So, I was listening to a podcast that was discussing the Hope Diamond and the MacLean family. And in mentioning the death of their son Vinson, there had been a discussion of the expansion of household staff beforehand to include personal security to protect him from being kidnapped.

This led me to think about the changing role of free labor domestic servants in rich households in the United States. How rich did you have to be from late industrialism on to still have domestic servants in the house? I know there was a thread four years ago about the general decline of household staff in the United States (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/88emhp/why_were_livein_domestic_servants_so_much_more/) but my interest is in the changes as to who CONTINUES to use domestic staff. Was it the same general coterie of the extraordinarily wealthy, or did it narrow in numbers of households?

And if (as the previous thread suggested) the changes in material culture suggested by Frank Trentmann (like dishwashers, etc.) changed the general interest in hiring domestic staff, did it also change the desirability of hiring certain types of domestic staff? If you were rich, did you first hire a butler or cook or chauffer? Was the rise of agencies of maids, au pairs, etc. making some types of servants less likely to be live in? And when did personal security become a type of domestic servant in these households? (I assume the Lindburg kidnapping may have had some cultural impact, but this is pretty far away from my own knowledge).

Just a weird random question that made be think of everything from Mitt Romney supposedly bringing his cook with him while he was on mission in the 1960s-70s to what it says about the creation of the fictional Batman that Wayne still has a single domestic servant in Alfred and it specifically is his butler.

I promise I am not trying to ask this as a present day question, because as an academic I have no expectation of ever being in the position of having to prioritize hiring domestic staff!