Lessons from the Gilded Age: Old Money vs New Money

I've been watching HBO's The Gilded Age recently, and it has made me start thinking about the conflict between Old Money and New Money--the major theme and conflict of the show. My primary home world is pre-industrial, which means that we don't have the rapidly rising industrial capitalist class of the "new people," but that does not mean that this conflict should be absent from the world.

The clash between the "old money" and the "new money" has existed in pretty much every society, ever. You can create a lot of interesting dynamic tension in your world by emphasizing this fault line between your highest social class, be they the New York rich, the nobility in a fantasy world, the CEOs of the Shadowrun MegaCorps, or the wealthy of ancient Rome. It breaks up the monolith of "rich," giving your players disaffected patrons or allies in whatever quests they might be pursuing, which can make a faction more complex. It can help you show the "entropy of victory" between a group after they've ousted an old regime (as in the Gilded Age, for example, even the "old money" were from a once-inferior set to the old British aristocrats). And if you're running a political campaign, having a complex web of factions, including (as I wrote about a few weeks ago) having multiple "faces" in a single faction to show the tension within a faction, can be essential in developing an interesting political story.

In this post, I'm going to break down the traits that are commonly associated with each of these groups, as inspired by The Gilded Age, so that it is easier to build your "faces"--NPCs that represent these factions or sub-factions within an aristocratic faction.

Source of Legitimacy

What makes someone "proper"? In The Gilded Age, Mrs. Russell seems like she's doing everything right. She's building a house in a fashionable part of town, she's employed a French chef, and her husband has more money than most of her peers in Manhattan's social world. And yet she is snubbed routinely, never invited to the most fashionable parties and unable to secure her family a box at the most prestigious opera house in the city. Why?

As Mrs. Astor, the most prestigious person in New York and the person who largely determines someone's acceptance by high society (and a very real person), puts it: "her family comes from nothing."

This is obviously the main distinction between old and new money: how old is their money? It may seem silly to start with such an obvious point, but it shows the universality of this tension. There is always an "old" money and a "new" money any time that there is money to be gained. In the Gilded Age, that is "new" industrialists versus "old" landowner families who made their fortunes in trade before or around the American Revolution. But in Ancient Rome, it is the conflict between the novus homo and the families that had been consuls in generations past. In France before the Revolution, the aristocracy was divided between the Nobles of Sword, who had been nobles for generations, and the Nobles of the Robe, who had purchased government office that made them noble. Any time that there is social advancement, particularly if there is a moment where many people are advancing simultaneously--whether due to government selling titles to raise funds or changing technology enabling new fortunes to be built--this clash will be particularly pronounced.

But why? Simply to protect their status. Elitism is defined by being elite, a small fraction of society that holds a lot of power. Adding more people to the social class will, by definition, divide that power among more people and therefore weaken your individual power. So, if you're looking to protect your power, you want to build something as exclusionary as possible.

The Old

So, just to be a little more specific: the Old Money gets their power from the past. Lady Astor was a descendant of the Dutch colonists of New Amsterdam. Her family predates the very existence of New York City. The old senatorial class of Rome staked their claim on the fact that they had powerful ancestors who had served as Consul. The French Nobles of the Sword had titles dating back to an era where each French duke ruled basically independently of Paris.

This is certainly an astronomical level of wealth because it has been built over generations. Investments and businesses, given 300 years to grow, are massive. Landholdings are entrenched. Yet the Old are more than their money, and view the new's wealth as more crass than their own, even so much so that the Old Money can lose a considerable portion of their fortune--think the financial pressures facing Downton Abbey--and be unable to upkeep their mansions, and yet they still cling to superiority. There's more to "Old Money" than money.

The New

Contrasting that is the new. The New Money has, well, made their money. These are whatever the best way to get rich is. They are bankers, lawyers, and industrial capitalists in The Gilded Age. They're government appointees of an absolutist king, promoting his favorites, in pre-Revolutionary France. They're taking advantage of new opportunities.

The New Money is just its money. If they went bankrupt, they would not have anything to fall back upon, and they'd be cast back into the truly lower rungs of society. Yet they often have more money than the Old. In The Gilded Age's first season, Mr. Russell is able to prop up his own stock price when the Old Money tries to crush him simply because of his ungodly amount of personal wealth. He can beat the combined economic might of the Old Money, even if he cannot be accepted socially.

Exclusivity

All of the "money"ed groups are obviously an exclusive elite. Yet there is a definite distinction between the exclusivity of the old and the exclusivity of the new. The Old must keep out everyone to win, both poor and "new money" alike, which means crafting institutions that are not accessible just through money. The New can afford to invite the Old into their circle; in fact, getting the Old to call upon you, attend the same theater, or be seen with you in public is the very victory you are looking for. This means that while the New Money is still certainly excluding the lower classes, they can afford to appear far more inclusive.

