Imagine waking up one morning to learn you had won the lottery.

You are informed that the jackpot is ten billion dollars.

You, the sole winner, have become the richest person in the world.

The lottery officials tell you that you will receive all of the prize money in one lump

sum tax-free that morning.

As a condition of receiving the money, you must never give away any of it to charity.

A close approximation of this unlikely event occurred an astonishing number of times during

the Gilded Age.

That heady time from the end of the Civil War to the turn of the century, the height

of the Industrial Revolution in the United States, when great fortunes were made and spent

overnight in a way that had never been seen before, and will probably never be seen again.

The nation's first great industrial fortune was won by the Vanderbilt family.

And for a while, this family could claim the title of the richest in the world.

Subsequent fortunes surpassed it, but by then great wealth was decried.

The unique opportunity that confronted the members of this particular family was the

freedom to use their fortune just as they'd damn pleased, to create whatever reality

they wanted, to give free reign to their every impulse without any sense of the social

responsibilities that great wealth confers.

But the Vanderbilt lived in a day when flaunting one's money was not only accepted, but celebrated.

What may have started as play-acting, as dressing up as dukes and princesses for fancy dress

balls and fairy-dale palaces, soon developed into a firm conviction that they were indeed

the new American nobility.

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