August 11, 2025 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, The Hope Diamond has been blamed for madness, financial ruin, and untimely death. It’s also one of the most visited artifacts in the world. So what kept people chasing it? Richard Kurin, author of Hope Diamond: The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem, traces how this 45-carat blue diamond moved from European royalty to American catalogs and eventually into the Smithsonian’s glass case.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we continue with our American stories. The Hope Diamond
is the world's most famous. This blue diamond is widely
believed to be cursed, with stories of misfortune and tragedy
befalling those who owned or simply touched it. Here to
take a closer look at the legend and the diamond's
history is the Smithsonian's Richard Current, author of Hoop Diamond,
(00:34):
The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
It came to the Smithsonian in nineteen fifty eight. A
guy who is an ex police officer in New York
City worked for Harry Winston's. He packages up round paper bag,
put the diamond in it, got on the New York
Subway to go to the Central Post Office, addressed it too,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, d c. That was it. Two dollars
(01:04):
and sixty six cents. Newspapers said, what are you crazy?
Art Buckwald wrote a column. Who in Washington is responsible
for this? This is a curse gem. Once we get
this and it's acquired by the National Museum of the
United States, the US will be cursed. The idea was
that the gem was cursed by a Hindu deity, and
(01:26):
it could harm the Curse of the Diamond would harm
the United States, and the Smithsonian had committed a terrible
faux pas. The guy that delivered the diamond was James Todt.
He actually drove it along from the post office down
here to the museum. No swat team, no guns, nobody
writing shotgun. He delivered it. He said it was all
(01:47):
hoopla in February, delivered in November. In February, his wife
died of heart tech, his dog got run over, he
got hit by a car and broke both legs, and
finally his house burnt down, and people in Washington said, well,
maybe there's something to this curse now. The curse story
was first told in a fancy hotel, Hotel Bristol in
(02:10):
Paris in nineteen ten by Pierre Cardier. Everybody knows Cardier, right,
and Cardier came into the suite of an American couple,
Evelyn and Ned McClain. You know McClain Virginia named after
the mcclains, Riggs Bank, few other things. Cardier walked into
their suite. Ned was a little drunk. Evelyn was always
(02:32):
ready for something. She bought other things from Cardier in
the past, and Cardier took out a package and he
started telling her the story of a blue diamond, and
Evelyn was very intrigued. Basically, Cardier said, Jean Baptiste Tavernave,
(02:54):
who had acquired the diamonds, stole it from the Hindu
idol and he was eaten by dogs. That it went
to the French Louis the fourteenth. By the time it
got to Marie Antoinette over there in Louis the sixteenth,
they owned the diamond and they were guillotined and went
to the Hope family later and Hope was went bankrupt.
It then went to the Turkish Sultan who was undone
(03:15):
by the young Turks in the revolution, and it was
worn by his concubine who had her throat slit. This
is a pretty heavy taiale by Cardier. Now, Cardier was
right about some things. In that time, India was the
only known source of diamonds in the world, So all
the diamonds known to the Romans known through antiquity the
(03:37):
Middle Ages, all came from India prior to the discovery
of diamonds in Brazil in the seventeen twenties. In South
Africa much later, and there Tavine visited the mines and
he was the only He was the first person European
person to really report on how diamonds were got. A
lot of the stories were Marco Polo's stories that were
traced back to Sinbad, stories that were traced back to Alexander.
(03:58):
The great stories of how diamonds were myth thickly got.
Taverne wrote about the actual diamond techniques. And these diamonds
are alluvial diamonds. It's not the big pit diamonds that
you have in South Africa. These diamonds are found in
alluvial streams. They come up from volcanoes, They carried by rivers,
they end up resting someplace, They covered by other sludge
and other stuff, and so you only have to dig
(04:18):
about eight to fourteen feet to get them, but it
takes a lot of labor. In this mine where Taverne
actually acquired the Hope, the diamond, the blue diamond that
was later we know to be named the Hope, there
were about one hundred thousand people working to find literally
a handful of diamonds a year, very hard work. And
(04:39):
in the Color mine in sixteen fifty three, Taverne acquired
this roughly cut diamond of one hundred and twelve carrots,
just to give your prospective usual engagement rings or what
one carrot if the guy really loves you a little more,
you know, very small, one hundred twelve, there's a lot
of carrots. Taverynda sold one hundred and twelve carrot diamond.
