Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of a summer series. Read the first article here.
Cyrus McCormick had perseverance in his DNA. His father, Robert McCormick labored for two decades to develop a mechanical reaper, and Cyrus continued his work for several years after developing a prototype. By 1850, the McCormick reaper was known in every part of the United States. Although mocked by The Times of London as “a cross between an Astley Chariot, a wheelbarrow and a flying machine,” in 1855, it won the Grand Medal of Honor at the Paris International Exposition. There followed a long series of prize honors and awards that made the McCormick reaper known to farmers throughout the world.
For farmers in the early 19th century, harvesting required a large number of laborers. If a farm had insufficient workers for a harvest, the farmer faced crop losses. This was particularly acute in some sparsely populated prairie states. The mechanical reaper increased the productivity of prairie farms dramatically, which increased cattle herds, which increased railroad lines, which turned Chicago into the meatpacking center of America. The young McCormick was granted a patent on the reaper in 1834. He did not win his 1848 patent renewal battle, however (one of the lawyers opposing McCormick was young attorney Abraham Lincoln.)
Except for improvements on the reaper patented after 1831, the basic machine passed into the public domain. McCormick then set out to beat his competitors another way — by outselling them. Unlike many inventors, McCormick was not displaced by captains of industry with access to Wall Street money. He benefitted by the high tariff act of 1864 which gave impetus to new technology such as industrial sewing machines, leather and textile machinery, new mining processes, new flour-milling and cattle processing.
Pools, Chokepoints & the Meatpacking Trade
In the realm of cattle processing, meatpackers similarly worked to increase the productivity of their industry. 1874 saw the invention of the refrigerator car, which made the transportation of frozen and smoked meat possible all around the year, as well as all around the globe. In Chicago, technical advancements contributed by what would become Wilson & Company, among other innovators, tightened the processing of meat within the city. Cattle entering through the railyards of Chicago would be rapidly unloaded into pens, where they would be stunned, dropped into slaughtering rooms via trap doors, hung onto trolley lines, then cut, bled, dressed and classified. These efforts created large capital gains for their investors, who used pools as their lasso to corral the meatpacking industry to their interests.
The labors of the early captains of industry were generally peaceful as pools formed during the consolidation of industries. Pools sought to create “chokepoints” within their industries to maximize profitability. In Chicago, meatpackers Armour, Morris, and Swift would give each other “a wallop with a smile” as prices were fixed. The chief problem with pools was that although everyone in the pools appreciated the prize of monopoly, there was continual conflict over who got the most of the prize. There were no rules, no arbiters nor courts to appeal to when a pool member broke rank. Fundamentally, pools were transitory and ultimately gave way to the trusts, which had a formal legal structure.
Standard Oil and the Architecture of Monopoly
Henry Flagler and John Rockefeller understood the crucial chokepoint in their industry. This occurred in the early 1870s, at a time of falling prices in the nascent oil-refining business when they leveraged a below-market freight deal with the railroad to compel their competitors in Cleveland to sell out to them. Charged with behaving aggressively and dishonestly, Rockefeller responded that his company was an “Angel of Mercy.” Standard Oil, which refined 90% of American oil by the close of the century, was “The Moses who delivered his benighted competitors from their folly which had wrought such havoc in their fortunes,” to quote Rockefeller in a Senate hearing.
At the heart of the problem — as their critics saw it — was the sheer scale of the robber barons’ enterprises. It was ‘the curse of bigness’ that gave these men the giddying power they had. But the robber barons’ riposte was that the post-war economy required central planning. “The day of combination is here to stay,” Rockefeller assured a Senator. “Individualism is gone, never to return.”
In 1882, The Standard Oil Trust was created as the 40-odd companies controlled by John Rockefeller and his partners were combined. The various stockholders received “trust certificates” in return for the shares that they tendered but had no voice in the affairs of the trust. The nine trustees controlled two thirds of the trust’s shares. The trust’s capitalization was set at $70 million in 1882 and by 1886, net profit was estimated to total $15 million.
