President Donald Trump’s recent Great Gatsby–themed party at Mar-a-Lago shimmered with all the excess of a lost empire: champagne towers, roaring twenties jazz, guests dripping in pearls and self-congratulation.
Outside, a different story: millions of Americans were about to lose access to food assistance — their average $6 a day, roughly the cost of one McDonald’s Big Mac — after the president cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
The Mar-a-Lago bash was an imitation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel of hollow glamour, a book that doesn’t celebrate wealth but condemns it.
Trump’s Halloween fête became a modern version of an ancient ritual: the privileged enacting pageantry amid deprivation.
It brought to mind, for me — a student of Irish history —Queen Victoria’s feast in the middle of the greatest humanitarian disaster of the nineteenth century.
Let’s get into it.
In 1849, at the height of An Gorta Mór, the Queen crossed the Irish Sea to visit her suffering subjects. More than a million would die from starvation and disease; more than two million would flee in coffin ships. Needless to say, her itinerary did not include fever hospitals or mass graves.
In a dress trimmed with Limerick lace, she rode to Carton House, an opulent estate outside Dublin. The peasantry lined her route along the Liffey, some walking from nearby famine fields to glimpse her carriage.
Inside, nobles, gentry, and clergy sat down to “a magnificent dejeuner,” as historian Christine Kinealy recounts. “While they ate,” she writes, “about 160 people were given refreshments ‘of the most varied and costly kind’ in tents erected in the grounds. At the Queen’s request, ‘numbers of peasantry’ were invited to observe her walk about the estate.”
According to reports at the time, in nearby Maynooth, at least 141 people were suffering with starvation-related disease (cholera and typhus) from which more than 50 subsequently died.
The Queen laughed “most heartily,” visited a thatched cottage and departed before nightfall — while her government continued exporting the colony’s grain and livestock to itself, oftentimes under guard. Poverty, London reasoned, was a moral failing.
As Professor Kinealy notes, “Queen Victoria reigned over a government that increasingly turned its back on Ireland, resulting in the most lethal and devastating event in Irish history.”
Next, let’s backtrack two years to Dublin, where, on April 5, 1847, the French celebrity chef Alexis Soyer held his party for the poor and the rich.
Famous for feeding London’s elite, Soyer’s government-funded kitchen was a “humanitarian experiment.” A thousand could be fed every hour; spoons were chained to tables to prevent theft. The soup, costing about a dollar and a half per gallon in today’s money, was thin broth — turnip, onion, a trace of meat—only the appearance of nourishment.
“His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant was there,” a newspaper reported, “the ladies Ponsonby and many other fair and delicate creatures assembled; there were earls and countesses, lords and generals, clergymen and doctors; for, reader, it was a gala day — a grand gala.” The gentry paid five shillings apiece — around $40 today — for the privilege of watching the poor eat.
“To watch the burning blush of shame chasing pallidness from poverty’s wan cheek,” one reporter wrote, “five shillings each! When animals in the Zoological Park can be inspected at feeding time for sixpence.”
Historian Thomas Gallagher put it more bluntly in Paddy’s Lament: “With drums beating and horns sounding, the Union Jack flying proudly from the kitchen’s smoking chimney, the British government fed the Irish a soup incapable of keeping a newborn cat alive.”
Suffering as backdrop for elite virtue. Trump’s party didn’t even pretend charity.
The continuity between these three moments — Soyer’s soup, Victoria’s feast and Trump’s gala — is unmistakable. Each sanitized cruelty, transforming hunger into theater and moral reassurance for the rich. The roar of the party masks the silence of hunger — then, as now. Physically, morally, spiritually.
Trump’s suspension of SNAP benefits and 19th century British famine policy share the same logic: the poor are undeserving dependents; hunger a moral lesson in self-reliance. Meanwhile inflation rises, wages fall and the U.S. wastes nearly 40 percent of its food each year.
As the Queen feasted, “the New East India Tea Company advertised teas, coffee, claret, champagne, wines, and spirits; the George Hotel in Wales invited Irish families ‘desirous of combining comfort and quietness to vacation there.’” Local markets, one paper noted, were “busy with fat cattle and fat sheep…all sold at remunerating prices.”
Tone-deaf extravagance, it seems, is a constant companion of inequality. In America, we have long equated wealth with virtue and dismissed poverty as failure. What F. Scott Fitzgerald saw as tragedy, modern America treats as aspiration.
The Gatsby myth has been reborn — not as cautionary tale, but as campaign slogan.
Meanwhile, millions who rely on food stamps — working parents, veterans, the elderly — now face impossible choices between groceries and rent.
The good news: across our region, people are responding. Food drives, fundraisers, and neighborhood efforts are springing up to help those losing SNAP benefits.
It’s time to join them.
Michael Carolan lives in Dwight, a village of Belchertown.