(05:00):
It was called the Tavernet violet, not that it was
a different color violet. In that time, Infrench meant intense blue.
He sold that diamond to Louis the sixteenth. It was
recorded in the court sales and he got the equivalent
of one one point eight million dollars for the diamond.
When Taverne came back and reported on his travels Tandya,
his book was a best seller, polished in I think
(05:22):
sixteen seventy six. Everybody was reading Taverney and in it
seventh Volley's six or seven volumes. In one paragraph or
two paragraphs, he had this story about that he heard.
It had nothing to do with the violet or a
blue diamond he acquired. It was just a story he
heard in passing one night traveling around India about a
(05:43):
temple where there was a great idol that had two
diamonds for his eyes. There was a forty carrot diamond.
A jeweler wanted to steal the diamond, got shut up
in the tent, took the diamond, got shut up in
the temple at night. They opened the doors of the
temple in the morning, and the guy was dead, and
it was the wrath of the god. That story, that
snippet became the basis of every cursed diamond story in
(06:04):
the West for the next four hundred years. In tavery
night's time, you had these Indian cuts, and again it
was just too not really symmetrical to make the diamond shine,
but just to get rid of deficiencies the Europe. In
Europe you started having after the Renaissance, the application of
geometry optics, thinking about and theorizing light. You started getting
(06:29):
Europeans figuring out how to cut glass, how to make glasses,
how to make telescopes, and how to cut diamonds so
you can make stuff sparkle and shine and manipulate light.
The secret to cutting diamonds is olive oil. Who would
have known only a diamond could cut diamond. You rub
(06:51):
the diamonds together, and if you rub a diamond together,
a diamond you'll get a lot of heat, and you
can't really cut mold diamonds that way. The way you
do it is you add olive oil to the thing
and it lubricates the thing. So that was the great
innovation that allowed for diamond cutting in Europe. Here were Europeans,
here were in the and so concerned about keeping the
(07:11):
power of the gem in as a protective force. And
here were Europeans so intent on cutting the diamond to
let this stuff out. That's basically the trope. In seventeen
ninety two French Revolution, the French crown jewels, which had
been taken away by the royal family were stolen out
of the royal warehouse and disappear from history. Eighteen twelve,
(07:36):
a forty four carrot blue diamond without provenance is documented
in London and the possession of this guy Daniel Oliason.
George the fourth purchases that blue diamond from Elias in
and it looks like he wore it during his coronation.
I think it's a trophy against Napoleon. Napoleon you wanted
as blank you in your eye. It's around my neck
(07:58):
when he died in eighteen thirty, iss last missed just
try to steal a lot of his treasures. The Duke
of Wellington was the executor of the state. He told
Lady Cunningham, give me back the diamonds and the gems,
or off with your head. She complied, and Wellington was
friends with Thomas Hope, a wealthy banker family. The Hopes
actually made possible to Louisiana purchase. They're the ones that
(08:20):
loaned the US the money for the deal. George the
Fourth had so many debts they don't want to make
them public because he would have bankrupted England, and so
they tried to sell off the non kind of family
non you know, a royal property, and Thomas Hope was
a good friend of Wellington. They made a secret sale,
and so this is why it goes to the Hope
(08:40):
family to settle George's debts. He did not call it
the Hope diamond. He called it number one. His diamond
was inherited by his Henry Thomas Hope, his nephew, was
displayed at the Crystal Palace, and it became known as
one of the world's great diamonds. And when you read
the catalogs, it's mister Hope's blue diamond Hopes Blue Diamond,
(09:01):
Hopes a Hope Diamond. Yeah, it just gets to be
the Hope Diamond that way.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
And you've been listening to Richard Curran and he's the
author of Hope Diamond, The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem.
