Period dramas are formulaic, and that’s the pleasure: Women faint. Rakes get punched. Cousins get married. Mail shatters lives. The chaperone looks away for five seconds and someone’s ruined. The beautiful are poor; the rich are tragic.
This historian is a surprisingly forgiving, eager viewer of every last one of them, and therefore no stranger to the whims of Julian Fellowes. Before I subscribed to HBO Max purely to inhale The Gilded Age, I took the same approach to Downton Abbey.
Fellowes, the creator, writer, and executive producer of both, knows how to write a woman worth rooting for: spirited but not destabilizing, progressive but still palatable, gorgeously dressed and impeccably cast.
But Mr. Fellowes, why are you hiding Anne Morgan from The Gilded Age?
Anne Morgan, born July 25, 1873, at her family’s Cragston estate on the Hudson, was the only daughter of J. Pierpont Morgan—the man who once bailed out the U.S. Treasury and who, through brilliance and brutality, anchored American corporate finance for a half-century. Her mother, Frances, was estranged from Pierpont by Anne’s childhood.
Anne, shy and stubborn, grew up moving between Cragston and the family’s electrified (first in America) Madison Avenue mansion, shadowed by Rembrandts, family scandal, and a fortune designed to be protected—not spent.
She started relatively small, co-founding New York’s Colony Club. It was a first in her world, offering amenities previously reserved for men, designed by Stanford White and decorated by Elsie de Wolfe (whom Anne would later help launch as society’s interior decorator). The club made headlines; her father disapproved—then quietly joined the men’s advisory committee anyway.
But by the early 1900s, Anne had seen enough polite society to know it didn’t need defending. Like the Astors, Tildens, and Lenoxes, she used her name as a lever—but not for decoration or hobby reform. She walked away from the debutante circuit and her father’s protection to find herself in harder circles: radical activists, French expats, and workers in Manhattan’s garment factories; and theater-world “bachelors” Elsie de Wolfe and Bessie Marbury, who made no secret of their relationship. She used her position less as a platform and more as a battering ram.
“We feel in helping the women to organize we are working not only for them but for ourselves,” she told The New York Times on December 23, 1909. When New York erupted in garment workers’ strikes, Anne joined the picket lines with Alva Belmont, the Vanderbilt-divorcee-turned-suffrage financier, and Mary Dreier, a labor reformer from Brooklyn. The press dubbed the trio “the mink brigade.” So be it, if it made it harder for police and hired thugs to rough up Jewish and Italian immigrant girls when J.P. Morgan’s daughter was on the line. When strikers were jailed, Anne and her friends bailed them out—and led legal actions against the police.
Her activism didn’t always align with union leadership; when socialist rhetoric clashed with her own reform style, she withdrew support—but not before raising public attention (and real money) for legal aid, better wages, and safer factories. She helped create the New York Women’s Trade Union League, and in 1910, she was central in founding the American Woman’s Association (AWA), a place where working women could (in Anne’s words) “push up and up” in their professions. The gym came with a swimming pool, not just parlor games.
After J.P. Morgan’s death in 1913, Anne inherited $3 million (roughly $72 million today) and put it to radical use. During World War I, she moved to France’s front lines at Blérancourt, living in a chateau—sometimes under shellfire. She founded the American Committee for Devastated France (CARD), which offered direct emergency relief and long-term rebuilding. Her mostly female team restored villages, organized mobile health clinics, distributed food and seed, and even set up training centers for war widows and orphans. She directly managed hundreds of volunteers and locals.
French generals were appalled by her independence, but the French government wasn’t: She became the first American woman made a commander of the Legion of Honor, and after World War II, French veterans formed her honor guard at her funeral. The relief network she built outlasted her; it continues as the Association Médico-Sociale Anne Morgan.
All the while, Anne was a comet in the world’s elite, hosting writers (Marcel Proust), pilots (Wilbur Wright), and philanthropists at the Villa Trianon, part of the “Versailles Triumvirate” with de Wolfe and Marbury. Her home on Sutton Place in Manhattan was—and remains—legendary, later gifted as the residence of the U.N. Secretary-General.
Her philanthropy didn’t end in Europe. She was a founder of the Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving (SPUG), an early anti-commercialization crusade that ridiculed obligatory Christmas gifting. In 1915, she won a medal from the National Institute of Social Science—the same year she published The American Girl and bankrolled Cole Porter’s first flop, See America First. She compiled a cookbook for charity with recipes by Pearl Buck, Salvador Dalí, and Katharine Hepburn—because for Anne Morgan, high society was always a toolkit, never just a comfort zone.
When Anne Morgan died at her Mount Kisco home in 1952 at the age of 78, New York’s financial and philanthropic elite joined French war veterans in the pews at St. George’s Church. Her nephew Junius Morgan and relatives of Hamilton and Belmont attended, as did the French ambassador.
And that full life is what differentiates her from Sybil Crawley, the youngest daughter on Downton Abbey and what appears to be Fellowes’ archetype of a “safe rebel.” She flirts with transgression—wears harem pants, becomes a nurse during the war, marries the chauffeur—but her politics are personal, her rebellion romantic, and her exit heartbreaking but swift and tidy. Even when she crosses class lines, it’s with a tragic innocence that reassures the viewer: the system, though stretched, holds.
But as with all history, I hope Gilded Age viewers use the show as a jumping-off point—and find their way to the likes of Anne Morgan, who saw formulas as blueprints for revision. The evidence, as ever, is in the archives, the hospitals, and the villages she helped resurrect—where a fortune, finally, was spent.
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