Rockefeller and Carnegie claimed that they were motivated not by personal ambition but by public-spiritedness. The two were hardly soulmates (Carnegie got a kick out of giving an annual Christmas present of fine Scotch whisky to the teetotal Rockefeller) but they each developed a theory of capitalism: the vast organizations they built were the necessary means of managing the hellishly disruptive forces unleashed by post-war industrialization. Their companies, they argued, reduced inefficiency and wasteful over-production. Where there was chaos, they brought order. Where there was strife, they brought harmony. This was a breathtaking inversion of how many critics saw them, but it was repeated with conviction, and it drew on a coherent and, to them, self-evidently true narrative of their careers.
Piety and Profit: The Religious Roots of the Robber Baron Mindset
This worldview of self-determinism can be traced back to the religious climate into which these industrial titans were born. Informed by the Protestant and Calvinist beliefs which the early settlers carried, the robber barons were taught from an early age a direct link between piety and productivity. For example, Rockefeller had been raised a devout Baptist and frequently gave to the church, even before he amassed his wealth. His mother instilled within him both this piety as well as entrepreneurship, having him begin a turkey-raising business at seven years old. The combination of these two things embedded an unshakeable parsimony, which served him greatly throughout his storied career as the Standard Oil magnate. It’s no surprise that Rockefeller was unwavering to the harsh winds of his critics, as he saw his impact of his work on the world as a service to God.
Critics and fans alike saw the captains of industry for good or ill, as the masters of this new world. But these men did not always see it that way at all. They were, by their own accounts, driven as much by anxiety as optimism. Neither Horatio Alger heroes nor Ida Tarbell villains, they saw themselves as the necessary instruments by which the economy could be managed.
The Big Four and the Conquest of the West
Out west, Collis Huntington got his start as a watch peddler. Unlike most of the others who headed straight for the gold fields, he opened a store in Sacramento selling mining equipment. While most of the miners wound up broke, Huntington amassed a small fortune. He represented himself as the head of The Central Pacific Railroad of California, capitalized at $8.5 million ($312 million in today’s dollars), but with nothing paid in. With his deeply lined face, his long nose and black beard, Huntington might have sat for a portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger as a prince of the church in the Renaissance. With his “wharf-rat’s tongue,” he took delight in corporate and political combat.
The other partners in “The Big Four” were Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Mark Hopkins. The vision of The Big Four was total dominance of the Pacific states with their railroads, ships and banking (oh, and politics). It was said of Stanford that “no bear will make a more savage fight than Mr. Stanford in defense of his material interests.” Much like his future partners, Stanford had remade himself in gold rush California as a shopkeeper. He had also formed a tight bond with Huntington, Hopkins and Crocker through Sacramento’s new Republican party, which would soon nominate Stanford as its candidate for Governor. Hopkins was well known for his thriftiness; it was said that he knew how to “squeeze 106 cents out of every dollar.”
The big four were backed by pliant “Railway Congressmen” eager for their rewards, who signed off on free land, waterfront harbor grants, government subsidies and the purchase or guarantee of mortgage bonds by their governments. A railway magnate’s decision about where to lay his tracks could turn a prairie hamlet into a booming metropolis or a thriving city into a ghost town. In 1863, when the citizens of San Francisco were voting over the question of a bond issue guaranteed by the city for The Central Pacific Railway, Philip Stanford threw gold pieces into the crowd lining up to vote. The bond issue passed.
The wealth created by the railroad was prodigious but unevenly bestowed. Railroads could deliver riches to middle-class investors or turn their railroad securities from gilt to dross. Between 1873 and 1879, it was estimated that European investors had lost $600 million ($21 billion in today’s dollars) from bankruptcies and frauds. In 1876, two-thirds of all railroad bonds were in default. In 1879, 65 railroads capitalized at $235 million dollars ($8.1 billion in today’s dollars) were in foreclosure. Amidst this industry mayhem, where possible, the railroads sought to gouge helpless farmers and store owners in the Midwest with usurious shipping rates. By the mid-1880s, the frustrations of farmers, merchants and labor unions over the power of the railroads, steel mills and slaughterhouses reached a boiling point. At first, the railroads were seen as providers of good jobs. By the 1880s, after the first round of punishing layoffs and wage cuts, they were regarded as exploiters of labor. The average annual wages of workers in “Diamond Jim’s” barbed wire factories were $400 ($13,700 in today’s dollars).
