Caricature of Andrew Carnegie, 1835-1919, full, standing, wearing kilt, throwing money in air. Appeared in Life magazine, April 13, 1905. Source: Library of Congress

Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

The History of America’s Wealthy Elite

09.14.18

It’s been ten years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers shook the world’s economy. Today Ed, Nathan and Brian explore the iconic figure of the American Millionaire, telling the story of one of the first African American Millionaires, delving into the ambiguities around Andrew Carnegie’s philanthropy, and finding out that there is more to the board game Monopoly than just rolling the dice and passing “Go.”

economic inequality; social class; wealth

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Prince of Darkness

Nathan sits down with historian Shane White to talk about Jeremiah Hamilton, who against all odds, became one of the first African American millionaires in history. We learn how his path to financial prosperity reflects the unregulated capitalism that typified New York City in the 19th century.

Jeremiah Hamilton; wealth

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Brian Balogh: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, and the Robert and Joseph Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Ed Ayers: From Virginia Humanities, this is Back Story.

Brian Balogh: Welcome to BackStory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Brian Balogh.

Ed Ayers: I’m Ed Ayers.

Nathan Connolly: And I’m Nathan Connolly.

Ed Ayers: If you’re new to the podcast, we’re all historians. Each week, we explore the history of one topic that’s been in the news.

Nathan Connolly: Brian and Ed, if I were to ask you two to name famous millionaires from the 19th century, who would you say?

Brian Balogh: Well, first I’d ask you not to, Nathan, but, if I really had to answer the question, I’d say John Jacob Astor, the real estate mogul.

Ed Ayers: I’d say Cornelius Vanderbilt. Even his name sounds like a million bucks.

Nathan Connolly: Well, that’s right. Now, those two are both famous white millionaires, but what if I told you there was actually someone else, someone just as successful, who belongs on the same breadth as a Vanderbilt or an Astor? His name is Jeremiah Hamilton, and he happens to be one of the first African-American millionaires in history. He amassed his wealth in the 19th century in New York City. He was a brilliant businessman and, like many of those businessmen, his dealings weren’t always above board.

Nathan Connolly: We’re going to start off this story off the coast of Port-au-Prince in the 1820s, in Haiti, where Hamilton undertakes a scheme of forging Haitian currency.

Shane White: A consortium of New York merchants in 1828 gets a load of counterfeit currency. Hamilton is only about 20 years old.

Nathan Connolly: That’s historian Shane White.

Shane White: He’s in charge of … He’s Black, so he’s running it down to the Black republic, Haiti.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Shane White: Ironically, they get caught because the counterfeits are too good. There’s too much silver in the coins, because Haiti is watering down their currency as they’re being sort of …

Nathan Connolly: Squeezed.

Shane White: Screwed, basically, by France.

Nathan Connolly: Right, right.

Shane White: They’re having to pay huge, huge debts. Americans basically … A, they’re trying to make money and, B, in the back of their minds, they know they’re completely and utterly undermining the other republic in the hemisphere, the Black republic. They get Jeremiah Hamilton as their front man.

Shane White: They get caught down there and he sort of runs away, and ends up being sort of sheltered by Black fisherman around Port-au-Prince harbor for a day or two before he gets on a boat and goes back to New York City.

Nathan Connolly: Now, how did he manage to go from this experience into the world of finance?

Shane White: Well, again, you’ve got to … Finance sort of sounds really sort of highfalutin. We’ve got to remember that this is the free market, untrammeled by regulation in any way, shape, or form. You could get away with murder pretty much, financial murder, on Wall Street. He actually … Jeremiah Hamilton struggles when he first … He moves to New York City in probably 1833 or ’34 and he struggles for a bit. He actually finds his financial feet by, again, engaging in what you could argue is a very American enterprise. He over insures boats with insurance companies and then arranges to sink them and claim the insurance.

Shane White: Then, as now, many people thought that, if you ripped off an insurance company, that’s not really theft, but going to the point of insuring and then sinking boats is … Most people would concede that was over the line. In fact, the American insurance industry in New York starts to form an association, in part to stop people like Jeremiah Hamilton sort of ripping off the insurance companies.

Nathan Connolly: So you have insurance companies organizing to basically create their own regulations to keep people like Hamilton out of the game?

