08This was new architecture. Certain interior details such as fireplaces and staircases were brought from crumbling European chateaus and palaces
06:18and castles.
06:19But all those American palaces were constructed brand new here.
06:25The walls are hung with genuine old master paintings, snapped up by the crate from cash-poor European aristocrats.
06:32What they're showing here is one of the great Gilded Age barons buying art and collecting art.
06:38That's very true. People like JP Morgan, Jay Gould, Mrs. Astor, Henry Clay Frick, all of them assembled extraordinary collections.
06:49When you were building your collection, it was also important to rely on an art consultant,
06:54someone that you knew you could trust in buying up old master art from Europe.
07:00People like Bernard Berenson, people like Joseph Devine, who advised Henry Clay Frick,
07:05and even Belle de Costa Greene, the famous librarian of the Morgan Library.
07:10She assisted JP Morgan in creating and collecting some of the most priceless manuscripts in the world.
07:17You have telephones, central heating, an elevator, and marble bathrooms with hot and cold running water,
07:25while the families in the tenements downtown share a single cold tap among dozens.
07:29That's true. That's very true.
07:40For a lady of the Gilded Age elite, hiring a French chef for the kitchen was also a sign of
07:47status.
07:47This was a great gig. If you were a chef in Paris, you could get snapped up and arrive in
07:53New York and have a whole new career.
07:55In fact, it's said that Caroline Astor did exactly that. She enjoyed a meal at a French restaurant and snapped
08:02up the chef.
08:03The old families, the original Dutch and English New York aristocracy, guard the gates ferociously,
08:09and they look upon the new industrial fortunes with open contempt.
08:13I'm so surprised to see a grand dame sitting in a leather chair.
08:19A leather chair would have been found in the library or in the smoking rooms,
08:23and usually occupied by one of the gentlemen of the family.
08:27A lady would be sitting in perhaps a Venetian or French tapestry chair, not a leather one.
08:35That just seems wrong to me.
08:37One legendary heiress, frozen out by the old guard, built a fairytale chateau on Fifth Avenue.
08:42So the house that they're talking about right here was Alva Vanderbilt's Petit Chateau, the Little Chateau,
08:49which was built in 1882, and it was actually designed by one of the great architects of the Gilded Age
08:55before Stanford White, Richard Morris Hunt.
08:58Alva loved everything French. After all, she was educated in Paris, and she wanted to copy her house after the
09:05Chateaus of the Loire.
09:07But not the enormous ones, the smaller, more intimate Chateaus.
09:12Intimate, of course, is a very relative term in the Gilded Age.
09:16And through a costume ball so spectacular and so expensive that the old families simply could not bear to be
09:22excluded from it.
09:23Now, it's doubtful that Alva's ballroom looked anything like that.
09:29And in fact, there are some photographs of the interior of her house, which you can find.
09:34But what's interesting here is we have almost a baronial feeling here, maybe a little bit of a medieval hall.
09:41One of the traits of these Gilded Age mansions often was to have rooms in different styles that didn't match.
09:49You'd have a Tudor room, an Elizabethan room, a Louis XV room, and all of it was meant to reflect
09:57a long European heritage.
10:00One of my favorite images in that shot is the champagne fountain.
10:05One mansion, and that was the mansion of Leonard Jerome, had two.
10:09One poured champagne and one poured cologne.
10:13They did weird crap.
10:15Next video.
10:16There were 400 people in America who mattered.
10:19Carolyn Astor decided who they were.
10:21Oh my gosh.
10:22Her name was not Carolyn.
10:25It was Caroline.
10:26She was born Caroline Webster Skirmerhorn.
10:31The Skirmerhorns were a wealthy Dutch-American trading family.
10:34Her family made their money in importing and selling goods here in New York.
10:39In fact, the Skirmerhorn building is still there down by the seaport in Lower Manhattan.
10:44One woman in a Fifth Avenue mansion with a ballroom that held exactly 400 guests.
10:49Yes, Caroline Astor and her sidekick Ward McAllister decided who they thought were part of proper New York society.
10:59And you can see that depicted in the HBO series The Gilded Age fairly accurately.
