William Crapo Durant was one of the great empire-builders of the American automobile age — and one of its most complete financial casualties. Having already made a fortune in horse-drawn carriages, he founded General Motors on September 16, 1908, by bundling together a string of fledgling car and parts companies, and he later co-founded Chevrolet. At his peak in the 1920s his fortune was enormous — popularly estimated as high as nearly $1 billion at the height of the boom — and he was a titan of American industry.
Durant’s genius was promotion, expansion, and the audacious deal; his weakness was that the same restless, leveraged optimism that built his empires repeatedly cost him control of them. He was forced out of General Motors not once but twice — in 1910 by the bankers who refinanced his over-extended company, and again in 1920 when a postwar slump and his own stock-market commitments left him unable to hold on.
After losing GM the second time he launched Durant Motors and threw himself into the booming stock market of the late 1920s, trading and promoting shares on an enormous scale and on heavy margin. The 1929 crash destroyed him. The man who had built the world’s largest automaker saw his fortune wiped out, Durant Motors was liquidated in 1933, and in 1936 he filed for bankruptcy, listing assets of only a few hundred dollars against liabilities of roughly a million.
Durant spent his final years in Flint, Michigan — the city where his career had begun — running modest ventures including a bowling alley (the North Flint Recreation Center, opened 1940) and an attached drive-in restaurant, the Horseshoe Inn, which he promoted with the same enthusiasm he had once brought to building GM. A stroke in 1942 ended his plans to build a national chain, and he died on March 18, 1947, his bills reportedly covered by Alfred P. Sloan and the Chrysler family. He remains the archetype of the builder who could create vast wealth but never learned to hold it.
Clarence Saunders was the Memphis grocer who reinvented how the world buys food. On September 6, 1916, he opened the first Piggly Wiggly store at 79 Jefferson Avenue in Memphis, where shoppers — for the first time — passed through turnstiles, pulled their own goods from open shelves, and paid at a single checkout. The self-service layout he patented in 1917 became the template for the modern supermarket, and within a few years Piggly Wiggly franchises spread across the country; the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in February 1922.
Saunders was a flamboyant, self-made man who believed his own legend. When bear raiders on Wall Street began selling Piggly Wiggly stock short in late 1922 and early 1923 — wagering the company would fall after several independently owned Eastern franchises failed — Saunders took it personally. Rather than ignore the speculators, he resolved to beat them at their own game by quietly buying up nearly every available share of his own company, attempting one of the last great stock corners in American history.
He nearly pulled it off. Borrowing roughly $10 million, Saunders bought so heavily that within weeks he controlled almost all of Piggly Wiggly’s freely traded shares, squeezing the short sellers who now had to buy from him to cover their positions. The price climbed from about $39 to roughly $124 by March 20, 1923. But with the shorts trapped, the New York Stock Exchange declared that a corner existed, suspended trading in Piggly Wiggly the next day, halted it permanently on March 26, and granted the short sellers extra time to deliver their shares — breaking the squeeze Saunders had built.
The reprieve was fatal. Saunders was left holding millions in stock he could not sell at the prices he had paid, crushed by the loans he had taken to buy it. In August 1923 he resigned as president and surrendered his property — his stock, his cars, even his unfinished Memphis mansion, the “Pink Palace” — to his creditors, and personal bankruptcy followed. He spent the rest of his life chasing comeback ventures, including a second grocery chain and an automated store called the Keedoozle, but never recovered the fortune the corner had cost him.
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.