WEALTH

In 1840 the largest fortune in America was $40 million, held by Cornelius Vanderbilt, but by 1912 it was $1 billion, held by John D. Rockefeller. Median family wealth rose less dramatically during this period, from $500 to $800; thus, the ratio of the largest fortune to the median rose from 80,000:1 to 370,000:1. In Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2002), Kevin Phillips provides these and other interesting statistics about the Gilded Age, the period he titles "The Rise of the Great American Fortunes, 1865–1900." Phillips concludes, "wealth and incomes . . . were concentrating, mirroring the huge new centralization of the economy through industrial combines, corporate monopolies, and trusts. One analysis in 1890 argued that more than half of the wealth was held by just 1 percent of U.S. families, up from about 29 percent in 1860" (p. 43).

At the top of this scale were the self-styled captains of industry, known more popularly as the robber barons. Among them, Jay Gould (1836–1892) and John Pierpont (J. P.) Morgan (1837–1913) were the most notorious. Gould controlled railroads, the New York World, the New York City elevated train system, and Western Union. Morgan also turned to railroads and in the 1890s controlled the largest group of railroads in the country. In 1901 he then bought out Andrew Carnegie's steel business and merged with others to form U.S. Steel, the world's first billion-dollar corporation. Many of the other robber barons also involved themselves with railroads, which underwent a huge expansion during the 1870s and 1880s. Great financial battles for consolidation were waged among the robber barons and lesser financiers, prompting accusations of wanton disregard of the public interest and of corruption of the political system. In 1887 the Interstate Commerce Commission was formed to attempt to address these problems, but it had little power. According to Alan Trachtenberg in The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (1982), the age of the robber barons and their

"epic scale of enterprises" also "marked a significant increase in the influence of business in America" (pp. 4–5). In a trilogy of novels—The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), and The Stoic (1947)—Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) created a powerful and extensive portrait of a robber baron, based upon the exploits of Chicago streetcar magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes (1837–1905).

THE PHILOSOPHY OF WEALTH

The philosophy behind—or rationale for—the increase and concentration of wealth was the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). The historian Stewart H. Holbrook, writing in Lost Men of American History (1946), asserts that Spencer was "the man who had greatest influence on the United States during the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the following century" (p. 226). Many aspects of Spencer's theory are clearly relevant to capitalist America: the idea of competition and progressive increase certainly appealed to corporate America, and the notion of survival of the fittest gave a quasi-biological justification to the robber barons and other elites. The idea that Western culture—or more particularly Anglo-American culture—is at the most highly evolved point of human history supported a self-satisfied feeling of moral superiority that was common in the Victorian era. In Social Darwinism in American Thought (1959), Richard Hofstadter writes, "With its rapid expansion, its exploitative methods, its desperate competition and its peremptory rejection of failure, post-bellum America was like a vast human caricature of the Darwinian struggle for existence and survival of the fittest" (p. 44).

Spencer's chief American follower was William Graham Sumner (1840–1910), who from his chair at Yale proclaimed the Social Darwinist doctrine in even stronger terms than Spencer. Sumner extols the virtues of wealth and even argues that capital is the main factor in the origin of civilization. "We know that men once lived on the spontaneous fruits of the earth, just as other animals do. In that stage a man was just like the brutes," he writes. "At the present time man is an intelligent animal. He knows something of the laws of Nature. . . . he can bring the productive forces of Nature into service and make them produce food, clothing, and shelter. How has this change been brought about? The answer is, by capital" (pp. 59–60). In the course of humans' development, Sumner continues, "not a step has been or can be made without capital" (p. 62).

Another friend and disciple of Spencer, Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), made an equally sweeping claim. The title of his famous 1889 essay, "The Gospel of Wealth," published in The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays (1962), concisely expresses his view. Like Sumner, Carnegie sees capital as the beginning of civilization:

To those who propose to substitute Communism for this intense Individualism, the answer therefore is: The race has tried that. All progress from that barbarous day to the present time has resulted from its displacement. Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumulation of wealth by those who have had the ability and energy to produce it. (P. 18)

He continues, "Individualism, Private Property, the Law of Accumulation of Wealth, and the Law of Competition . . . are the highest result of human experience, the soil in which society, so far, has produced the best fruit" (p. 19). As for the disparities in wealth, Carnegie celebrates them: "It is well, nay, essential, for the progress of the race that the houses of some should be homes for all that is highest and best in literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization. . . . Without wealth there can be no Mæcenas" (p. 15). Aesthetic values, to Carnegie, are vitally connected to and dependent upon wealth.