Railroads, Regulation & the Rise of J.P. Morgan
In 1887, The Interstate Commerce Act was passed to bring order to the chaotic shipping industry. The act banned secret rebates, pooling, price fixing and other types of collusion. But the act was largely toothless. It took the power of J.P. Morgan to bring the industry to heel. Morgan liked to say to railroad presidents, “Your roads … belong to my clients.” Morgan made it his business to tame the unruly industry, eventually with Ned Harriman as his last surviving adversary.
In addition to his own bank, Morgan dominated the New York, the Equitable and the Mutual life insurance companies whose assets totaled $1 billion in 1900 and who needed to invest $50 million annually. Morgan had indirect control of Chase Bank, First National Bank, Hanover Bank, Liberty Bank, U.S. Steel and 21 railroads. He was the ringmaster in the big circus tent in which the railroad and trust presidents, as well as Wall Street operators like “Bet a Million” Gates, Henry Villard and Russell Sage were merely side acts.
Morgan and Harriman transformed America’s railroads from a patchwork of short lines waging constant self-destructive wars into what can be considered America’s first big business. Vanderbilt’s goal was to stifle competition affecting his railroads. Morgan and Harriman’s goals were to stifle all competition. But in their efforts to consolidate the industry, they were playing with fire, for the public’s disenchantment with the concentration of business would produce The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890.
Harriman’s life would have provided ample grist for a novel by Horatio Alger, whose rags-to-riches tales reached the peak of their popularity during Harriman’s lifetime. At the height of his power, his only equal in influence over the economic life of America was Morgan. By combining a brilliant mind with an instinct for operational efficiency, he emerged as a new kind of owner in the railroad industry. Notwithstanding his accomplishments, he was labeled a “great malefactor of wealth” by his onetime friend, Teddy Roosevelt, and his Southern Pacific Railroad was called “The Octopus.” Harriman left a legacy of good works, including thousands of acres of parkland in New York State.
James Buchanan Duke and the Automation of Tobacco
In the Carolinas, James Buchanan Duke took over his father’s tobacco company in 1885 when he acquired the first automated cigarette rolling machine. Unlike many captains of industry, Duke did not pay bribes or manipulate Wall Street; instead, he harnessed technology to create a dynastic market dominance. Prior to the 1880s, cigarettes had been rolled by hand. Readymade cigarettes were a luxury item. A skilled cigarette roller could produce only about four cigarettes per minute on average, which was insufficient to satisfy demand by the 1870s. With this new technology, Duke could make 200 per minute and by the turn of the century, he controlled over 90% of the American cigarette market. Duke created “a moat” around his company by becoming a “first mover.” His aggressive business tactics in cutting prices paid to tobacco farmers directly led to “The Black Patch Tobacco Wars” in 1906–1908 during which “The Night Riders” resorted to lynching and kidnapping. In 1911, The United States Supreme Court ordered the breakup of Duke’s empire.
In 1905, he founded the Southern Power Company, which became known as Duke Power. Within two decades, they were supplying electricity to more than three hundred cotton mills. In 1924, Duke gave $40 million to create The Duke Endowment ($775 million in today’s dollars). Unlike many of his peers who created foundations with sweepingly broad mandates, Duke’s indenture gave his trustees very specific instructions: they were to support hospitals, orphan care, rural Methodist churches and four Carolina colleges, including Trinity College which was transformed into Duke University.
From Industry to Aristocracy: The Great Transatlantic Art Rush
Prior to The Gilded Age, America had no history of collecting art nor had great museums like The Louvre or Tate Britain. In the post-civil war period, travel abroad became popular among wealthy Americans. Touring the capitals of culture broadened their cultural horizons with tours of The Vatican, the Pyramids and Glyptothek in Munich. Henry Frick extensively toured the salons and museums with his best friend, Andrew Mellon. Their travel exposed them to European culture and raised their ambitions to acquire what they had seen in museums and salons.
In the economic boom following The Civil War, affluent Americans fell in love with European art. They also fell in love with the American artist John Singer Sargent, who conferred on his American Gilded Age compatriots the cachet of European taste and sophistication.
