This was the dawn of the first Gilded Age, a phrase coined by Mark Twain in a popular 1873 book, co-written with his friend Charles Dudley Warner, that satirized the greed and corruption of post–Civil War America. Industry had boomed, with half of the nation’s wealth concentrated in the hands of the one percent. America’s tycoons lived lavishly in the “seat of the empire,” as President George Washington once described New York—making
