Evalyn Walsh McLean was the last private owner of the Hope Diamond, the most famous and most fabled “cursed” gem in the world, and one of the great spenders of the American Gilded Age. The daughter of a poor Irish immigrant who struck it rich with a Colorado gold mine, she married into the family that owned The Washington Post, and for a time she commanded a fortune that let her treat money as something that simply appeared.
In January 1911 her husband bought the Hope Diamond from the Paris jeweler Pierre Cartier for $180,000, and Evalyn wore the 45-carat blue stone to parties as a casual ornament — even, by her own telling, letting her great dane wear it. She delighted in its reputation as a bringer of doom, but her own life would deliver tragedy after tragedy: the death of her young son, the disintegration of her marriage, the loss of her daughter, and the steady erosion of the wealth that had once seemed inexhaustible.
McLean’s spending was legendary and ceaseless, and the family’s income could not keep pace. Her husband, Edward “Ned” McLean, drank himself into mental collapse, lost control of the Post, and was eventually declared legally insane. In one of the most notorious episodes of her life, she was swindled out of more than $100,000 by the con man Gaston Means, who claimed he could recover the kidnapped Lindbergh baby through underworld contacts.
By the time she died in 1947, the great Walsh-McLean fortune had largely dissolved into debt, and her jewels — including the Hope Diamond — were sold to settle her estate. The diamond passed to the jeweler Harry Winston and, in 1958, was donated to the Smithsonian Institution, where it remains. Evalyn Walsh McLean’s life stands as a parable of inherited wealth spent faster than it could ever be replaced.
William Magear Tweed — known to New York and to history as ‘Boss’ Tweed — rose from a volunteer fire company on the Lower East Side to become the most powerful man in the city, the master of the Tammany Hall Democratic machine, and the head of a ring of officials who looted the municipal treasury on a scale that has never been precisely measured. Contemporary estimates of what the ‘Tweed Ring’ stole between roughly 1865 and 1871 ranged from about $25 million to as much as $200 million; some modern historians, adjusting for inflation and the full sweep of the graft, have suggested figures running into the billions of dollars. Whatever the true number, it was enough to make Tweed, for a few years, one of the largest landowners in New York and a director of banks, a railroad, and a hotel.
The machinery of the theft was almost banal in its method and breathtaking in its volume. The Ring controlled the bodies that audited and paid the city’s bills, and they simply padded those bills — contractors and suppliers were instructed to inflate their charges enormously, kick most of the surplus back to the Ring, and keep a share for their silence. The new New York County Courthouse, begun in 1861, became the monument to the scheme: a building budgeted at a few hundred thousand dollars that swallowed many millions, with thermometers, plastering, and furniture billed at sums that defied belief.
Tweed’s undoing came not from the police or the courts, which he largely owned, but from the press. The cartoonist Thomas Nast pilloried him relentlessly in Harper’s Weekly, rendering the rotund Boss in images so vivid that even the illiterate could understand them — Tweed reportedly complained less about the articles than about ‘them damned pictures.’ In July 1871 The New York Times, supplied with figures leaked from inside the comptroller’s office, published the Ring’s own accounts, laying the fraud out in columns of numbers the public could verify.
The exposure destroyed him. Tweed was arrested, tried, and convicted; he escaped from custody and fled the country, only to be recaptured in Spain — where, by a famous irony, officials are said to have identified him from one of Nast’s cartoons. He was returned to New York and died, broke and broken, in the Ludlow Street Jail in April 1878, in the very institution his own machine had once controlled.