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A vintage piece of glurge, one which appears to have been in continuous circulation since at least 1948, has been through a variety of alterations, with names being added and dropped from the list, the fates of the various men changing in severity, and different morals being tacked onto the end. In modern versions many of the names are have become so distorted through mistranscription to be almost unrecognizable: The introductory section about all these men meeting at Chicago's Edgewater Beach Hotel in 1923 is apocryphal: contemporaneous newspapers made no mention of such a meeting nor suggested any event that could plausibly have brought so many prominent men from several diverse industries to Chicago all at the same time. Also, as noted below, some of the entries are anachronistic in that they list men who did not yet hold the positions ascribed to them in 1923. After sifting through stacks and stacks of dusty old newspapers, we managed to assemble capsule biographies of the men listed in all the variations of this piece we've collected so far: The lessons we're to take from this item are many and varied: money and power don't bring happiness so be careful what dreams you pursue; a lust for wealth is necessarily a corrupting goal; playing golf more and working less will do wonders for your lifespan (and possibly your wallet). Whether one could prove any of these lessons from the examples offered is problematic, as the data have been carefully selected to establish the desired conclusions. One could just as easily draw up a very long list of wealthy and powerful men who did not lose great sums of money, who did not earn their fortunes through fraud, and who lived long, healthy, and happy lives, but none of their names appear here. And by its very nature the list offered here is somewhat self-selecting for failure in the sense that: As with most glurge, we might scratch the surface of this one to find a darker subtext beneath: only a few of us lead lives of privilege, it says; the rest of us can take comfort in a skewed sour grapes tale that casts those privileged few as corrupt individuals struggling through flawed, unhappy existences, inevitably suffering disastrous losses of their wealth and health. Perhaps it's better we not obscure the idea that happiness and misery, kindness and greed, and good works and bad deeds are within the capacities of us all, not merely a select few. Sightings: This list appears in the 1997 financial advice bestseller Rich Dad, Poor Dad.
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