Shane White: Yep. There’s actually a court case in 1835 or ’36 in which one of the witnesses plaintively says, “We have met and we got a …” Not a regulation, “We’ve agreed amongst ourselves that no one will insure Jeremiah Hamilton for anything.” Hamilton had arranged through a proxy that they had insured him, and so he was getting around their regulations. It’s primitive, the way these insurance companies are associating with one another, but they’re beginning to try to regulate the industry to stop whole scale fraud, and also they get more and more involved … The insurance company has to agree on who the captain can be on boats and stuff. They’re getting more and more involved in the way the shipping business is being run out of New York.

Nathan Connolly: One of the stories, then, about the origins of regulation actually begin from these small associations, in effect.

Shane White: Yes, it does. I find it interesting that this African-American guy is involved in … These institutions, insurance companies, end up basically black-banning him, the insurance industry. Then, the secondary stock exchange later on, in 1846, it passes a regulation, tries to pass a regulation, saying anyone who buys or sells shares from Jeremiah Hamilton will be expelled from the stock exchange. These … The interesting thing is that the playing field is not level. He’s known as the Prince of Darkness, so he’s known as being Black …

Nathan Connolly: And satanic, by their estimation, I guess, in terms of the double meaning of that world.

Shane White: Yep. Yes. It’s … That’s a retrograde nickname. He had a reputation for being slippery, fast, and loose.

You Must Be The Monopoly Gal

Producer Kelly Jones and author Mary Pilon bring you the story of Monopoly’s forgotten inventor, and explain how the original rules were meant to expose the ills of capitalism, not fetishize them. (repackaged)

Music:

Jazz Up Your Lingerie by Beryl Newell
Get Out and Get Under the Moon by Regal Jazz Band
Feathers N Fringe by Albert Marlowe

Monopoly (game); Progressive Era; wealth

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Ed Ayers: Now, everyone knows that American millionaires live on Park Place, but did you know that sometimes they get sent to jail, they don’t pass go, and they definitely do not collect $200?

Nathan Connolly: I thought you were going to discuss insider trading there for a second but you’re actually talking about the rules of Monopoly, aren’t you?

Ed Ayers: Quiet, Nathan. I’m just going to buy up the Pennsylvania Railroad.

Speaker 9: Uncle, when we grow up, we want to be just like you. Rich.

Speaker 10: Well, boys, I’ll tell you my secret. Build hotels on boardwalk, [crosstalk 00:20:58].

Ed Ayers: These are commercials from Monopoly that aired in the 1980s and ’90s.

Speaker 11: Monopoly has been bringing people together for almost 50 years. That’s how long we’ve been wheeling and dealing together, building hotels together, and going to jail together.

Speaker 12: Corner the market and utilities. You can’t lose.

Speaker 13: Share a smile [crosstalk 00:21:17] …

Ed Ayers: Whether or not Monopoly brought your families together or, more likely, drove them apart, one thing is clear, and it has to do with that 50 years part. These commercials had their history all wrong.

Ed Ayers: Producer Kelly Jones caught up with the author of a book about the origins of Monopoly. Here’s Kelly to tell us more.

Kelly Jones: The common story about MOnopoly’s origins is a classic rags to riches tale, and it goes like this. In the 1930s, a despondent and unemployed man named Charles Darrow invented the game to make himself feel better about being poor. Ultimately, and this is part of the story that is true, Darrow became the first millionaire board game inventor when he sold it to Parker Brothers, living the very dream that Monopoly celebrates, but Mary Pilon, author of “The Monopolists,” says that Darrow didn’t invent Monopoly, it was invented by a woman a few decades earlier, and it was originally called Landlords.

Mary Pilon: The game dates to a woman named Elizabeth McGee. She gets a patent for her Landlords game in 1904. She had originally devised the game as a teaching tool to protest against monopolies and the monopolists of her time.

Kelly Jones: Elizabeth, or Lizzie, McGee was a devout follower of anti-monopolist crusader Henry George. He was the author, most famously, of “Progress and Poverty,” a book that sold millions of copies in the 1880s and ’90s. At the time, the only book that sold more was the Bible.

Mary Pilon: The core of his argument was something called a land value tax, or a single tax. His basic idea was that people should own 100% of what they made or created but that things found in nature, like land, should belong to everybody.

Kelly Jones: George’s efforts kick-started progressive reforms around the turn of the century, but when he died in 1897, his followers were concerned that they wouldn’t be able to keep his movement afloat. At the time, Lizzie McGee had been delivering anti-monopolist lectures in her Maryland living room. She felt a strong responsibility to keep the single tax message alive and, lo, the game of Landlords was born.