A great public uproar in England arose over the proposed sale of a Holbein to Henry Frick, which was ultimately blocked by the British government. At this time, Frick controlled over 80% of the U.S. coking industry, so he had “a fat wallet.” This prompted Henry James to write a play called “The Outcry.” A character in the play, Hugh Crimble, describes the Robber Barons as “such a conquering horde as invaded old civilizations, only armed with huge checkbooks instead of spears and battle-axes.” Another character, Lady Grace Theign, points out that much of England’s art wealth had come from Italy, Holland, France and Greece, not England. Wealthy English collectors had been acquiring precious things from all over the world … sometimes with money, other times at the point of a gun in countries like Greece and China.
Tumultuous economic change marked The Gilded Age in England as many British aristocrats experienced sharp declines in wealth and political power as an agricultural depression in the 1870s took hold. The railroads opened up the vast American farmlands as the new harvesting machinery invented by McCormick automated grain cutting, significantly boosting agricultural efficiency. Grain prices, land values and rents plunged in Europe. Landowners in Britain who had once been amongst the wealthiest elite in the world’s richest nation suddenly found themselves with massive estates full of art with very little income. The introduction of estate taxes in 1894 hastened the decline.
In The Gilded Age, the direction of the flow changed to America, creating “The Great British Art Drain,” as the new inheritance tax forced many old families with noble titles and declining income, like the Churchills, to sell their treasures. Collectors like Frick succeeded the old-line aristocrats, purchasing treasures such as Rembrandt’s Nicholaes Ruts, the blue marble Gouthiere table and several paintings by Vermeer and Gainsborough, today all at The Frick Museum in New York. An art critic in New York felt he had the last word about the Holbein denied to Frick when he described the artist as “a hired-gun celebrant of whoever employed him, most decisively King Henry VIII!”
Duveen, Frick and the Business of Trophy Collecting
European art dealers such as Joseph Duveen and Asher Wertheimer made frequent pilgrimages to America with European masterworks. On one such pilgrimage, Duveen sold three full-length Gainsborough portraits to the Huntingtons for $775,000, an astounding figure at the time ($29.6 million in today’s dollars). Duveen told Huntington, “In my opinion, you have the greatest eye for English portraiture I have ever known in anyone.”
Duveen, Morgan and Frick often garnered newspaper headlines for Morgan and Frick’s art purchases. In 1903, Duveen sold Morgan two Qing dynasty Figures of Ladies on Stands for $14,860 ($546,961 in today’s dollars) and then resold these to Frick in 1918 for $117,000 ($2.57 million in today’s dollars). The single most important sale that Duveen made to Morgan were four paintings commissioned in 1771 for the mistress of Louis XV, Madame du Barry, The Progress of Love.
A formidable art collector and competitor of Frick was Peter Widener in Philadelphia, who made his fortune in cable and trolley cars. In 1911, Widener paid a record $100,000 for Rembrandts’ Mill. Not to be outdone, in the same year, Frick paid $475,000 for the great Velasquez portrait of King Philip IV. Frick had been envious of the picture gallery in the home of New York department store magnate B. Altman, which was 90 feet in length. When Frick’s art room in his mansion on Fifth Avenue was finished in 1914, at 96 feet long and 33 feet wide, it was the largest private art gallery in New York.
When Art Deals Went Wrong: Debt, Divorce and Disgrace
Other art deals were not so fruitful. In 1895, Anna Gould married Count Paul Ernest Boniface de Castellane, the son of a marquis who traced his ancestry back to 11th century France. Prior to Miss Gould, “Boni” as he was known, had tried his luck with the daughter of Morgan, who was not interested. While Anna was not known for her beauty, her annual income from The Jay Gould Trust of $900,000 (about $26 million today) caught Boni’s eye. By 1900, Boni and Anna had run up nearly $4 million in debt to art dealers such as Duveen and Wertheimer. Between 1895 and 1898, they had bought today’s equivalent of $14 million in antiques and decorative arts including Gainsborough’s Nancy Parsons, Gobelin tapestries, a 13th century carpet from Lisbon Cathedral and a clock gifted to the Pope by King Louis XIV for their palatial home “Le Palais Rose” on Avenue Foch. However, they neglected to pay for any of it. Boni and Anna most certainly did Jay Gould proud!
