The term the 'Gilded Age' actually comes from a novel written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873. I never knew that until recently. I started to read the book online and found it, like a lot of stories written back then, verbose. The storyline however is very interesting. A family seeks their fortune from 75,000 acres of land they own in Tennessee, believing it will bring them great wealth one day as mining, railroads, and people flock to the area. The story also satirizes political corruption at the time: one of the family members tries to lobby the U.S. Congress to buy the land. It all sounds so familiar!!!

This book was written at the beginning of what is historically called the Gilded Age in America. A time when political corruption was rampant, and a period of conspicuous  consumption. That term, was coined in 1899 by economist Thorstein Veblen, in a book titled The Theory of the Leisure Class. The theory, in a nutshell, is that people of the time were consuming goods not for want or need but purely to show off to their friends that they could afford such things as yachts, jewels, and lavish homes. 

My research helped me understand the motivations of the characters in my Durant family saga. Along the way I picked up a book at a library book sale titled: Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: the Story of a Daughter and Mother in the Gilded Age, and I am shocked at the excess. One passage in particular caught my attention: after her divorce Alva Vanderbilt stays in Newport where the Vanderbilt mansion, the Marble House, was located. There, she "withdrew to a life of extravagant vacuity", inviting guests to dig for party favors of rubies, sapphires, and emeralds with silver spoons in a stream that ran through the center of the dining table.

Jeesh, my dinner parties would never pass the muster in this time period. Our idea of entertainment is letting go of sky lanterns on a quiet summer night.

I discovered a great tool in my research for my historical novel: a calculator that lets me plug in a sum from the 1890s and then provides an equivalent value in today's dollars for various indexes. I used the consumer price index - the lowest value to calculate the value of the money inherited or earned by the characters in my novel in today's rates.

This has allowed me to wrap my head around the idea of how a few of them lost it all within a decade.

William West Durant sold the Adirondack Railroad Company for $650,000 in 1889 and that sale, along with some land sales in the Adirondacks netted him close to $1.5 million. In today's dollars that is about $40 million. A lot of money right? Why then was he broke by 1903? Could it have been that he spent it all on his $200,000 yacht? His Great Camps that he built with such fine detail and then sold at a loss? Or was it his trip around the world with his yacht in 1891-92 when he entertained royalty? Maybe it was the Panic of 1893, or a combination of all of the events I've described.

Then there is Ella Durant. Granted she was given the short end of the stick when it came to her inheritance: a measly $35,000 give or take some change. In today's dollars that is about $800,000. I imagine her brother William was wondering what she was spending it on  because she also received a $200/monthly allowance and was broke within three years  of receiving her inheritance.

Two hundred a month may seem like chump change now, but back then it was equivalent to about $5,000; plenty to live on in London, one would think, since monthly rent in 1890 was about $50.00 for a decent flat. That would be only one quarter of her allowance. What, I had to wonder, caused her to go broke so quickly? Was it the doctor bills that piled up from an extended illness? Her social life in London? A woman in London in the 1890s would need dresses for the opera and theater, and jewels to go along with them. I found a receipt in the archives of the University of Iowa, a bill that Ella's father Dr. Durant incurred for a diamond necklace he purchased in 1869 from Tiffany's. It was worth $1600.00. I had this much to go by. Maybe Ella treated herself to jewels and dropped a month's allowance on them.

Another potential cause of the downfall of the Durant siblings was that they were easy prey for businessmen who knew they had assets and may have enticed them to invest in risky money-making schemes, and taken advantage of their lack of business acumen. This was a familiar theme in Twain's novel The Gilded Age. To put this into context one only has to read about how J.P. Morgan the financier operated. During the Panic of 1893 he negotiated with President Cleveland to sell U.S. bonds to international bankers for gold, which at the time was being bled out of the U.S. Treasury. The bonds sold out in less than twenty-five minutes and Morgan made over $5 mil in the transaction. That $5 mil in today's dollars was worth $140 million. Yes, that's right, he made $135 mil. in twenty-five minutes. Morgan surely knew what he was doing. It is telling he bought William's Camp Uncas in 1895, William's masterpiece of Great Camp architecture, for half the amount William had spent building it. Morgan knew how to take advantage of a situation.


In the end both Ella and her brother William were risk takers; not only with their personal wealth, but also their art: William his Great Camps and Ella her writing. The Durant siblings wanted to create something, a trait they inherited, along with the money, from their father Dr. Durant. Perhaps the cost of being creative is what really did them in at the end.