According to Holbrook in Lost Men of American History, the author Horatio Alger (1832–1899) was "the man who made Spencer mean something to the rising generation of the masses of Americans, not just the college men nor the intellectuals" (p. 228). Alger's repetitive, formulaic novels generated larger sales than those by any other author in America. In the Alger formula, a young boy, poor but moral, industrious, and intelligent, gets a break from someone in a class above him, works hard, saves money, and rises in the socioeconomic order. The novels, filled with references to money, are an explicit endorsement of the corporate, capitalist culture, as is their unrelenting morality and their portrayal of the spectrum of social classes. For instance, Alger's early novel, Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York (1868), is filled with respectful and sometimes awestruck references to money. When Dick is showing Frank Whitney, a well-to-do young visitor, around Manhattan, the culmination of the tour is Wall Street, "a street not very wide or very long, but of very great importance. The reader would be astonished if he could know the amount of money involved in the transactions which take place in a single day in this street" (p. 101). At the end of the street is the Custom House, which Frank likens to the Parthenon. The connection between wealth and art is strengthened in the advice that Frank's father, who becomes Dick's benefactor, gives him: "save your money, my lad, buy books, and determine to be somebody" (p. 109). Dick does that, gets money, and thereafter thoroughly enjoys contemplating his bank-book, the loss and recovery of which forms the climactic action of the novel.

Whether as gospel, myth of cultural origins, or model for contemporary behavior, "The Way to Wealth"—to use Ben Franklin's title—seems a significant American path many attempted to follow. The prospect of quickly obtained wealth lured many prospectors to the California gold rush (begun in 1849) and the Comstock Lode (begun in 1859) near Virginia City, Nevada. The latter yielded more than $300 million, and both helped build the businesses and mansions of San Francisco. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835–1910) comically detailed his own adventures as a failed fortune seeker in the gold and silver fields in Roughing It (1872). Later, the Klondike gold rush of 1897–1898 brought more than eighteen thousand people to that region, including Jack London (1876–1916), whose experiences formed the material for his initial success as a writer with The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far North (1900) and The Call of the Wild (1903). Land speculation, occasioned by the expansion of the railroads and the settlement of the American West, was also seen as a route to wealth. Whether developing towns and cities along proposed rail lines or cultivating the vast natural resources deliverable by rail, the speculators contrived by lobbying or corrupting corporate and governmental authorities to gain their part of the expanding "Incorporation of America," as Trachtenberg labels the phenomenon in the subtitle to his book. Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1874) details the land speculation of Colonel Beriah Sellers, who gets involved in various schemes and eventually goes bankrupt.

THE DISPLAY OF WEALTH

Historians stress one central aspect of wealth in this period: its conspicuous display. In The Rise of Industrial America: A People's History of the Post-ReconstructionEra (1984), Page Smith notes that "perhaps the most noticeable change in the life of the very rich was their 'conspicuousness.'" The modest facades of antebellum homes went out of fashion, and "now the rich built extravagant mansions that publicly proclaimed their wealth" (p. 853). This was, after all, the Gilded Age, a term borrowed from the title of Twain and Warner's novel and an apt image for the period. The display of gold, of wealth, in material objects and cultural practices is perhaps the defining factor in the lifestyle of the rich in the late 1800s. The wealthy built castles along the Hudson River and villas in Newport and moored their massive yachts nearby. Ezra Cornell, Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and Andrew Carnegie put their names and endowments on universities—what Trachtenberg calls "a conspicuous display of philanthropy" (p. 145) was also a part of the gilding. The wealthy were also busy endowing monumental art museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, both established in 1870; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, founded in 1876; and the Art Institute of Chicago, which dates from 1879. In most cases, the ladies of high society were the driving force behind the establishment of these institutions. Trachtenberg argues that "the museums subliminally associated art with wealth, and the power to donate and administer with social station and training" (p. 144). He concludes that the Gilded Age "contained a particular idea of culture as a privileged domain of refinement, aesthetic sensibility, and higher learning" (p. 143).

