The parties are logistically impressive, but Fitzgerald's disturbing sense that we are witnessing something like an American Weimar is not really there, and even the gushing, shaken-champagne-bottle approach doesn't quite approximate the giddy sense that America really is where gigantic fortunes are suddenly and unfairly to be made.
The New Economy has produced gigantic fortunes and in record time.
Many gigantic fortunes, built by virtue of private enterprise under the Constitution, have fallen under the direction of Internationalists, One-Worlders, Socialists and Communists.
Count Nicholas Demidoff had a gigantic industrial fortune, backed by a mining fortune, that gave him carte blanche to buy whatever he liked.
Far from it: the men (they are mostly men) who propelled the financial system towards ruin not only kept their gigantic personal fortunes, they found themselves in cushy new jobs.
However, the most spectacular fundraiser was not the auction room but a wedding, when the ninth duke married the American railroad heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, securing a gigantic dowry, a fortune in shares and an annual allowance.
But it is not clear whether even a gigantic win here could reverse her fortunes, which took a turn for the worse last week when she lost North Carolina by a big margin and won Indiana by a small one.
IN THE 50 years between the end of the American civil war in 1865 and the outbreak of the first world war in 1914, a group of entrepreneurs spearheaded America's transformation from an agricultural into an industrial society, built gigantic business empires and amassed huge fortunes.
By the time the United States entered the first world war, John D. Rockefeller had become its first billionaire.In the 50 years since Data General introduced the first mini-computers in the late 1960s, a group of entrepreneurs have spearheaded the transformation of an industrial age into an information society, built gigantic business empires and acquired huge fortunes.