Duveen and Wertheimer trusted them with long running credit because “they knew the glorious tradition of the Castellane family,” to say nothing of The Jay Gould Trust. The New York attorney for art dealer Wertheimer closed his argument in the litigation against The Jay Gould Trust in 1902 by stating ”this shows The Castellanes to be scamps as thorough as ever lived. With a princely fortune, the defendants have descended to methods in dealing with their creditors that would arouse the contempt of an ordinary thief.” In his defense, Boni told the New York judge, “I was driven by passion as strong as that of some players for baccarat … decorating “Le Palais Rose” was my descent into the abyss.” The judge was unmoved. In 1906, Anna sued Boni for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Two years later, thinking that lightning never strikes twice, she married Boni’s cousin, Le Marquis de Tallyrand Perigord, Duc de Sagan.
Another art collector to run afoul of the law was professional gambler Richard Albert Canfield, after whom the solitaire game “Canfield” is named. Known as the “Prince of Gamblers,” he bought a partnership in the Saratoga Clubhouse in Saratoga Springs in 1893, and bought it outright the following year for $250,000 ($9 million in todays’ dollars). Business was lucrative and he became an extremely wealthy man. However, gambling was illegal in the U.S., and he served a six-month sentence in a Rhode Island jail for violating gaming laws. Canfield invested an estimated $800,000 (over $30 million in today’s dollars) to bring his club up to the standards of the top European establishments. In 1902, he added an early form of air conditioning. His clientele during this period included not only The Whitneys, Vanderbilts and Morgans, but gambling legends like “Diamond Jim” Brady, “Bet-a-Million” Gates, and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld.
He became a personal friend and patron of James McNeil Whistler and possessed the second largest and most important Whistler collection in the world prior to his death. In May 1901, Canfield commissioned a portrait from Whistler, “Portrait of Richard A. Canfield,” posing every day for Whistler from New Year’s Day 1903 until May 16, 1903. Whistler was ill and frail at this time, and this work was his last completed portrait. The cheekily deceptive air of respectability with which Whistler portrayed Canfield caused Whistler to call it “His Reverence.” Today, three of Canfield’s Whistler paintings are hanging in the Frick Museum in New York City.
Portraiture, Patronage and the Making of American Museums
It was hardly a new thing in the history of banking and industry for a successful entrepreneur to be portrayed in noble style in an oil portrait. The Medicis were depicted by leading artists of the day. Likenesses of the banker Bindo Altovito was depicted by Raphael. Two centuries later, Dutch Masters presented successful burghers in starched white collars and costly furs.
An important Gilded Age arts patron was railroad tycoon and art collector Henry Marquand, who controlled The St. Louis, Iron Mountain and Southern Railway until Jay Gould’s monopoly on the southwestern railroad system forced him to sell. In his retirement, Marquand was instrumental, along with John Jay in founding The Metropolitan Museum of Art. When he was President of The Met, the museum commissioned Sargent to do the formal portrait of Marquand. Through the patronage of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Henry Marquand, General Lucius Fairchild and Edward Boit, John Singer Sargent was able to put the Paris scandal of Madame X behind him and win the commission to paint the murals for The Boston Public Library in Copley Square. Today, Sargent’s masterpiece Daughters of Edward Boit hangs in Boston’s Museum of Fine Art.
Henry James introduced Sargent to Isabella Stewart Gardner, a Gilded Age heiress wife of a Coolidge cousin who became one of his most important patrons. Her husband, Jack, was an early investor in the Hecla Mining Company. In 1888, she saw Sargent’s massive painting, El Jaleo at a public exhibition in Boston. In 1914, Gardner borrowed El Jaleo to exhibit in her Boston Fenway museum, and after subsequently purchasing the painting, constructed the Spanish Cloister gallery especially for it, which, up to this day is framed by a Moorish arch in her museum.
