A century ago, while the world was tearing itself apart in the First World War, a small financial magazine founded by an immigrant Scottish journalist did something that still feels strangely modern: it published a list of America’s richest people. That magazine was Forbes, and the list, issued in 1918, was the original version of what would become the famous Forbes rankings. It was not a clean, scientific table with tax returns and audited balance sheets. There were no government databases, no private-jet trackers, no teams of wealth analysts with spreadsheets. Instead, B. C. Forbes and his editors did what journalists did in those days: they called bankers, brokers, rival businessmen, and people who claimed to know the secrets of the rich, and they pieced together estimates. The result was part financial reporting, part gossip, part national portrait. What is remarkable is how much of it still feels real today, not because the numbers were precise, but because the names and the stories behind them were the living architecture of American capitalism. The list was published at a strange historical moment: the country was emerging as a global industrial power, yet the economy was still young, ruthless, and stunningly unequal. A handful of men controlled oil, steel, railroads, banks, and the food supply. They were heroes to some, villains to others, and endlessly fascinating to almost everyone.
At the very top of that first list sat John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in America and, by most accounts, the richest man in the world. By 1918, Rockefeller was already an old man, long removed from the daily management of Standard Oil, the company he had built into a near-monopoly that controlled the refining, shipping, and selling of petroleum across the country. He was a strange figure: deeply religious, famously disciplined, a teetotaler who wore dark suits, attended Baptist services, and was known to hand out dimes to children and strangers as a kind of humble paternalistic gesture. But behind that quiet, almost saintly facade was one of the most aggressive business minds in history. He had started as a bookkeeper, built a tiny Cleveland refinery into a colossal empire, crushed competitors with below-cost pricing, made secret deals with railroads, and eventually controlled something close to ninety percent of America’s oil refining. The Supreme Court had forced Standard Oil to break apart in 1911, but by then Rockefeller and his family had accumulated so much wealth that the breakup hardly mattered. Estimates of his fortune in 1918 approached a billion dollars, a number so large it was almost impossible for ordinary people to grasp. To put it in perspective, that single fortune represented somewhere around one percent of the entire national economy of the United States. In an era when a comfortable yearly income for a working family might be a thousand dollars or less, Rockefeller’s wealth was not just another step on the ladder; it was a separate dimension, almost another species. He was, in the public imagination, both the genius of American enterprise and the face of everything that was wrong with concentrated money.
Right behind Rockefeller were men whose names still echo through American history, though in different ways. Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish immigrant who had started out as a bobbin boy in a textile mill, had built the largest steel company in the world and then sold it to J. P. Morgan for hundreds of millions of dollars. Unlike Rockefeller, Carnegie spent his final decades trying to give his fortune away. He wrote a famous essay called “The Gospel of Wealth,” in which he argued that rich men should act as trustees for the public and use their money to create libraries, universities, and cultural institutions. By 1918, Carnegie was an old man, frail and increasingly isolated, but he was still a symbol of what an immigrant could achieve in the American industrial system. Next to him stood Henry Clay Frick, his old steel and coke partner, who was everything Carnegie was not in the public memory: cold, hard, and unapologetically ruthless. Frick had survived an assassination attempt after the bloody Homestead Strike, in which strikers at his steel plant clashed with Pinkerton guards. He later built an astonishing art collection and an elegant mansion that became the Frick Collection in New York. The list also included George F. Baker, the quiet, powerful banker known as the Sphinx of Wall Street. Baker did not make steel or oil; he financed the men who did. He sat on the boards of railroads, banks, and insurance companies and controlled enormous sums of money that never appeared in his own name. What the 1918 list showed more than anything else was that the American economy was not built by a single kind of capitalist. It was built by operators, dreamers, monopolists, financiers, and, in many cases, men who believed, with total sincerity, that their wealth was proof of their virtue.
But the 1918 list also contained names that would have seemed strange a generation earlier, and those names showed how quickly the American economy was changing. William Wrigley Jr., for example, had made a fortune not in railroads or oil, but in chewing gum. He had started as a soap salesman and had given away gum as a premium, only to realize that people liked the gum more than the soap. By the time the Forbes list appeared, Wrigley’s Spearmint and his clever advertising had turned a small novelty product into a national brand, and he would later buy the Chicago Cubs and build one of the great commercial names in America. J. Ogden Armour stood for the enormous meatpacking industry, with its refrigerated railcars, stockyards, and giant distribution networks that fed the growing cities, though his own fortune would eventually collapse in the 1920s. James B. Duke had built a tobacco empire and would later use his wealth to create Duke Endowment and what became Duke University. Vincent Astor represented old money, inherited real estate, and the strange permanence of New York land. He was the son of John Jacob Astor IV, who had died on the Titanic, and Vincent had inherited a vast property fortune before he was old enough to fully understand it. These men were not all industrial giants in the traditional sense. One sold gum, another sold cigarettes, another simply owned land. But they all understood that the new American nation was becoming a consumer country, where a product could be advertised, packaged, and sold to millions of ordinary people. The old list was not just a ranking of old-fashioned industrialists; it was the beginning of the modern celebrity businessman.
Of course, the original list had enormous limitations, and it is important to look at them honestly. The list was made up entirely of men, for one thing, and almost all of them were white, Protestant, and connected to the northeastern or midwestern business world. It left out women who controlled fortunes in their own right, left out Black entrepreneurs, left out the millions of workers whose labor created these immense fortunes, and left out the human cost of the industries that made the rich even richer. The estimates themselves were also wildly uncertain. Wealth in 1918 could be hidden in trusts, in foundations, in with-held titles, in family partnerships, in art collections, in real estate, and in dozens of other places. B. C. Forbes himself knew better than anyone that the numbers were approximations, sometimes based on no more than rumor and guesswork. But that did not make the list less powerful. In fact, it made it more powerful, because it turned wealth into a public story. It made the rich accountable, at least in the court of public opinion, and it helped feed the ongoing American debate about whether these men were robber barons or captains of industry. Some readers saw Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Frick as patriotic giants who had built the country, produced steel, oil, and jobs, and made America strong. Others saw them as thieves who had used monopoly power, exploited workers, corrupted politics, and concentrated enormous resources in the hands of a few. The list forced people to ask a question that still haunts American society: what does it mean for a democracy to tolerate extreme wealth?
The true legacy of that 1918 list, however, is not just the names on the page, but the fact that the question never went away. A hundred years later, Forbes still ranks the wealthiest people in the world, and the public still reads those rankings with the same mixture of admiration, envy, and curiosity. The methods have changed dramatically. Modern editors trace stock portfolios, analyze real estate, track art deals, use court filings, and even look at satellite images to measure the size of private estates. But the underlying impulse is identical to the one B. C. Forbes captured in 1918. We want to know who has the money, because money in America has always meant power, influence, autonomy, and the ability to shape the world. The men on that first list are mostly gone now. Their names remain on buildings, foundations, universities, and museums, but the actual men themselves, with their quirks, their obsessions, and their ruthless determination, have become historical figures. Their money, however, has not disappeared. It lives on in the institutions they created, the causes they funded, the industries they built, and in some cases, the damage they left behind. That is the most human lesson of the original Forbes rich list. Wealth is not merely a number; it is a force that outlives its creators. It changes cities, families, institutions, and entire communities. The people who make it may be forgotten, but the consequences of their ambition continue to shape the lives of millions of people they never met. And that is why we still look at lists of rich people, perhaps a century later, with an uneasy sense that we are not just counting money. We are looking at a mirror of our own hopes, desires, and fears about what America really is.
