HUMANITY OF NO CONSEQUENCE.

Human life was nothing; the supremacy of the property idea dominated all thought and all laws, not because mankind was callous to suffering, wretchedness and legalized murder, but because thought and law represented what the propertied interests demanded. If the proletarian white population had been legal slaves, as the negroes in the South had been, much consideration would have been bestowed upon their gullets and domiciles, for then they would have been property; and who ever knew the owner of property to destroy the article which represented money? But being "free" men and women and children, the proletarians were simply so many bundles of flesh whose sickness and death meant pecuniary loss to no property-holder. Therefore casualities to them were a matter of no great concern to a society that was taught to venerate the sacredness of property as embodied in brick and stone walls, clothes, machines, and furniture, which same, if inert, had the all-important virile quality of having a cash value, which the worker had not.

But these landlords "of the highest character" not only owned, and regularly collected rents from, tenement houses which filled the cemeteries, but they also resorted to the profitable business of leasing certain tenements to middlemen who guaranteed them by lease a definite and never-failing annual rental. Once having done this, the landlords did not care what the middlemen did—how much rent they exacted, or in what condition they allowed the tenements. "The middlemen," further reported the Metropolitan Board of Health,

are frequently of the most heartless and unscrupulous character and make large profits by sub-letting. They leave no space unoccupied: they rent sheds, basements and even cellars to families and lodgers; they divide rooms by partitions, and then place a whole family in a single room, to be used for living, cooking, and sleeping purposes. In the Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Tenth, and Fourteenth Wards may be found large, old fashioned dwellings originally constructed for one family, subdivided and sublet to such an extent that even the former sub-cellars are occupied by two or more families. There is a cellar population of not less than 20,000 in New York City.

Here, again, shines forth with blinding brightness that superior morality of the propertied classes. There is no record of a single landlord who refused to pocket the great gains from the ownership of tenement houses. Great, in fact, excessive gains they were, for the landowning class considered tenements "magnificent investments" (how edifying a phrase!) and all except one held on to them. That one was William Waldorf Astor of the present generation, who, we are told, "sold a million dollars worth of unpromising tenement house property in 1890."[156] What fantasy of action was it that caused William Waldorf Astor to so depart from the accepted formulas of his class as to give up these "magnificent investments?" Was it an abhorrence of tenements, or a growing fastidiousness as to the methods? It is to be observed that up to that time he and his family had tenaciously kept the revenues from their tenements; evidently then, the source of the money was not a troubling factor. And in selling those tenements he must have known that his profits on the transaction would be charged by the buyers against the future tenants and that even more overcrowding would result. What, then, was the reason?

About the year 1887 there developed an agitation in New York City against the horrible conditions in tenement houses, and laws were popularly demanded which would put a stop to them, or at least bring some mitigation. The whole landlord class virulently combated this agitation and these proposed laws. What happened next? Significantly enough a municipal committee was appointed by the mayor to make an inquiry into tenement conditions; and this committee was composed of property owners. William Waldorf Astor was a conspicuous member of the committee. The mockery of a man whose family owned miles of tenements being chosen for a committee, the province of which was to find ways of improving tenement conditions, was not lost on the public, and shouts of derision went up. The working population was skeptical, and with reason, of the good faith of this committee. Every act, beginning with the mild and ineffective one of 1867, designed to remedy the appalling conditions in tenement houses, had been stubbornly opposed by the landlords; and even after these puerile measures had finally been passed, the landlords had resisted their enforcement. Whether it was because of the bitter criticisms levelled at him, or because he saw that it would be a good time to dispose of his tenements as a money-making matter before further laws were passed, is not clearly known. At any rate William Waldorf Astor sold large batches of tenements.

AN EXALTED CAPITALIST.

To return, however, to William B. Astor. He was the owner, it was reckoned in 1875, of more than seven hundred buildings and houses, not to mention the many tracts of unimproved land that he held. His income from these properties and from his many varied lines of investments was stupendous. Every one knew that he, along with other landlords, derived great revenues from indescribably malodorous tenements, unfit for human habitation. Yet little can be discerned in the organs of public opinion, or in the sermons or speeches of the day, which showed other than the greatest deference for him and his kind. He was looked up to as a foremost and highly exalted capitalist; no church disdained his gifts;[157] far from it, these were eagerly solicited, and accepted gratefully, and even with servility. None questioned the sources of his wealth, certainly not one of those of his own class, all of whom more or less used the same means and who extolled them as proper, both traditionally and legally, and as in accordance with the "natural laws" of society. No condemnation was visited on Astor or his fellow-landlords for profiting from such ghastly harvests of disease and death. When William B. Astor died in 1875, at the age of eighty-three, in his sombre brownstone mansion at Thirty-fifth street and Fifth avenue, his funeral was an event among the local aristocracy; the newspapers published the most extravagant panegyrics and the estimated $100,000,000 which he left was held up to all the country as an illuminating and imperishable example of the fortune that thrift, enterprise, perseverance, and ability would bring.

FOOTNOTES:

[143] Matthew Hale Smith in "Sunshine and Shadow in New York," 186-187.

[144] See Part III of this work, "The Great Railroad Fortunes".

[145] See Part III, Chapters iv, v, vi, etc.

[146] Proceedings of the [New York City] Commissioners of the Sinking Fund, 1844-1865:213.

[147] Doc. No. 46, Documents of the [New York City] Board of Aldermen, xxi, Part II.

[148] Proceedings of the [New York City] Commissioners of the Sinking Fund, 1844-1865:734.

[149] Ibid:865.

[150] Proceedings of the [New York City] Sinking Fund Commission, 1882:2020-2023.

[151] Documents of the [New York City] Board of Aldermen, 1877, Part II. No. 8.

[152] New York Senate Journal, 1871:482-83.

[153] See Exhibits Doc. No. 8, Documents of the [New York City] Board of Aldermen, 1877.

[154] For a full account of the operations of the Tweed regime see the author's "History of Tammany Hall."

[155] Report of the Metropolitan Board of Health for 1866, Appendix A:38.

[156] "America's Successful Men of Affairs":36.

[157] "No church disdained his gifts." The morals and methods of the church, as exemplified by Trinity Church, were, judged by standards, much worse than those of Astor or of his fellow-landlords or capitalists. These latter did not make a profession of hypocrisy, at any rate. The condition of the tenements owned by Trinity Church was as shocking as could be found anywhere in New York City. We subjoin the testimony given by George C. Booth of the Society for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor before a Senate Investigating Committee in 1885:

Senator Plunkett: Ask him if there is not a great deal of church influence [in politics].

The Witness: Yes, sir, there is Trinity Church.

Q.: Which is the good, and which is the bad?

A.: I think Trinity is the bad.

Q.: Do the Trinity people own a great deal of tenement property?

A.: Yes, sir.

Q.: Do they comply with the law as other people do?

A.: No, sir; that is accounted for in one way—the property is very old and rickety, and perhaps even rotten, so that some allowance must be made on that account.

(Investigation of the Departments of the City of New York, by Special Committee of the [New York] Senate, 1885, 1:193-194.)



CHAPTER VII

THE CLIMAX OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE

The impressive fortune that William B. Astor left was mainly bequeathed in about equal parts to his sons John Jacob II. and William. These scions, by inheritance from various family sources, intermarriage with other rich families, or both, were already rich. Furthermore, having the backing of their father's immense riches, they had enjoyed singularly exceptional opportunities for amassing wealth on their own account.

In 1853 William Astor had married one of the Schermerhorn family. The Schermerhorns were powerful New York City landholders; and if not quite on the same pinnacle in point of wealth as the Astors, were at any rate very rich. The immensely valuable areas of land then held by the Schermerhorns, and still in their possession, were largely obtained by precisely the same means that the Astors, Goelets, Rhinelanders and other conspicuous land families had used.

