Snobs, Parasites & Proper Society

On a cold February evening in 1893, a woman in rural New Hampshire sat down to write a letter. Among the local news - a husband's toothache, a neighbor's silver wedding, two inches of fresh snow - she mentioned almost in passing that a lecturer named Garrison was coming to the village hall. His subject: Snobs and Parasites of Society. She would not be attending. She did not have fifteen cents to spare.

That small moment opens a window onto one of the most turbulent and revealing periods in American history. The Gilded Age was a society in upheaval - drowning in new industrial wealth at the top, anxious and precarious in the middle, and brutally exposed at the bottom. It was an era obsessed with who deserved what, who was living off whom, and whether the republic's promise of equality had any meaning at all against the reality of Newport ballrooms, immigrant tenements, and the Four Hundred.

In Snobs, Parasites & Proper Society, Robert F. Geissler traces the era's defining social anxieties from the lyceum lecture hall to the parlors of the very rich, from Herbert Spencer's Social Darwinism to Thorstein Veblen's devastating anatomy of conspicuous consumption, from the etiquette manuals that sold respectability by the volume to the muckrakers who tore the facade away. Along the way, he asks the question that the Gilded Age never fully answered - and that we have not answered since: in a society that proclaims equality while organizing itself around hierarchy, who exactly is the parasite?

The snob and the social parasite are permanent American archetypes. This is the history of where they came from - and why they never left.