11:04The number 400 actually came from a comment of Ward McAllister's that he thought that they were just about 400
11:11people in good society.
11:14He also said that it was about the number that would fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom.
11:20Whether it was really 400 or not, we'll never know.
11:23Mrs. Astor's annual ball was the most powerful event in American social life.
11:26Every year in January, Caroline Astor would hold what she called her annual opera ball.
11:33Why was it called an opera ball? Because it began with a performance at the opera.
11:39So imagine going to the opera, sitting through several hours getting in your carriage and going to Mrs. Astor's,
11:46where you knew you would be up all night long eating and dancing.
11:51Let's move on.
11:53Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883. People were terrified it might collapse.
11:59The Brooklyn Bridge and its opening in 1883 was called one of the wonders of the world.
12:05To create a suspension bridge this large and this complex was something no one had ever seen.
12:12Brooklyn was its own separate city and remained so until the end of the 19th century when all the boroughs
12:18consolidated.
12:20So until the Brooklyn Bridge was born, how did you get from Manhattan over to Brooklyn?
12:24Well, the Fulton Ferry was your answer. And this particular path between Manhattan and Brooklyn is what eventually became the
12:32same path that was replicated by the Brooklyn Bridge.
12:36Just a year later, a deadly stampede killed 12 people when a rumor spread that the bridge was falling.
12:44To prove its strength once and for all, P.T. Barnum stepped in with a wild idea. Elephants.
12:51Oh my gosh, P.T. Barnum. P.T. Barnum was one of the great marketers of the 19th century. He
12:58could sell anybody anything.
13:00He had a museum downtown, but he was also looking for the biggest publicity moments that he could find that
13:07helped him and helped his museum.
13:10Barnum marched 21 elephants, including the legendary Jumbo, across the Brooklyn Bridge. The public's fear disappeared, replaced by awe.
13:22And the Brooklyn Bridge, even today, inspires awe. The same bridge exists and it's still carrying traffic all these years
13:31since 1883.
13:32One of my favorite stories about the Brooklyn Bridge isn't really about the bridge at all, but it's about the
13:36people that created it.
13:38Washington Roebling, who was in charge of building the bridge, actually developed the bends in the process of the bridge
13:45being built.
13:46And he was incapacitated at home. And it was his wife, Emily, that was instrumental in finishing the bridge.
13:55Washington gave her instructions, taught her, educated her about the process.
14:00And she interacted with designers, with the actual construction crew.
14:06And it was through her efforts that the bridge finally was built.
14:11She became the first person to cross that bridge in a carriage once it finally opened to the public.
14:17Next.
14:18September 4th, 1882, Edison flipped the switch at the Pearl Street Station in Lower Manhattan.
14:24The massive dynamos roared to light.
14:27One of my favorite phrases is the great white way of Broadway.
14:32Well, the origin of that is because of the white light bulbs that were now lining the street.
14:38The great white way.
14:39Not much else here. Next.
14:41The Newport cliff walk wasn't exercise. It was theater.
14:46Every afternoon, the women of the 400 appeared on that path in full dress.
14:51Now we find ourselves in Newport.
14:53And if there was ever a place to see and be seen, Newport, Rhode Island was it.
14:57Here we find ourselves on the cliff walk, which is the windy path that goes behind all of the mansions
15:03overlooking the ocean.
15:05First of all, this was not a place to see and be seen.
15:09That would have been done on Bellevue Avenue or Ocean Avenue in front of the mansions.
15:15And every afternoon around three or four o'clock, you would have climbed into your carriage.
15:20And that was the great parade up and down.
15:24And that's where you would have shown off your best.
15:26And also when we look at the gowns and the dress, these are ball gowns.
15:31They're incredibly elegant, but they weren't day dresses.
15:34This is not what a woman of this social class and style would have worn in the afternoon.
15:39That would have been worn at night.
15:42No Gilded Age woman that would have been living in Newport would have had these trains that would drag in
15:48the dirt like that.
15:49And would have gotten really filthy by the time you'd only walked a couple of feet.
15:53A day dress would have been certainly elegant.
