An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew

by Annejet van der Zijl

Old age and illness are destroyers of individuality. Just as babies look alike, so do people at the end of their lives.

For if you no longer have a future, what else is there left but dreams of the past?

The American population tripled between 1865 and 1900 but became, as a whole, a whopping thirteen times richer.

Everything seemed possible in the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain called this period of national expansion and unbridled optimism. Paupers came in rags on boats from Europe and worked themselves up to being millionaires. The attraction of this country of unlimited opportunities had never been greater for fortune hunters than it was now.

America was the land of unprecedented opportunity, but this didn’t mean class consciousness didn’t exist. On the contrary, now especially, as the country was flooded with millionaires, the existing elite withdrew into a social fortress in which lineage and name were of utter importance.

After Georges Clemenceau—who would eventually become French prime minister—announced in 1889 that America had gone from barbarism to hedonism “without achieving any civilization between the two,” Mrs.

During the Industrial Revolution, Pittsburgh had—thanks to its strategic placement on the Allegheny, the Monongahela, and the Ohio Rivers and the rich coal deposits in the soil—become one of the richest cities in North America. In those years, the city housed more millionaires than even New York.

American banks began to get into difficulty, and the United States tumbled into a depression that would ultimately result in the bankruptcy of fifteen thousand businesses, of which seventy-four were railway companies and six hundred were banks. The Panic of 1893, as this serious economic depression was called, made it painfully clear how dependent the young country actually was on foreign capital.

“Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness,” he said. “It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

“If one has no steady belief and foundation to one’s life, it is all hopelessness and tears,” Allene would later write, clearly from personal experience.