Brady, Diamond Jim

The phrase “Gilded Age” appears in histories of the later nineteenth century and is often accompanied by pictures of obese, bearded men, their bulging stomachs covered in white and black evening clothes stuck through with diamond pins and draped with gold chains. Captains of industry and finance, they are often seated at saturnalian tables, symbols of an age of coarse materialism, massive corruption, and unbridled greed. Of them all, none was more emblematic than the grand gourmand of his, and perhaps any, age, Diamond Jim Brady.