Part 20 (1/2)
The wealth of the Rhinelander family is commonly placed at about $100,000,000. But this, there is excellent reason to believe, is an absurdly low approximation. Nearly a century and a half ago William and Frederick Rhinelander kept a bakeshop on William street, New York City, and during the Revolution operated a sugar factory. They also built s.h.i.+ps and did a large commission business. It is usually set forth, in the plenitude of eulogistic biographies, that their thrift and ability were the foundation of the family's immense fortune. Little research is necessary to shatter this error. That they conducted their business in the accepted methods of the day and exercised great astuteness and frugality, is true enough, but so did a host of other merchants whose descendants are even now living in poverty. Some other explanation must be found to account for the phenomenal increase of the original small fortune and its unshaken retention.
This explanation is found partly in the fraudulent means by which, decade after decade, they secured land and water grants from venal city administrations, and in the singularly dubious arrangement by which they obtained an extremely large landed property, now having a value of tens upon tens of millions, from Trinity Church. Since the full and itemized details of these transactions have been elaborated upon in previous chapters, it is hardly necessary to repeat them. It will be recalled that, as important personages in Tammany Hall, the dominant political party in New York City, the Rhinelanders used the powers of city government to get grant after grant for virtually nothing. From Trinity Church they got a ninety-nine year lease of a large tract in what is now the very hub of the business section of New York City--which tract they subsequently bought in fee simple. Another large tract of New York City real estate came into their possession through the marriage of William C. Rhinelander, of the third generation, to a daughter of John Rutgers.
This Rutgers was a lineal descendant of Anthony Rutgers, who, in 1731, obtained from the royal Governor Cosby the gift of what was then called the ”Fresh Water Pond and Swamp”--a stretch of seventy acres of little value at the time, but which is now covered with busy streets and large commercial and office buildings. What the circ.u.mstances were that attended this grant are not now known. The grant consisted of what are now many blocks along Broadway north of Lispenard street. It is not merely business sections which the Rhinelander family owns, however; they derive stupendous rentals from a vast number of tenement houses.
The Rhinelanders, also, employ their great surplus revenues in constantly buying more land. With true aristocratic aspirations, they have not been satisfied with mere plebeian American mansions, gorgeous palaces though they be; they set out to find a European palace with warranted royal a.s.sociations, and found one in the famous castle of Schonberg, on the Rhine, near Oberwesel, which they bought and where they have ensconced themselves. How great the wealth of this family is may be judged from the fact that one of the Rhinelanders--William--left an estate valued at $50,000,000 at his death in December, 1907.
THE SCHERMERHORNS.
The factors entering into the building up of the Schermerhorn fortune were almost identical with those of the Astor, the Goelet and the Rhinelander fortunes. The founder, Peter Schermerhorn, was a s.h.i.+p chandler during the Revolution. Parts of his land and other possessions he bought with the profits from his business; other portions, as has been brought out, he obtained from corrupt city administrations. His two sons continued the business of s.h.i.+p chandlers; one of them--”Peter the Younger”--was especially active in extending his real estate possessions, both by corrupt favors of the city officials and by purchase. One tract of land, extending from Third avenue to the East River and from Sixty-fourth to Seventy-fifth street, which he secured in the early part of the nineteenth century, became worth a colossal fortune in itself. It is now covered with stores, buildings and densely populated tenement houses. ”Peter the Younger” quickly gravitated into the profitable and fas.h.i.+onable business of the day--the banking business, with its succession of frauds, many of which have been described in the preceding chapters. He was a director of the Bank of New York from 1814 until his death in 1852.
It seems quite superfluous to enlarge further upon the origin of the great landed fortunes of New York City; the typical examples given doubtless serve as expositions of how, in various and similar ways, others were acquired. We shall advert to some of the great fortunes in the West based wholly or largely upon city real estate.
While the Astors, the Goelets, the Rhinelanders and others, or rather the entire number of inhabitants, were trans.m.u.ting their land into vast and increasing wealth expressed in terms of hundreds of millions in money, Nicholas Longworth was aggrandizing himself likewise in Cincinnati.