15:56But of course the hem would have come up a little bit so it would have cleared the dirt and
16:00the rocks on that path.
16:01Who walked beside you mattered, who nodded, who looked away.
16:06All the women understood this.
16:08Cliff walk was also a public space.
16:11Virtually anybody could walk along here.
16:13The elite were not going to mix with just anyone.
16:16Next.
16:17They called it a cottage.
16:1970 rooms, 44,000 square feet.
16:22A limestone palace on the cliffs of Newport, Rhode Island.
16:26When you go to Newport today, many of these houses, excuse me,
16:30many of these cottages that were built during the Gilded Age are still there that you can visit.
16:36What's interesting is that at this point they were copying European style.
16:41The Breakers is entirely Italian Renaissance.
16:45Other properties look more like they've been transported from the French chateaus in the Loire Valley.
16:52One of the most famous marble house was built by Alva Vanderbilt and designed like one of the Petit Trianon
16:59at Versailles.
17:00The Breakers was not a home.
17:03It was a declaration.
17:04A statement written in Italian Renaissance marble and gilded ceilings.
17:09So many of these families wanted to copy and mirror European royalty and aristocracy.
17:17The Vanderbilts imagined themselves as the Italian Renaissance Medici family.
17:23Who were the Medicis?
17:24They were the merchant princes.
17:26They made a great deal of money in banking and in trade.
17:30The Vanderbilts actually thought they were a modern day Medici family.
17:35In fact, if you visit one of their mansions in Hyde Park, New York,
17:40you see the Medici coat of arms in their own drawing room.
17:45Not everyone agreed, however.
17:47The great writer Edith Wharton thought this was vulgar and garish taste.
17:54And in fact, she wrote in a letter that the Vanderbilts seemed entrenched in a thermopoly of bad taste
18:01from which no force on earth can extract them.
18:04Every room was designed to be seen, not lived in.
18:07The great hall alone rose 50 feet.
18:10When you look at a Gilded Age mansion, certainly like those of Newport or elsewhere,
18:16you have to look at it with very specific eyes.
18:19We think of a place to live where we would like to spend our time.
18:24They thought of it very differently.
18:27The actual living quarters were often fairly small and they were on upper floors.
18:32What we see on the ground floor or the first floors are really stage sets.
18:38They're very calculated spaces intended to convey certain messages about wealth, status and power.
18:45Vanderbilts used it for six weeks a year. Then they closed it and left.
18:49So when you look at these grand houses, they actually were not intended to live in all year long.
18:55In fact, many wealthy Gilded Age families had rather a nomadic lifestyle.
19:00The fall into the winter was spent here in New York in your townhouse.
19:05The spring was spent traveling in Europe, usually in Paris, to buy new dresses from Worth.
19:11And then by late spring, you moved to Newport and you were there for the entire summer season
19:18until early fall comes back and you're back in town.
19:22Next.
19:26Breakfast in the Gilded Age.
19:28That would have been a simple breakfast in bed of maybe some toast, some eggs.
19:33That croissant?
19:34I don't think so.
19:36Have you ever tried to eat a croissant in bed?
19:38You know what I mean.
19:40I would think that someone like this, of this stature in this period,
19:44would be living along Central Park.
19:46And this looks like we're in the middle of town.
19:48Good morning, sir.
19:53Ah, it's those croissants again.
19:55Everyone was trying to emulate France and French and things that were elegant.
20:00But you tended to save that for a dinner party when you were entertaining 400 of your closest friends.
20:05Have a pleasant morning, sir.
20:08So this looks like it's trying to be Fifth Avenue.
20:12But if that's St. Patrick's, it's on the wrong angle because that's on a cross street.
20:18And St. Patrick's would have been parallel to Fifth Avenue.
20:21And also, let's take a closer look at the condition of the streets.
20:24You have to remember that horses were the main mode of transportation.
20:27There were often other animals that were running wild in the streets, too.
20:31And they just weren't that clean.
20:35Softly, may I present our newest acquisition?
20:38The company that we know as Tiffany & Company was founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany way downtown.
20:44It evolved.