And he gave this talk to the Library of Congress
back in two thousand and nine. And we love drawing
from this remarkable treasure, treasury actually of American culture, history
(09:28):
and storytelling. And my goodness, the Hope Diamond was shipped
to the Smithsonian through the postal service. That just struck me.
I love also that the Hope Diamond, of course, wasn't
initially named the Hope Diamond. Mister Hope called it number one.
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
(09:49):
this cursed gem, the Hope Diamond. Here on our American stories.
Can we continue with our American stories and with Richard
(10:13):
current author of Pope Diamond, The Legendary History of a
Cursed Gem. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Around the same time eighteen fifty eight, the British government
took control of India. Now Queen Victoria, Empress of India,
becomes Empress of India, in the eighteen sixties, and you
had in eighteen sixty eight a guy named Wilkie Collins
wrote The Moonstone. People have read The Moonstone, or enough people, Okay,
it's about a cursed diamond. It's yellow, it's stolen from
(10:42):
the eye of an idol, it comes to the British countryside,
it wrecks havoc on the family, and finally it's returned.
And the whole notion was that basically that here's a
cursed diamond. Now, Wilkie Collins, when you go through his
notes on writing the book, he's using what as a
source material, Taverney and that paragraph. But diamonds gets the
(11:06):
diamond minding gets started at eighteen the first diamonds that
discovered eighteen sixty eight, and all of a sudden in
South Africa, you have a great new explosion of the
availability of diamonds. If you look at the United States
before then, literally a few hundred carrots being imported to
the United States. After the discovery of diamonds in South Africa,
(11:28):
it's huge. The biggest biggest seller of diamonds in the
world after the discovery in South Africa is the Beer's
Nah Tiffany Sears Roadbuck, Sears Roebuck. You want a diamond
(11:48):
one carrot diamond seventeen ninety five. You don't like that,
eleven dollars, We'll sell you two for twenty five. You
want a three carrot diamond, thirty eight dollars, five carrots.
I'm not kidding the Sears Robot catalogs from the eighteen eighties.
Diamonds are very cheap, and they're trying to sell it
to everybody, and Tiffany invents the solitary setting in what
(12:11):
eighteen eighty six? They have to invent uses for the
diamond because there's too many diamonds around, and so Tiffany
and others start saying, well, if you love somebody, you'll
give them a diamond. They try an investment strategy. First,
buy a diamond as investment. That doesn't work so well.
Buy a diamond as love works real well. And so
(12:34):
now they're selling diamond rings, diamond engagement rings, diamond necklaces,
diamond watches, diamond and everything before that. There is no
sustained tradition of diamond engagement rings, none, zero, none. In
the United States, the wealthy use diamonds for big, conspicuous display.
I am more powerful than you. My wife will wear
(12:57):
more diamonds than yours. And this gets to be a
thing in New York. It's called the Diamond Circle in
the Metropolitan Opera. And the idea is that diamonds start
becoming a standard. If everybody can have diamonds, how do
you isolate or show your particular power or wealth other
than having bigger diamonds. So big diamonds becomes a thing
(13:17):
in America in the late eighteen hundreds. Cardier acquires the
diamond in nineteen oh nine, and Cardier applied the Moonstone
story to the Hope Diamond. Now, Evelyn didn't mind that,
because Evelyn Walsh mclan said, what was bad luck for
other people was good luck for her. Her dad was
a miner, and she was pure at heart and poor
(13:40):
at heart. He struck it rich. When she was about
ten years old, she said, all this stuff, Marie Antoinette,
these kings won't apply to me. I'm a you know,
I'm salt of the earth gal. I'm not a king
or queen. I wasn't born rich. All this stuff isn't
going to get to me. Cardier brought the Hope Diamond
to Washington and sold it to them. He came on
a boat yep called the Lusitania. That's the one, okay,
(14:03):
So he came on that ship. He tracked them down
at their Washington home, the old office of Washington Post,
and he sold them the diamond for one hundred and
eighty thousand, which is three point nine million today, and
the curse made front page headlines in the New York
Times Post in other places. Florence Harding, at that time,
the Senator's wife later to become First Lady, was very superstitious.
(14:25):
She actually worried about the curse of the Hope Diamond.
