Research Trip, Post #4: History Repeats Itself

While I was in Providence doing research, I took a day trip to Newport to tour the Victorian mansions there. When I was younger, I always felt in awe of opulent historic mansions. It felt as if such splendor was a relic of an excessive past.

The reality, though, is that these megamansions are still being built today by the super rich. Mansions that, in a contemporary context, are appalling in their over-the-top expenditures and are objects more of curiosity than of admiration. These mansions, like their Gilded Age predecessors, are monuments to conspicuous consumption. They are structures that force you to wonder whether anybody should ever be able to amass that much money. Who really needs 24-karat gold fixtures in the bathrooms? (Donald Trump, apparently).

Somehow, we seem more apt to remember the less-than-savory ways some of today's megarich have acquired the money to build such houses. Lavish home expenditures are often raised in corruption trials; newspapers reported that Enron exec Ken Lay's mansion cost $7 million, and today's charges against Senator Ted Stevens allege that he took bribes in the form $250,000 of work on his house.

When I toured the Vanderbilts' mansion, The Breakers, I heard all about the marble imported from Italy, the family portraits, the size (65,000 sq. ft. and 70 rooms), and the decorating choices. But I didn't hear much about how the money--$150 million in today's dollars--came into the family. I didn't see the servants quarters or hear about how (poorly) they lived. Because let's be honest: the hard truth takes away from the romance of the house.

Good history is not romantic. It's irresponsible to leave out the realities of these mansions in the tours given to throngs of admiring and uncritical tourists. I don't think tourists would enjoy the houses any less for getting a fuller story; if anything, the realities will sound awfully familiar.