Part 16 (1/2)
CHAPTER VI
THE PROPULSION OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE
At the time of his father's death, William B. Astor, the chief heir of John Jacob Astor's twenty million dollars, was fifty-six years old. A tall, ponderous man, his eyes were small, contracted, with a rather vacuous look, and his face was sluggish and unimpressionable. Extremely unsocial and taciturn, he never betrayed emotion and generally was dest.i.tute of feeling. He took delight in affecting a carelessly-dressed, slouchy appearance as though deliberately notifying all concerned that one with such wealth as he was privileged to ignore the formulas of punctilious society. In this slovenly, stoop-shouldered man with his cold, abstracted air no one would have detected the richest man in America.
Acquisitiveness was his most marked characteristic. Even before his father's death he had ama.s.sed a fortune of his own by land speculations and banking connections, and he had inherited $500,000 from his uncle Henry, a butcher on the Bowery. It was said in 1846 that he possessed an individual fortune of $5,000,000. During the last years of his father he had been president of the American Fur Co., and he otherwise knew every detail of his father's multifarious interests and possessions.
WILLIAM B. ASTOR'S PARSIMONY.
He lived in what was considered a fine mansion on Lafayette place, adjoining the Astor Library. The sideboards were heaped with gold plate, and polyglot servants in livery stood obediently by at all times to respond to his merest nod. But he cared little for this show, except in that it surrounded him with an atmosphere of power. His frugality did not arise from wise self-control, but from his parsimonious habits. He scanned and revised the smallest item of expense. Wine he seldom touched, and the average merchant spent more for his wardrobe than he did. At a time when the rich despised walking and rode in carriages drawn by fast horses, he walked to and from his business errands. This severe economy he not only practiced in his own house, but he carried it into every detail of his business. Arising early in the morning, he attended to his private correspondence before breakfast. This meal was served punctually at 9 o'clock. Then he would stride to his office on Prince street. A contemporary writer says of him:
He knew every inch of real estate that stood in his name, every bond, contract and lease. He knew what was due when leases expired, and attended personally to the matter. No tenants could expend a dollar, or put in a pane of gla.s.s without his personal inspection. His father sold him the Astor House [an hotel] for the sum of one dollar. The lessees were not allowed to spend one cent on the building, without his supervision and consent, unless they paid for it themselves.
In the upper part of New York hundreds of lots can be seen enclosed by dilapidated fences, disfigured by rocks and waste material, or occupied as [truck] gardens. They are eligibly located, many of them surrounded by a fas.h.i.+onable population....
Mr. Astor owned most of these corner lots but kept the corners for a rise. He would neither sell nor improve them.... He knew that no parties can improve the center of a block without benefiting the corners.
He was sombre and solitary, dwelt alone, mixed little with general society, gave little and abhorred beggars.[143]
It was a common saying of him ”when he paid out a cent he wanted a cent in return;” and as to his abject meannesses we forbear relating the many stories of him. He pursued, in every respect, his father's methods in using the powers of city government to obtain valuable water grants for substantially nothing, and in employing his surplus wealth for further purchases of land and in investments in other profitable channels. No scruples of any kind did he allow to interfere with his constant aim of increasing his fortune. His indifference to compunctions was shown in many ways, not the least in his open support of notoriously corrupt city and State administrations.
This corruption was by no means one existing despite him and his cla.s.s, and one that was therefore accepted grudgingly as an irremediable evil.
Far from it. Corrupt government was welcomed by the landholding, trading and banking cla.s.s, for by it they could secure with greater facility the perpetual rights, franchises, privileges and the exemptions which were adapted to their expanding aims and riches. By means of it they were not only enabled to pile up greater and greater wealth, but to set themselves up in law as a conspicuously privileged body, distinct from the ma.s.s of the people.
THE PURCHASE OF LAWS.
Publicly they might pretend a proper and ostentatious horror of corruption. Secretly, however, they quickly dispensed with what were to them idle dronings of political cant. As capitalists they ascribed their success to a rigid application and practicality; and being practical they went about purchasing laws by the most short-cut and economical method. They had the money; the office-holders had the votes and governmental power; consequently the one bought the other. It was a systematic corruption springing entirely from the propertied cla.s.ses; they demanded it, were responsible for it and kept it up. It worked like an endless chain; the land, charters, franchises and privileges corruptly obtained in one set of years yielded vast wealth, part of which was used in succeeding years in getting more law-created sources of wealth. If professional politicians had long since got into the habit of expecting to be bought, it was because the landholders, traders and bankers had accustomed them to the lucrative business of getting bribes in return for extraordinary laws.
Since the men of wealth, or embryo capitalists who by hook or crook raised the funds to bribe, were themselves ready at all times to buy laws in common councils, legislatures and in Congress, it naturally followed that each of them was fully as eager to partic.i.p.ate in the immense profits accruing from charters, franchises or special grants obtained by others of their own cla.s.s. They never questioned the means by which these laws were put through. They did not care. The mere fact that a franchise was put through by bribery was a trite, immaterial circ.u.mstance. The sole, penetrating question was whether it were a profitable project. If it were, no man of wealth hesitated in investing his money in its stock and in sharing its revenue. It could not be expected that he would feel moral objections, even the most attenuated, for the chances were that while he might not have been a party to the corrupt obtaining of this or that particular franchise, yet he was involved in the grants of other special endowments. Moreover, money making was not built on morality; its whole foundation and impetus lay in the extraction of profits. Society, it is true, professed to move on lofty moral planes, but this was a colossal pretension and nothing less.