Mary Pilon: Much like Monopoly today, you pick a token, although the charms and things wouldn’t have been there, and you try to make your way around the board, gathering properties. Her original board had railroads, it had “go to jail,” it had public park instead of free parking, so it’s not wildly dissimilar from what a lot of us know as Monopoly today.

Kelly Jones: But the Landlords game was different in one crucial way. McGee’s game had two sets of rules. In the monopolist rule set, the goal was to gobble up all the property you could and drive your opponents into bankruptcy. In the second anti-monopolist, single tax-inspired rule set, every player benefited when one player benefited. There were no taxes on essential utilities. All rent was first paid to a public treasury, not a private property owner. The public treasury eventually got used for things like making railroads and college free for everyone, and raising wages, that fistful of dollars you get for passing go. The game was declared over in just five rounds.

Kelly Jones: It might seem weird to have invented a game that you have to play twice but the two rule sets were supposed to teach through stark contrast, the merits of spreading wealth versus the evil of hoarding it for oneself.

Kelly Jones: The two rule sets lasted for a couple of decades. McGee renewed the game’s patent in 1924 but, by then, it was clear which rule set was the most popular. Even as capitalism’s boom and bust cycle showed its ugly side in 1929, the monopolistic rules prevailed.

Mary Pilon: They allow us a context for role-playing. I think that this idea of being able to throw around property and a lot of money at a time when the middle class didn’t have a lot of that and was very much struggling, there’s a fantasy aspect to that that I think made Monopoly really, really appealing.

Kelly Jones: Charles Darrow, the guy usually credited with inventing the game, capitalized on the appeal of this fantasy to Depression Era Americans down on their luck. His board game was just Landlords without McGee’s single tax rules. He called it Monopoly and sold it to Parker Brothers in 1935. The same year, Parker Brother’s bought up McGee’s patent for just $500, cornering the market on financial board games and essentially securing a monopoly on Monopoly.

Kelly Jones: Mary Pilon says it wasn’t simply the very real prospect of poverty that made middle class Americans want to play at being rich, because, as middle class prosperity returned after World War II, Monopoly continued to enjoy huge popularity. In fact, at that very time, tiny irons, thimbles, Scotty dogs, and top hats became staples of American households.

Mary Pilon: The middle class needs a nice refrigerator and they need nice appliances. You have the rise of the suburbs and things like that. Monopoly very much becomes another ubiquitous household item.

Kelly Jones: In the second half of the 20th century, the aspiration to wealth was coming to define the American dream. More and more, it was a part of what it meant to be middle class. Monopoly, the cunning, cruel, and, according to Lizzie McGee, evil version of the game perfectly embodied the new American dream. If you wanted to keep up with Joneses, you better have a hotel on Boardwalk.

Ed Ayers: Producer Kelly Jones. Helping her tell that story was Mary Pilon, author of the book “The Monopolists.”

The Extraordinary Life of Jeremiah Hamilton

What happens when you are African American and marry a white girl, pursue crooked business dealings, and aggressively compete against rivals on Wall Street in 19th century New York City? You become a millionaire, of course. Nathan continues his discussion with historian Shane White about the larger than life personality of Jeremiah Hamilton.

Music:

Big Blue by Podington Bear
Modest House by Podington Bear

Jeremiah Hamilton; race; wealth

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Nathan Connolly: Now, remember Jeremiah Hamilton, one of the first African-American millionaires? We heard about his less than scrupulous business dealings in the insurance market and Wall Street earlier in the episode. He was so rich and famous by the time of his death, newspapers across the country published obituaries in his honor.

Speaker 16: Democrat and Weekly Sentinel, June 26th, 1875. “Mr. Jeremiah Hamilton, for many years passed one of the noted men of New York, died a few days since of pneumonia at the age of 62. He was a colored man but, from the circumstance of having worn a fine, black, long-haired wig, had somewhat the appearance of a Mexican or Spaniard. He had a peculiarly shrill voice and, without the slightest effort, always made himself heard, whether desirous of doing so or not. He was an intelligent, gentlemanly man, and is reputed to have left a fortune of $2 million to his two daughters, accomplished women and much respected.”

Nathan Connolly: What makes his life truly extraordinary is not necessarily how he amassed his fortune, but when. Historian Shane White explains the racial context in 19th century New York City.