INTERRELATED WEALTH.

The settled policy, from the start, of the rich men, and very greatly of rich women, was to marry within their class. The result obviously was to increase and centralize still greater wealth in the circumscribed ownership of a few families. In estimating, therefore, the collective wealth of the Astors, as in fact of nearly all of the great fortunes, the measure should not be merely the possessions of one family, but should embrace the combined wealth of interrelated rich families.

The wedding of William Astor (as was that of his son John Jacob Astor thirty-eight years later to a daughter of one of the richest landholding families in Philadelphia) was an event of the day if one judges by the commotion excited among what was represented as the superior class, and the amount of attention given by the newspapers. In reality, viewing them in their proper perspective, these marriages of the rich were infinitesimal affairs, which would scarcely deserve a mention, were it not for the effect that they had in centralizing wealth and for the clear picture that they give of the ideas of the times. Posterity, which is the true arbiter in distinguishing between the enduring and the evanescent, the important and the trivial, rightly cares nothing for essentially petty matters which once were held of the highest importance. Edgar Allan Poe, wearing his life out in extreme poverty, William Lloyd Garrison, thundering against chattel slavery from a Boston garret, Robert Dale Owen spending his years in altruistic endeavors—these men were contemporaries of the Astors of the second generation. Yet a marriage among the very rich was invested by the self-styled creators and dispensers of public opinion with far more importance than the giving out of the world of the most splendid products of genius or the enunciation of principles of the profoundest significance to humanity. Yet why slur the practices of past generations when we to-day are confronted by the same perversions? In the month of February, 1908, for instance, several millions of men in the United States were out of work; in destitution, because something or other stood between them and their getting work; and consequently they and their wives and children had to face starvation. This condition might have been enough to shock even the most callous mind, certainly enough to have impressed the community. But what happened? The superficial historian of the future, who depends upon the newspapers and who gauges his facts accordingly, will conclude that there was little or no misery or abject want; that the people were interested in petty happenings of no ultimate value whatsoever; that an Oriental dance and pantomime given in New York by "society" women, led by Mrs. Waldorf Astor, where a rich young woman reaped astonishment and admiration by coiling a live boa constrictor around her neck, was one of the great events of the day, because the newspapers devoted two columns to it, whereas scarcely any mention was made of armies of men being out of work.

MONEY AND HUMANITY.

As it was in 1908 so was it in the decades when the capitalists of one kind or another were first piling up wealth; they were the weighty class of the day; their slightest doings were chronicled, and their flimsiest sayings were construed oracularly as those of public opinion. Numberless people sickened and died in the industrial strife and in miserable living quarters; ubiquitous capitalism was a battle-field strewn with countless corpses; but none of the professed expositors of morality, religion or politics gave heed to the wounded or the dead, or to the conditions which produced these hideous and perpetual slaughters of men, women and children. But to the victors, no matter what their methods were, or how much desolation and death they left in their path, the richest material rewards were awarded; wealth, luxury, station and power; and the Law, the majestic, exalted Law, upheld these victors in their possessions by force of courts, police, sheriffs, and by rifles loaded with bullets if necessary.

Thus, to recapitulate, the Astors debauched, swindled and murdered the Indians; they defrauded the city of land and of taxes; they assisted in corrupting legislatures; they profited from the ownership of blocks of death-laden tenement houses; they certified to thieving administrations. Once having wrested into their possession the results of all of these and more fraudulent methods in the form of millions of dollars in property, what was their strongest ally? The Law. Yes, the Law, theoretically so impartial and so reverently indued with awe—and with force. From fraud and force the Astor fortune came, and by force, in the shape of law, it was fortified in their control. If a starving man had gone into any one of the Astor houses and stolen even as much as a silver spoon, the Law would have come to the rescue of outraged property by sentencing him to prison. Or if, in case of a riot, the Astor property was damaged, the Law also would have stepped in and compelled the county to idemnify. This Law, this extraordinary code of print which governs us, has been and is nothing more or less, it is evident, than so many statutes to guarantee the retention of the proceeds of fraud and theft, if the piracy were committed in a sufficiently large and impressive way. The indisputable proof is that every single fortune which has been obtained by fraud, is still privately held and is greater than ever; the Law zealously and jealously guards it. So has the Law practically worked; and if the thing is to be judged by its practical results, then the Law has been an instigator of every form of crime, and a bulwark of that which it instigated. Seeing that this is so, it is not so hard to understand that puzzling problem of why so large a portion of the community has resolved itself into a committee of the whole, and while nominally and solemnly professing the accustomed and expected respect for Law, deprecates it, as it is constituted, and often makes no concealment of contempt.

LAW THE STRONGEST ASSET.

In penetrating into the origin and growth of the great fortunes, this vital fact is constantly forced upon the investigator: that Law has been the most valuable asset possessed by the capitalist class. Without it, this class would have been as helpless as a babe. What would the medieval baron have been without armed force? But note how sinuously conditions have changed. The capitalist class, far shrewder than the feudalistic rulers, dispenses with personally equipped armed force. It becomes superfluous. All that is necessary to do is to make the laws, and so guide things that the officials who enforce the laws are responsive to the interests of the propertied classes. Back of the laws are police forces and sheriffs and militia all kept at the expense of city, county and State—at public expense. Clearly, then, having control of the laws and of the officials, the propertied classes have the full benefit of armed forces the expense of which, however, they do not have to defray. It has unfolded itself as a vast improvement over the crude feudal system.

In complete control of the laws, the great propertied classes have been able either to profit by the enforcement, or by the violation, of them. This is nowhere more strikingly shown than in the growth of the Astor fortune, although all of the other great fortunes reveal the same, or nearly identical, factors. With the millions made by a career of crime the original Astors buy land; they get more land by fraud; the Law throws its shield about the property so obtained. They cheat the city out of enormous sums in taxation; the Law does not molest them. On the contrary it allows them to build palaces and to keep on absorbing up more forms of property. In 1875 William Astor builds a railroad in Florida; and as a gift of appreciation, so it is told, the Florida Legislature presents him with 80,000 acres of land. It is wholly probable, if the underlying circumstances were known, that it would be found that an influence more material than a simple burst of gratitude prompted this gift. Where did the money come from with which this railroad was built? And what was the source of other immense funds which were invested in railroads, banks, industrial enterprises, in buying more land and in mortgages—in many forms of ownership?

The unsophisticated acceptor of current sophistries or the apologist might reply that all this money came from legitimate business transactions, the natural increase in the value of land, and thus on. But waiving these superficial explanations and defenses, which really mean nothing more than a forced justification, it is plain that the true sources of these revenues were of a vastly different nature. The millions in rents which flowed in to the Astor's treasury every year came literally from the sweat, labor, misery and murder of a host of men, women, and children who were never chronicled, and who went to their death in eternal obscurity.

THE BASIS OF WEALTH'S STRUCTURE.

It was they who finally had to bear the cost of exorbitant rents; it was their work, the products which they created, which were the bases of the whole structure. And in speaking of murder, it is not deliberate, premeditated murder which is meant, in the sense covered by statute, but that much more insidious kind ensuing from grinding exploitation; in herding human beings into habitations unfit even for animals which need air and sunshine, and then in stubbornly resisting any attempt to improve living conditions in these houses. In this respect, it cannot be too strongly pointed out, the Astors were in nowise different from the general run of landlords. Is it not murder when, compelled by want, people are forced to fester in squalid, germ-filled tenements, where the sunlight never enters and where disease finds a prolific breeding-place? Untold thousands went to their deaths in these unspeakable places. Yet, so far as the Law was concerned, the rents collected by the Astors, as well as by other landlords, were honestly made. The whole institution of Law saw nothing out of the way in these conditions, and very significantly so, because, to repeat over and over again, Law did not represent the ethics or ideals of advanced humanity; it exactly reflected, as a pool reflects the sky, the demands and self-interest of the growing propertied classes. And if here and there a law was passed (which did not often happen) contrary to the expressed opposition of property, it was either so emasculated as to be harmless or it was not enforced.