She said, Evelyn, give it back. It's cursed. It's not good.
Bad stuff is going to happen. Her and Evelyn would
go around Washington to astrologers and palm readers. Some of
them would even come into the White House. And so
the Hope Diamond was kind of there is like this
funny thing that was lurking. In nineteen nineteen, the mcleans
(14:48):
were in Kentucky for the Kentucky Derby their son. He
was running across the street. A car, a Model t Ford,
going eight miles an hour, hit him. He was knocked
to the ground, suffered a concussion and died all of
a sudden Washington Post other papers another tragedy in the
wake of the Hope Diamond. Who will next own this
(15:10):
death gem? The Malignant Rays, the gem of disass Star
right Disaster, bad Star. Evelyn McLain, Great Washington Hostess, supported
GI's charities, opened her home to GI's. She actually went
to Walta read once a week and she let Gis
play with the Hope Diamond. She used it for charity.
(15:31):
She even pawned the Hope Diamond. Here's her pawn ticket
for ransom. And the Lindberg kidnapping didn't work. Her daughter
Evie committed suicide. Was married to a senator, and so
Evelyn was quite ambivalent about the curse. She sometimes she
believed it. Sometimes she's very playful about it. She thought
the curse was great wealth misspent. When she died, the
(15:54):
estate didn't have much money in it. Harry Winston acquired
the Hope from the estate, and he used the Hope
to Americans in buying diamonds after World War Two. He
believed that the US diamond collection down in the Smithsonian
was kind of a third rate collection, putting it somewhere behind,
you know, like Bulgaria or Croatia somewhere. And here was
the US as a superpower and really needed a big,
(16:15):
massive national collection to a mirror its political and economic
and military role after World War Two, and so he
created something called the Court of Jewels. We didn't have
a court in this country. Harry created his own. And
he had women around the US where the diamonds for
fashion shows to raise money for charity. And I've had
(16:36):
many people around the country come back to me and say,
I wore the diamond at the Pecan Festival, the Texas
State Fair in nineteen fifty four or whatever, and they
have pictures. And the idea was to create interest in gems,
but also to make them historical and biographical. At a
time when synthetic diamonds were coming on the market and
Harry wanted to stem that because he was worried that
(16:57):
he'd lose business. The Smithsonian use diamonds that had been
confiscated by smugglers coming into the US to use those
diamonds to acquire the Hope diamond. France requested to get
the Hope diamond in nineteen sixty two. Charles de Gaulle
appropriately try to do what Napoleon could not bring back
the French crown jewels. And he said, you guys at
(17:19):
the Smithsonian have that blue, that blue diamond, that Hope
diamonds really are French blue. We want it back to
display temporarily. We said no. We kept saying no. The
secretary of the Smithsonian said no. Finally he got a
call from some lady who lived in a white house
down the block by the name of Jackie Kennedy, who said,
(17:43):
you have to say yes. And so we said yes,
but not being stupid. We're just as good as you
all here. Not being stupid. We said at the Smithsonian, Okay,
if we're going to give up the Hope Diamond to
the French, we need a hostage. And that hostage was
Mona Lisa. It's still an icon, a national treasure, A
(18:07):
least credible estimate of its value two hundred million dollars
by Ronald Winston. What I did is I said, okay,
let me look at all the lifespans of those people
who've been associated with the Hope Diamond and see what
age they lived to my hypothesis being that if you
own the Hope Diamond or steward of the Hope Diamond,
or did something with the Hope Diamond, you would die younger.
The normal it's not true. Purse doesn't seem to affect
(18:30):
that whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
And a special thanks to Richard Kerrn, author of Hope Diamond,
The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem. And it was
from a speech a story he told that the Library
of Congress back in two thousand and nine, and what
a story he told. We learned that India for many
centuries had been the primary source of diamonds, until, of course,
(18:52):
the discoveries in South Africa and everything changed. Imports to
America exploded in the very first big seller of diamonds
was none other than Sears Roebuck. But soon the marketing
kicked in and it was tied to love and scarcity.
Prices shot up and the status of diamonds shot up.