Shane White: Slavery formally ends in New York state on July the 4th, 1827. I actually think there’s this incredible cultural convulsion because New York really is one of the first places in the world to have to cope with how do you work out race relations once slavery has ended. They’re pioneering, and, in New York City, they’re pioneering the development of free Black culture. There’s this aggressive pushing at the boundaries of now they’re no longer slaves, of what freedom meant.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Shane White: There’s this incredible mixture, this bouncing backwards and forwards between Black and white, that’s going on. Talking about Jeremiah Hamilton in this context is sort of interesting because he distanced himself from these other African-Americans, but, whether he liked it or not, for almost all the New Yorkers, he was just another Black. He actually … The way he behaves on Wall Street is part of this, as I suggested, cultural convulsion that lasts for about 15 years in New York City.

Nathan Connolly: Give me an example, if you can, of this kind of personality, what you found to give you some sense of him as a character.

Shane White: I’m trying to remember the exact date, but it was in the 1830s, as he’s first establishing himself, some business rivals arrange to have him arrested. At this time, he’s actually living out near Bloomingdale, up near Columbia University, actually, outside the city, then the city in the 1830s. These business rivals arrange to have him arrested at 11:00 at night by the police for a trumped up charge so that he spends the night in prison. It’s too late for him to arrange bail. It’s vicious.

Shane White: A couple of weeks later, those same two white guys get arrested at 5:00 in the morning and bail gets set so high they can’t get out for a week or two. Again, you do it to me, and I’m going to come straight back at them.

Nathan Connolly: So he arranged that arrest, Jeremiah Hamilton?

Shane White: He … Well, I can’t actually connect it that he spoke to someone, but it very much looks … That’s what it looks like. That’s what happened, as far as I’m concerned, looking at the sources.

Shane White: He does that sort of thing continuously. He’s very, very, very clever. You’d love to meet him but you’d always keep your hand on your wallet because he had a very loose idea of what was right and what was wrong.

Nathan Connolly: Now, he’s not the only African-American in New York by a long way. Did he have any standing at all in the broader African-American community in the city?

Shane White: He has absolutely … As far as I can tell, he has absolutely nothing to do with any other African-American in the city. The other …

Nathan Connolly: Not one?

Shane White: It’s amazing. His … Tracing him through the census, his servants are white in his house in New York City.

Nathan Connolly: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shane White: His friend Benjamin Days’ wife takes in charitable cases as part of reform type of impulse. So does Jeremiah Hamilton and his wife. Their charity cases are white, as well. They’re not African-American. To me, one of the most amazing images is in the mid-1840s. Jeremiah Hamilton, he … Several times, he tries to leave the city. In the mid-1840s, he buys an estate in New Jersey. It’s 250 acres, it’s a mansion, it’s got 10 bedrooms and a ballroom, it’s got a trout stream, it’s got quail and grouse hunting on it. The idea of a Black man standing on his terraces in New Jersey, looking down over his trout stream, is not the image that comes to mind when you think of African-Americans in the North in 1845.

Shane White: What was also typical of him was, when he bought that, he bought that estate from someone who actually didn’t have the legal right to sell it. He bought it on the cheap and was trying to leverage and do things in an underhand fashion. There’s a court case and he ends up losing it and gets turfed out of it, which means he moves back to New York City, to East 29th Street, where he buys a house, where he lives for the rest of his life.

Nathan Connolly: It’s the house on 29th Street that is attacked by a mob during the draft riots of 1863, yes?

Shane White: Yes, yes. All right, as I mentioned before, Jeremiah Hamilton, for 40 years, is this aggressive. Just to make things even worse, in the late 1830s, he actually gets … He would have been 28 or 29. He gets a 14-year-old white girl pregnant. Again, he breaks the stereotypes. These sorts of temporary liaisons are quite common, but this was the beginning of a marriage that lasted for 40 years. They had 10 children between the two of them.

Shane White: He’s married to a white woman, so that means that, every time he walks down the street with a white woman, there’s the chance of violence. What was threatened for 40 years finally happens in July 1863, on the second day of the draft riots, when a mob turns into East 29th Street. The mob is chanting, “68, 68, 68,” which was the number of his house. It’s targeted, his house.

Nathan Connolly: Oh, wow.

Shane White: They go to his house, they break in through the cellar door and rush up the stairs. His wife, his white wife is standing at the top of the stairs and she says, “What do you want?” The guy at the front of the mob says, “Your husband.” She says, “What are you going to do with him?” They say, “See that lamp post out the front there? We’re going to string him up from the lamp post.”

Shane White: Again, Jeremiah Hamilton was clever. He had heard them and he had jumped over the back fence and …

Nathan Connolly: They’re chanting his address halfway down the block.

