He saw danger in a variety of modern activities, especially those that allowed the crossing of gender or class lines. Elite New Yorkers themselves constantly made this comparison. They modeled New York high society after the European aristocracies, and they suffered from the knowledge that Europeans often dismissed them, declaring that America had no aristocracy. Contemporaries, including Henry James, noted that almost all men worked in New York, and that business considerations and a business attitude shaped social life to some degree. Many accounts suggested that men were reluctant participants in society's rituals, that they were often bored at elaborate dinner parties, and, because they had to be at the office by nine or ten AM, that they were unwilling to socialize into the fashionably early hours of the morning.
Society also appears to have been both more puritanical and more egalitarian in New York.
Montgomery notes that the distinction between respectable society and the demimonde was maintained far more strictly in New York than in Paris at the turn of the century. She also records a greater ambivalence among these wealthy women about the appropriate relationship of a mistress to her servants. But the absence of an established aristocracy very likely encouraged the evolution of social celebrity in New York. New York society had to justify itself as an elite group, and it came to rely on the use of the press and public display to glamorize and promote itself as America's aristocracy. Society women became public figures and social celebrities.