The direct sacrifice of human life, however, was merely one substratum of the Astor fortune. It is very likely, if the truth were fully known, that the stupendous sums in total that the Astors cheated in taxation, would have been more than enough to have constructed a whole group of railroads, or to have bought up whole sections of the outlying parts of the city, or to have built dozens of palaces. Incessantly they derived immense rentals from their constantly expanding estate, and just as persistently they perjured themselves, and defrauded the city, State and Nation of taxes. It was not often that the facts were disclosed; obviously the city or State officials, with whom the rich acted in collusion, tried their best to conceal them.

GREAT THEFTS OF TAXES.

Occasionally, however, some fragments of facts were brought out by a legislative investigating committee. Thus, in 1890, a State Senate Committee, in probing into the affairs of the tax department, touched upon disclosures which dimly revealed the magnitude of these annual thefts, but which in nowise astonished any well-informed person, because every one knew that these frauds existed. Questioned closely by William M. Ivins, counsel for the committee, Michael Coleman, president of the Board of Assessments and Taxes, admitted that vast stretches of real estate owned by the Astors were assessed at half or less than half of their real value.[158] Then followed this exchange, in which the particular "Mr. Astor" referred to was not made clear:

Q.: You have just said that Mr. Astor never sold?

A.: Once in a while he sells, yes.

Q.: But the rule is that he does not sell?

A.: Well, hardly ever; he has sold, of course.

Q.: Isn't it almost a saying in this community that the Astors buy and never sell?

A.: They are not looked upon as people who dispose of real estate after they once get possession of it.

Q.: Have you the power to exact from them a statement of their rent rolls?

A.: No.

Q.: Don't you think that ... if you are going to levy a tax properly and fully ... you ought to be vested with that power to learn what the returns and revenues of that property are?

A.: No, sir; it's none of our business.[159]

This fraudulent evasion of taxation was anything but confined to the Astor family. It was practiced by the entire large propertied interests, not only in swindling New York City of taxes on real estate, but also those on personal property. Coleman admitted that while the total valuation of the personal property of all the corporations in New York was assessed at $1,650,000,000, they were allowed to swear it down to $294,000,000.

Here we see again at work that fertile agency which has assisted in impoverishing the masses. Rentals are exacted from them, which represent on the average the fourth part of their wages. These rentals are based upon the full assessment of the houses that they live in. In turn, the landlords defraud the city of one-half of this assessment. In order to make up for this continuous deprivation of taxes, the city proceeds time and time again to increase taxes and put out interest-bearing bond issues. These increased taxes, as in the case of all other taxes, fall upon the workers and the results are seen in constantly rising rents and in higher prices for all necessities.

LICENSED PIRACY RAMPANT.

Was any criminal action ever instituted against these rich defrauders? None of which there is any record.

Not a publicist, editor, preacher was there who did not know either generally or specifically of these great frauds in taxation. Some of them might protest in a half-hearted, insincere or meaningless way. But the propertied classes did not mind wordy criticism so long as it was not backed by political action. In other words, they could afford to tolerate, even be amused by, gusty denunciation if neither the laws were changed, nor the particular enforcement or non-enforcement which they demanded. The essential thing with them was to continue conditions by which they could keep on defrauding.

Virtually all that was considered best in society—the men and women who lived in the finest mansions, who patronized art and the opera, who set themselves up as paramount in breeding, manners, taste and fashions—all of these were either parties to this continuous process of fraud or benefited by it. The same is true of this class to-day; for the frauds in taxation are of greater magnitude than ever before. It was not astonishing, therefore, when John Jacob Astor II died in 1890, and William Astor in 1892, that enconiums should be lavished upon their careers. In all the accounts that appeared of them, not a word was there of the real facts; of the corrupt grasping of city land; of the debauching of legislatures and the manipulation of railroads; of their blocks of tenements in which disease and death had reaped so rich a harvest, or of their gigantic frauds in cheating the city of taxes. Not a word of all of these.

Without an exception the various biographies were fulsomely laudatory. This excessive praise might have defeated the purpose of the authors were it not that it was the fashion of the times to depict and accept the multimillionaires as marvels of ability, almost superhuman. This was the stuff fed out to the people; it was not to be wondered at that a period came when the popular mind reacted and sought the opposite extreme in which it laved in the most violent denunciations of the very men whom it had long been taught to revere. That period, too, passed to be succeeded by another in which a more correct judgment will be formed of the magnates, and in which they will appear not as exceptional criminals, but as products of their times and environment, and in their true relation to both of these factors.

The fortune left by John Jacob Astor II in 1890 amounted to about $150,000,000. The bulk of this descended to his son William Waldorf Astor. The $75,000,000 fortune left by William Astor in 1892 was bequeathed to his son John Jacob Astor. These cousins to-day hold the greatest part of the collective Astor fortune.

Having reached the present generation, we shall not attempt to enter into a detailed narrative of their multifarious interests, embracing land, railroads, industries, insurance and a vast variety of other forms of wealth. The purpose of this work is to point out the circumstances underlying the origin and growth of the great private fortunes; in the case of the Astors this has been done sufficiently, perhaps overdone, although many facts have been intentionally left out of these chapters which might very properly have been included. But there are a few remaining facts without which the story would not be complete, and lacking which it might lose some significance.

THE ASTOR FORTUNE DOUBLES.



We have seen how at William B. Astor's death in 1876 the Astor fortune amounted to at least $100,000,000, probably much more. Within sixteen years, by 1892, it had more than doubled in the hands of his two sons. How was it possible to have added the extraordinary sum of $125,000,000 in less than a decade and a half? Individual ability did not accomplish it; it is ludicrous to say that it could have done so. The methods by which much of this increase was gathered in have already been set forth. A large part came from the rise in the value of land, which value arose not from the slightest act of the Astors, but from the growth of the population and the labor of the whole body of workers. This value was created by the producers, but far from owning or even sharing in it, they were compelled to pay heavier and heavier tribute in the form of rent for the very values which they had created. Had the Astors or other landlords gone into a perpetual trance these values would have been created just the same. Then, not content with appropriating values which others created, the landlord class defrauded the city of even the fractional part of these values, in the form of taxation.

Up to the present generation the Astors had never set themselves out as "reformers" in politics. They had plundered right and left, but withal had made no great pretenses. The fortune held by the Astors, so the facts indubitably show, represents a succession of piracies and exploitation. Very curious, therefore, it is to note that the Astors of the present generation have avowed themselves most solicitous reformers and have been members of pretentious, self-constituted committees composed of the "best citizens," the object of which has been to purge New York City of Tammany corruption. Leaving aside the Astors, and considering the attitude of the propertied class as a whole, this posing of the so-called better element as reformers has been, and is, one of the most singular characteristics of American politics, and its most colossal sham. Although continuously, with rare intermissions, the landholders and the railroad and industrial magnates have been either corrupting public officials or availing themselves of the benefits of corrupt politics, many of them, not in New York alone, but in every American city, have been, at the same time, metamorphosing themselves into reformers. Not reformers, of course, in the true, high sense of the word, but as ingenious counterfeits. With the most ardent professions of civic purity and of horror at the prevailing corruption they have come forward on occasions, clothed in a fine and pompous garb of righteousness.

THE QUALITY OF "REFORMERS."