In addition to paintings by Rossetti, Rembrandt, Titian and Botticelli, Isabella Stewart Gardner brought the second Vermeer…The Concert… to America. On a trip to Paris in 1891, she paid $70,000 for a ruby weighing nine carats from Boucheron, a staggering sum in those days when an average laborer earned $2 per day. (Sadly, on March 18, 1990, two men disguised as police officers stole thirteen works of art valued at over $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The thieves bound the security guards, looted the galleries for over one hour and vanished. The crime remains unsolved and the empty frames still hang in the museum in hope of the art’s return.)
Millionaires, Mansions and the New York Social Order
In 1892, The New York Tribune published a nationwide list of more than 4,000 millionaires. Adjusted for inflation, $1 million in 1890 is roughly equivalent to $35 million today, so those included in the Tribune’s list were multimillionaires. Nearly 1,500 millionaires lived in New York City, many of whom owned large estates in Westchester County and Long Island where they could escape on weekends and vacations.
The failure of Washington D.C. to become the court or social capital of America toward the end of the 19thcentury was symptomatic of the profound shift of power from political leaders to captains of industry who controlled the trusts and Wall Street stock pools. The strategic importance of The Erie Canal in establishing New York City as the economic hub of America was the tipping point that transformed the city into the social capital of the country.
The stuffy social circles of the Knickerbockers gave way after The Civil War to the wave of the wives of the captains of industry with their diamond dog collars, tiaras, lavish balls, yachts and Caroline Shermerhorn Astor’s “Four Hundred.” Society in New York City became centralized and controlled by Mrs. Astor and the Grand-Vizier and arbiter elegantiarum, Ward McAllister, much like the railroads, slaughterhouses and steel mills. According to The New York Times, “not to have received an invitation to an Astor ball or to have dined with Mrs. Astor was equal to a sentence of social banishment for life.” New York society “was convulsed” when Mrs. Astor and her daughter were conspicuously excluded from invitation list of the March 26, 1883 fancy-dress ball of Alva Vanderbilt.
Conspicuous Consumption and the Society Feuds of The Gilded Age
The over-the-top opulence of galas like the Bradley Martin Ball at The Waldorf on February 10, 1897 gave rise to the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” The American public viewed the ostentation with a mixture of envy, fascination and disgust.
The fin de siècle was The Cotillion in New York for Barbara Woolworth Hutton in June 1930. In accordance with New York’s high society traditions, she was given a lavish debutant ball on her 18th birthday, where the Astors and Vanderbilts, amongst many other elites, were entertained by stars such as Maurice Chevalier and Rudy Vallee. The gala cost $60,000, a fortune in the early days of The Depression. Public criticism was so severe that she was sent on a tour of Europe to escape the onslaught of the press. One newspaper headline shouted out “Keeping the Heiress Happy: Sixty Times the Annual Wage of Her Grandfather’s Workers.” Like so many American heiresses, her marriages to several European aristocrats foundered, as did her marriage to Cary Grant, so nicknamed “Cash and Carry.”
Another spectacular social rupture between Stuyvesant “Mamie” Fish and Mary Harriman was breathlessly reported in the newspapers. It was a Gilded Age social feud rooted in social ambition, exclusion and ultimate betrayal. Mamie Fish, a reigning queen of New York and Newport society, famously snubbed the Harrimans at her home in Newport, ”Crossways,” leading to a profound antipathy that was later mirrored in a business conflict between their husbands. In 1906, Ned Harriman broke with long-time partner Stuyvesant Fish during their power struggle for control of the Illinois Central Railroad.
Fifth Avenue and the Architecture of Wealth
The captains of industry were America’s aristocracy, and they needed homes that reflected their status. Historically, Fifth Avenue became the most sought-after address because it was the farthest away from the disease and crime ridden piers on the Hudson and East Rivers. The mansions of the Vanderbilts, Astors and Frick reflected the obeisance to European architecture. The house of Irving Brokaw — who made his fortune in Union military uniforms and ready-to-wear men’s suits, competing against Brooks Brothers — sat imperiously at the corner of East 79th Street and Fifth Avenue — and had a moat! It was designed after the 16th century Chateau Chenonceaux, which was called “The Château of Six Women” in the Loire Valley. Brokaw was obliged to fill the moat in after a neighboring equestrian fell into the moat on his horse and nearly drowned one evening.