Inside the mansions, opulent display grew proportionate to the increase of wealth. "Silver might have been in dispute as a medium of exchange," Smith says, "but as a symbol of success it was unchallenged in the domestic setting" (p. 856); dozens of silver implements were devised for use and display. Some household items made the mansions uniquely American; Carnegie commented that "there is no palace or great mansion in Europe with half the conveniences and scientific appliances which characterize the best American mansions" (Smith, p. 856), a reference to modern amenities such as telephones, electric lights, and central heating. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) by William Dean Howells (1837–1920) exposes this tendency in the title character's smug satisfaction with the showy improvements he makes to his house.

Although wealth was certainly a prerequisite for reaching what Trachtenberg calls the "privileged domain," certain cultural practices were also required. Eric Homberger gives one example in Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age (2002): "In this complex transaction toward heightened visibility, the ball was a social weathervane. Charity balls and assemblies were public events, and were treated as such in the press. But when 'private' balls began to be held on a newly lavish scale, the newspapers began to take notice" (p. 23). Newport held "subscription balls," which allowed the public who wanted to subscribe to watch. And the balls of the period were indeed lavish: in 1897 Mrs. Bradley-Martin spent $360,000 on a ball, explaining that she was trying to stimulate business during the depression (Smith, p. 853). Occupying a box at the opera or a carriage for the evening procession in Newport were also signs of privileged status. Homberger describes the opening of the Metropolitan Opera in New York in 1883 as a carefully designed gala to show off the riches and taste of the wealthy: "A reporter at opening night on October 22, 1883, noted that 'All the nouveaux riches were there. The Goulds and the Vanderbilts and people of that ilk perfumed the air with the odor of crisp greenbacks. The tiers of boxes looked like cages in a menagerie of monopolists'" (p. 230).

In this "age of aristocracy," as Homberger terms it, the wealthy could further demonstrate their status by showing a connection to European nobility. Most superficially, this involved re-creating or importing English homes, goods, and fashions, affecting English accents, hiring Irish nannies, and so forth. Twain loved to attack such pretensions, satirizing it through the King and Duke, two low-life con men in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and through Colonel Sellers in The American Claimant (1892), who insists he is the rightful earl of Durham. Marrying into European nobility was highly regarded, as can be seen in one of the period's major social scandals. Mrs. Alva Vanderbilt was so determined to marry off her daughter Consuelo to the ninth duke of Marlborough that she threatened to shoot the young man her daughter was in love with. Alva prevailed, and in one of the biggest social events of the century, Consuelo married the duke, who was also given $2.5 million in railroad stock.

Travel to Europe was also a major part of the upper-class regimen. The retinues and entourages of the wealthy travelers—which included maids, nurses, relatives, and so forth—increased their visibility, as did the piles of luggage they brought along, which commonly included twenty or thirty pieces. Smith likens the travelers to "small armies on campaign, to Rome, to Florence, to European spas, and, most desired of all, to English country homes" (p. 858). American writers chronicled and took part in similar European sojourns. Twain's The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims' Progress (1869) and A Tramp Abroad (1880) humorously chronicle his travels, whereas Edith Wharton (1862–1937) shows a more serious admiration for European culture in Italian Backgrounds (1905) and French Ways and Their Meaning (1919). In his fiction, Henry James (1843–1916) subtly explores wealthy Americans' interest in European aristocracy: The American (1877) details Christopher Newman's failed courtship of Claire de Cintré, and The Ambassadors (1903) describes Chad Newsome's relationship with the Countess de Vionnet.

The increasing number of wealthy in the Gilded Age posed a problem for dominant members of the social elite: How could they maintain their privileged position? They attempted to do this by setting up a dichotomy between themselves, the old money, and the new money, also called the parvenus, the arrivistes, the social climbers. They enforced this decision in various ways. Samuel Ward McAllister (1827–1895), who as Homberger says, "articulated the ideals upon which the aristocratic idea in America took its stand" (p. 149), founded in 1872 the Patriarchs, which was made up of the twenty-five (later fifty) most exclusive families in New York, a group Homberger calls "the most prestigious social institution of the age" (p. 149). In the 1880s McAllister was the impetus for "the 400"—issued as The 400 (Officially Supervised) in 1890—a list of the officially elite. This and other publications such as the Social Register sought to validate the truly exceptional and exclusive. In The Custom of the Country (1913), Wharton presents an attack on the nouveau riche in the person of Undine Spragg, whose ruthless pursuit of a place in high society forms the core of the novel.