The very men who cheated cities, states and nation out of enormous sums in taxation; who bribed, through their retainers, legislatures, common councils and executive and administrative officials; who corruptly put judges on the bench; who made Government simply an auxiliary to their designs; who exacted heavy tribute from the people in a thousand ways; who forced their employees to work for precarious wages and who bitterly fought every movement for the betterment of the working classes—these were the men who have made up these so-called "reform" committees, precisely as to-day they constitute them.[160]

If there had been the slightest serious attempt to interfere with their vested privileges, corruptly obtained and corruptly enhanced, and with the vast amount of increment and graft that these privileges bought them, they would have instantly raised the cry of revolutionary confiscation. But they were very willing to put an end to the petty graft which the politicians collected from saloons, brothels, peddlers, and the small merchants, and thereby present themselves as respectable and public-spirited citizens, appalled at the existing corruption. The newspapers supported them in this attitude, and occasionally a sufficient number of the voters would sustain their appeals and elect candidates that they presented. The only real difference was that under an openly corrupt machine they had to pay in bribes for franchises, laws and immunity from laws, while under the "reform" administrations, which represented, and toadied to, them, they often obtained all these and more without the expenditure of a cent. It has often been much more economical for them to have "reform" in power; and it is a well known truism that the business-class reform administrations which are popularly assumed to be honest, will go to greater lengths in selling out the rights of the people than the most corrupt political machine, for the reason that their administrations are not generally suspected of corruption and therefore are not closely watched. Moreover, corruption by bribes is not always the most effective kind. There is a much more sinister form. It is that which flows from conscious class use of a responsive government for insidious ends. Practically all of the American "reform" movements have come within this scope.

This is no place for a dissertation on these pseudo reform movements; it is a subject deserving a special treatment by itself. But it is well to advert to them briefly here since it is necessary to give constant insights into the methods of the propertied class. Whether corruption or "reform" administrations were in power the cheating of municipality and State in taxation has gone on with equal vigor.[161]

A VAST ANNUAL INCOME.

The collective Astor fortune, as we have said, amounts to $450,000,000. This, however, is merely an estimate based largely upon their real estate possessions. No one but the Astors themselves know what are their holdings in bonds and stocks of every description. It is safe to venture the opinion that their fortune far exceeds $450,000,000. Their surplus wealth piles up so fast that a large part of it is incessantly being invested in buying more land. Originally owning land in the lower part of Manhattan, they then bought land in Yorkville, then added to their possessions in Harlem, and later in the Bronx, in which part of New York City they now own immense areas. Their estate is growing larger and larger all the time.

In rents in New York City alone it is computed that the Astors collect twenty-five or thirty million dollars a year. The "Astor Estates" are managed by a central office, the agent in charge of which is said to get a salary of $50,000 a year. All the business details are attended to entirely by this agent and his force of subordinates. Of these annual rents a part is distributed among the various members of the Astor family according to the degree of their interest; the remainder is used to buy more land.

The Astor mansions rank among the most pretentious in the United States and in Europe. The New York City residence long occupied by Mrs. William Astor at Fifth avenue and Sixty-fifth street is one of extraordinary luxury and grandeur. Adjoining and connected with it is the equally sumptuous mansion of John Jacob Astor. In these residences, or rather palaces, splendor is piled upon splendor. In Mrs. William Astor's spacious ball-room and picture gallery, balls have been given, each costing, it is said, $100,000. In cream and gold the picture gallery spreads; the walls are profuse with costly paintings, and at one end is a gallery in wrought iron where musicians give out melody on festive occasions. The dining rooms of these houses are of an immensity. Embellished in old oak incrusted with gold, their walls are covered with antique tapestries set in huge oak framework with margins thick with gold. Upon the diners a luxurious ceiling looks down, a blaze of color upon black oak set off by masses of gold borders. Directly above the center of the table are painted garlands of flowers and clusters of fruit. In the hub of this representation is Mrs. Astor's monogram in letters of gold. From the massive hall, with its reproductions of paintings of Marie Antoinette and other old French court characters, its statuary, costly vases and draperies, a wide marble stairway curves gracefully upstairs. To dwell upon all of the luxurious aspects of these residences would compel an extended series of details. In both of the residences every room is a thing of magnificence.

PROXIMITY OF PALACES AND POVERTY.

From these palaces it is but a step, as it were, to gaunt neighborhoods where great parts of the population are crowded in the most inhuman way into wretched tenement houses. It is an undeniable fact that more than fifty blocks on Manhattan Island—each of which blocks is not much larger than the space covered by the Astor mansions—have each a teeming population of from 3,000 to 4,000 persons. In each of several blocks 6,000 persons are congested. In 1855, when conditions were thought bad enough, 417,476 inhabitants were crowded into the section south of Fourteenth street; but in 1907 this district contained fully 750,000 population. Forty years ago the lower sections only of Manhattan were overcrowded, but now the density of congestion has spread to all parts of Manhattan, and to parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn. On an area of two hundred acres in certain parts of New York City not less than 200,000 people exist. It is not uncommon to find eighteen men, women, and children, driven to it by necessity, sleeping in three small, suffocating rooms.



But the New York City residences of the Astors are only a mere portion of their many palaces. They have impressive mansions, costing great sums, at Newport. At Ferncliffe-on-the-Hudson John Jacob Astor has an estate of two thousand acres. This country palace, built in chaste Italian architecture, is fitted with every convenience and luxury. John Jacob Astor's cousin, William Waldorf, some years since expatriated himself from his native country and became a British subject. He bought the Cliveden estate at Taplow, Bucks, England, the old seat of the Duke of Westminster, the richest landlord in England. Thenceforth William Waldorf scorned his native land, and has never even taken the trouble to look at the property in New York which yields him so vast a revenue. This absentee landlord, for whom it is estimated not less than 100,000 men, women and children directly toil, in the form of paying him rent, has surrounded himself in England with a lofty feudal exclusiveness. Sweeping aside the privilege that the general public had long enjoyed of access to the Cliveden grounds, he issued strict orders forbidding trespassing, and along the roads he built high walls surmounted with broken glass. His son and heir, Waldorf Astor, has avowed that he also will remain a British subject. William Waldorf Astor, it should be said, is somewhat of a creator of public opinion; he owns a newspaper and a magazine in London.

* * * * *

The origin and successive development of the Astor fortune have been laid bare in these chapters; not wholly so, by any means, for a mass of additional facts have been left out. Where certain fundamental facts are sufficient to give a clear idea of a presentation, it is not necessary to pile on too much of an accumulation. And yet, such has been the continued emphasis of property-smitten writers upon the thrift, honesty, ability and sagacity of the men who built up the great fortunes, that the impression generally prevails that the Astor fortune is preeminently one of those amassed by legitimate means. These chapters should dispel this illusion.

FOOTNOTES:

[158] See Testimony taken before the [New York] Senate Committee on Cities, 1890, iii:2312, etc.

[159] Testimony taken before the [New York] Senate Committee on Cities, 1890, iii: 2314-2315.

[160] As one of many illustrations of the ethics of the propertied class, the appended newspaper dispatch from Newport, R. I., on Jan. 2, 1903, brings out some significant facts:

"William C. Schermerhorn, whose death is announced in New York, and who was a cousin of Mrs. William Astor, was one of Newport's pioneer summer residents. He was one of New York's millionaires, and his Newport villa is situated on Narragansett avenue near Cliffside, opposite the Pinard cottages.

"Mr. Schermerhorn, with Mrs. Astor and ex-Commodore Gerry, of the New York Yacht Club, in order to avoid the inheritance tax of New York, and to take advantage of Newport's low tax-rate, obtained in January last through their counsel, Colonel Samuel R. Honey, a decree declaring their citizenship in Rhode Island. Since that time Mr. Schermerhorn's residence has been in this state. In last year's tax-list he was assessed for $150,000.