(19:16):
In came Harry Winston, the great jeweler, to promote his
enterprise just so smart, the story of the Hope Diamond.
Here on our American Stories
And we continue with our American stories. The Hope Diamond
is the world's most famous. This blue diamond is widely
believed to be cursed, with stories of misfortune and tragedy
befalling those who owned or simply touched it. Here to
take a closer look at the legend and the diamond's
history is the Smithsonian's Richard Current, author of Hoop Diamond,
(00:34):
The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
It came to the Smithsonian in nineteen fifty eight. A
guy who is an ex police officer in New York
City worked for Harry Winston's. He packages up round paper bag,
put the diamond in it, got on the New York
Subway to go to the Central Post Office, addressed it too,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, d c. That was it. Two dollars
(01:04):
and sixty six cents. Newspapers said, what are you crazy?
Art Buckwald wrote a column. Who in Washington is responsible
for this? This is a curse gem. Once we get
this and it's acquired by the National Museum of the
United States, the US will be cursed. The idea was
that the gem was cursed by a Hindu deity, and
(01:26):
it could harm the Curse of the Diamond would harm
the United States, and the Smithsonian had committed a terrible
faux pas. The guy that delivered the diamond was James Todt.
He actually drove it along from the post office down
here to the museum. No swat team, no guns, nobody
writing shotgun. He delivered it. He said it was all
(01:47):
hoopla in February, delivered in November. In February, his wife
died of heart tech, his dog got run over, he
got hit by a car and broke both legs, and
finally his house burnt down, and people in Washington said, well,
maybe there's something to this curse now. The curse story
was first told in a fancy hotel, Hotel Bristol in
(02:10):
Paris in nineteen ten by Pierre Cardier. Everybody knows Cardier, right,
and Cardier came into the suite of an American couple,
Evelyn and Ned McClain. You know McClain Virginia named after
the mcclains, Riggs Bank, few other things. Cardier walked into
their suite. Ned was a little drunk. Evelyn was always
(02:32):
ready for something. She bought other things from Cardier in
the past, and Cardier took out a package and he
started telling her the story of a blue diamond, and
Evelyn was very intrigued. Basically, Cardier said, Jean Baptiste Tavernave,
(02:54):
who had acquired the diamonds, stole it from the Hindu
idol and he was eaten by dogs. That it went
to the French Louis the fourteenth. By the time it
got to Marie Antoinette over there in Louis the sixteenth,
they owned the diamond and they were guillotined and went
to the Hope family later and Hope was went bankrupt.
It then went to the Turkish Sultan who was undone
(03:15):
by the young Turks in the revolution, and it was
worn by his concubine who had her throat slit. This
is a pretty heavy taiale by Cardier. Now, Cardier was
right about some things. In that time, India was the
only known source of diamonds in the world, So all
the diamonds known to the Romans known through antiquity the
(03:37):
Middle Ages, all came from India prior to the discovery
of diamonds in Brazil in the seventeen twenties. In South
Africa much later, and there Tavine visited the mines and
he was the only He was the first person European
person to really report on how diamonds were got. A
lot of the stories were Marco Polo's stories that were
traced back to Sinbad, stories that were traced back to Alexander.
(03:58):
The great stories of how diamonds were myth thickly got.
Taverne wrote about the actual diamond techniques. And these diamonds
are alluvial diamonds. It's not the big pit diamonds that
you have in South Africa. These diamonds are found in
alluvial streams. They come up from volcanoes, They carried by rivers,
they end up resting someplace, They covered by other sludge
and other stuff, and so you only have to dig
(04:18):
about eight to fourteen feet to get them, but it
takes a lot of labor. In this mine where Taverne
actually acquired the Hope, the diamond, the blue diamond that
was later we know to be named the Hope, there
were about one hundred thousand people working to find literally
a handful of diamonds a year, very hard work. And
(04:39):
in the Color mine in sixteen fifty three, Taverne acquired
this roughly cut diamond of one hundred and twelve carrots,
just to give your prospective usual engagement rings or what
one carrot if the guy really loves you a little more,
you know, very small, one hundred twelve, there's a lot
of carrots. Taverynda sold one hundred and twelve carrot diamond.
