Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent explores the history of the Gilded Age, using three people as its guide. Robert Ray Hamilton was a state lawmaker from New York and the great-grandson of Alexander Hamilton. John Dudley Sargent came from a long line of Brahmin families in New England that included several colonial governors and the famous painter John Singer Sargent. Edith Drake Sargent was the eccentric and musical daughter of a New York banker who had made a fortune selling short.
All three experienced some form of humiliation after newspapers speculated on their possible shameful secrets. They fled to Wyoming, believing the frontier was a place where they could hide. But by the 1890s the “frontier” was gone. Just as many today are learning that the internet has opened up a vast wilderness of information to exploration and settlement, so, too, did Hamilton and the Sargents learn that changes in technology made it difficult for anyone in the West to leave a scandal-laden past behind. Compliments of Hamilton and Sargent is a story about the early demise of our right to be forgotten.
Written by Maura Jane Farrelly