For Richer, For Poorer
A CENTURY AGO, The New York Times was even more sober than it is today, seldom deigning to cover the titillating stories of love or scandal that fueled its lowbrow competitors. But on April 6, 1905, an extraordinary headline greeted readers at the top of the paper’s front page: “J. G. Phelps Stokes to Wed Young Jewess.” Other newspapers across the country and the world were no less enthralled. The San Francisco Chronicle’s story, “New York’s Most Interesting Romance,” was framed by drawings of two winged cupids. The religious press weighed in as well, The Christian Advocate’s account titled “Hearts Making Havoc of Conventionalism.”
In the America of 1905, intermarriage between gentiles and Jews was indeed unconventional. But something else made this match even more startling: the enormous gap in class between bride and groom. We feel the same fascination with inter-ethnic and rags-and-riches marriages today. Would most of us, for instance, even know who Meghan Markle was if she had not married into the British royal family?
If American royalty existed, the Phelps Stokes dynasty was it. At 33 years old and six feet four inches tall, James Graham Phelps Stokes, Graham to his friends, was its crown prince. Several Phelps Stokeses were among the legendary 400 people—the capacity of Mrs. William Backhouse Astor Jr.’s ballroom—who constituted New York’s Gilded Age high society. The roots of the clan’s fortune went back to colonial times and included Manhattan real estate, a Nevada railroad, and the Phelps Dodge mining empire. A decade prior to Graham’s engagement, his parents had built a 100-room summer “cottage” in the Berkshires, at the time the largest private home in the United States.
A story had it that one of Graham’s brothers, in the class of 1896 at Yale, telegraphed his mother that he was bringing “some ’96 men home for the weekend.” The apostrophe failed to appear in the telegram, and his mother replied, “Many guests here already, don’t bring more than 50.”
The woman Graham chose to marry, auburn-haired, 25-year-old Rose Pastor, was from the most different kind of family imaginable. With less than two years of formal schooling, she had gone to work at the age of 11, spending the next dozen years laboring in cigar factories. By the time she was in her 20s, that work provided the only earnings to support herself, her mother, and six younger brothers and sisters who had been abandoned by Rose’s ne’er-do-well stepfather. It wasn’t enough, and several of the children were placed in foster care. Moreover, Rose was a refugee in an America as roiled by hostility to immigration as it is today. When she was a small child, she and her mother had fled the spate of pogroms that followed the assassination of Russia’s Tsar Alexander II in 1881.
No American match of its time won more attention—or more enthusiasm. An effusive editorial in New York’s called it an “amazing marriage” and praised Graham: “All honor, in this generation of idle, rich and spendthrift young men, to one who has the courage of his convictions, the fervor of his faith and the daring of his devotion!” When the two appeared in public for the first time after news of their engagement broke, at a speech Graham gave at New York’s Municipal Ownership League—not normally a venue for displays of great emotion—the crowd waved handkerchiefs and cheered for minutes before they would let him