One other route the old money took was a sort of conspicuous anti-display, bohemian aestheticism. William Sturgis Bigelow became a Buddhist and collected Japanese art. George Cabot Lodge became a poet/artist/philosopher who affected a Whitmanesque appearance and who, with his friend Joseph Trumbull Stickney, formed the Conservative Christian Anarchist Party. John Hay and Henry Adams settled in Washington, D.C., where their houses became centers for artists, writers, and other aesthetically minded members of the gentry. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, John LaFarge, and John Singer Sargent were frequent visitors. Many of the artistically inclined members of the social elite would, by the end of the nineteenth century, gravitate to Greenwich Village, where avantgarde modernism would be formed. Perhaps the best example would be Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962), who married well and wealthy, traveled extensively in Europe, and settled in Greenwich Village, where she established a salon. Later she relocated to Taos, New Mexico.

Two factors, newspapers and photography, significantly affected the increasing prominence of wealth. The first attempt to create society journalism was W. H. Andrews's magazine American Queen, which began publication in 1879. "Devoted to the publication of social reports from American cities, and long lists of invited guests," Homberger writes, "American Queen provided a dry account of current fashions being worn across the nation" (p. 204). In 1880 Charles Anderson Dana's New York Sun began to include a society column, and other papers soon followed suit, with the New York Tribune and the New York World adding social coverage in 1882. Photography also increased the visibility of the rich, and "society photographers" were present at any major social event. "When the half-tone process was introduced in late 1896," Homberger writes, "allowing photographs to be printed in the daily press, among the most popular innovations was an illustrated supplement printed on quality paper with the regular Sunday edition of the New York Times" (p. 19), which featured those prominent in society. "The press presented a story about society to the public," Homberger concludes. "It was a story with a strong, recurrent narrative forms, building toward seasonal high points [balls, opera openings, and so forth]. . . . a story with wealth, color, power, and fancy clothes" (p. 19). Increasingly, to be in the press was a requisite sign of being in the elite.

CRITICISM OF WEALTH

This complicity with the press was, however, what Homberger calls "a Faustian bargain for the wealthy" (p. 11). While publicity was valued, scandal became more difficult to hide. The 1880s saw not only the rise of society columns but gossip columns as well. In 1874 Henry Ward Beecher, the most prominent minister of the time, was skewered in the press over his adulterous relations—"criminal conversation"—with Elizabeth Tilton, the wife of Theodore Tilton (Homberger, p. 12). Even more famous, then and now (because of its retelling in E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime), is the scandal involving Harry Thaw, a sadomasochist, his wife, Evelyn Nesbit, and the aging libertine Stanford White. It was, says Smith, "the greatest scandal of the day" (p. 857).

Twain and Warner's The Gilded Age fictionalizes most of the nonsexual dimension of what Trachtenberg calls "the corruption and scandal of a political universe dominated by a great wealth" (p. 144). Land speculation involving the expansion of railroads, legislators bought and sold by industrialists, small businesses and workers being squeezed by monopolies, all are fodder for Twain and Warner's cannons. Other major novelists of the period also took stances critical of the social elite. William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Laphamconcerns the moral threat posed by the acquisition of wealth, contrasting Mrs. Lapham's traditional values with Mr. Lapham's business practices. In The Age of Innocence (1920) Wharton presents her fullest and most nuanced portrait of New York's elite, who are at once objects of nostalgic sympathy and distanced criticism.

A more wide-ranging and incisive criticism of this era is The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions (1899) by Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), a powerful and insightful social critique and an important work of nonfiction literature. In every way, it opposes the ideas of Herbert Spencer and his book First Principles. Veblen begins by locating the contemporary capitalist culture not at the high endpoint of cultural evolution but at "the predatory phase of culture" (p. 19) or "this exemplary barbarian culture" (p. 3) dominated by power, invidious distinction, exploit, aggression, and combat. Veblen begins his analysis with the concept of pecuniary emulation, "the motive that lies at the root of ownership" (p. 25). This phase evolved from a previous one marked by quasi-peaceable savagery and primitive communal organization, when individuals began to raid neighboring tribes and bring back trophies—goods and women—for invidious display. Others then sought to emulate them, and the culture of private property, which would result in modern capitalism, was born. In modern times the exploit of the raid has been replaced by business enterprise and the trophies by a complex and wide-ranging set of practices that are, in essence, contemporary culture, the discussion of which forms the body of Veblen's book.