I think that this is best seen in Andrew Carnegie--a classic Gilded Age New Money person--and his real book, usually called the Gospel of Wealth. Carnegie lays out how he thinks it is immoral to "hoard" wealth, and instead says that it should be used for the benefit of the public. Not by paying your workers a living wage, of course, as Carnegie famously had striking workers shot, but by investing in public institutions: Carnegie Hall, Carnegie-Mellon, etc. When the Metropolitan Opera in New York was built, it was far more inclusive than the old opera house: it had more seats, lower tickets for the common folk, and more boxes--enough that the main "new" families AND the "old" could both buy in if they wished.

That is not to say that Old Money does not do significant charity donations. But when building institutions in the city that they're in, they're trying to limit who can be involved--even in charity boards--while the New Money is trying to force their way into those exclusive circles with a broader, if only slightly broader, demographic.

Business or Pleasure

Another major distinction in the tropes of old money and new is the role that work plays in their affairs. While none of them are actually workers, and they may have clashes with the people actually making their fortunes (see the Gilded Age Season 2 plotline with the labor union), there is a distinct difference between the relationship to work held by the old and new.

Oscar van Rhijn, in the Gilded Age, says that he was "born to be rich," something that sets him apart from new money Larry Russell. This is also a common trope for the old money: their wealth has become deeply abstracted from any particular business venture, making them divorced from any form of work.

Contrast that with Larry Russell. He enters into business with a common servant to help produce clocks, though he does not really understand any of the mechanisms of the machine. He works as an architect. Or, take Marian Brook, our main protagonist of the show. She works as a teacher at a school, much to the scandal of her old money aunt. In short, the new money is content to work--they do not need the money thanks to their newly-built fortune, but there is still a work ethic present in the fortune-builders or in the next generation. It is a work ethic of the rich, backed by astronomical wealth, which means often flitting from venture to venture, or playing at business you do not really understand, but there is a desire for some sort of semi-structured "job" to be involved with.

This is obvious in the Gilded Age, where the old money seems to not be truly involved in any business beyond occasionally throwing a check at some investment opportunity, while the Russells are directly involved with their railroads and their expansion or architecture. But the same can be true for the French nobility on the eve of the Revolution: the "old money" nobles of the sword hold their land, collect rents, and perform courtly politics at Versailles. The "new money" nobles of the robe are still technically court functionaries, and would be expected to fulfill their official court duties in industries of finance or justice. You can easily imagine a fictional world where the new nobility are being elevated for military service, giving them an active martial character and skill, while the old money rests on its laurels.

In short, it does not have to be "investment vs business"--that is a Gilded Age distinction. But old money simply is rich, allowing them to have given up the pretexts of work. The new money--the fortune builders, but also their children--still have a level of desire or expectation that they still need to know how to do something, whether that role is military or judicial or administrative.

The Victors

Ultimately, the path of the New Money is almost always successful in gaining acceptance. The pressures of less money, or more fragile fortunes, combined with their need to keep people out completely and their lack of interest in doing much tangible to expand their fortunes, stacks the deck against the Old Money's exclusivity. The New can invite the old into their circle, and so all it takes is one crack in the Old's circle--one lost fortune, one more tolerant member--and the New can infiltrate high society. The Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, and the Carnegies win, being admitted into "high society" and becoming the new "Old Money" against which the next century's new rich fight.

This is a cyclical pattern. The Astors and Washingtons and van Rensselaers are the "new" money of colonial expansion, fighting for acceptance among the old money of the British nobility. The Revolution sees them ascend into that highest society. The Vanderbilts and Carnegies make their fortune in industrial capitalism, resisted by the Astors, until eventually they're accepted. And today, the Bezoses and Musks and Zuckerbergs are the billionaires created by tech, and they're absolutely trying to win the social approval of the living Crowns, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts--all the while seeming "crass" to the old families.

Conclusion

What defines the "Old Money" in your world? What is the source of the "New"?

In one of the countries of my world, the one most modeled after feudal Britain, has three distinct groups of the rich. There's the old nobility, the real old money, with diverse investments and a complete lack of expectations to do anything. At most, they'll hold political office, but even this is a far cry from the expectation to actually manage a business.

The second group are the new nobility, created shortly before a revolution overthrew the monarchy. These families have "made it" as the Russells have made it in the Gilded Age: they're rich, they have land, they do not need to worry about anything. But they're still expected to do something: to serve in the military as an officer, to run a shipping company out of their family's landholdings, or to serve as a diplomat or something practical of that sort. These new families face social slights from the older, more established nobility, but they're making inroads: key marriages are starting to take place across the boundaries between old and new nobility, as the new nobility starts to be accepted into high society and see their legitimacy as rooted in their ancestral titles of 50-100 years rather than their more recent service to the government.

Lastly, the newest generation is the fortune-building bourgeoisie. Unleashed by the recent revolution (a cross between French Revolution and English Civil War), these people are still far below "acceptable society". These are the Russells thirty years before the start of the Gilded Age, still building the colossal fortune that will enable them to rise. These people are not rich yet, but the signs are there that they will one day seek their own climb into high society. It is a motivating factor for the old nobles to accept the new, to shore up their exclusivity with new wealth and new titles, so that the new nobility does not ally with this next generation of rich commoners.

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