"New Money" is Crude and Vulgar (1903)

But a "Pickaninny" dinner?

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The vignette cartoon satirizes the gaudy vulgarity of the wealthy. With a special animosity for “New Money.”

Men on horseback dining beneath palm trees in the center and with vignettes showing various special dinners, such as "The girl-in-the-pie dinner", "The dinner that was raided", "The monkey dinner", and others; includes a map showing streets, buildings labeled after dinner courses, and horse-drawn carriages. Also shows men and women wearing formal clothing, walking through a water fountain, captioned "Another prank of the 400".

The Four Hundred was a list of New York society during the Gilded Age. In the decades following the American Civil War, the population of New York City grew almost exponentially, and immigrants and wealthy arrivistes from the Midwestern United States began challenging the dominance of the old New York Establishment. Aided by Ward McAllister, Mrs. Astor attempted to codify proper behavior and etiquette, as well as determine who was acceptable among the arrivistes, as champions of old money and tradition.

Reportedly, McAllister coined the phrase "the Four Hundred" by declaring that there were "only 400 people in fashionable New York Society." According to him, this was the number of people in New York who really mattered; the people who felt at ease in the ballrooms of high society. In 1888, McAllister told the New-York Tribune that "If you go outside that number," he warned, "you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease."

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Title: The limit / Ehrhart.

Subtitle: Puck - “Let us be thankful there are only Four Hundred of these.”

Contributor Names: Ehrhart, S. D. (Samuel D.), approximately 1862-1937, artist

Created / Published: N.Y. : J. Ottmann Lith. Co., Puck Bldg.,

Date: 1903 May 13.

Library of Congress: 2010652264