Current Magazines

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    Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer contributes the first of a series of articles, which have the general title "Our Social Ladder: Its Sound and Rotten Rungs," to the February issue of The Ladies' Home Journal, under the caption, "When Blood and Breeding Were the Supreme Essentials." She points out that "it is a far cry from the stately, patrician society that New York knew in pre-Revolutionary times to the loose, rather indiscriminate social circle of today." An idea of the old social manner is given in an anecdote which concerned a President of the United States. In the Revolutionary battle of Trenton a young Lieutenant of Virginia infantry was wounded. He was carried to the home of Lord Stirling and nursed back to health by Lady Stirling and Miss Nannie Brown, an orphan member of a family that traced its lineage back to Brockholst, the first English Lieutenant Governor of New York.

    Nannie Brown was fair and a devoted nurse, and James Monroe, destined to be the fifth President of the United States, fell in love with her as his wound healed. Convalescent, he offered his hand and she accepted, in spite of the warnings of Mrs. Alexander, who protested that he was only an obscure Virginian, unfitted to be the husband of a daughter of one of New York's best families.

    Some thirty years thereafter, James Monroe, President of the United States, bowed to Mrs. Alexander Hamilton on a street in Washington. She looked through him.
    You remember me, Mrs. Hamilton," he said, smiling at her blunder. "I am James Monroe, President of the United States."
    "Are you?" she replied icily, and walked on.
    Later they met again at a reception, and he attempted again to break through her scornful reserve.
    "I do not care to know a James Monroe," she informed him. "I do not care to know a President of the United States who jilted my friend, Miss Nannie Brown." She turned her back upon him and walked away.

Astors. Not a single name runs back to Revolutionary times. In describing society as it was years ago Mrs. Van Rensselaer declares that she drove the first pony-phaeton ever seen on Fifth Avenue, and that members of the Union Club, sitting in their windows, shook their heads and feared that young Miss King was "rather fast." It is all amusing to read, for the article becomes a sort of trumpet call to those old "blue-bloods" who formed the first real society in the United States.

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Source:

Unknown, "Current Magazines," The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., Sunday, 4 February, 1923, pp. BR24, BR27.