20:45It focused on silver and also fine jewelry, diamonds, emeralds, rubies.
20:51But in the Gilded Age, at the end of it, in 1902, Charles Lewis Tiffany dies.
20:56And his son, Louis Comfort Tiffany, who's far more famous for his stained glass work, takes over as design and
21:03art director.
21:04And he changes the focus of Tiffany a little bit.
21:06In 1905, that would probably be not the moment when someone was looking for this kind of necklace.
21:18Let's take a closer look at this shot of Central Park.
21:21A lot of the buildings surrounding Central Park, particularly on that side, which it looks to be the west side,
21:27would have been residential buildings.
21:29But they wouldn't have been this tall by the date of this supposed shot here, which is 1905.
21:34Two of the most famous, the San Remo and the Beresford, they're still there to this day.
21:38And that looks like what they're trying to emulate here.
21:41Those were built a little bit later than what we have here.
21:44For Monsieur.
21:46Ah, the lobster.
21:48I'm a boy from Maine.
21:49How can I not love a shot of a lobster?
21:51But here we are in a fine dining restaurant.
21:55Lobster could have been served.
21:56Certainly it was served at Delmonico's.
21:59But not an entire lobster that you would have to really get messy and pull it apart with the picks
22:05and the knives.
22:06Certainly not when you're wearing your best clothes.
22:09So what would have been on this table was likely a dish that was popularized by Delmonico's called Lobster Newberg,
22:15which is the claw and the tail meat served in a beautiful sauce of sherry and cream and butter.
22:21Not a whole entire boiled lobster.
22:24You certainly would have had the oysters.
22:26New Yorkers have been slurping those, whether you're fancy or not, for decades.
22:33Now this is a very grand opera house.
22:36We wouldn't have had the same kind of opera house here in New York.
22:39This looks like it's very much modeled on a European theater.
22:43The Metropolitan Opera House, when it was built in 1883, actually had a very small vestibule.
22:48You wouldn't have seen this at all.
22:50But then if we move forward to look at the interior of the theater, the most important thing here are
22:56the boxes.
22:57And you see them ringed around.
22:59These were the most expensive.
23:00One of the signs of status in Gilded Age society was whether you owned a box at the opera.
23:07The original opera house before the Metropolitan Opera was the Academy of Music on 14th Street and Irving Place.
23:14Well, that theater only had 18 boxes and they were all subscribed to the older families.
23:20When Alva Vanderbilt came along, she wanted a box at the opera too, but there were none to be had.
23:27She said, I'll pay $30,000, which was an awful lot of money at the time, for my own box.
23:33That even didn't work.
23:34So, she spoke to her husband and the Vanderbilts and the Morgans and some others got their money together and
23:40built a brand new opera house way uptown on 39th Street and Broadway with many more boxes.
23:47Alva finally got her own box at the opera.
23:51Next!
23:54So, here we see another side of life in the Gilded Age.
23:57This is the tenement life of the Lower East Side.
24:00Life overflowed onto stairways and hallways and rooms full of people.
24:06These were not particularly large buildings, but they were crammed with multiple families.
24:11You hear me over there, Tony?
24:13You still owe me for the bread!
24:14So, the back of these tenement buildings were often common areas that were bordered by other buildings.
24:19This was a place where so many different populations of the immigrants came together throughout the 19th century.
24:26There were waves of immigration beginning with the Irish in the 1840s, then the Germans followed by the Italians,
24:31and then at the end of the century, many of the Eastern Europeans and Russians all coming together.
24:36So, in the backyard of a tenement building, you'd hear different languages, you'd hear different accents,
24:42you'd hear different levels of English all combining to become a new America.
24:47Oh, let's watch another video.
24:50Welcome to New York City in the year 1880.
24:53We will start at Castle Garden.
24:55Long before Ellis Island ever existed, Castle Garden was the point of immigration through a substantial part of the 19th
25:03century.
25:03Until the later part of the 19th century, everything transferred to Ellis Island.
25:08Castle Garden continued on and became a theatre, an aquarium, a venue for public performances.
25:14But the foundations are still there.
25:16The twin spires of the new St. Patrick's Cathedral have just been completed.
