January 2011

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.

The author recommends Bessie L. Pierce’s three-volume A History of Chicago , which is more than most people want to read straight through, but it is useful for looking up any aspect of the subject. Edward Wagenknecht’s Chicago (1964) is good reading, as is the long section on Chicago in the 1939 Federal Writers’ Project guide to the state of Illinois. Lost Chicago (1975), by David Lowe, is a mixture of old photographs and anecdotal text that conveys a real sense of the city. And don’t overlook Theodore Dreiser’s novel The Titan , whose hero’s career is closely based on that of Charles Tyson Yerkes and gives a tangy sense of what it must have felt like to be making big money in the confident, disheveled, splendid Chicago of the late nineteenth century.

People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship,” says a character speaking from the vantage point of the year 2000 in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel, Looking Backward, “but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence and disinterestedness which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community interest which supports our social system.” Writing a century ago, Bellamy foresaw that by 2000 there would be no money and no wages. Employed or not, everybody would receive the same income in the form of an annual credit card (so called) loaded with more purchasing power than people actually would use in the average year. Work would begin at age twenty-one, on the conclusion of education, and end at a mustering-out day when the citizen reached the age of forty-five.

Wise sayings about business always seem to boil down to contradictory prescriptions. On the one hand, work hard, be patient, prudent, and steadfast, and you will make your fortune. On the other hand, dare to take risks, to speculate boldly, to keep on the move, and you will make your fortune. Or not, in either case. If American entrepreneurs have never found a single formula for success, they nevertheless have agreed that on a continent overflowing with abundance and energy, the one certainty is the need for both opportunity and luck. Of course, looking backward after a lifetime of accumulation, our rich men have often claimed they made their own luck, as if the wheel of fortune were something they could actually steer, a claim the Romans who invented that wheel would have considered blasphemous.

On November 1 a week-long preview of Christmas toys came to an end in New York City. A ten-dollar miniature Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy, was the season’s sensation. A streamlined automobile with a Skippy trailer in tow also attracted attention, as did an eight-inch version of the China Clipper , a seventynine-cent metal model of the contemporary Cord car; and a plaster-cast WPA road-construction set that included workmen, shovels, picks, trucks, and even MEN WORKING signs.

Twenty thousand Communists gathered in Madison Square Garden in New York City on November 13 to celebrate the Soviet Union’s twentieth anniversary. “The Internationale” was sung, Stalin was saluted and Hitler booed, a play was presented that depicted the history of socialism in the U.S.S.R. from 1917 to 1937, and three thousand new members pledged their “complete devotion to the Leninist struggle for socialism, for a Soviet America.”

As I write, the earnest image of Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North has faded from our television screens, but a volume of his complete testimony in the Iran-contra hearings still tops the nonfiction paperback best-seller list, a video cassette of the highlights of his appearances has materialized on the shelf of my local rental store, two hundred thousand copies of an Oliver North coloring book have been shipped, and there is talk of an autobiography, even a mini-series.

Half a century ago another Marine was admired for many of the same qualities North seems to exemplify: plain speaking, aggression, impatience with channels. His name was Smedley Darlington Butler, and his politics became very different from North’s, but he, too, eventually found that the untrammeled zeal of the sort that lets Marines take a hill and bring back their dead under fire is often out of sync with civilian life.

Everyone has fantasies to help make life bearable, and one of my fantasies is that someday some billionaire in need of a tax loss is going to give me ten million dollars to make a movie based on the life of my favorite robber baron, Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Now I’m worried that someone may beat me to the box office. Under the headline NICARAGUA RELIVES ITS YANKEE PAST, The New York Times informs me that a movie is being made about the adventures of the American soldier of fortune William Walker in Nicaragua in the 1850s. What worries me is that the story of Walker’s adventures connects at vital points with the story of Vanderbilt’s adventures, which I wanted for my movie.

It could be simple and utilitarian, like this turn-of-the-century example, an everyday object made of a clear glass base rising to a bowl, a brass wick holder, and a transparent chimney to channel the flame: the kerosene lamp was, after all, to be found in the most modest houses, but it could also come in all sizes and shapes. Some lamps were adorned with bosses, scrolls, and flowers; they could be made of metal or porcelain, as well as glass; and they were priced accordingly, to fit all budgets. Best of all, they were wonderfully convenient. Unlike candles, kerosene lamps did not blow out at the slightest breeze; they gave far more light, far more cheaply; and in no time at all they provided just the kind of symbolism the mid-nineteenth century loved.

Visitors to Chicago have tended either to love the city or to despise it, but its bursting vitality has awed everyone. Perhaps Mark Twain expressed it best. “That astonishing Chicago,” he wrote in Life on the Mississippi in 1883, “a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities.”

Some of those who rubbed the lamp and fetched up the genii are the subject of an article in this issue of American Heritage, and on a recent trip to Chicago I tried to discover what footprints left by the millionaires of Chicago’s golden age are still visible.

I started my visit at the John Hancock Center observatory—on the ninety-fourth of its hundred stories. From almost a thousand feet up, Chicago looks spacious and agreeable, with no sign of its nineteenth-century smoky ugliness. It has wide streets, generously spaced buildings, many parks, and a feast of skyscrapers, new and old. It is easy to see why the city is considered the architectural capital of the United States.