"Mr. Schermerhorn was a member of both the fashionable clubs on Bellevue avenue, the Newport Casino and the Newport Reading-Room."

[161] For further details on this point see Chapter ix, Part II.



CHAPTER VIII

OTHER LAND FORTUNES CONSIDERED

The founding and aggrandizement of other great private fortunes from land were accompanied by methods closely resembling, or identical with, those that the Astors employed.

Next to the Astors' estate the Goelet landed possessions are perhaps the largest urban estates in the United States in value. The landed property of the Goelet family on Manhattan Island alone is estimated at fully $200,000,000.

THE GOELET FORTUNE.

The founder of the Goelet fortune was Peter Goelet, an ironmonger during and succeeding the Revolution. His grandfather, Jacobus Goelet, was, as a boy and young man, brought up by Frederick Phillips, with whose career as a promoter and backer of pirates and piracies, and as a briber of royal officials under British rule, we have dealt in previous chapters. Of Peter Goelet's business methods and personality no account is extant. But as to his methods in obtaining land, there exists little obscurity. In the course of this work it has already been shown in specific detail how Peter Goelet in conjunction with John Jacob Astor, the Rhinelander brothers, the Schermerhorns, the Lorillards and other founders of multimillionaire dynasties, fraudulently secured great tracts of land, during the early and middle parts of the last century, in either what was then, or what is now, in the heart of New York City. It is entirely needless to iterate the narrative of how the city officials corruptly gave over to these men land and water grants before that time municipally owned—grants now having a present incalculable value.[162]

As was the case with John Jacob Astor, the fortune of the Goelets was derived from a mixture of commerce, banking and ownership of land. Profits from trade went toward buying more land, and in providing part of corrupt funds with which the Legislature of New York was bribed into granting banking charters, exemptions and other special laws. These various factors were intertwined; the profits from one line of property were used in buying up other forms and thus on, reversely and comminglingly. Peter had two sons; Peter P., and Robert R. Goelet. These two sons, with an eye for the advantageous, married daughters of Thomas Buchanan, a rich Scotch merchant of New York City, and for a time a director of the United States Bank. The result was that when their father died, they not only inherited a large business and a very considerable stretch of real estate, but, by means of their money and marriage, were powerful dignitaries in the directing of some of the richest and most despotic banks. Peter P. Goelet was for several years one of the directors of the Bank of New York, and both brothers benefited by the corrupt control of the United States Bank, and were principals among the founders of the Chemical Bank.

These brothers had set out with an iron determination to build up the largest fortune they could, and they allowed no obstacles to hinder them. When fraud was necessary they, like the bulk of their class, unhesitatingly used it. In getting their charter for the notorious Chemical Bank, they bribed members of the Legislature with the same phlegmatic serenity that they would put through an ordinary business transaction. This bank, as we have brought out previously, was chartered after a sufficient number of members of the Legislature had been bribed with $50,000 in stock and a large sum of money. Yet now that this bank is one of the richest and most powerful institutions in the United States, and especially as the criminal nature of its origin is unknown except to the historic delver, the Goelets mention the connection of their ancestors with it as a matter of great and just pride. In a voluminous biography giving the genealogies of the rich families of New York—material which was supplied and perhaps written by the families themselves—this boast occurs in the chapter devoted to the Goelets: "They were also numbered among the founders of that famous New York financial institution, the Chemical Bank."[163] Thus do the crimes of one generation become transformed into the glories of another! The stock of the Chemical Bank, quoted at a fabulous sum, so to speak, is still held by a small, compact group in which the Goelets are conspicuous.

From the frauds of this bank the Goelets reaped large profits which systematically were invested in New York City real estate. And progressively their rentals from this land increased. Their policy was much the same as that of the Astors—constantly increasing their land possessions. This they could easily do for two reasons. One was that almost consecutively they, along with other landholders, corrupted city governments to give them successive grants, and the other was their enormous surplus revenue which kept piling up.

ONCE A FARM; NOW OF VAST VALUE.

When William B. Astor inherited in 1846 the greater part of his father's fortune, the Goelet brothers had attained what was then the exalted rank of being millionaires, although their fortune was only a fraction of that of Astor. The great impetus to the sudden increase of their fortune came in the period 1850-1870, through a tract of land which they owned in what had formerly been the outskirts of the city. This land was once a farm and extended from about what is now Union Square to Forty-seventh street and Fifth avenue. It embraced a long section of Broadway—a section now covered with huge hotels, business buildings, stores and theaters. It also includes blocks upon blocks filled with residences and aristocratic mansions. At first the fringe of New York City, then part of its suburbs, this tract lay in a region which from 1850 on began to take on great values, and which was in great demand for the homes of the rich. By 1879 it was a central part of the city and brought high rentals. The same combination of economic influences and pressure which so vastly increased the value of the Astors' land, operated to turn this quondam farm into city lots worth enormous sums. As population increased and the downtown sections were converted into business sections, the fashionables shifted their quarters from time to time, always pushing uptown, until the Goelet lands became a long sweep of ostentatious mansions.

In imitation of the Astors the Goelets steadily adhered, as they have since, to the policy of seldom or never selling any of their land. On the other hand, they bought constantly. On one occasion they bought eighty lots in the block from Fifth to Sixth avenues, Forty-second to Forty-third streets. The price they paid was $600 a lot. These lots have a present aggregate value of perhaps $15,000,000 or more, although they are assessed at much less.

MISERS WITH MILLIONS.

The second generation of the Goelets—counting from the founder of the fortune—were incorrigibly parsimonious. They reduced miserliness to a supreme art. Likewise the third generation. Of Peter Goelet, a grandson of the original Peter, many stories were current illustrating his close-fistedness. His passion for economy was carried to such an abnormal stage that he refused even to engage a tailor to mend his garments.[164] He was unmarried, and generally attended to his own wants. On several occasions he was found in his office at the Chemical Bank industriously absorbed in sewing his coat. For stationery he used blank backs of letters and envelopes which he carefully and systematically saved and put away. His house at Nineteenth street, corner of Broadway, was a curiosity shop. In the basement he had a forge, and there were tools of all kinds over which he labored, while upstairs he had a law library of 10,000 volumes, for it was a fixed, cynical determination of his never to pay a lawyer for advice that he could himself get for the reading.

Yet this miser, who denied himself many of the ordinary comforts and conveniences of life, and who would argue and haggle for hours over a trivial sum, allowed himself one expensive indulgence—expensive for him, at least. He was a lover of fancy fowls and of animals. Storks, pheasants and peacocks could be seen in the grounds about his house, and also numbers of guinea pigs. In his stable he kept a cow to supply him with fresh milk; he often milked it himself.

This eccentric was very melancholy and, apart from his queer collection of pets, cared for nothing except land and houses. Chancing in upon him one could see him intently pouring over a list of his properties. He never tired of doing this, and was petulantly impatient when houses enough were not added to his inventory.

He died in 1879 aged seventy-nine years; and within a few months, his brother Robert, who was as much of an eccentric and miser in his way, passed away in his seventieth year.

THE THIRD GENERATION.

