America's Secret Aristocracy Read online

  His lineage was far from distinguished. His father had been a German butcher. For years, rumors would circulate in New York about an Astor “family secret,” which was that the Astors were Jewish. This may very well have been true. Family historians have traced the name back to eighteenth-century Spain, when it was Astorga, and there is a possibility that the family were Marranos, or secret Jews, who merely pretended to convert to Christianity when the Spanish monarchs issued their expulsion edict in 1492. In any case, the family for some reason was forced to flee Spain in the 1700s and settled in Walldorf, near Heidelberg, Germany. Here John Jacob was born in 1763, and here the name became Ashdor. More than anything else, the Jewish rumors probably stemmed from John Jacob Astor’s exceptional business shrewdness, a talent often attributed to Jews.

  In any case, John Jacob had left home at age seventeen with only a few coins in his pocket and began making his way across the face of Europe, on foot, in the proverbial search of a fortune. Later, he would say that he had set down three rules for himself: to work hard, always to be honest, and never to gamble. Whether or not he actually kept the latter two of these resolutions is open to question, but he did keep the first one. For three years, he worked in London for an older brother, George, who sold musical instruments. Tiring of this, he headed for America and arrived in 1784 with the equivalent of twenty-five dollars in cash, and seven flutes to sell on consignment for his brother.

  In New York, he found work with another older brother, Heinrich, who spelled the name Ashdoor and who, like their father, ran a smaller butcher shop, in the Bowery. But it was not long before the younger Astor grew restless with butchering, married Sarah Todd, the daughter of the woman who ran his boardinghouse (known simply as the Widow Todd), and then set off into the wilds west of the Hudson to enter the lucrative fur trade.

  Actually, Sarah Todd was a prudent choice as a wife. She brought with her as her dowry three hundred dollars, John Jacob Astor’s first working capital. She was also able to claim that she was related distantly—very distantly—to the Brevoort family, which gave Astor his first brush with respectability. Having made a quick fortune in the fur business—as anyone who was able to peddle counterfeit wampum to the Indians had no trouble doing—Astor returned to Manhattan to go into the real estate business.

  Real estate was something nearly all the Old New York families thought they understood. Most of the early fortunes were based on land deals: acquiring land, attracting settlers, and collecting rents. It was a simple, and comparatively effortless, way to secure a steady income. Landlords, like English country squires, were considered gentlemen, and the title even had the ennobling word “lord” in it. But Mr. Astor’s real estate deals were of a Byzantine complexity such as had never been seen before. There was nothing dishonest per se or—at the time—illegal about Mr. Astor’s land transactions. But to ordinary lessor-lessee agreements he added clauses and fillips that were his own inventions. A tenant, for example, might find that he had leased a parcel of Astor land for a ninety-nine-year period for what he had thought was a fixed annual sum, only to discover, when he examined the small print, that the lease contained escalator clauses depending on how the land was used or how productive it became. Another tenant might learn that though, in his lease, he had the property through his lifetime and that of another generation, any buildings placed on the land belonged to Mr. Astor and his heirs and assigns forever. Or the reverse gimmick might be offered. The tenant might lease a building, but the land it sat upon would always belong to Astor.* It all smacked of sharp practice, but Astor was able to make his leases withstand the scrutiny of the courts—for a long time, at least. And it had to be admitted that, as a businessman, John Jacob Astor was innovative.

  Soon Astor and his wife moved to a spacious residence at 221 Broadway (later the site of the first Waldorf-Astoria Hotel). Next door, at 223 Broadway, lived Aaron Burr, and the two men became friends and would eventually be partners in some interesting real estate transactions. But Astor had already made powerful enemies in high places, and none other than a former secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, had declared that he would never handle John Jacob Astor’s accounts. “He dined here last night,” Gallatin wrote sneeringly, “and ate his ice cream and peas with a knife.” This troubled Mr. Astor not at all. He was quite capable of handling his own accounts. He boasted that he knew his rent rolls by heart, and probably did.

