“The ideal pecuniary man is like the ideal delinquent”
Thorstein Veblen and the Captains of Industry
It was Mark Twain and his coauthor Charles Dudley Warner, in their 1873 novel The Gilded Age, who gave a label to an American era characterized by political corruption and vulgar displays of wealth.1 And it was the economist Thorstein Veblen, in his 1899 book The Theory of the Leisure Class, who coined some of the most memorable terms to describe the sociology of that era, including “conspicuous consumption” and “the leisure class” itself. Although Veblen and the early Twain wrote more than a quarter of a century apart, their subject was the same: the corruption of values in a society increasingly based on the manic pursuit of wealth and the desire to show it off publicly.
By the time Veblen published his most famous works, the acceleration in capitalist development Henry George witnessed during the post–Civil War years had generated some of the largest agglomerations of private riches the world had ever seen, as entrepreneurs like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, and Andrew Carnegie created huge industrial combines. Vanderbilt, also known as “the Commodore,” was one of the original US railroad barons who fought with one another and consolidated their industry. When Vanderbilt died, in 1877, he left a fortune of some \$100 million (nearly \$3 billion in 2024 dollars). Rockefeller, through the Standard Oil Trust Agreement of 1882, combined forty companies involved in the production, refining, and marketing of oil under a single board of trustees. Although this arrangement fell short of full-scale merger, it enabled Standard Oil to eliminate price wars and other competitive threats. Seeing the success of the Rockefeller trust, other industrialists sought to replicate it. In 1887 Henry Osborne Havemeyer put together the Sugar Refineries Company, or Sugar Trust, which soon produced 98 percent of the sugar in the United States. In 1890 J. B. Duke created the American Tobacco Company, the constituent businesses of which controlled about 90 percent of the cigarette market.2
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