Shane White: He was off. He wasn’t an idiot.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Shane White: That was the threat that he had constantly. He was … To rip off Tom Wolf, in his day job on Wall Street, he was a master of the universe, but, as soon as that job finished and he was on the streets, he wasn’t even a second class citizen. He’s got that threat of violence.

Shane White: That was what attracted me to try and write a book about him, was that, this very weird, schizophrenic life he must have lived.

Nathan Connolly: Now, is there anything that we learn that’s new about the 19th century as a whole, looking at it through the lens of someone like Jeremiah Hamilton?

Shane White: If you think about the way American race relations has been organized, the point has been particularly to limit and keep down African-Americans, not to allow them to get ahead, not allow them to get educated, not allow them to get ahead in any way, shape, or form. This has led to very, very talented African-Americans going off in ways that often end up … Sometimes can end up being illegal. Running gambling, for example, in New York and Philly. I think there is a whole lot of things that, looked at now, I would label as Black achievement.

Shane White: I think there is a lot more nuance or a lot more stuff that you can put into African-American history to sort of change slightly the contours, or the way it’s often considered too simplistically to be a story of Black poverty in the city or Blacks being at the bottom of the heap in the city. Most were, but there are odd stories like Jeremiah Hamilton that I think can make our understanding of the past a bit more interesting.

Nathan Connolly: Shane White is the author of “Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire.”

Star Spangled Scotsman gives it all away

In 1889, Steel Magnate Andrew Carnegie published “The Gospel of Wealth,” a clarion call for millionaires to transform themselves into philanthropists and give their fortunes away. But as Carnegie’s biographer David Nasaw explains, this public declaration didn’t improve the lot of Carnegie’s workers, and the self styled “Star Spangled Scotsman” never lived to see his work have its greatest influence on Bill Gates and a new generation of philanthropists.

Music:

Birth of an Industry by Patrick Smith

Andrew Carnegie; exploitation; philanthropy; wealth

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Brian Balogh: Today on the show, we’ll be looking at the figure of the American millionaire. How did millionaires become iconic figures in American society?

Ed Ayers: We’ll be discovering the true story behind the origins of the board game that aims to turn us all into millionaires through real estate speculation.

Nathan Connolly: And we’ll be hearing more about Mr. Jeremiah Hamilton, of course.

Brian Balogh: First, in 1889, one of the wealthiest men in America publicly announced that he was going to give away all his money.

Nathan Connolly: Not just that. In a pair of essays which together became known as “The Gospel of Wealth,” Andrew Carnegie argued that the wealthy had a moral duty to give it away.

Speaker 7: “The Gospel of Wealth” by Andrew Carnegie. “The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth.”

David Nasaw: I’ve read “The Gospel of Wealth” 20 times, 50 times. I was giving a class to high school teachers and they wanted a primary source so I read it again, and I came out of this last reading just astounded. He says, in “The Gospel of Wealth,” capitalism generates huge inequality, and that’s the way it’s got to be, so what do we do? The capitalists have to start giving back their money.

Brian Balogh: That’s David Nasaw, the biographer of Andrew Carnegie. When Andrew Carnegie sold his steel company to J.P. Morgan in 1901, the Carnegie Steel Company was valued at more than $400 million. Carnegie had been giving his money away for three decades, most famously in the form of free public libraries, which he gifted to 2,500 communities around the world.

David Nasaw: The scope of his philanthropy is extraordinary. He thinks the people in Pittsburgh should be able to see a dinosaur so he sends an expedition to Arizona to dig up dinosaurs. Then, he thinks the people of the world should see dinosaurs so he creates molds from his dinosaur bones in a warehouse and creates fake dinosaurs that he gives to museums all over the world. He thinks people should have access to classical music. He buys pipe organs for churches so that working people, when they go to church, are going to get good classical music. He creates what he calls bath house, but which are really gyms, meeting rooms and community centers. Later in life, he becomes the number one peace activist probably in the world.

Brian Balogh: What drove his radical philanthropy?

David Nasaw: Let me tell you Carnegie begins. Carnegie’s fortune is made by his mother because his mother decides to relocate the family from Dunfermline, Scotland. Mrs. Carnegie, understanding that her boys, Andrew and his younger brother, had no future in Dunfermline, put them on a boat, borrowed some money, and took them to what was then known as Allegheny City, which is today part of Pittsburgh and was then just over the river in Independent City.

