MARK TWAIN KNEW a lot about throwing money away, starting with a failed
try at silver mining in Nevada and culminating in a string of bad
investments and unprofitable land deals. But he got revenge by making
fun of rural con artists in/The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn/and
shifty plutocrats in the novel he called/The Gilded Age/, co-written
with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873. Until recently, this era of flimflam
often seemed like a distant/Puck/cartoon of capitalist egregiousness:
titans roaming the continent in private railroad cars to the next field
of plunder; the rise of the corrupt political boss, aptly caricatured
with a moneybag for his head.
Thanks to the current administration, we can’t look as far down on
squalid 19th-century politics as we once did. And so it is a
particularly good subject for Paul Starobin’s new book,/A Most Wicked
Conspiracy: The Last Great Swindle of the Gilded Age/, about the Alaskan
gold craze of 1899–1900.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gold-buggers/
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