William Dean Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham" I

During our class discussion of Howell's "The Rise of Silas Lapham" yesterday, I started thinking about the fierce duality that is "old money" and "new money".  I think that for many people, rich is rich, and to an extent, that's certainly true in comparison to those without.  However, I also think that many people, particularly those who are wealthy, make the distinction between wealthy based on the origins and age of the said wealth, much in the same way that we see the Corey's do in Silas Lapham.  For the old money Anna Corey and her daughters, the thought of her only son Tom condescending himself to marry into a family only recently rich is a travesty.

As a modern reader, it's almost comical to witness the women essentially freaking out over a situation that is truly insipid in comparison to large scale world issues like hunger, poverty, violence, etc.  However, despite the superficiality of the Corey's plight, this schism between new money and old money is very much alive in the United States today.

Having grown up in New England, I've met a number of people who are relatively (relatively because, as we've established, the United States is by no means an "old" country) old-money wealthy, and these people tend to look-down on those only more recently wealthy in a way that is guised and tacit yet still totally present.  HOWEVER, what I'm wondering is, is this elitist phenomenon unique to the more historic New England states as opposed to the rest of the United States??

Recently I was visiting my extremely wealthy aunt in California who happens to be dating a guy even wealthier than she is and made all of his money founding a very large software company.  Im not going to name names because you can totally google both of them, but the jist is, both are self-made, and have worked hard for their "new" money.  And yet, new money didn't really seem to exist as a category out in California, at least from what I saw.  Many people in the Silicon Valley area where they live have made their money on technology, an obviously more nascent industry, and hence, wealth only transcends a couple generations at best.  Granted, I'm not from California, so I probably didn't get a fully nuanced perspective, but this is something I observed while out there, but it just made me question the subjectivity of this categorical exclusion based on wealth and time and see just how shallow this type of classification truly is.