ABSTRACT
Andrew Carnegie’s annual income was at least twenty thousand times greater than that of the average American workman. Carnegie was one of the very wealthiest men of his day, but many others had incomes in the millions. If the members of the Zodiac Club dined heavily and well, they at least made no special attempt to enhance the grandeur of the surroundings in which they ate. Just as some Americans of wealth, for all their patriotism, felt that the best art and culture were European, so they recognized that the insignia of aristocracy, too, were European–and equally worth embracing. It was good to feel sure one belonged to the American nobility. During the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, when a great many American millionaires had decided that the thing for a rich man to do was to build him a princely mansion, it had been the Vanderbilt family who had set the pace for the rest to follow.
