Conspicuous Consumption in the Ponce de Leon Hotel

The Ponce de Leon Hotel first opened its doors on 1888 right in the middle of what was known as the Gilded Age, a time period that was marked by rapid industrialization, expansion of nations into a structure, free market economy with almost no regulations, rise of captains of industry, emergence of organized labor, and age of conspicuous consumption. The creator of the Ponce de Leon Hotel was Henry Flagler, one of the captains of industry who made most of his money using the Standard Oil Company. When he visited St. Augustine Florida, he recognized the potential for the area to become an attraction for the leisure class and decided he would build a hotel for only the wealthiest in the country. Thorstein Veblen was an American economist and sociologist who lived during the Gilded Age as well and wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class. In it he discusses the concept of items such as the leisure class, vicarious consumption, and conspicuous consumption. By reading his text, it is fairly easy to understand how the Ponce de Leon Hotel holds the values of the Gilded Age and the leisure class.

To understand how the Ponce de Leon Hotel shows the values of the leisure class, one must understand how the leisure class came to be as according to Veblen. Veblen states in his book that ‘In the sequence of cultural evolution the emergence of a leisure class coincides with the beginning of ownership.’ (Veblen 15) He then goes on to discuss how early distinctions of the working class and the leisure class ‘is a division maintained between men’s and women’s work in the lower stage of barbarism’ and how even ‘the earliest form of ownership is the ownership of women’. So essentially the leisure class is the leisure class thank...

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...e period, and he ensured that during meals there would be two orchestras playing in the music lofts of the dining hall (Graham 27). Flagler not only showed conspicuous consumption in building his hotel but also the money he put in it to make it more luxurious than it needed to be,

The Gilded Age first began around 1865, the end of the civil war, and ended around 1914, the beginning of World War One, and one of the largest characteristics of this time period is the leisure class participating in conspicuous consumption. The Ponce de Leon Hotel reflects the values of the Gilded Age and the rising leisure class in the fact that it allowed the wealthy to engage in conspicuous consumption in front of other such wealthy families, as well as it provided Henry Flagler with the ability to engage in conspicuous consumption by the building of the lavish hotel Ponce de Leon.