For The Love of Money

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.