HOW LONGWORTH BEGAN.
Longworth had been born in Newark, N. J., in 1782, and at the age of twenty-one had migrated to Cincinnati, then a mere outpost, with a population of eight hundred sundry adventurers. There he studied law and was admitted to practice. The story of how Longworth became a landowner is given by Houghton as follows: His first client was a man accused of horse stealing. In those frontier days, a horse represented one of the most valuable forms of property; and, as under a system wherein human life was inconsequential compared to the preservation of property, the penalty for stealing a horse was usually death. No term of reproach was more invested with cutting contempt and cruel hatred than that of a horse thief. The case looked black. But Longworth somehow contrived to get the accused off with acquittal. The man--so the story further runs--had no money to pay Longworth's fee and no property except two second-hand copper stills. These also were high in the apprais.e.m.e.nt of property values, for they could be used to make whisky, and whisky could be in turn used to debauch the Indian tribes and swindle them of furs and land. These stills Longworth took and traded them off to Joel Williams, a tavern-keeper who was setting up a distillery. In exchange, Longworth received thirty-three acres of what was then considered unpromising land in the town.[167] From time to time he bought more land with the money made in law; this land lay on what were then the outskirts of the place. Some of the lots cost him but ten dollars each.
As immigration swarmed West and Cincinnati grew, his land consequently took on enhanced value. By 1830 the population was 24,831; twenty years later it had reached 118,761, and in 1860, 171,293 inhabitants. For a Western city this was a very considerable population for the period. The growth of the city kept on increasingly. His land lay in the very center of the expanding city, in the busiest part of the business section and in the best portion of the residential districts. Indeed, so rapidly did its value grow soon after he got it, that it was no longer necessary for him to practice law or in any wise crook to others. In 1819 he gave up law, and thenceforth gave his entire attention to managing his property.
An extensive vineyard, which he laid out in Ohio, added to his wealth.
Here he cultivated the Catawba grape and produced about 150,000 bottles a year.
All available accounts agree in describing him as merciless. He foreclosed mortgages with pitiless prompt.i.tude, and his adroit knowledge of the law, approaching if not reaching, that of an unscrupulous pettifogger, enabled him to get the upper hand in every transaction. His personal habits were considered repulsive by the conventional and fastidious. ”He was dry and caustic in his remarks,” says Houghton, ”and very rarely spared the object of his satire. He was plain and careless in his dress, looking more a beggar than a millionaire.”
HIS VAGARIES--SO CALLED.
There were certain other conventional respects in which he was woefully deficient, and he had certain singularities which severely taxed the comprehension of routine minds. None who had the appearance of respectable charity seekers could get anything else from him than contemptuous rebuffs. For respectability in any form he had no use; he scouted and scoffed at it and pulverized it with biting and grinding sarcasm. But once any man or woman pa.s.sed over the line of respectability into the besmeared realm of sheer disrepute, and that person would find Longworth not only accessible but genuinely sympathetic. The drunkard, the thief, the prost.i.tute, the veriest wrecks of humanity could always tell their stories to him and get relief. This was his grim way of striking back at a commercial society whose lies and shams and hypocrisies he hated; he knew them all; he had practiced them himself. There is good reason to believe that alongside of his one personality, that of a rapacious miser, there lived another personality, that of a philosopher.
Certainly he was a very unique type of millionaire, much akin to Stephen Girard. He had a clear notion (for he was endowed with a highly a.n.a.lytical and penetrating mind) that in giving a few coins to the abased and the wretched he was merely returning in infinitesimal proportion what the prevailing system, of which he was so conspicuous an exemplar, took from the whole people for the benefit of a few; and that this system was unceasingly turning out more and more wretches.
