Social Register

Today, the Social Register.  The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. 

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Here’s an elegant little book that just emerged from my dusty bookshelf: My mother’s old copy of the 1927 Social Registerfor St. Paul and Minneapolis.  I suppose she had it because several relatives were listed in it.  Though she surely wasn’t.  In case you aren’t aware of the Social Register, I should explain.

It's an annual publication that was created in the 1880’s – the Gilded Age – a time of vast class stratification.  And it still exists today.  Though I doubt many of us are aware of it.  But my little volume tells us much about what it once represented – what it took to be listed as a “somebody”.

My 1927 Social Register

The names heavily favor British ancestry.  St. Paul was a city where Scandinavian names like Petersen, Carlson, and Swenson went on for pages in the phone book.  Yet I’m hard pressed to find names representing any of these more-recent immigrants.  Nor do we find typically Jewish or Hispanic names. It’s pretty clear what it took to be socially prominent back then.

Then too, what sort of information do they include?  Telephone numbers and addresses.  And socially significant club memberships.  Married man’s name – wife’s name in parentheses.  No indication of wealth.  That was tacitly assumed. 

Let’s look at the social clubs that they list: Here are two automobile clubs.  This only fourteen years after Ford’s assembly line. And those clubs were not for Model-T owners.  We also find two country clubs and a yacht club. 

Then there’s the University Club.  I used to ride my bike past that one.  And it was fancy.  It sat on Summit Avenue which had been home to the famed robber barons – James J. Hill, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, and more.  They called it Millionaire’s Row. 

But money alone didn’t get you into the Social Register.  The criteria were not explicit.  But one surely had to display an element of class, however one might define that.  Of course accomplishment helped.  And an element of history.  This was not meant for the nouveau riche.  Still this was a time of huge income inequality.  And one could certainly not be a part of society’s vast lower tiers. 

But then the Depression, followed by World War II.  Inequities still existed but they were far harder to canonize than they once had been.  I’ve been watching old movies of the 1930s: They often had so much fun mocking this upper class.  They did so because it was so easy to ridicule.  A cat could now look at a king, as the old saying goes.  And so it did.

A Successful Calamity – 1932 movie ridiculing the ultra-rich (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

My family was clearly middle class.  But I wonder if this little book – this piece of past history – somehow reassured my mother of her old-world somebody-ness. 

I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.

(Theme music)

Social Register St. Paul 1927 and Social Register Minneapolis 1927: Social Register Association, New York City, 1927.  This curious little book has two front covers.  You must turn it over and upside down to go from St. Paul to Minneapolis or vice versa. 

A Typical “ridicule the rich”-themed pre-code movie from 1932: A Successful Calamity - Wikipedia 

The Social Register still exists, but greatly reformed today.  See: Social Register - Wikipedia

This Episode first aired on November 3, 2026.