  The richer he got, furthermore, the more miserly and tight-fisted he became. Every lady and every gentleman of the period had a favorite charity or public service to which he or she either gave money or donated time. Astor had none. This was not designed to endear him to the Upper Ten, but the maddening thing about Astor was that he appeared not to care one whit. His only charity, he declared, was himself. Once, when a charity seeker reminded him that his son had given more to a certain cause than he had, Astor grinned crookedly and said, “My son can afford it. He has a rich father.”

  But it was the Astor manners, if one can even call them that, which were particularly offensive. In the middle of a business meeting, for example, a potential client was startled to see Mr. Astor remove his quid of chewing tobacco from his mouth and absently begin tracing a watery design with it on a windowpane. Indeed, one cannot help but wonder how much of Mr. Astor’s coarseness was intentional, part of a carefully concocted persona designed to put people off. There were a number of times when businessmen confessed that they had perhaps agreed to Astor’s terms more quickly than they should have, simply in order to get out of his unappetizing presence. He complained of digestive problems, and his hostesses, in turn, complained that Mr. Astor made “indescribable digestive noises” at their dinner tables. He was fond, furthermore, of describing in vivid detail the various medical solutions that doctors had prescribed for his misbehaving stomach. One doctor recommended that, to stimulate his digestive system for the day, Mr. Astor be tossed naked in a blanket by his servants every morning. Another doctor advised daily dosages of mother’s milk, and a young wet nurse was hired to breastfeed the tycoon. Of such matters were Mr. Astor’s dinner conversations.

  Albert Gallatin’s son, Albert Eugene Gallatin, found Mr. Astor’s table manners even more deplorable than his father had, and wrote in 1820: “Really Mr. Astor is dreadful.… He came to dejeuner today; we were simply en famille, he was sitting next to Frances [Gallatin’s sister]. He actually wiped his fingers on the sleeves of her fresh white spencer [jacket].”

  Why, one wonders, did polite New Yorkers put up with such a ruffian? For one thing, by 1835 John Jacob Astor was the richest man in the New World, and his children, as they say, had great expectations. He and Sarah had eight of these. Three died young, and three were daughters. One of the girls ran off with Colonel Walter Langdon during the War of 1812 and was never heard from again. A second married, first, Adrian Bentzon, governor of the Virgin Islands, and second, an Englishman, the Reverend John Bristed. Both these husbands deserted her. The third daughter made the country’s first “titled” marriage, to a Swiss count, Vincent Rumpff, and then promptly died. The count, though he might have hoped to become one, was not an Astor heir. In a carefully prepared premarital agreement that his wife’s father had gotten the count to sign, all her money went straight back into the Astor family coffers.

  The elder of John Jacob’s two sons, John Jacob Astor, Jr., had had a fall in childhood and was mentally incompetent for the rest of his life. This left only the younger son, William Backhouse Astor, named after a merchant friend of his father’s, to carry on the family name.

  It seemed a spindly sort of start for a great American family tree and for what John Jacob Astor insisted was to become the House of Astor. And yet that is exactly what it was destined to be. John Jacob Astor would not only amass the greatest real estate fortune in the world. He also founded a family that would make more money, and keep more money, and keep it for a longer period of time than any other family in American history.

  To a man such as John Jac
ob Astor, even a family marriage was a business matter. In 1818, after several years as a high-living bachelor, John Jacob’s son William Backhouse decided to settle down—and to take a Livingston as his bride. She was nineteen-year-old Margaret Rebecca Armstrong, the daughter of General John and Alida Livingston Armstrong. This union would definitely advance the social standing of the Astors, and it would add substantially to the Livingston family coffers. But there was a catch to it, as there usually was with an Astor lease (William Astor was, in a sense, leasing his bride for life). In a premarital agreement drawn up by the bridegroom’s father, the bride was required—in return for a sum of money that seemed princely to the Livingstons but was nothing to Astor—to sign away her dower rights to the Astor fortune. This meant that, if her husband predeceased her or if the marriage ended in divorce, all Astor money would be returned to the Astor family. This agreement was to be a model used in Astor marriages for generations to come. It was also Astor’s means of circumventing the laws against primogeniture.

  A new rule was being laid down for the American aristocracy. Old money could refresh itself through marriage to new money, but there was usually a price to pay.

