NEW YORK -- During a recent talk in this city on his lifelong subject, the Iwakura Embassy, businessman-scholar Saburo Izumi reminded those gathered that the Japanese group visited the United States during the Gilded Age. This appellation comes, of course, from American writer Mark Twain (and C.D. Warner) and refers to the period in 19th-century America when, as a literary encyclopedia puts it, "unbridled acquisitiveness dominated the national life."
The Iwakura Embassy had occasion to witness some prominent representatives of the Gilded Age flaunting their wealth.
Darius Ogden Mills (1825-1910), who invited the group to his estate in San Bruno on Jan. 21, 1872, was the founder and president of the Bank of California, and was then at the pinnacle of the first phase of his "conspicuously successful" business career. His brief biographical sketch, in fact, reads like acquisitiveness gone rampant, even though the West Coast region at the time was virgin enough to tolerate such activity. "The gardens in his mansion took up vast land," the embassy reported, and no wonder. Mills owned much of the town of San Bruno.