A reading: excerpts from the Foreword to Lucius Beebe's "The Big Spenders" --

"Anybody," said Jay Gould, "can make a fortune. It takes a genius to hold onto one."

"A man with a million dollars can be as happy nowadays as though he were rich," deposed Ward McAllister.

"Money has a tendency to buy happiness," wrote Damon Runyon.

"Money is something to be thrown off the back platform of moving trains," was the stated philosophy of Gene Fowler.

Each of the foregoing expressed at least a facet of the basic thinking of all but the most benighted men and women. There are proverbs and admonitions to the contrary, to be sure. "A fool and his money are soon parted" is learned by that mythical entity, every schoolboy, as early as he can read and write. Prudence and saving were advocated in ample abundance by Benjamin Franklin. The impending rainy day is part of every American's subconscious awareness as is attested by the hundreds of millions of dollars in savings banks; but, by and large, the American people are a spending people just as, by and large, the French people are a saving people, unless, of course, they happen to have in hand someone else's money.

On the basis of the existing record it is safe to assert that, in the great American credo, a rich man is the noblest handiwork of God, and the corollary of the aphorism is that how he spends his money is the measure of the rich man.

It is the purpose of this book to explore some of the ways in which Americans and, in a few cases, foreigners financed with American money have expressed the genius required for the rewarding expenditure of substantial sums of money.

When in the early 1920's an Armenian named Michael Arlen who was then living in England and later became an American citizen found himself on the way to almost overnight riches on the strength of a novel called 'The Green Hat', he was faced with the problem of how to spend the not inconsiderable sum represented by his first royalty check. His first impulse, which he happily was able to resist, was to pay his indebtedness to his tailor, who happened to be Henry Poole & Company Limited just off Burlington Gardens. He might also have paid his back rent which was mounting or even repaid some of the loans from kind friends on which he had been subsisting while waiting for fame to crown his slightly oriental brows.

With great strength of character he was able to restrain himself from indulging such urgings of middle-class probity and went out and spent the entire sum in hand on the biggest, flashiest Rolls-Royce touring car with a body by Ward Park, in blinding canary yellow.

"It gave me a new dimension," he said.

"All I want of the world is very little," he later explained as his basic philosophy of life. "I only want the best of everything and there is so little of that."

[...]

Compared to such stimulating recollections of the belle epoque of big spending, the degenerate present, despite material abundance on a scale to dwarf the dreams of a Roman proconsul, offers a sorry comparison. Never have material prosperity and emergent good fortune in such radiant dimension crowned a nation's destinies, never have diffidence and timidity suggested their enjoyment on a scale of more debased mediocrity.

The details of what can only be regarded, by persons of taste and imagination, as an American tragedy came over the wires from Houston not long ago when a Texas oil tycoon named James M. West at last encountered the old fellow with the scythe. It wasn't the fact of Mr. West's demise, a matter we must all face sooner or later, that constituted tragedy: it was the details of his life as furnished by the Associated Press.

Mr. West left an estate of $100,000,000, take or leave a few dollars, $290,000 of it squirreled away in silver dollars in a secret cellar in his home. He also left a fleet of forty-one Cadillacs and his favorite relaxation, which was riding night patrol in squad cars with Houston policemen.

There you have the archtypical American millionaire in the years of the nation's greatest economic affluence: more high-priced motorcars than he could possibly use, a taste for Skid-road adventure vicariously achieved, and such a terror of the times that he couldn't feel secure without a hoard of hard cash in the cellar. His concern for minted coinage may have been prophetic but its suggestion of insecurity is none the less explicit.

If this were an isolated example of men of great wealth it would still be a matter for tears, but when you realize that, with only slight variations, it may be taken as typical of an entire generation of American millionaires it becomes a national catastrophe.

It may be argued that Texas millionaires are a specially inhibied and unimaginative breed, predisposed from birth to the inanities of football, drum majorettes, and private flying machines, and that elsewhere in the land rich men rise above this level of tastelessness and conformity, but the argument, alas, is not valid. Fords, Rockefellers, Morgans, Mellons, and Vanderbilts to a man are given to public good works and private lives of the most revolting probity. Among the inheritors of great names and great fortunes in America it is difficult if not impossible to find a living man who has given a dinner party at which nude chorus girls leaped from the innards of a lamb potpie.

The great hallmarks of wealth and character that once set rich men apart from their inferiors -- affairs with stage favorites, love nests aboard oceangoing yachts, private railroad cars, racing stables, vast retinues of domestics, collections of bogus old masters, membership at Colonel Edward Bradley's Beach Club at Palm Beach, titled sons-in-law, custom-made motorcars, cottages at Newport and mansions on Fifth Avenue, a nice taste in Madeira, and fêtes champêtres around swimming pools into which guests in evening dress precipitated themselves at frequent intervals -- all are gone with the wind. And don't talk about poverty and income taxes and the hard lot of the well-to-do. There are men in Texas who could buy and sell J. P. Morgan, Jim Hill, and Jay Gould all rolled into one, but they are poltroons to a man, scared beyond measure of having fun. Instead of fancy-dress balls of revolting dimensions at the Waldorf-Astoria they are a pushover for family foundations. Instead of scandalous associations with French actresses, busted silk hats, and champaign bottles on the lawn, they prefer to be known as "plain as an old shoe."

[...]

There is no moral to this recital of a few of the morelighthearted gestures of a departed generation of the millionaires except to point out that they will live in fragrant memory. There are ten times more millionaires today than there were when Morgans, Mellons, Hills, Astors, and first-generation Fords trod the earth but only the merest handful are known to the public, and there isn't an authentic magnifico in a carload.

[...]

Walter Lord, an accredited commentator on the rich and their tribal rituals, inclines to the belief that the years of the ortolans came to an end with the loss of the Titanic where so many of the well-to-do of the world departed under auspices of signifcant decorum and gallantry. Their curtain call from the sloping sun deck, he maintains, was the final salute of a generation that knew how to spend money splendidly both in this world and on the threshold of the next.

In this context it would seem little short of churlish in a British politician of the time to announce that "paying twenty-two hundred dollars for a single suite for a five days' voyage is without any qualification utterly indefensible and morally wrong." It may be the merest casuistry to point out that, for the occupant of the suite, the trip was of longer duration than had been planned. In any event the passenger in question could have done better for himself had he wished, as did Emile Brandeis, an Omaha department store owner, who paid another $4350 for a private promenade deck.

Nowhere, it has been remarked, is moderation so debilitating and destructive of character as in the expenditure of money. The decision to spend excessively on the caprices of their choice is what lent the stature of greatness to most of the people who will be encountered in this book. It was they who validated the lost art of being rich.

Lucius Beebe

1966

Virginia City

(excerpts: "Foreword" -- "The Big Spenders", Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1966)

"In his lifetime, jovial and flamboyant Amon G. Carter of nearby Fort Worth gave Mr. Stanley a run for his money as the best-known Texan of his time, but their personalities were somewhat different. Carter's notion of showing good will, and one that was widely approved by its beneficiaries, was to arrive in New York's Waldorf-Astoria for the annual newspaper publishers' convention, take over an entire floor, and throw all the keys out the window into Park Avenue. He then kept open house like a maharaja for the duration."

(ibid, p. 303)

Those are really great quotes. Thanks!