(05:00):
It was called the Tavernet violet, not that it was
a different color violet. In that time, Infrench meant intense blue.
He sold that diamond to Louis the sixteenth. It was
recorded in the court sales and he got the equivalent
of one one point eight million dollars for the diamond.
When Taverne came back and reported on his travels Tandya,
his book was a best seller, polished in I think
(05:22):
sixteen seventy six. Everybody was reading Taverney and in it
seventh Volley's six or seven volumes. In one paragraph or
two paragraphs, he had this story about that he heard.
It had nothing to do with the violet or a
blue diamond he acquired. It was just a story he
heard in passing one night traveling around India about a
(05:43):
temple where there was a great idol that had two
diamonds for his eyes. There was a forty carrot diamond.
A jeweler wanted to steal the diamond, got shut up
in the tent, took the diamond, got shut up in
the temple at night. They opened the doors of the
temple in the morning, and the guy was dead, and
it was the wrath of the god. That story, that
snippet became the basis of every cursed diamond story in
(06:04):
the West for the next four hundred years. In tavery
night's time, you had these Indian cuts, and again it
was just too not really symmetrical to make the diamond shine,
but just to get rid of deficiencies the Europe. In
Europe you started having after the Renaissance, the application of
geometry optics, thinking about and theorizing light. You started getting
(06:29):
Europeans figuring out how to cut glass, how to make glasses,
how to make telescopes, and how to cut diamonds so
you can make stuff sparkle and shine and manipulate light.
The secret to cutting diamonds is olive oil. Who would
have known only a diamond could cut diamond. You rub
(06:51):
the diamonds together, and if you rub a diamond together,
a diamond you'll get a lot of heat, and you
can't really cut mold diamonds that way. The way you
do it is you add olive oil to the thing
and it lubricates the thing. So that was the great
innovation that allowed for diamond cutting in Europe. Here were Europeans,
here were in the and so concerned about keeping the
(07:11):
power of the gem in as a protective force. And
here were Europeans so intent on cutting the diamond to
let this stuff out. That's basically the trope. In seventeen
ninety two French Revolution, the French crown jewels, which had
been taken away by the royal family were stolen out
of the royal warehouse and disappear from history. Eighteen twelve,
(07:36):
a forty four carrot blue diamond without provenance is documented
in London and the possession of this guy Daniel Oliason.
George the fourth purchases that blue diamond from Elias in
and it looks like he wore it during his coronation.
I think it's a trophy against Napoleon. Napoleon you wanted
as blank you in your eye. It's around my neck
(07:58):
when he died in eighteen thirty, iss last missed just
try to steal a lot of his treasures. The Duke
of Wellington was the executor of the state. He told
Lady Cunningham, give me back the diamonds and the gems,
or off with your head. She complied, and Wellington was
friends with Thomas Hope, a wealthy banker family. The Hopes
actually made possible to Louisiana purchase. They're the ones that
(08:20):
loaned the US the money for the deal. George the
Fourth had so many debts they don't want to make
them public because he would have bankrupted England, and so
they tried to sell off the non kind of family
non you know, a royal property, and Thomas Hope was
a good friend of Wellington. They made a secret sale,
and so this is why it goes to the Hope
(08:40):
family to settle George's debts. He did not call it
the Hope diamond. He called it number one. His diamond
was inherited by his Henry Thomas Hope, his nephew, was
displayed at the Crystal Palace, and it became known as
one of the world's great diamonds. And when you read
the catalogs, it's mister Hope's blue diamond Hopes Blue Diamond,
(09:01):
Hopes a Hope Diamond. Yeah, it just gets to be
the Hope Diamond that way.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
And you've been listening to Richard Curran and he's the
author of Hope Diamond, The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem.
And he gave this talk to the Library of Congress
back in two thousand and nine. And we love drawing
from this remarkable treasure, treasury actually of American culture, history
(09:28):
and storytelling. And my goodness, the Hope Diamond was shipped
to the Smithsonian through the postal service. That just struck me.