The fortunes of the brothers descended to Robert's two sons, Robert, born in 1841, and Ogden, born in 1846. These wielders of a fortune so great that they could not keep track of it, so fast did it grow, abandoned somewhat the rigid parsimony of the previous generations. They allowed themselves a glittering effusion of luxuries which were popularly considered extravagances but which were in nowise so, inasmuch as the cost of them did not represent a tithe of merely the interest on the principal. In that day, although but thirty years since, when none but the dazzlingly rich could afford to keep a sumptuous steam yacht in commission the year round, Robert Goelet had a costly yacht, 300 feet long, equipped with all the splendors and comforts which up to that time had been devised for ocean craft. Between them, he and his brother Ogden possessed a fortune of at least $150,000,000. The basic structure of this was New York City land, but a considerable part was in railroad stocks and bonds, and miscellaneous aggregations of other securities to the purchase of which the surplus revenue had gone. Thus, like the Astors and other rich landholders, partly by investments made in trade, and largely by fraud, the Goelets finally became not only great landlords but sharers in the centralized ownership of the country's transportation systems and industries.

When Ogden Goelet died he left a fortune of at least $80,000,000, reckoning all of the complex forms of his property, and his brother, Robert, dying in 1899, left a fortune of about the same amount. Two children survived each of the brothers. Then was witnessed that characteristic so symptomatic of the American money aristocracy. A surfeit of money brings power, but it does not carry with it a recognized position among a titled aristocracy. The next step is marriage with title. The titled descendants of the predatory barons of the feudal ages having, generation after generation, squandered and mortgaged the estates gotten centuries ago by force and robbery, stand in need of funds. On the other hand, the feminine possessors of American millions, aided and abetted doubtless by the men of the family, who generally crave a "blooded" connection, lust for the superior social status insured by a title. The arrangement becomes easy. In marrying the Duke of Roxburghe in 1903, May Goelet, the daughter of Ogden, was but following the example set by a large number of other American women of multimillionaire families. It is an indulgence which, however great the superficial consequential money cost may be, is, in reality, inexpensive. As fast as millions are dissipated they are far more than replaced in these private coffers by the collective labor of the American people through the tributary media of rent, interest and profit. In the last ten years the value of the Goelet land holdings has enormously increased, until now it is almost too conservative an estimate to place the collective fortune at $200,000,000.

This large fortune, as is that of the Astors and of other extensive landlords, is not, as has been pointed out, purely one of land possessions. Far from it. The invariable rule, it might be said, has been to utilize the surplus revenues in the form of rents, in buying up controlling power in a great number and variety of corporations. The Astors are directors in a large array of corporations, and likewise virtually all of the other big landlords. The rent-racked people of the City of New York, where rents are higher proportionately than in any other city, have sweated and labored and fiercely struggled, as have the people of other cities, only to deliver up a great share of their earnings to the lords of the soil, merely for a foothold. In turn these rents have incessantly gone toward buying up railroads, factories, utility plants and always more and more land.

WHERE SURPLUS REVENUE HAS GONE.

But the singular continuity does not end here. Land acquired by political or commercial fraud has been made the lever for the commission of other frauds. The railroads now controlled by a few men, among whom the large landowners are conspicuous, were surveyed and built to a great extent by public funds, not private money. As time passes a gradual transformation takes place. Little by little, scarcely known to the people, laws are altered; the States and the Government, representing the interests of the vested class, surrender the people's rights, often even the empty forms of those rights, and great railroad systems pass into the hands of a small cabal of multimillionaires.

To give one of many instances: The Illinois Central Railroad, passing through an industrial and rich farming country, is one of the most profitable railroads in the United States. This railroad was built in the proportion of twelve parts to one by public funds, raised by taxation of the people of that State, and by prodigal gifts of public land grants. The balance represents the investments of private individuals. The cost of the road as reported by the company in 1873 was $48,331 a mile. Of this amount all that private individuals contributed was $4,930 a mile above their receipts; these latter were sums which the private owners gathered in from selling the land given to them by the State, amounting to $35,211 per mile, and the sums that they pocketed from stock waterings amounting to $8,189 a mile. "The unsold land grant," says Professor Frank Parsons, "amounted to 344,368 acres, worth probably over $5,000,000, so that those to whom the securities of the company were issued, had obtained the road at a bonus of nearly $2,000,000 above all they paid in."[165]

By this manipulation, private individuals not only got this immensely valuable railroad for practically nothing, but they received, or rather the laws (which they caused to be made) awarded them, a present of nearly four millions for their dexterity in plundering the railroad from the people. What set of men do we find now in control of this railroad, doing with it as they please? Although the State of Illinois formally retains a nominal say in its management, yet it is really owned and ruled by eight men, among whom are John Jacob Astor, and Robert Walton Goelet, associated with E. H. Harriman, Cornelius Vanderbilt and four others. John Jacob Astor is one of the directors of the Western Union Telegraph monopoly, with its annual receipts of $29,000,000 and its net profits of $8,000,000 yearly; and as for the many other corporations in which he and his family, the Goelets and the other commanding landlords hold stock, they would, if enumerated, make a formidable list.

And while on this phase, we should not overlook another salient fact which thrusts itself out for notice. We have seen how John Jacob Astor of the third generation very eagerly in 1867 invited Cornelius Vanderbilt to take over the management of the New York Central Railroad, after Vanderbilt had proved himself not less an able executive than an indefatigable and effective briber and corrupter. So long as Vanderbilt produced the profits, Astor and his fellow-directors did not care what means he used, however criminal in law and whatever their turpitude in morals. John Jacob Astor of the fourth generation repeats this performance in aligning himself, as does Goelet, with that master-hand Harriman, against whom the most specific charges of colossal looting have been brought.[166] But it would be both idle and prejudicial in the highest degree to single out for condemnation a brace of capitalists for following out a line of action so strikingly characteristic of the entire capitalist class—a class which, in the pursuit of profits, dismisses nicety of ethics and morals, and which ordains its own laws.

THE RHINELANDERS.

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 ships 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 circumstances 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 associations, 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 ship 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 ship 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 fashionable 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 transmuting 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 appraisement 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 promptitude, 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 passed 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 prostitute, 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 analytical 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 circumstances 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 circumstances 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 amassed within an astonishingly 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, constituting 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 principal 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 principally to two grandsons, both of which heirs were in boyhood. The factors constituting this fortune are various. At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the executors made their inventory, by a multitude 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 ownership were such that we shall have pertinent occasion to deal more relevantly with his career in subsequent parts of this work.



The careers of Field, Leiter and several other Chicago multimillionaires ran in somewhat parallel grooves. Field was the son of a farmer. He was born in Conway, Mass., in 1835. When twenty-one he went to Chicago and worked in a wholesale dry goods house. In 1860 he was made a partner. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its contracts at a time of distress. The Government and the public were forced to pay the highest sums for the poorest material. It was established that Government officials were in collusion with the contractors. This extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the Civil War (as it does of all wars,) but conventional history is silent on the subject, and one is compelled to look elsewhere for the facts of how the commercial houses imposed at high prices shoddy material and semi-putrid food upon the very army and navy that fought for their interests.[170] In the words of one of Field's laudatory biographers, "the firm coined money"—a phrase which for the volumes of significant meaning embodied in it, is an epitome of the whole profit system.

Some of the personnel of the firm changed several times: in 1865 Field, Leiter and Potter Palmer (who had also become a multimillionaire) associated under the firm name of Field, Leiter & Palmer. The great fire of 1871 destroyed the firm's buildings, but they were replaced. Subsequently the firm became Field, Leiter & Co., and, finally in 1887, Marshall Field & Co.[171] The firm conducted both a wholesale and retail business on what is called in commercial slang "a cash basis:" that is, it sold goods on immediate payment and not on credit. The volume of its business rose to enormous proportions. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year.

FOOTNOTES:

[162] Some of this land and these water grants and piers were obtained by Peter Goelet during the corrupt administration of City Controller Romaine. Goelet, it seems, was allowed to pay in installments. Thus, an entry, on January 26, 1807, in the municipal records, reads: "On receiving the report of the Street Commissioner, Ordered that warrants issue to Messrs. Anderson and Allen for the three installments due to them from Mr. Goelet for the Whitehall and Exchange Piers."—MSS. Minutes of the [New York City] Common Council, 1807, xvi:286.

