Rooting for the Robber Barons on the Screen

When the luxury rail car tycoon George Pullman died in 1897, so fierce was the animosity directed at him from the underclasses, and toward the entire robber-baron population, that his family buried him in a grave lined with steel-reinforced concrete and covered with asphalt for fear that former workers would desecrate it. The reverence or at least quiet sympathy that popular culture extends to the very rich — factors without which the ascendancy of a gaudy billionaire in a presidential election would not be possible — may have been harder to make sense of then.