  Meanwhile, things had been looking up for the Livingstons in other ways. By 1807, “Chancellor” Robert R. Livingston, Jr., had managed to live down the embarrassment of what is known in the family as his Louisiana Purchase caper.* Over, too, were his years of living in the shadow of his former friend and classmate John Jay and of having to bolster his ego with a second-rate New York State administrative title, which he had officially lost six years earlier.

  Ever since meeting Robert Fulton during his Paris days, Livingston had been working closely with Fulton on his ideas for steam and submarine propulsion. In Paris, the two had demonstrated a submarine boat, the Nautilus, and in 1802 had conducted successful trials of a paddle-wheel steamboat on the Seine. But neither the French, British, nor U.S. governments had shown much interest in these inventions, and the whole idea of steam-driven vessels had been branded Fulton’s Folly.

  But the two had persisted, and the steamboat had become very much a Livingston family affair. Fulton married a Livingston cousin, and the men were soon joined by Robert Livingston’s wife’s brother, John Stevens. In 1802, Livingston had been able to obtain an absolute monopoly to operate steamboats—before there were such things—in all the waters within and surrounding New York State. In obtaining these exclusive rights, it certainly had not hurt that Livingston himself was a former New York State official and that his brother Edward was at the time mayor of New York City. With renewals, this monopoly would extend for the next thirty-five years.

  On August 17, 1807, Fulton’s Folly was ready for her maiden voyage up the Hudson River. She was christened the North River Steam Boat—later to be renamed the Clermont after Robert Livingston’s estate—and she was certainly an ungainly-looking affair, 130 feet long and only 16 feet wide, with a 16-foot paddle wheel. It was hard for most people to see how such a long, skinny vessel managed to stay upright in the water without keeling over on its side. A large crowd of jolly onlookers turned up at the pier to see the North River off, and there was a great deal of joking. What the spectators had come to see, of course, once the craft had built up a full head of steam, was a huge midriver explosion. Instead, disappointed, they watched as the steamship slid smoothly out of her dock and moved upriver against the tide at a brisk pace. Twenty-four hours later, the North River made an intermediate stop at Robert Livingston’s Clermont, and eight hours after that, she docked safely in Albany. Soon the boat was operating on a regular schedule between the two cities.

  The success of Robert Fulton’s steamboat, and of the Fulton-Livingston partnership, was not an unmixed blessing for the Livingston family. As mentioned earlier, Fulton’s wife would claim that her husband was improperly appropriating and selling shares of steamboat company stock that were rightfully hers. Soon, rival steamboat companies would be challenging Livingston’s monopoly to New York State waters with lawsuits that were costly to defend.

  One of these upstarts was a rough-spoken giant of a man named Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. An ex-ferryboat captain, Vanderbilt was given command of a steamboat owned by a man named Gibbons and began operating it on the Hudson in opposition to Livingston’s line and in defiance of the Livingston monopoly. Livingston promptly obtained a restraining order from the courts, which Vanderbilt also defied, but he failed to reckon on the power of the Livingston connections. As mayor of New York, Edward Livingston had appointed a former Revolutionary soldier named Jacob Hays to the police force and in 1802 had given him the resounding title of high constable of the city of New York. Jacob Hays was dispatched to serve the papers on Vanderbilt and to take the commodore into custody. “If you want to arrest me,” the commodore told Hays angrily, “you’ll have to carry me off my boat!” The high constable promptly jumped aboard, grabbed the huge commodore under the armpits, and threw him over the railing onto the dock.

  Still, despite such attempted inroads and uprisings, it had to be admitted that Fulton and Livingston had revolutionized American transportation. The trip by sailboat from Manhattan to Albany had taken anywhere from a week to ten days, depending on the tides, the winds, and the weather. Now it could be done in just over twenty-four hours, and as refinements to Fulton’s invention were developed, the length of the journey was cut to less than half of that. Soon there was overnight service, and a popular song called “Why Do They All Take the Night Boat to Albany?”

  The steamboat also had a profound effect on the environment of the Hudson River valley and of other peaceful river valleys across the United States. Gone were the sleek and stately Hudson River sloops that, with tall masts and broad sails, plied their silent way up and down the river. In their place were the noisy steamboats, blowing raucous whistles and belching steam. Soon, along the riverbanks, would come even noisier and dirtier railroad trains, and in the wake of the railroads would follow the superhighways, with the exhaust from internal combustion engines despoiling the air.