[163] "Prominent Families of New York":231. Another notable example of this glorifying was Nicholas Biddle, long president of the United States Bank. Yet the court records show that, after a career of bribery, he stole $400,000 of that bank's funds.

[164] At this very time his wealth, judged by the standard of the times, was prodigious. "His wealth is vast—not less than five or six millions," wrote Barrett in 1862—"The Old Merchants of New York City," 1:349.

[165] "The Railways, the Trusts and the People":104.

[166] See Part III, "Great Fortunes From Railroads."

[167] "Kings of Fortune":172.

[168] Census of 1900.

[169] Eighth Annual Report, Illinois Labor Bureau:104-253.

[170] In those parts of this work relating to great fortunes from railroads and from industries, this phase of commercial life is specifically dealt with. The enormities brazenly committed during the Spanish-American War of 1898 are sufficiently remembered. Napoleon had the same experience with French contractors, and the testimony of all wars is to the same effect.

[171] So valuable was a partnership in this firm that a writer says that Field paid Leiter "an unknown number of millions" when he bought out Leiter's interest.



CHAPTER IX

THE FIELD FORTUNE IN EXTENSO

In close similarity to the start of the Astors and many other founders of great land fortunes, commerce was the original means by which Marshall Field obtained the money which he invested in land. Consecutively came a ramification of other revenue-producing properties. Once in motion, the process worked in the same admixed, interconnected way as it did in the amassing of contemporary large fortunes. It may be literally compared to hundreds of golden streams flowing from as many sources to one central point. From land, business, railroads, street railways, public utility and industrial corporations—from these and many other channels, prodigious profits kept, and still keep, pouring in ceaselessly. In turn, these formed ever newer and widening distributing radii of investments. The process, by its own resistless volition, became one of continuous compound progression.

LAND FOR ALMOST NOTHING.

Long before the business of the firm of Marshall Field & Co. had reached the annual total of $50,000,000, Field, Leiter and their associates had begun buying land in Chicago. Little capital was needed for the purpose: The material growth of Chicago explains sufficiently how a few dollars put in land fifty or sixty years ago became in time an automatically-increasing fund of millions. A century or so ago the log cabin of John Kinzie was the only habitation on a site now occupied by a swarming, conglomerate, rushing population of 1,700,000.[172] Where the prairie land once stretched in solitude, a huge, roaring, choking city now stands, black with factories, the habitat of nearly two millions of human beings, living in a whirlpool of excitement and tumult, presenting extremes of wealth and poverty, the many existing in dire straits, the few rolling in sovereign luxury. A saying prevails in Chicago that the city now holds more millionaires than it did voters in 1840.

Land, in the infancy of the city, was cheap; few settlers there were, and the future could not be foreseen. In 1830 one-quarter of an acre could be bought for $20; a few bits of silver, or any currency whatsoever, would secure to the buyer a deed carrying with it a title forever, with a perpetual right of exclusive ownership and a perpetual hold upon all succeeding generations. The more population grew, the greater the value their labor gave the land; and the keener their need, the more difficult it became for them to get land.

Within ten years—by about the beginning of the year 1840—the price of a quarter of an acre in the center of the city had risen to $1,500. A decade later the established value was $17,500, and in 1860, $28,000. Chicago was growing with great rapidity; a network of railroads converged there; mammoth factories, mills, grain elevators, packing houses:—a vast variety of manufacturing and mercantile concerns set up in business, and brought thither swarms of workingmen and their families, led on by the need of food and the prospects of work. The greater the influx of workers, the more augmented became the value of land. Inevitably the greatest congestion of living resulted.

By 1870 the price of a quarter of an acre in the heart of the city bounded to $120,000, and by 1880, to $130,000.

IT BECOMES WORTH MILLIONS.

During the next decade—a decade full of bitter distress to the working population of the United States, and marked by widespread suffering—the price shot up to $900,000. By 1894—a panic year, in which millions of men were out of work and in a state of appalling destitution—a quarter of an acre reached the gigantic value of $1,250,000.[173] At this identical time large numbers of the working class, which had so largely created this value, were begging vainly for work, and were being evicted by the tens of thousands in Chicago because they could not pay rent for their miserable, cramped habitations.

By exchanging a few hundred, or a few thousand dollars, in Chicago's extreme youth, for a scrap of paper called a deed, the buyer of this land found himself after the lapse of years, a millionaire. It did not matter where or how he obtained the purchase money: whether he swindled, or stole, or inherited it, or made it honestly;—so long as it was not counterfeit, the law was observed. After he got the land he was under no necessity of doing anything more than hold on to it, which same he could do equally well, whether in Chicago or buried in the depths of Kamschatka. If he chose, he could get chronically drunk; he could gamble, or drone in laziness; he could do anything but work. Nevertheless, the land and all its values which others created, were his forever, to enjoy and dispose of as suited his individual pleasure.

This was, and is still, the system. Thoroughly riveted in law, it was regarded as a rational, beneficent and everlasting fixture of civilized life—by the beneficiaries. And as these latter happened to be, by virtue of their possessions, among the real rulers of government, their conceptions and interests were embodied in law, thought and custom as the edict of civilization. The whole concurrent institutions of society, which were but the echo of property interests, pronounced the system wise and just, and, as a reigning force, do still so proclaim it. In such a state there was nothing abnormal in any man monopolizing land and exclusively appropriating its revenues. On the contrary, it was considered a superior stroke of business, a splendid example of astuteness. Marshall Field was looked upon as a very sagacious business man.

FIELD'S REAL ESTATE TRACTS.

Field bought much land when it was of comparatively inconsequential value, and held on to it with a tenacious grip. In the last years of his life, his revenues from his real estate were uninterruptedly enormous.

"Downtown real estate in Chicago," wrote "a popular writer" in a typically effusive biographical account of Field, published in 1901, "is about as valuable, foot for foot, as that in the best locations in New York City. From $8,000 to $15,000 a front foot are not uncommon figures for property north of Congress street, in the Chicago business district. Marshall Field owns not less than twenty choice sites and buildings in this section; not including those used for his drygoods business. In the vicinity of the Chicago University buildings he owns square block after block of valuable land. Yet farther south he owns hundreds of acres of land in the Calumet region—land invaluable for manufacturing purposes."

This extension and centralization of land ownership were accompanied by precisely the same results as were witnessed in other cities, although these results were the sequence of the whole social and industrial system, and not solely of any one phase. Poverty grew in exact proportion to the growth of large fortunes; the one presupposed, and was built upon, the existence of the other. Chicago became full of slums and fetid, overcrowded districts; and if the density and congestion of population are not as great as in New York, Boston and Cincinnati, it is only because of more favorable geographical conditions.

Field's fortune was heaped up in about the last twenty years of his life. The celerity of its progress arose from the prolific variety and nature of his possessions. To form even an approximate idea of how fast wealth came in to him, it is necessary to picture millions of men, women and children toiling day after day, year in and year out, getting a little less than two parts of the value of what they produced, while almost nine portions either went to him entirely or in part. But this was not all. Add to these millions of workers the rest of the population of the United States who had to buy from, or in some other way pay tribute to, the many corporations in which Field held stock, and you get some adequate conception of the innumerable influxions of gold which poured into Field's coffers every minute, every second of the day, whether he were awake or asleep; whether sick or well, whether traveling or sitting stock still.

HIS INCOME: $500 TO $700 AN HOUR.

