THE SPLENDOR SEEKERS. AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF AMERICA'S MULTIMILLIONAIRE SPENDERS. New York: Grossett & Dunlap. 1974. 278 pp illustrations, index. $10.00 Reviewer: ROBERT C. BANNISTER Department of History Swarthmore College Swarthmore, Pennsylvania W

THE SPLENDOR SEEKERS. AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF AMERICA'S MULTIMILLIONAIRE SPENDERS. New York: Grossett & Dunlap. 1974. 278 pp. illustrations, index. $10.00

Reviewer: ROBERT C. BANNISTER Department of History Swarthmore College Swarthmore, Pennsylvania WALL STREET REVIEW , December 1975

IF AMERICA'S BUSINESS IS BUSINESS, her heroes have not been businessmen. For more than a century scholars, journalists, and novelists have found in men of commerce the worst in the national character. "Thoughts bent on practical gains are not pleasant to contemplate," wrote the 19th century historian Francis Parkman, "no matter how much virtue may accompany them." During the 1880s the Robber Baron became a stock figure in the literature of reform. At the turn of the century, progressives launched a two-pronged attack against immoral business practices and the vulgar ostentation of the new rich. The result was a corpus of classics, among them Ida Tarbell's Standard Oil (1904), Charles E. Russell's Lawless Wealth (1908), Gustavus Myers' History of Great American Fortunes (1910), and Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). Novelists joined the fray with the result that William Dean Howells' Silas Lapham possibly stands as the last sympathetic businessman in American fiction.

These critics did not always agree. While Veblen punctured the pretensions of conspicuous consumption, Tarbell twitted Rockefeller for meanness. "Not one of the three houses he occupies," she told readers of McClure 's, "has any claim to rank among the notable homes of the country." Nor was the indictment without ambivalence. Unable entirely to resist the sweet smell of success, muckrakers and novelists alike brought to their work the special passion of the half-convinced. Although their studies were well researched, and the novels often sensitive in portrayal of character, "malefactors of great wealth" became in the public mind the major source of the nation's difficulties.

But all this is past. Or so one might have thought before reading Allen Churchill's The Splendor Seekers. Although the Thirties revived the progressive indictment, most notably in Matthew Josephson's Robber Barons (1935), the Eisenhower years marked a significant shift. Revisionist historians, stressing method over morality, answered the muckrakers point by point. A new agnosticism filtered into popular accounts of business practices. In The Age of the Moguls (1953), Stewart Holbrook refused "to pass judgment on matters that have baffled moralists, economists, and historians." A new Age of Affluence found new appreciation for the opulence of the Gilded Age. Lucius Beebe, in his gusty portrayal of The Big Spenders (1966) was perhaps the frankest. "Nowhere," he wrote, quoting a favorite saying, "is moderation so debilitating and destructive of character as in the expenditure of money."

Yet even in America, tradition dies hard. In The Splendor Seekers muckraking is alive if not especially well. Familiar tales of business chicanery are vintage Robber Baron. Quotable quotes are firmly in place if slightly shopworn. Jay Gould: "We made this country rich." Rockefeller: "God gave me my money." And inevitably, W. H. Vanderbilt: "The public be damned!" (twice for good measure). The Hall Carbine Affair, long ago disproved, joins other "evidence" of Civil War profiteering. "Deviousness, ambition, and a deep-rooted slyness seem to have been essential attributes," Churchill writes. Abuses ranged from hypocrisy in religion to the brutal treatment of labor, and even lengthy delay in paying bills Butchers, specialty shops, and florists often failed "because the filthy rich considered trades people lucky merely to serve them." Paradoxically, however, the "multimillionaire was revered as a hero by the majority of the American people"

In this version, the off-duty Robber Baron is more amusing although no more uplifting. The author's particular interest is the Immensely Rich who from the 1850s onward made New York a mecca for millionaires By century's end, Fifth Avenue from Thirty-fourth Street to the Eighties presented a crash course in the history of architecture A bit of doggerel in Collier's captured the spirit

Pillars Ionic
Eaves Babylonic,
Doors cut in scallops, resembling a shell'
Roof was Egyptian, Gables caniptian,
Whole grand effect, when completed, wuz--HeIl!

Similar in their uniqueness, each had its mark of distinction: the Twin Mansions" which R. M. Hunt designed for the Vanderbilts; "Huntington's Castle" with eight Rembrandts in a single room; Isaac Brokaw's Loire Chateau at Seventy-ninth, complete with moat. Again anecdote and the bon mot are the stuff of legend. A new millionaire, asked if he wanted a porte-cochere with his new chateau, responding: "You bet I do. Put in at least five on each floor and make sure they don't make too damn much noise when they flush." Or the celebrated society wit, a stutter increasing effect, answering whether men in the comfortable chairs of the Union Club were habitués: "No, s-s-some are s-s-sons of habitués."

In several respects, The Splendor Seekers outdoes its sources. At their best, the progressives sincerely believed that corporate duplicity was corrupting the American polity. Behind Veblen's satire lay a profound conviction that the status regime of "business" civilization was subverting "industrial" efficiency. But in these Cynical Seventies, the search for the rotten motive seems an end in itself. Merchant princes, we are told, introduced a single-price policy among other reasons so as "to employ women sales clerks at wages lower than men." Inspiring the splendid palaces were "pride, envy, insecurity, and a desire to lord it over the rest of humanity." If Charles Yerkes has "astoundingly good taste" in art, "it is possible to believe that a good part of his pleasure in acquiring paintings and statuary lay in the fact that they could so readily be bought". "Sexual peccadilloes," innocent by today's standards, are paraded so as to combine titillation and tongue-clucking in the best tabloid tradition. Ambivalence lingers only in overly-fond descriptions of furnishings, menus, and interior appointments.

Was it really that bad? Given the perennial appeal of the Robber Baron legend the question seems somehow churlish. Yet revisionist history has gone too far to be ignored, as it is here, even if "industrial statesmen" cannot be credited with winning both World Wars single-handedly. Cherished quotations are suspect at best. William H. Vanderbilt, for example, categorically denied damning the public. And other commentators have noted how out of character the remark was. What is clear is that the newspaper report of the celebrated remark perfectly suited the public mood. Furthermore, the causes of conspicuous consumption were at the least complex, as Edward Kirkland suggested some time ago. Single-minded devotion to corporate efficiency or even profits, far from being a natural instinct, exacted psychic costs that social historians have only begun to explore. Architects fed their clients' dreams, carefully calculating commissions. Labored claims that vast expenditures "provided employment," if finally unconvincing, were one sign of the severe strain new wealth placed on old conviction. However untrue, social myths may nonetheless be salutary. The ideal of the "yeoman farmer," some have argued, has proved a valuable antidote to the unabashed logic of commercial capitalism. So also the anti-image of the Robber Baron at its best represented an updating of the Puritan conviction that men must be in the world but not of it. If so, The Splendor Seekers is a pernicious vulgarization. Particularly dangerous are two related assumptions: that an earlier generation of Americans made heroes of predatory "splendor seekers"; and that a wiser public now reigns. The historical record holds little evidence of popular acclaim of businessmen and much of growing hostility from the Civil War onward. Nor is it clear that the abandonment and subsequent razing of so many of the Fifth Avenue palaces inaugurated anything more than the democratization of "splendor seeking." While some readers, fresh from looking up porte-cochere in their Webster's, will doubtless nod knowing disapproval of by-gone folly, this latest portrait of the Filthy Rich perhaps captures only ourselves.