Witty scribe and charming guest Clare Boothe Luce (1903 – 1987) summed-up the good and the bad that could be found at the two highest levels of social America in the Thirties:
“American society resembles French, German, and English society in its essentials, if not its superficial aspects. It is more self-conscious, and therefore more snobbish; less self-contained, but more fearful of its integrity; more dissipated, and on the other hand, more moral; far less intellectual, but on the whole, less sterile, and more useful to that larger society of human beings of which it is sometimes an ornament, but usually an excrescence… Otherwise American society is much the same as in other lands: linked, in the popular imagination, with glamorous women who wear beautiful clothes, ride in handsome motors and go to sea in splendid yachts with witty, rich and handsome men, whereas in reality it is more apt to be rather dull, dispirited, unenlightened, indifferent and usually a little disconnected.”
“…and everybody is habitually, incredibly late for every engagement.”
Click here to read an article about one of New York’s greatest mayors: Fiorello LaGuardia.