All this European art needed places to hang. Enter the home designers such as Frederick J. Osterling, who made his name designing the Pittsburgh manors of Henry J. Heinz and George Westinghouse. Owen Jone’s taste-making bible of style, The Grammer of Ornament, was closely emulated by American furniture manufacturers such as A. Kimbell & Co. and Kittinger until the turn of the century. The Herter Brothers were hired by William Vanderbilt to decorate his massive home at Fifth Avenue and 51st Street, with its three story art gallery as the centerpiece. At the dawn of the 20th century, Sir Charles Allom became the most sought-after interior designer for the likes of Frick, Huntington, Widener and Rockefeller, since he had redecorated Buckingham Palace for George V.
Sir Charle’s English-inspired interior designs can be seen to this day at The Frick Museum in New York and The Huntington in San Marino, CA.
No home was complete without a Steinway grand piano, sculpture by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Tiffany lamps. French, English and Chinese porcelain plates and serving vessels such as Frick’s Sèvres tea service, which was decorated by Antoine-Joseph Chapuis were all meticulously curated and purveyed by Davis, Collamore & Co. in New York.
Dollar Princesses: American Fortunes Meet European Titles
The obeisance to European aristocracy didn’t stop with architecture.
American “Dollar Princesses” had more than 450 marriages with European aristocrats, most of whom were British, including six Dukes such as Winston Churchill’s father. American heiresses married more than one third of the House of Lords. One such marriage was the daughter of Irving Brokaw, who married Carl Aage Vilhelm Frederick von Fischer-Hansen, who belonged “to an ancient and noble Danish family.” The June 1896 wedding was “the most fashionable wedding of the season,” breathlessly chronicled by The New York Times, after which the happy couple decamped to honeymoon at his feudal castle in Denmark. Quite sadly, his noble and illustrious lineage could not keep him from a term in Blackwell Island prison in New York City for larceny. Another glaring example of those New York City judges who failed to appreciate the true nobility of gentlemen like von Fischer-Hansen and “Boni”?
Legacy in Brick and Stone: The Surviving Gilded Age Mansions
Many of the baronial mansions of The Robber Barons stand today. Morgan and Frick’s homes in Manhattan are museums. The Hudson Valley and Newport palaces — Gould’s “Lyndhurst”, Fish’s “Crossways”, and Vanderbilt’s “The Breakers” to name a few — evoke the incredible wealth of The Gilded Age captains of industry. The Huntington and Hearst Castle stand guard on the West Coast. The San Francisco earthquake in 1906 destroyed the Nob Hill homes of Crocker and Hopkins. Henry Flagler’s ubiquitous influence in Florida remains to this day. “Bet A Million” Gates had no regal homes but instead maintained a suite with his own private entrance and elevator at The Waldorf Astoria for the princely sum of $30,000 annually from 1894 to 1907, whereupon he took possession of his 16-room apartment in the newly built Plaza Hotel.
Antitrust, Roosevelt and the Reckoning with Monopoly Power
Getting back to business, like the toothless Interstate Commerce Commission, enforcement of The Sherman Antitrust Act was tempered in the 1904 election by the largest contributors to Teddy Roosevelt — Frick, Morgan, Jay Gould’s son, Harriman and Stillman. But shortly after taking office, Roosevelt assailed the captains of industry as “malefactors of great wealth.” They realized that the tactless arrogance of the likes of Cornelius Vanderbilt needed to be replaced by more equitable and peaceful division of the national wealth.
As America emerged from the chaos of The Civil War and witnessed the many bull markets and panics, the three surviving giants of The Gilded Age — Morgan, Carnegie and Harriman- confronted one another in battles of wills and capital that defined The Gilded Age. Morgan, Carnegie and Harriman’s ferocious contests for supremacy over the railroads and the steel industry shook the nation’s nascent financial markets, cost millions of small investors their hard-won nest eggs and produced dramatic, lasting changes in the relationship between business and government.
Upon hearing that Roosevelt was spending his days in retirement hunting lions in Africa, Morgan was known to have said “I hope the first lion he meets does his duty!”
Hugh Larratt-Smith is a managing director of Trimingham and a regular contributing author to ABF Journal.
Clayton Harmonson is an associate at Trimingham.