Long after Longworth had become a multimillionaire he took a savage, perhaps a malicious, delight in doing things which shocked all current conceptions of how a millionaire should act. To understand the intense scandal caused by what were considered his vagaries, it is only necessary to bear in mind the ultra-lofty position of a multimillionaire at a period when a man worth $250,000 was thought very rich. There were only a few millionaires in the United States, and still fewer multimillionaires. Longworth ranked next to John Jacob Astor. On one occasion a beggar called at Longworth's office and pointed eloquently at his gaping shoes. Longworth kicked off one of his own untied shoes and told the beggar to try it on. It fitted. Its mate followed. Then after the beggar left, Longworth sent a boy to the nearest shoe store, with instructions to get a pair of shoes, but in no circ.u.mstances to pay more than a dollar and a half.
This remarkable man lived to the age of eighty-one; when he died in 1863 in a splendid mansion which he had built in the heart of his vineyard, his estate was valued at $15,000,000. He was the largest landowner in Cincinnati, and one of the largest in the cities of the United States.
The value of the land that he bequeathed has increased continuously; in the hands of his various descendants to-day it is many times more valuable than the huge fortune which he left. Cincinnati, with its population of 325,902,[168] pays incessant tribute in the form of a vast rent roll to the scions of the man whose main occupation was to hold on to the land he had got for almost nothing. Unlike the founder of the fortune the present Longworth generation never strays from the set formulas of respectability; it has intermarried with other rich families: and Nicholas, a namesake and grandson of the original, and a representative in Congress, married in circ.u.mstances of great and lavish pomp a daughter of President Roosevelt, thus linking a large fortune, based upon vested interests, with the ruling executive of the day and strategically combining wealth with direct political power.
The same process of reaping gigantic fortunes from land went on in every large city. In Chicago, with its phenomenally speedy growth of population and its vast array of workers, immense fortunes were ama.s.sed within an astonis.h.i.+ngly short period. Here the growth of large private fortunes was marked by much greater celerity than in the East, although these fortunes are not as large as those based upon land in the Eastern cities.
MARSHALL FIELD AND LEITER.
The largest landowners that developed in Chicago were Marshall Field and Levi Z. Leiter. In 1895 the Illinois Labor Bureau, in that year happening to be under the direction of able and conscientious officials, made a painstaking investigation of land values in Chicago. It was estimated that the 266 acres of land, const.i.tuting what was owned by individuals and private corporations in one section alone--the South Side,--were worth $319,000,000. This estimate was made at a time when the country was slowly recovering, as the set phrase goes, from the panic of 1892-94, and when land values were not in a state of inflation or rise. The amount of $319,000,000 was calculated as being solely the value of the land, not counting improvements, which were valued at as much more. The princ.i.p.al landowner in this one section, not to mention other sections of that immense city, was Marshall Field, with $11,000,000 worth of land; the next was Leiter, who owned in that section land valued at $10,500,000.[169] It appeared from this report that eighteen persons owned $65,000,000 of this $319,000,000 worth of land, and that eighty-eight persons owned $136,000,000 worth--or one-half of the entire business center of Chicago. Doubling the sums credited to Field and Leiter (that is to say, adding the value of the improvements to the value of the land), this brought Field's real estate in that one section to a value of $22,000,000, and Leiter's to nearly the same. This estimate was confirmed to a surprising degree by the inventory of Field's executors reported to the court early in 1907. The executors of Field's will placed the value of his real estate in Chicago at $30,000,000. This estimate did not include $8,000,000 worth of land which the executors reported that he owned in New York City, nor the millions of dollars of his land possessions elsewhere.
FIELD'S MANY POSSESSIONS.
Field left a fortune of about $100,000,000 (as estimated by the executors) which he bequeathed princ.i.p.ally to two grandsons, both of which heirs were in boyhood. The factors const.i.tuting this fortune are various. At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the executors made their inventory, by a mult.i.tude of bonds and stocks in a wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining corporations. The variety of Field's possessions and his numerous forms of owners.h.i.+p were such that we shall have pertinent occasion to deal more relevantly with his career in subsequent parts of this work.
[Ill.u.s.tration: MARSHALL FIELD.]