The very rich are different from you and me, F. Scott Fitzgerald noted. It is not merely, as Ernest Hemingway wisecracked in response, that they have more money; the possession of a fortune sets them apart in other ways too. They are free to indulge their dreams; free from anxiety about bills; free from the basic burdens of a struggle for subsistence. On the other hand, they must worry constantly about exploiters, extortionists, cranks, frauds, beggars, blackmailers, kidnappers, and every form of hostility that envy can generate. Small wonder that the conflicting pressures often squeeze them into eccentricity. They may not resemble the rest of us, but they tend to look a lot like each other.
Yet there are exceptions and degrees. And the case can be made that the founders of Chicago’s first families—especially those who earned their money in the years between the Civil War and World War I—were distinguishable from their fellow moguls. For one thing, unlike their more notorious and overpublicized counterparts among the New York Four Hundred, most of them created their fortunes in their own front yard. Call the roll of Chicago wealth, and the most resonant names will belong to men who packed meat, made farm machinery and railroad cars, sawed lumber, rolled steel, and sold goods right there in the city—men like Armour, Swift, McCormick, Pullman, and Field, known to the country at large but remembered best as Chicagoans. Their names survive in the schools, institutes, museums, hospitals, orchestras, opera companies, parks, and auditoriums that they endowed there.
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