David Nasaw: Carnegie knew damn well that, as a little man, he was maybe 4’10”, 4’11”, who didn’t dig the coal, who didn’t mine the iron, who didn’t run the railroad trains, who didn’t stoke the ovens or keep the ovens, who wasn’t a barrel man who moved the molten steel to the molds, he knew that wealth is not created by the capitalist, by the entrepreneur, but by the larger community. He knew damn well that, if his mother hadn’t moved him to Pittsburgh, where within 50 miles there was iron and coal, and Pittsburgh, which was the gateway to the west, he would have been a shopkeeper or someone. Probably a successful shopkeeper, but a shopkeeper.

David Nasaw: He understood, as well, that, if he had not arrived in America before the Civil War, come of age after the Civil War, when the population is expanding and moving west, there would have been no need for the trains and for his steel. From a very early age, he understands that this money doesn’t belong to him.

Speaker 7: “Serious obstacles to the improvement of our race is indiscriminate charity. It were better for mankind that the millions of the rich were thrown into the sea than so spent as to encourage the slothful, the drunken, the unworthy. Of every thousand dollars spent in so-called charity today, it is probable that $950 is unwisely spent.”

David Nasaw: Everybody who has written about Carnegie says that, when he becomes a philanthropist, he becomes a softer, nicer, gentler, more humane individual. The opposite is true. Carnegie knows that he’s going to give away his fortune from very early on. Before he’s even got that fortune, he’s going to give it away. What that means is he feels that he is entitled to exploit his workers to create a larger fortune to give back to the community.

Brian Balogh: Now, I’m sure he doesn’t call it exploiting. though, does he? In his own mind, is that the calculation he’s making?

David Nasaw: Boy, it’s a good question. Yes. Yes, I think so. There’s this great scene, which I write about in my biography, this wonderful scene when he returns to Pittsburgh to dedicate one of this libraries. For the ceremony, the mayor is there and the governor and the leaders of church and schools and universities. There’s a procession and they all line up in this library. He gives his prepared speech and, at the end of the speech, he looks. All the way in the back … He looks out and he says, “I see workers here.” He said, “Some of you may work for my steel mills.” He said, “You’re thinking to yourselves, why didn’t he pay us more? He’d have less to give away and might have had to build a less grand library, but why didn’t he give us our fair share?

David Nasaw: “I’ll tell you why. Because, if I had raised your wages, you would have spent it on a better cut of meat, maybe something to drink that you shouldn’t be drinking.” He said, “But that’s not what you need. What you need are libraries, museums, concert halls.” He said, “It is for the best, for the community and for your children, that it works out this away.”

David Nasaw: He knew what he was doing and, as he becomes a philanthropist, he becomes more exploitive. He institutes a 12 hour day. He puts his workers on shifts so they work 6 1/2 days. They get a half day off so that they can switch from days to nights. They work 12 hours. In order to pay his workers as little as possible, so that he does not have to improve conditions in the plant that result in untold injuries and deaths from workplace accidents, he’s got to break the union, and he breaks the union.

Speaker 7: “The man who dies leaving behind many millions of available wealth which was his to administer during life will pass away unwept, unhonored, and unsung, no matter to what uses he leaves the dross which he cannot take with him. Of such as these, the public verdict will then be the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.”

David Nasaw: The apex of Carnegie’s influence, I think, comes in the last 20 years, when Vartan Gregorian becomes the president of the Carnegie corporation. He preaches the gospel of philanthropy. He brings it to the west coast and preaches it, and does so brilliantly to Gates, to Buffet, to a variety of fabulously wealthy new wealth, and convinces them that this is their responsibility, to give away their money as Carnegie did.

Brian Balogh: So it’s a delayed consequence by almost 100 years.

David Nasaw: Yeah. There’s a delayed consequence, but … You can understand why philanthropy would appeal to millionaires, as it appealed to Carnegie, because they are convinced, as Carnegie was, of their intrinsic brilliance, that, if they’ve made these gazillions of dollars, they have a will, they have a capacity, they have a series of intellectual and cognitive skills, that, if they turn to spending that money to save the universe, who better than they?

David Nasaw: At the same time that trust in government declines, in large part because these millionaires are saying, “Regulation is bad for us. Big government is bad for the people,” so the importance and the rhetoric of philanthropy and the philanthropic sector is ramped up. Carnegie always claimed that he was an American through and through and he loved democracy and he hated the hereditary dynasties of Europe and the kings and queens should be eliminated and the people rule, but he didn’t believe in rule by the people, he believed in rule by the fittest who had survived. How did they do that? By bypassing government through philanthropy.