This one man had the legal power of taking over to himself, as his inalienable property, his to enjoy, hoard, squander, bury, or throw in the ocean, if his fancy so dictated, the revenue produced by the labor of millions of beings as human as he, with the same born capacity for eating, drinking, breathing, sleeping and dying. Many of his workers had a better digestive apparatus which had to put up with inferior food, and, at times, no food at all. He could eat no more than three meals a day, but his daily income was enough to have afforded him ten thousand sumptuous daily meals, with exquisite "trimmings," while periods came when those who drudged for him were fortunate to have any meals at all. Few of his workers received as much as $2 a day; Field's income was estimated to be at the rate of about $500 to $700 an hour.

First—and of prime importance—was his wholesale and retail drygoods business. This was, and is, a line of business in which frantic competition survived long after the manufacturing field had passed over into concentrated trust control. To keep apace with competitors and make high profits, it was imperative not only to resort to shifts, expedients and policies followed by competitors, but to improve upon, and surpass, those methods if possible. Field at all times proved that it was possible. No competing firm would pay a certain rate of wages but what Field instantly outgeneraled it by cutting his workers' wages to a point enabling him to make his goods as cheap or cheaper.

HIS EMPLOYEES' WRETCHED WAGES.

In his wholesale and retail stores he employed not less than ten thousand men, women and children. He compelled them to work for wages which, in a large number of cases, were inadequate even for a bare subsistence. Ninety-five per cent. received $12 a week or less. The female sewing-machine operators who bent over their tasks the long day, making the clothes sold in the Field stores, were paid the miserable wages of $6.75 a week. Makers of socks and stockings were paid from $4.57 to $4.75 a week. The working hours consisted variously of from fifty-nine to fifty-nine and a half a week. Field also manufactured his own furniture as well as many other articles. Furniture workers were paid: Machine workers, $11.02, and upholsterers $12.47 a week. All of Field's wage workers were paid by the hour; should they fall sick, or work become slack, their pay was proportionately reduced.

The wretchedness in which many of these workers lived, and in which they still live (for the same conditions obtain), was pitiful in the extreme. Even in a small town where rent is not so high, these paltry wages would have been insufficient for an existence of partial decency. But in Chicago, with its forbidding rents, the increasing cost of all necessaries, and all of the other expenses incident to life in a large city, their wages were notoriously scanty.

Large numbers of them were driven to herding in foul tenements or evil dwellings, the inducements of which was the rent, a little lighter than could be had elsewhere. Every cent economized meant much. If an investigator (as often happened) had observed them, and had followed them to their wretched homes after their day's work, he would have noted, or learned of, these conditions: Their food was circumscribed and coarse—the very cheapest forms of meat, and usually stale bread. Butter was a superfluous luxury. The morning meal was made up of a chunk of bread washed down with "coffee"—adulterated stuff with just a faint odor of real coffee. At noon, bread and an onion, or a bit of herring, or a slice of cheap cheese composed their dinner, with perhaps a dash of dessert in the shape of sweetened substance, artificially colored, sold as "cake." For supper, cheap pork, or a soup bone, garnished occasionally in the season by stale vegetables, and accompanied by a concoction resembling tea. Few of these workers ever had more than one suit of clothes, or more than one dress. They could not afford amusements, and were too fatigued to read or converse. At night bunches of them bunked together—sometimes eight or ten in a single room; by this arrangement the rent of each was proportionately reduced.

It is now we come to a sinister result of these methods of exploiting the wage-working girls and women. The subject is one that cannot be approached with other than considerable hesitancy, not because the facts are untrue, but because its statistical nature has not been officially investigated. Nevertheless, the facts are known; stern, inflexible facts. For true historical accuracy, as well as for purposes of humanity, they must be given; that delicacy would be false, misleading and palliative which would refrain from tearing away the veil and from exposing the putridity beneath.

Field was repeatedly charged with employing his workers at such desperately low wages as to drive large numbers of girls and women, by the terrifying force of poverty, into the alternative of prostitution. How large the number has been, or precisely what the economic or psychologic factors have been, we have no means of knowing. It is worth noting that many official investigations, futile though their results, have probed into many other phases of capitalist fraud. But the department stores over the country have been a singular exception.

Why this partiality? Because the public is never allowed to get agitated over the methods and practices of the department stores. Hence the politicians are neither forced, for the sake of appearance, to investigate, nor can they make political capital from a thing over which the people are not aroused. Not a line of the horrors taking place in the large department stores is ever reported in the newspapers, not a mention of the treatment of girls and women, not a word of the injunctions frequently obtained restraining these stores from continuing to sell this or that brand of spurious goods in imitation of those of some complaining capitalist, or of the seizures by Health Boards of adulterated drugs or foods.

Wherefore this silence? Because, unsophisticated reader, these same department stores are the largest and steadiest advertisers. The newspapers, which solemnly set themselves up as moral, ethical, and political instructors to the public, sell all the space desired to advertise goods many of which are fraudulent in nature or weight. Not a line objectionable to these department stores ever gets into newspaper print; on the contrary, the owners of these stores, by the bludgeon of their immense advertising, have the power, within certain limitations, of virtually acting as censors. The newspapers, whatever their pretensions, make no attempt to antagonize the powers from whom so large a portion of their revenue comes. It is a standing rule in newspaper offices in the cities, that not a specific mention of any unfavorable or discreditable matter occurring in department stores, or affecting the interests of the proprietors of those stores, is allowed to get into print. Thus it is that the general public are studiously kept in ignorance of the abominations incessantly going on in the large department stores.

OUTCASTS RATHER THAN SLAVES.

Notwithstanding this community of silence, in some respects akin to a huge compounded system of blackmail, it is generally known that department stores are often breeding stations of prostitution by reason of two factors—extremely low wages and environment. There can be no disputing the fact that these two working together, and perhaps superinduced by other compelling influences, do bring about a condition the upshot of which is prostitution. Such supine reports as those of the Consumers' League, an organization of well-disposed dilletantes, and of superficial purposes, give no insight into the real estate of affairs. In his rather sensational and vitriolic raking of Chicago, W. T. Stead strongly deals with the effects of department store conditions in filling the ranks of prostitutes. He quotes Dora Claflin, the proprietress of a brothel, as saying that such houses as hers obtained their inmates from the stores, those in particular where hours were long and the pay small.[174]

Mockery of mockeries that in this era of civilization, so-called, a system should prevail that yields far greater returns from selling the body than from honest industry!

It has been estimated that the number of young women who receive $2,500 in one year by the sale of their persons is larger than the number of women of all ages, in all businesses and professions, who make a similar sum by work of mind or hand.[175] But one of the most significant recognitions of the responsibility of department stores for the prevalence of prostitution, was the act of a member of the Illinois legislature, a few years ago, in introducing a resolution (which failed to pass) to investigate the department stores of Chicago on the ground that conditions in them led to a shocking state of immorality. The statement has been repeatedly made that nearly one-half of the outcast girls and women of Chicago have come from the department stores.[176]

It was not only by these methods that the firm of Marshall Field & Co. was so phenomenally successful in making money. In the background were other methods which belong to a different category. Whatever Field's practices—and they were venal and unscrupulous to a great degree, as will be shown—he was an astute organizer. He understood how to manipulate and use other men, and how to centralize business, and cut out the waste and junket of mercantile operations. In the evolutionary scheme of business he played his important part and a very necessary part it was, for which he must be given full credit. His methods, base as they were, were in no respect different from those of the rest of the commercial world, as a whole. The only difference was that he was more conspicuous and more successful.

CENTERING ALL PROFITS IN HIMSELF.

At a time when all business was run on the chaotic and desultory lines characteristic of the purely competitive age, he had the foresight and shrewdness to perceive that the storekeeper who depended upon the jobber and the manufacturer for his goods was largely at the mercy of those elements. Even if he were not, there were two sets of profits between him and the making of the goods—the jobber's profits and the manufacturer's.