  But the steamboat was the first mode of transportation to open up the city to the surrounding countryside. Steam-driven ferries and private yachts made Manhattan an easy commute from such outlying river communities as Tarrytown, Hastings-on-Hudson, and Dobbs Ferry.

  John Jacob Astor may have helped invent high-powered Manhattan real estate deals. But Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton had helped invent suburbia.

  *When New York’s First subway system was being planned, it was discovered that much of the earth through which the city planned to tunnel was the property of Astor heirs.

  *In 1801, President Jefferson had offered the chancellor the position of minister to France with the specific assignment of negotiating with Napoleon for the purchase of “Louisiana,” which then meant the Florida Panhandle and the port of New Orleans. Two years later, however, Livingston’s negotiations with France were still dragging on with no agreement in sight. To assist him, Jefferson then dispatched James Monroe and, just two days after Monroe’s arrival, Napoleon startled the entire world by offering the United States not only the land it wanted but the entire Louisiana Territory—825,000 square miles, an acquisition that would double the size of America. Then, most unwisely, Livingston had decided to claim full credit for the purchase, and to do so altered the dates in his calendar so that it appeared the French offer had been made the day before Monroe’s arrival. He issued a self-serving statement to the press to that effect, which, needless to say, was immediately and indignantly denied by the White House. Livingston was summarily removed from his French post, and—humiliation piled on humiliation—was replaced by his brother-in-law John Armstrong. Livingston spent the next year and a half wandering about Europe, sulking and licking his wounds.

  13

  Endangered Species

  The American aristocracy wasn’t very old before its members were complaining that things just weren’t what they used to be. The basis of their lament was that “new mo
ney,” such as Mr. Astor’s, was forcing the concept of “old family” into the shadows and that precious standards of gentility and manners and probity and public service were disintegrating in the process. One of the first to sound the alarm was the New York diarist and gentleman George Templeton Strong, who started recording his impressions of a diminished social scene in 1835 and who bemoaned:

  How New York has fallen off during the last forty years! Its intellect and culture have been diluted and swamped by a great flood-tide of material wealth … men whose bank accounts are all they can rely on for social position and influence. As for their ladies, not a few of who were driven in the most sumptuous turnouts, with liveried servants, looked as if they might have been cooks or chambermaids a very few years ago.

  A generation later, in 1867, Mrs. Elizabeth Ellet echoed the same sentiments in a book titled The Queens of American Society, in which she lovingly celebrated the lives of bygone ladies named Livingston, Jay, Morris, Roosevelt, Beekman, Van Rensselaer, Van Cortlandt, Adams, and Otis—and rather pointedly omitted any mention of Astors or Vanderbilts. Of these families, who were Mrs. Ellet’s contemporaries, she had nothing at all nice to say:

  These leaders of gayety flutter in the admiring gaze of the stupid and ignorant masses, but they are not worthy to be named in the same category with those who can boast better claims to distinction than merely the possession of money. It is not worth our while to treasure the names of ladies of this order, who have made themselves conspicuous entirely by the extravagance of their entertainments, the excessive costliness of their dress, or their disregard of all feminine discretion. It is very easy to create a sensation in New York, or any large city. Where there is a display of unbounded wealth, such old-fashioned articles as morality and good taste are often despised.… The wildest stories are extant in current gossip about these dames of the gay world. One, who is building a splendid house near Central Park, is said to get herself up with hasheesh for dissipation. Another, overturned in a pony drive, and almost swooning, faintly exclaimed, “Take me to my children!”—“She’ll have to be introduced to them,” observed a cynical bystander. To rise and reign among the money-worshiping idiots of this kind of fashion in New York … it is only necessary to possess millions and scatter money lavishly for show. No matter how the riches are obtained: dishonesty, cruelty, repudiation of debts, even fraud, provided it comes not under the ban of law, are lost in the brightness with which wealth covers its possessor. But such worse than vulgar parvenues dare not aspire even to admission to the society ruled by ladies such as are illustrated in this volume.…