THE INVERTED NATURE OF SOCIETY.
Society--and this is a truth which held equally strong of succeeding decades--was incongruously inverted. In saying this, the fact should not be ignored that the capitalist, as applied to the man who ran a factory or other enterprise, was an indigenous factor in that period, even although the money or inventions by which he was able to do this, were often obtained by fraud. Every needed qualification must be made for the time and the environment, and there should be neither haste in indiscriminately condemning nor in judging by the standards or maturity of later generations.
Yet, viewing society as a whole and measuring the results by the standards and ideas then prevailing, it was undoubtedly true that those who did the world's real services were the lowly, despoiled and much discriminated-against ma.s.s of mankind. Their very poverty was a crime, for after they were plundered and expropriated, either by the ruling cla.s.ses of their own country or of the United States, the laws regarded them as semi-criminals, or, at best, as excrescences to whom short shrift was to be given. They made the clothes, the shoes, hats, s.h.i.+rts, underwear, tools, and all the other necessities that mankind required; they tilled the ground and produced its food. Curiously enough, those who did these indispensable things were condemned by the encompa.s.sing system to live in the poorest and meanest habitations and in the most precarious uncertainty. When sick, disabled or superannuated they were cast aside by the capitalist cla.s.s as so much discarded material to eke out a prolonged misery of existence, to be thrown in penal inst.i.tutions or to starve. Substantially everywhere in the United States, vagrancy laws were in force which decreed that an able-bodied man out of work and homeless must be adjudged a vagrant and imprisoned in the workhouse or penetentiary. The very law-making inst.i.tutions that gave to a privileged few the right to expropriate the property of the many, drastically plunged the many down still further after this process of spoliation, like a man who is waylaid and robbed and then arrested and imprisoned because he has been robbed.
On the other hand, the cla.s.s which had the money, no matter how that money was gotten, irrespective of how much fraud or sacrifice of life attended its ama.s.sing, stood out with a luminous distinctness. It arrogated to itself all that was superior, and it exacted, and was invested with, a lordly deference. It lived in the finest mansions and laved in luxuries. Surrounded with an indescribably pretentious air of importance, it radiated tone, command and prestige.
But, such was the destructive, intestinal character of compet.i.tive warfare, that even this cla.s.s was continually in the throes of convulsive struggles. Each had to fight, not merely to get the wealth of others, but to keep what he already possessed. If he could but frustrate the attempts of compet.i.tors to take what he had, he was fortunate. As he preyed upon the laborer, so did the rest of his cla.s.s seek to prey upon him. If he were less able, less cunning, or more scrupulous than they, his ruination was certain. It was a system in which all methods were gauged not by the best but by the worst. Thus it was that many capitalists, at heart good men, kindly disposed and innately opposed to duplicity and fraud, were compelled to adopt the methods of their more successful but thoroughly unprincipled compet.i.tors. And, indeed, realizing the impregnating nature of example and environment, one cannot but conclude that the tragedies of the capitalist cla.s.s represented so many victims of the compet.i.tive system, the same as those among the wageworkers, although in a very different way. Yet in this bewildering jumble of fortune-s.n.a.t.c.hing, an extraordinary circ.u.mstance failed to impress itself upon the cla.s.s which took over to itself the claim to superior intelligence and virtue. The workers, for the most part, instinctively, morally and intellectually, knew that this system was wrong, a horror and a nightmare. But even the capitalist victims of the compet.i.tive struggle, which awarded supremacy to the knave and the trickster, went to their doom praising it as the only civilized, rational system and as unchangeable and even divinely ordained.
THE PREVAILING CORRUPTION.
If corruption was flagrant in the early decades of the nineteenth century, it was triply so in the middle decades. This was the period of all periods when common councils all over the country were being bribed to give franchises for various public utility systems, and legislatures and Congress for charters, land, money, and laws for a great number of railroad and other projects. The numerous specific instances cannot be adverted to here; they will be described more appropriately in subsequent parts of this work. For the present, let this general and sweeping observation suffice.
The important point which here obtrudes itself is that in every case, without an exception, the wealth ama.s.sed by fraud was used in turn to put through more frauds, and that the net acc.u.mulation of these successive frauds is seen in the great private fortunes of to-day. We have seen how the original Astor fortune was largely derived by the use of both force and fraud among the Indians, and by the exercise of cunning and corruption in the East. John Jacob Astor's immense wealth descends mostly to William B. Astor. In turn, one of the third generation, John Jacob Astor, Jr., representing his father, William B.
Astor, uses a portion of this wealth in becoming a large stockholder in the New York Central Railroad, and in corrupting the New York Legislature still further to give enormously valuable grants and special laws with incalculably valuable exemptions to that railroad. John Jacob Astor, Jr., never built a railroad in his life; he knew nothing about railroads; but by virtue of the possession of large surplus wealth, derived mainly from rents, he was enabled to buy enough of the stock to make him rank as a large stockholder. And, then, he with the other stockholders, bribed the Legislature for the pa.s.sage of more laws which enormously increased the value of their stock.
It is altogether clear from the investigations and records of the time that the New York Central Railroad was one of the most industrious corrupters of legislatures in the country, although this is not saying much in dealing with a period when every State Legislature, none excepted, was making gifts of public property and of laws in return for bribes, and when Congress, as was proved in official investigations, was prodigal in doing likewise.[144]