For most of human history, the rich took it with them. Or tried to. The pharaohs filled their tombs with gold, furniture, jewelry, food, and servants (sometimes living ones). The great necropolises of Egypt were monuments to the belief that wealth was most useful in the afterlife. The Greeks buried their dead with coins to cross the River Styx. The Vikings entombed their leaders together with their ships and weapons and more.
While the wealthy of the medieval world did build for the living, it was overwhelmingly through the church and with an eye on the next world. The great cathedrals of Europe, the monasteries, and the hospitals were ecclesiastical enterprises, funded by a combination of royal grants, aristocratic patronage, and the steady accumulation of tithes. When secular wealth entered the picture, it was through mercantile families like the Medicis that turned wealth into symbols of political power. Politics, religion, and great earthly works were closely entangled for a millennia.
All that changed in the new world. America had no church establishment to staff hospitals and schools, no aristocracy to endow them, and no monarchy to hand out charters. What we had was money: made fast by men who had often started with nothing and found themselves, as the republic matured, in possession of fortunes they could neither spend nor comfortably hoard. They took upon themselves the public works that in the Old World were the work of the nobility and the church.