I love also that the Hope Diamond, of course, wasn't
initially named the Hope Diamond. Mister Hope called it number one.
When we come back more of the remarkable story of
(09:49):
this cursed gem, the Hope Diamond. Here on our American stories.
Can we continue with our American stories and with Richard
(10:13):
current author of Pope Diamond, The Legendary History of a
Cursed Gem. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 2 (10:21):
Around the same time eighteen fifty eight, the British government
took control of India. Now Queen Victoria, Empress of India,
becomes Empress of India, in the eighteen sixties, and you
had in eighteen sixty eight a guy named Wilkie Collins
wrote The Moonstone. People have read The Moonstone, or enough people, Okay,
it's about a cursed diamond. It's yellow, it's stolen from
(10:42):
the eye of an idol, it comes to the British countryside,
it wrecks havoc on the family, and finally it's returned.
And the whole notion was that basically that here's a
cursed diamond. Now, Wilkie Collins, when you go through his
notes on writing the book, he's using what as a
source material, Taverney and that paragraph. But diamonds gets the
(11:06):
diamond minding gets started at eighteen the first diamonds that
discovered eighteen sixty eight, and all of a sudden in
South Africa, you have a great new explosion of the
availability of diamonds. If you look at the United States
before then, literally a few hundred carrots being imported to
the United States. After the discovery of diamonds in South Africa,
(11:28):
it's huge. The biggest biggest seller of diamonds in the
world after the discovery in South Africa is the Beer's
Nah Tiffany Sears Roadbuck, Sears Roebuck. You want a diamond
(11:48):
one carrot diamond seventeen ninety five. You don't like that,
eleven dollars, We'll sell you two for twenty five. You
want a three carrot diamond, thirty eight dollars, five carrots.
I'm not kidding the Sears Robot catalogs from the eighteen eighties.
Diamonds are very cheap, and they're trying to sell it
to everybody, and Tiffany invents the solitary setting in what
(12:11):
eighteen eighty six? They have to invent uses for the
diamond because there's too many diamonds around, and so Tiffany
and others start saying, well, if you love somebody, you'll
give them a diamond. They try an investment strategy. First,
buy a diamond as investment. That doesn't work so well.
Buy a diamond as love works real well. And so
(12:34):
now they're selling diamond rings, diamond engagement rings, diamond necklaces,
diamond watches, diamond and everything before that. There is no
sustained tradition of diamond engagement rings, none, zero, none. In
the United States, the wealthy use diamonds for big, conspicuous display.
I am more powerful than you. My wife will wear
(12:57):
more diamonds than yours. And this gets to be a
thing in New York. It's called the Diamond Circle in
the Metropolitan Opera. And the idea is that diamonds start
becoming a standard. If everybody can have diamonds, how do
you isolate or show your particular power or wealth other
than having bigger diamonds. So big diamonds becomes a thing
(13:17):
in America in the late eighteen hundreds. Cardier acquires the
diamond in nineteen oh nine, and Cardier applied the Moonstone
story to the Hope Diamond. Now, Evelyn didn't mind that,
because Evelyn Walsh mclan said, what was bad luck for
other people was good luck for her. Her dad was
a miner, and she was pure at heart and poor
(13:40):
at heart. He struck it rich. When she was about
ten years old, she said, all this stuff, Marie Antoinette,
these kings won't apply to me. I'm a you know,
I'm salt of the earth gal. I'm not a king
or queen. I wasn't born rich. All this stuff isn't
going to get to me. Cardier brought the Hope Diamond
to Washington and sold it to them. He came on
a boat yep called the Lusitania. That's the one, okay,
(14:03):
So he came on that ship. He tracked them down
at their Washington home, the old office of Washington Post,
and he sold them the diamond for one hundred and
eighty thousand, which is three point nine million today, and
the curse made front page headlines in the New York
Times Post in other places. Florence Harding, at that time,
the Senator's wife later to become First Lady, was very superstitious.
(14:25):
She actually worried about the curse of the Hope Diamond.
She said, Evelyn, give it back. It's cursed. It's not good.