David Nasaw: When you look at the ways in which American society is developed, with philanthropy creating our universities, our colleges, our museums, our concert halls, I can go on and on, in ways that were unimaginable in Europe, where the government sponsored these cultural and artistic enterprises, that’s the gift of Andrew Carnegie.

Brian Balogh: David Nasaw is professor of history at the City University of New York, and the author of “Andrew Carnegie,” published by the Penguin Press.

For The Love of Money

Brian, Ed, and Nathan discuss how Americans’ perception of wealth has changed over time, from the attitudes of the Puritans to rhetoric in contemporary presidential elections. They also examine millionaires in popular culture and why “The Beverly Hillbillies” stand out as an unconventional display of wealth.

popular culture; wealth

00:00:00 / 00:00:00

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Brian Balogh: Were doing this show about millionaires on the tenth anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the biggest bankruptcy in American history. I think it behooves us to take a moment and try to understand Americans’ relationship with great wealth. We obviously have a love-hate relationship with our millionaires. Am I wrong?

Ed Ayers: No, I think you’re right. I think that’s actually sort of hard-wired into American culture back to the Puritans, who had this paradox. They’re supposed to work as hard as they possibly can and maybe get wealthy but, if you do, you’re supposed to feel bad about it and to do something with it. I think that there’s a kind of instability in that core belief of Americans. Then, it really takes off, of course, after the Civil War, when there starts to be lots of new kinds of wealth that is visible in ways it has never been before in US history.

Brian Balogh: Nathan, where do we get this self-made man thing from?

Nathan Connolly: Well, I think part of it is absolutely an aftermath of a moment where many of the people who had the most money were slave masters in the South, for instance, and there wasn’t necessarily the argument that one could make that you were self-made if you had 400 slaves, for instance.

Ed Ayers: Yeah.

Nathan Connolly: That comes later in the 19th century, when you have European immigration coming in, populating many of the cities of this country. Industrialization enables the creation of these sectors where people are able to make money, even if they come in without inherited wealth. Again, Andrew Carnegie is one of these types, but there are a number of stories about the self-made man or the person who is pulling him or herself up by their own bootstraps. All of that becomes part of the culture that makes up the Gilded Age, to use the old Mark Twain phrase. That really does mark this period.

Nathan Connolly: I think it’s also important to note that the late 19th and early 20th century becomes this moment where, because people are apparently self-made, they also then are able to have opinions about any number of things that have to deal with the social world that they’re inhabiting. Someone like Carnegie can write a ton of essays or give speeches that are about things like race or wealth or land or a moral, upright upbringing. That becomes a start for people to then model their own behavior upon.

Ed Ayers: Yeah. I think that it’s not an accident that the word “millionaire” is invented in the same time that Nathan is describing. I think implicit in the idea is not just that you inherited this money, but that somehow you’re new to it and you have responsibility for it. It’s also in display. There are new places that you could see millionaires, as they’re riding around on their palace cars on their railroads, as they’re building the mansions and 5th Avenue in New York City. There’s just a new visibility, as well as a new preponderance of wealth in this period.

Ed Ayers: I think it’s interesting that along with the rationale for philanthropy comes the rationale for why people deserve this.

Brian Balogh: Let’s think a little bit about cultural representations of those rich people. If we want to go all the way to the 1980s, I think about “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” a very popular TV show and another moment when Americans are enamored of the rich, but I also think of all those screwball comedies in the 1930s.

Ed Ayers: Sure.

Brian Balogh: I think about “Bringing Up Baby,” where the museum is bailed out by a millionaire, but those rich people seem, #1, goofy, #2, like they haven’t really earned, or at least worked hard for, their money, and #3, they seem damn unhappy.

Ed Ayers: Thank goodness.

Brian Balogh: I think, now, of course, this is during the Great Depression in the 1930s. It’s not surprising that films would kind of make fun of the rich. I think, throughout American history, rich people have been represented as, well, maybe not quite really deserving that money.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah. There was absolutely, I think, a way one felt comfortable poking fun or mocking or even condemning wealthy people or thinking about their gains as almost ill-gotten. “It’s a Wonderful Life,” so much of the narrative device in that movie, again from the Golden Age, is about these unscrupulous dealings that almost run a whole town into the ground.

Ed Ayers: Right, right.

Nathan Connolly: You have the working class hero that basically has to save the day.

