Old Money: The Mythology of Wealth in America

Rating:
Summary: excellent insider's portrait and analysis
Review: Don't know what these other readers' problem is - hopefully not the envy and resentment that the author acknowledges as a natural byproduct of privilege! Aldrich is thoughtful, erudite and honest. Is he justifying himself? To a point, of course. Have you ever read a book that doesn't in some way promote the author and his values? He succeeds in a difficult endeavor, namely to describe a culture and a mentality; this he does with sympathy to its ideals and deep skepticism about its true motives and record. Also, though there may be a few too many of his own family anecdotes, it is an entertaining and informative read.

Rating:
Summary: Inspiring book, however, Americans are despicable...
Review: I've always known Americans to be ignorant, closed minded and uneducated, but never has it been so confirmed than in the reviews I've read here. Would one not buy a book in order to learn something about a subject they obviously know nothing about? I would think that the people who bought this book would be open to learning something about a sub-culture that is as much a part of America and its values as is baseball and apple pie. Unless you come from old money, you can not understand it, and to be closed in your mind process while reading this book, thinking that the author is "pompous" or "pathetic" concretes my understanding of the average American; ignorant, closed minded and uneducated. This author wrote a book that was inspiring in it's anecdotes and gave a further look into the life of the American aristocrat. I have no complaints.

Rating:
Summary: excellent insider's portrait and analysis
Review: In his examination of pejorative terms for mmembers of the Old Money class, Alrdich fails to include one that describes himself: Pompous Windbag. I've never seen so many obscure SAT words and French phrases sprinkled into one single volume. Aldrich claims that part of Old Money's noblesse oblige is to uphold the standards of culture, and one wonders if he's consciously trying to do that by elevating his audience's reading level. Some of his points are so obtuse -- like the difference between a "patrician" and an "aristocrat" -- that one can't help but visualize Aldrich as a young St. Midas schoolboy, hoping to write an essay of such brilliance that a teacher might ask him to read it aloud. And his saccharine eulogizing for the lost values of his class is, to use his own term, "pathetic." I think the entire volume is an excuse to publish his own father's eulogy at the end, which is just as obscure and filled with self importance as the rest of the book. I'm giving it three stars, however, because as a historical document of American aristocracy, it does provide some insight into the mind of a dying class, alone at midnight after too many martinis.

Rating:
Summary: I've read them ALL (this one last) -- Read this one FIRST!
Review: Over a few too many years I have acquired a 3-foot stack of classic books on wealth, status and power in America, and this is both the latest addition and the undisputed spiritual (!) capstone of the collection. "Rich and nuanced" is how I would characterize Mr. Aldrich's comprehensive assessment of the phenomenon of inherited wealth and established social class in the land of the American Dream. Mythic stuff indeed (it was this word that compelled me to buy the book) -- and Aldrich's background and skills are more than up to the challenge of rendering it, in all its paradox, contradiction and complexity, for the genuinely interested reader.

The brief panning reviews below mystified me also. Aldrich starts out not with anything construable as a "justification", but rather with a withering indictment of the source of his family's wealth -- in itself a mini-education in the dynamics of 19th century pork barrel politics. Aldrich's book is both a sort of personal exorcism of family demons that others would just as soon whitewash and preen themselves over, and a subtle and multi-dimensional account of a great many interrelated issues surrounding the institution of inherited wealth and privilege, and its effect on those both inside and outside the golden pale.

"Reasoned" and "balanced" are two other adjectives that suggest themselves with regard to the book's overall project. Outsiders may resent his sympathy for his own motley compatriots in hyper-enfranchisement, but you'll have to search elsewhere (e.g. the better-written WASP Supremacy diatribes) for the "our shortcomings are colorful foibles, theirs are hideous crimes" pathology that afflicts the comfortable somnambulists of the Far Right.

True, Aldrich hasn't climaxed his public catharsis by giving away his patrimony (though I'd be surprised if he hasn't been more than usually financially generous in all the right directions); but anyone accusing him of a lack of noblesse oblige is just being perverse or uncomprehending regarding the general thrust and intention of this eminently worthwhile read.

In Aldrich's defense, I can only suggest that the one virtually unassailable self-justification for Establishment predations -- "If it weren't us on top, it would inevitably be others, and probably the more harsh for lack of experience" -- is just slightly more justified for the occasional production of a gentleman as truly humane, culturally enriching, and deeply entertaining as Mr. Aldrich.

As for the alleged elitist style: I too lack basic French, and tend to resent its use in expository prose. But "blipping over" a phrase here and there doesn't usually harm the overall sense of a well-heeled authors' material; and a modicum of humility obliges any reader to make an effort to step outside himself and honor the sensibilities of the more accomplished. In this and other matters of vocabulary, would the disgruntled reviewer below prefer Aldrich to write down to him? Given the hazards of such behavior's leading to intellectual patronization or worse (i.e., just plain lazy thinking and/or exposition), I'll take the occasional mini-slight to my natural dignity as an uncultured reader -- there are dictionaries, after all -- and accept my cultural patrimony whole and unblighted by stylistic censorship.

The comment below about most writers on this topic being outsiders is well taken. "Old Money" lacks Ferdinand Lundberg's statistically-fuelled rantings, and stops a bit short of fellow outsider Veblen's ironic savaging of the cultural degeneracies of endemic privilege. The richly nuanced quality of Aldrich's treatment is due no less to his insider status than to his exceptional observational, analytic and descriptive powers, and the present reviewer is grateful for the synergy.

For those interested in the roots and mechanisms of wealth-as-power, Lundberg's trenchant "The Rich and the Super Rich" is quite irreplaceable; Epstein's and Fussel's mordant depictions of the invidious lifestyle are both entertaining and informative; and the other dozen-odd major authors are sources of endlessly varied morsels of cocktail party erudition. But no one ties it all together in as many different ways at once as Aldrich. Read him first, instead of last as I did, and avail yourself of an impeccable standard of measure for any other study of this topic that you'll ever find.