What do the Wealthy Folk do?

Questioning the display (primary and secondary) of affluence in two eras

May 01, 2023

The dining room at Marble House, the “summer cottage” of William K. Vanderbilt and his wife, Alva Vanderbilt (later Alva Belmont).

After meeting a major deadline, I shut down my computer and spent this weekend celebrating my birthday in the town of Newport, Rhode Island, which in the 1880s became the summer playground of America’s monied elite, old and new. There’s something laughable about taking a weekend trip to a region where marble-encased mansions are referred to as “summer cottages,” yet after doing some freelance research for the HBO series The Gilded Age at the start of the pandemic, I wanted to see these spaces for myself, to understand a bit more about the materialization of American wealth in the homes of the upwardly mobile. On Saturday, my husband and I had a chance to tour two of the area’s most (in)famous homes, Marble House, the crowning jewel of Alva Vanderbilt’s rise to the American elite, and the Breakers, the summer residence of Cornelius “the Commodore” Vanderbilt, the railroad magnate and grandfather of William K. Vanderbilt (Alva’s husband). (On Sunday we finished our tour with the Elms and the Green Animals Topiary Garden in Portsmouth.) Aided by a tour narrative provided via mobile app by the Preservation Society of Newport County, we walked through both houses, observing the architectural and decorating choices made in each home, and in doing so cobbled together a narrative of what fueled the impulse to showcase one’s power and privilege through one’s personal lifestyle.

As we walked through these spaces with their faded velvet and flaking gilded surfaces, I kept coming back to the question: who is clamoring for this content? What draws us again and again into seeking glimpses of the lifestyles of the rich and famous? It seems a bit ironic to me that in the same week we toured the homes of some of the wealthiest figures of the 19th and 20th century, I also followed the @successionfashion account on Instagram, offering links to the surprisingly mundane clothes and accessories showcased on the HBO series. It is notable that wealth in today’s American society (fictional and real) displays itself as intentionally un-gilded, and that the French fashions of the 1880s have given way to the hoodie, baseball hat, and sneakers of the 2020s. Moreover, the public availability of the renowned homes of Newport would seem downright ridiculous to a contemporary tycoon, who’d rather have his compound hidden from search engines than offer it up for photographs and tours. In contemporary life, true affluence now seems to be defined by how little you are willing to offer yourself up for public scrutiny.

And yet, the Preservation Society of Newport seems to have determined, what we want to know within these homes is nothing about the true motivations and priorities of the wealthy, only how they made their aspirations materially manifest. As we walked through Marble House, so-called because of the 500,000 cubic feet of marble it contained, I wondered about the role that Alva Erskine Smith’s upbringing played in the way she used her property (or rather, her husband’s property) to gain power and influence among the monied set of Manhattan’s elite. Born to a wealthy political family in Alabama in 1853, young Alva was known even as a child to terrorize the enslaved children on her father’s cotton plantation, and as an adolescent in Paris (where her family had fled after the Civil War destroyed their fortunes), she had already come to recognize that she would need to marry well in order to secure her family’s legacy and her own ambitions. None of this, of course, is noted in the body of the text supplied in the tour of Marble House—it only alludes to the fact that "Alva’s story was “a bit of a Scarlett O’Hara story. … After the war [her family] returned with nothing, and had to start all over again. It was up to Alva to try and regain her family’s status.” As Laurie Ossman, former director of Museum Affairs at the Preservation Society of Newport, noted in the app tour transcript, “By marrying into the wealthiest family, [Alva] had managed to literally go from rags to riches. And so she was, as much as a woman at the time could be, a self-made creation.”

In touring Marble House, I was fascinated by what details were revealed about Alva’s ambition and arrogance, and which were not considered meaningful context to how she used her husband’s wealth to buy her way into society. Wouldn’t it be an important detail to see the connective tissue between the rightly fallen fortunes of the slave-owning classes such as the Smiths and the flamboyant displays of wealth in the Newport set, in which Alva functioned like the Kim Kardashian of her day? Wouldn’t such details give deeper meaning to what Mark Twain meant when he called it the “Gilded Age,” an era in which gold leaf was laid, quite precariously, over baser materials such as wood and tin, giving only the momentary illusion of quality?

Or is the purpose of these tours to keep us, the museum visitors, sufficiently distracted by our opulent surroundings that we don’t even notice the crashing waves just beyond the garden wall? There is something inherently attractive about walking through these impressive homes, seeing the intentional incorporation of French, Italian, and Dutch architecture, art, textiles, and culinary technologies into the households of the American elite as an explicit showcasing of cultural capital. Yet there’s also something profoundly obscene about the continued hagiography of exhibiting such spaces to the public without an intentional examination of what lies beneath the gold leaf.

I want to be clear: I don’t necessarily fault the curators for this—after all, history museums tend to operate on shoestring budgets with minimal staff and resources. Additionally, adjustments to the curatorial approach of historic houses move much more slowly than in public museums and exhibition spaces, because they are often subject to the approval of local historical societies and boards of trustees who don’t like to intentionally take the polish off their treasures. (Though Thomas Jefferson’s sexual violence against Sally Hemings had been discussed by the public and in historical records since 1802, it was not until the year 2000 that the Thomas Jefferson Foundation acknowledged the role Jefferson had played in fathering Hemings’ children, and only then were tours at Monticello changed to incorporate said findings into their tour texts.) If there is anything that this moment of supremacist manipulation of public educational texts is teaching us, it’s that a small subset of powerful Americans don’t like to have their myths unmasked, or their most treasured justifications for American power and prestige questioned or undermined.

Nevertheless, I do think there is a space for these tours to show us both the gilding and the grit, to actually delve into the lived experiences and exploitations of the people whose homes we walk through, in order to help us understand exactly how wealth and power work in the American imagination, then and now. In theory we should be able to see Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont in all her complexities—as a fallen Southern belle whose attitude about wealth and power infuses every aspect of her adult life, from the balls she hosted to the divorce she initiated to the suffrage movement she fought for. She knew her power rested not just on her fortune on her influence, which rested on her ability to manipulate those around her, to do her bidding. None of these things are contradictory, and like the fraying silk wallpaper in her daughter Consuelo’s bedroom, the threads that have come apart tell us just about the fabric as the whole cloth.

French Fries and Martinis

Discussion about this post