Nathan Connolly: Or, you think about a film … You know I love my musicals, so “Fiddler on the Roof” is a great kind of mid-1960s display of Jewish life in Eastern Europe. It has a great line from the song, “If I Were A Rich Man,” that describes that people will somehow believe you, even if you’re totally wrong about what you’re saying, simply because you’re rich. “It won’t make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong. When you’re rich, they think you really know.” It’s, again, kind of mocking, even in the case of someone who is pining to be rich.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah. I think you’re right, Brian, that the ’80s in some ways represent such a sharp break, in the sense of a kind of bold celebration of wealth and accumulation as being another measure, again, a kind of second Gilded Age, of whether or not somebody is doing or knowing the right things.

Ed Ayers: Well, I have a very deep thought to share with you, Nathan, and to ask you if it would challenge your perspective. That thought is the Beverly Hillbillies.

Nathan Connolly: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Ed Ayers: The most popular show in the United States throughout the 1960s, when there were some other things going on in the culture, I understand.

Nathan Connolly: That’s right.

Ed Ayers: What do you make of that, of that show? Now, I will admit many people on the show talk like me and my family, and we couldn’t help but notice that people all over America were laughing at us but we couldn’t figure out if it was because of they were undeservedly rich or because they were hicks.

Nathan Connolly: Right.

Ed Ayers: We just chose to believe that this was actually a critique of millionaires rather than one more poke at hillbillies.

Brian Balogh: Could I just add, Ed, that it seemed that they always were the smartest people in the room by the end of the show.

Nathan Connolly: Exactly. Exactly. That’s right.

Ed Ayers: So you think that’s what it is, huh?

Nathan Connolly: That’s right. Yeah, it was absolutely a wink and a nod and a jab at West Coast elite Beverly Hills lifestyle, right? These folks, with their dead possums in the pot and always wearing the same clothes, in spite of all their millions, they actually were smarter than Mr. Drysdale and all the other well-heeled Beverly Hillians living out there. Absolutely.

Ed Ayers: You know, the fact is that a millionaire just isn’t a millionaire like they used to be. There’s 11,000,000 of them in the United States now. The problem is they don’t come clearly labeled. I think a lot of these millionaires have all that net worth wrapped up in big home mortgages or maybe college tuitions or maybe 401Ks they’ll cash in when they’re too old to enjoy them.

Nathan Connolly: Right, right.

Ed Ayers: It’s not really clear exactly who is a millionaire and what kind of social meaning that has anymore. I think we’re going to have to up our game and talk about billionaires if we’re going to be talking about sort of the same social consequences.

Nathan Connolly: Yeah. The political scene is an amazing one. I’m reminded of the election in 2000, if you can believe it, Al Gore and George W. Bush. It was a remarkable effort on Gore’s part to try to get Americans to understand that the proposed tax cut coming from the Republican party was not going to benefit them. He had the statistic, based off of polling data, that 25% of Americans believe they were part of the top 5%. Most Americans who are doing okay think they’re actually doing better than they are.

Brian Balogh: We’ve also seen how Americans test on math scores, right?

Nathan Connolly: Maybe it was just the percentages that were confusing them, but I don’t think so, Brian. I’ll tell you why. You flash forward to 2016. In 2016, you have two guys from New York with very similar kinds of East Coast accents who are reaching very different constituencies, in Donald J. Trump and, say, Bernie Sanders. They’re both running populous campaigns of different kinds. I think it really does point to this split in the way that most people understand their situation, where, on the one hand, you have folks from across a variety of class spectrums who believe that Donald Trump will represent them, that they want to be like him, that the job of a good American is to become a millionaire or a billionaire.

Nathan Connolly: Contrast that with someone like Sanders, who is running a very clear populous campaign from the left. He believes that you should have a much more expansive social safety net. I think that that divide, really, between folks who were thinking about themselves as a millionaire in the making and those who were saying, “You know what? We need to find a better way to reinvest in the public for everybody,” that that’s going to be what determines our politics going forward in large measure.

Brian Balogh: That’s going to do it for us today. If you’re a millionaire and would like to pass some of your money on to a good cause, you’ll find us at backstoryradio.org, or send an e-mail to backstory@virginia.edu. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter @BackStoryRadio. Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

Nathan Connolly: BackStory is produced at Virginia Humanities. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Tomato Fund, cultivating fresh ideas in the arts, the humanities, and the environment.

Speaker 17: Brian Balogh is professor of history at the University of Virginia. Ed Ayers is professor of the humanities and President Emeritus of the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is professor of history and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Baxter Adams associate professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University.

Speaker 17: BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for Virginia Humanities.

Speaker 18: Panoply.