Bad stuff is going to happen. Her and Evelyn would
go around Washington to astrologers and palm readers. Some of
them would even come into the White House. And so
the Hope Diamond was kind of there is like this
funny thing that was lurking. In nineteen nineteen, the mcleans
(14:48):
were in Kentucky for the Kentucky Derby their son. He
was running across the street. A car, a Model t Ford,
going eight miles an hour, hit him. He was knocked
to the ground, suffered a concussion and died all of
a sudden Washington Post other papers another tragedy in the
wake of the Hope Diamond. Who will next own this
(15:10):
death gem? The Malignant Rays, the gem of disass Star
right Disaster, bad Star. Evelyn McLain, Great Washington Hostess, supported
GI's charities, opened her home to GI's. She actually went
to Walta read once a week and she let Gis
play with the Hope Diamond. She used it for charity.
(15:31):
She even pawned the Hope Diamond. Here's her pawn ticket
for ransom. And the Lindberg kidnapping didn't work. Her daughter
Evie committed suicide. Was married to a senator, and so
Evelyn was quite ambivalent about the curse. She sometimes she
believed it. Sometimes she's very playful about it. She thought
the curse was great wealth misspent. When she died, the
(15:54):
estate didn't have much money in it. Harry Winston acquired
the Hope from the estate, and he used the Hope
to Americans in buying diamonds after World War Two. He
believed that the US diamond collection down in the Smithsonian
was kind of a third rate collection, putting it somewhere behind,
you know, like Bulgaria or Croatia somewhere. And here was
the US as a superpower and really needed a big,
(16:15):
massive national collection to a mirror its political and economic
and military role after World War Two, and so he
created something called the Court of Jewels. We didn't have
a court in this country. Harry created his own. And
he had women around the US where the diamonds for
fashion shows to raise money for charity. And I've had
(16:36):
many people around the country come back to me and say,
I wore the diamond at the Pecan Festival, the Texas
State Fair in nineteen fifty four or whatever, and they
have pictures. And the idea was to create interest in gems,
but also to make them historical and biographical. At a
time when synthetic diamonds were coming on the market and
Harry wanted to stem that because he was worried that
(16:57):
he'd lose business. The Smithsonian use diamonds that had been
confiscated by smugglers coming into the US to use those
diamonds to acquire the Hope diamond. France requested to get
the Hope diamond in nineteen sixty two. Charles de Gaulle
appropriately try to do what Napoleon could not bring back
the French crown jewels. And he said, you guys at
(17:19):
the Smithsonian have that blue, that blue diamond, that Hope
diamonds really are French blue. We want it back to
display temporarily. We said no. We kept saying no. The
secretary of the Smithsonian said no. Finally he got a
call from some lady who lived in a white house
down the block by the name of Jackie Kennedy, who said,
(17:43):
you have to say yes. And so we said yes,
but not being stupid. We're just as good as you
all here. Not being stupid. We said at the Smithsonian, Okay,
if we're going to give up the Hope Diamond to
the French, we need a hostage. And that hostage was
Mona Lisa. It's still an icon, a national treasure, A
(18:07):
least credible estimate of its value two hundred million dollars
by Ronald Winston. What I did is I said, okay,
let me look at all the lifespans of those people
who've been associated with the Hope Diamond and see what
age they lived to my hypothesis being that if you
own the Hope Diamond or steward of the Hope Diamond,
or did something with the Hope Diamond, you would die younger.
The normal it's not true. Purse doesn't seem to affect
(18:30):
that whatsoever.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
And a special thanks to Richard Kerrn, author of Hope Diamond,
The Legendary History of a Cursed Gem. And it was
from a speech a story he told that the Library
of Congress back in two thousand and nine, and what
a story he told. We learned that India for many
centuries had been the primary source of diamonds, until, of course,
(18:52):
the discoveries in South Africa and everything changed. Imports to
America exploded in the very first big seller of diamonds
was none other than Sears Roebuck. But soon the marketing
kicked in and it was tied to love and scarcity.
Prices shot up and the status of diamonds shot up.
(19:16):
In came Harry Winston, the great jeweler, to promote his
enterprise just so smart, the story of the Hope Diamond.
Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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