25:20But look around us. The city is still becoming.
25:24One of the points that I think is so important to make when we try to imagine what life was
25:30like in Gilded Age New York,
25:32for a lot of it, it was essentially a construction zone.
25:36These buildings didn't all exist at one time in beautiful blocks with beautiful avenues.
25:42It all had to be built, and the city moved south and moved north.
25:47When you look at images with muddy, dirty pits right next to a beautiful mansion,
25:54that's pretty close to the way it really was.
25:57Okay, next video.
25:59New York in the 1890s was becoming the city we recognize today.
26:04We've used AI reconstruction to bring these historical photographs to life.
26:09I particularly like this image.
26:11Let's take a closer look at it.
26:13Here you have the beautiful Grand Hotel, but right next door you have an older, dilapidated building,
26:20part of the older city, which eventually, of course, is going to be torn down.
26:24We think of Park Avenue as a very elegant address today, and it was becoming so in the Gilded Age.
26:31But we have to remember that there were originally train tracks there that were leading from Grand Central Station out
26:37of the city.
26:38Eventually, they were covered over, and beautiful hotels and residences began to be constructed.
26:45But what you have is brand new construction with bits of the old city interspersed throughout.
26:51That's what the Gilded Age really looked like.
26:53In 1898, the elevated train tracks curve overhead.
26:57I particularly like videos that are created this way using AI, which means to start with a real photograph of
27:06the period,
27:06and then using the computer to animate them so we get a sense of the look and the feel and
27:13the movement and all the smells of the original city.
27:16Next.
27:17Every afternoon, the wealthiest women in the city circled Central Park's carriage loop.
27:23And this is true.
27:24Every afternoon, around 4 o'clock, the wealthy would get in their carriages, and they would go for a drive
27:30in Central Park.
27:31One of the carriage turnarounds is still there in the park today.
27:35And that great mall with the great trees, that was where these families went in their carriages, and you watched
27:43who was going by and perhaps whose daughter your son could marry.
27:49Since we're in Central Park, let's take another look at those skyscrapers that we see in the background.
27:55Very modern skyscrapers, and the height of them, that's what you would actually see today, and certainly not the skyline
28:03of the period they're trying to recreate here.
28:06Skyscrapers were actually able to be created thanks to improvements in structural steel, and also elevators that allowed you to
28:15move up to further heights in the buildings.
28:18One of the most famous was in 1902 when the Flatiron Building rose at Madison Square Park.
28:24But as the city moved north, buildings of great height moved right along with them. But these, not right now.
28:32Who you rode with? Who you nodded to? Who you looked past without blinking? It was all reported in the
28:39Society pages by the next morning.
28:41The newspaper and the media was working overtime during the Gilded Age. Who threw what ball? What they wore? And
28:49who exactly was there?
28:51And Caroline Astor's name appeared pretty frequently in the press.
28:56Next video!
28:57When Astor died in 1908, the system didn't collapse. It shifted.
29:02One of the most important things when you were of society in the Gilded Age was to have your portrait
29:06painted.
29:07And Caroline Astor did exactly that. She didn't choose John Singer Sargent.
29:11She chose another painter, the famous French Carolus Duran, and she went to Paris to have her portrait painted.
29:18This is a very similar image to the original portrait, which you can see today at the New York Metropolitan
29:25Museum of Art.
29:26Alva Belmont, Mamie Fish, Teresa Erlrichs. Three women. One throne. Same machinery.
29:33So Caroline Astor dies in 1908. Does Gilded Age society collapse? It doesn't. It continues on.
29:40There were other women that had worked along Caroline Astor, but actually took over her role in the end.
29:48One of my favorites was the great Mamie Fish, who came from a very good old New York family. Plenty
29:56of money.
29:57She's played brilliantly by the actor Ashley Atkinson in the HBO series.
30:01All these women started to break the rules. You could go to restaurants. You didn't have to wear a hat.
30:07You could expose your neck and shoulders at dinner. All of these things showed a path for a new society
30:13and a new woman.
30:14Well, that's all the AI slop for today.
30:16Thanks for watching.