The first general category of these practices is "conspicuous leisure," for, Veblen notes, "in order to gain and hold the esteem of men it is not sufficient merely to possess wealth or power. The wealth or power must be put in evidence" (p. 36). And since work in predatory culture is associated with "weakness and subjection to a master" (p. 36), leisure becomes a sign of superior status. This is not simply attending balls or the opera or lounging in the Hamptons or Newport, for much of Veblen's idea of conspicuous leisure is vicarious leisure. For example, having a wife who demonstrably does not work is prized; having servants who do the "woman's work" is thus important, and even better is having servants who do little or no work and who therefore demonstrate vicariously the employer's leisure. Veblen's analysis extends even to small matters. For instance, a man's starched white shirt demonstrates that he can have someone else launder it for him, while his wife, dressed in whale-bone corset, hoop-skirted dress, and high heels, graphically shows herself incapable of doing work.

Veblen's second general category is "conspicuous consumption," for "unproductive consumption of goods is honourable, primarily as a mark of prowess and a perquisite of human dignity" (p. 69). Veblen continues:

MENCKEN ON THE MILLIONAIRES

These are the first two paragraphs in a short article, "A Chance for Millionaires," by H. L. Mencken originally published in the New York Evening Mail in 1918.

On the general stupidity and hunkerousness of millionaires a formidable tome might be written—a job I resign herewith to anyone diligent enough to assemble the facts. Not only do they gather in their assets by processes which never show any originality, but are always based upon a few banal principles of swindling; they also display the same lack of resource and ingenuity in getting rid of them. It is years since any American millionaire got his money in any new and stimulating way, and it is years since any American millionaire got rid of his money by any device worthy the admiration of connoisseurs.

Setting aside the pathetic dullards who merely hang on to their accumulations, like dogs hoarding bones, the rich men of the Republic may be divided into two grand divisions, according to their varying notions of what is a good time. Those in the first division waste their funds upon idiotic dissipation or personal display. They are the Wine Jacks, social pushers and horsy fellows—the Thaws, Goulds, and so on. Those in the second division devote themselves to buying public esteem by gaudy charities and a heavy patronage of the arts and sciences. They are the Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, et al.

H. L. Mencken, "A Chance for Millionaires," in A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), pp. 380–381.

The quasi-peaceable gentleman of leisure, then, not only consumes of the staff of life beyond the minimum required for subsistence and physical efficiency, but his consumption also undergoes a specialisation as regards the quality of the goods consumed. He continues freely and of the best, in food, drink, narcotics, shelter, services, ornaments, apparel, weapons and accoutrements, amusements, amulets, and idols or divinities. (P. 73)

Consumption, like leisure, can also be vicarious: one's wife's or servant's conspicuous consumption adds to one's honorific status.

Conspicuous consumption, Veblen shows, leads to "conspicuous waste," which, he says with considerable irony, is an unfortunate term, for it seems to carry "an undertone of deprecation" (p. 97). However, "it is here called 'waste' because this expenditure does not serve human life or human well-being on the whole, not because it is waste or misdirection of effort or expenditure as viewed from the standpoint of the individual consumer who chooses it" (pp. 97–98). Mrs. Bradley-Martin's wasting $360,000 on a ball may be deprecated by many, but it brought her honorific status among her leisure-class society. Veblen says, "customary expenditure must be classed under the head of waste in so far as the custom on which it rests is traceable to the habit of making an invidious pecuniary comparison" (p. 100). Veblen extends his analysis of these concepts into virtually every corner of Gilded Age culture, exposing the American wealthy to his sharp criticism.

See alsoBanking and Finance; Poverty; Social Darwinism; Success; The Theory of the Leisure Class

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Alger, Horatio, Jr. Ragged Dick and Mark, the Match Boy. 1868. New York: Collier, 1962.

Carnegie, Andrew. The Gospel of Wealth and Other Timely Essays. 1889. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1962.

Sumner, William Graham. What the Social Classes Owe to Each Other. 1883. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1920.

Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. 1899. New York: Penguin, 1981.

Secondary Works

Chambers, John Whiteclay, II. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000.

Hofstadter, Richard. Social Darwinism in American Thought. New York: George Braziller, 1959.

Holbrook, Stewart H. Lost Men of American History. New York: Macmillan, 1946.

Homberger, Eric. Mrs. Astor's New York: Money and Social Power in a Gilded Age. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002.

Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919. New York: Norton, 1987.

Phillips, Kevin. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. New York: Broadway Books, 2002.

Smith, Page. The Rise of Industrial America: A People's History of the Post-Reconstruction Era. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.

Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

John Samson