History of the Great American Fortunes Part 15

CORRUPTION AT THE POLLS.

A systematic corruption of the voters was now begun. The policy of bribing certain legislators to vote for bank, railroad, insurance company and other charters was extended to reach down into ward politics, and to corrupt the voters at the springs of power. With a part of the money made in the frauds of trade or from exactions for land, the propertied interests, operating at first by personal entry into politics and then through the petty politicians of the day, packed caucuses and primaries and bought votes at the polls. This was equally true of both city and rural communities. In many of the rural sections the morals of the people were exceedingly low, despite their church-going habits. The cities contained, as they always do contain, a certain quota of men, products of the industrial system, men of the slums and alleyways, so far gone in dest.i.tution or liquor that they no longer had manhood or principle. Along came the election funds of the traders, landholders and bankers to corrupt these men still further by the buying of their votes and the inciting of them to commit the crime of repeating at the polls. Exalted society and the slums began to work together; the money of the one purchased the votes of the other. Year after year this corruption fund increased until in the fall of 1837 the money raised in New York City by the bankers alone amounted to $60,000.

Although this sum was meager compared to the enormous corruption funds which were employed in subsequent years, it was a sum which, at that time, could do great execution. Ignorant immigrants were persuaded by offerings of money to vote this way or that and to repeat their votes.

Presently the time came when batches of convicts were brought from the prisons to do repeating, and overawe the polls in many precincts.[138]

As for that cla.s.s of voters who could not be bribed and who voted according to their conceptions of the issues involved, they were influenced in many ways:--by the partisan arguments of newspapers and of political speech-makers. These agencies of influencing the body politic were indirectly controlled by the propertied interests in one form or another. A virtual censorship was exercised by wealth; if a newspaper dared advocate any issue not approved by the vested interests, it at once felt the resentment of that cla.s.s in the withdrawal of advertis.e.m.e.nts and of those privileges which banks could use or abuse with such ruinous effect.

POLITICAL SUBSERVIENCY.

Finally, both of the powerful political parties were under the domination of wealth; not, to be sure, openly so, but insidiously.

Differences of issue there a.s.suredly were, but these issues did not in any way affect the basic structure of society, or threaten the overthrow of any of the fundamental privileges held by the rich. The political campaigns, except that later contest which decided the eventual fate of chattel slavery, were, in actuality, sham battles. Never were the ma.s.ses so enthusiastic since the campaign of 1800 when Jefferson was elected, as they were in 1832 when they sided with President Jackson in his fight against the United States Bank. They considered this contest as one between the people, on the one side, and, on the other, the monied aristocracy of the country. The United States Bank was effaced; but the State banks promptly took over that share of the exploitative process so long carried on by the United States Bank and the people, as has already been explained, were no better off than they were before. One set of ruling capitalists had been put down only to make way for another.

Both parties received the greater part of their campaign funds from the men of large property and from the vested corporations or other similar interests. Astor, for example, was always a liberal contributor, now to the Whig party and again to the Democratic. In return, the politicians elected by those parties to the legislature, the courts or to administrative offices usually considered themselves under obligations to that element which financed its campaigns and which had the power of defeating their reelection by the refusal of funds or by supporting the opposite party. The ma.s.ses of the people were simply p.a.w.ns in these political contests, yet few of them understood that all the excitement, partisan activity and enthusiasm into which they threw themselves, generally had no other significance than to enchain them still faster to a system whose beneficiaries were continuously getting more and more rights and privileges for themselves at the expense of the people, and whose wealth was consequently increasing by precipitate bounds.

ASTOR BECOMES AMERICA'S RICHEST MAN.

Astor was now the richest man in America. In 1847 his fortune was estimated at fully $20,000,000. In all the length and breadth of the United States there was no man whose fortune was within even approachable distance of his. With wonderment his contemporaries regarded its magnitude. How great it ranked at that period may be seen by a contrast with the wealth of other men who were considered very rich.

In 1847 and 1852 a pamphlet listing the number of rich men in New York was published under the direction of Moses Yale Beach, publisher of the "New York Sun." The contents of this pamphlet were vouched for as strictly accurate.[139] The pamphlet showed that there were at that time perhaps twenty-five men in New York City who were ranked as millionaires. The most prominent of these were Peter Cooper with an accredited fortune of $1,000,000; the Goelets, $2,000,000; the Lorillards, $1,000,000; Moses Taylor, $1,000,000; A. T. Stewart, $2,000,000; Cornelius Vanderbilt, $1,500,000, and William B. Crosby, $1,500,000. There were a few fortunes of $500,000 each, and several hundred ranging from $100,000 to $300,000. The average fortunes graded from $100,000 to $200,000. A similar pamphlet published in Philadelphia showed that that city contained a bevy of nine millionaires, only two of whose individual fortunes exceeded $1,000,000.[140] No facts are available as to the private fortunes in Boston and other cities.

Occasionally the briefest mention would appear in the almanacs of the period of the death of this or that rich man. There is a record of the death of Alexander Milne, of New Orleans, in 1838 and of his bequest of $200,000 to charitable inst.i.tutions, and of the death of M. Kohne, of Charleston, S. C., in the same year with the sole fact that he left $730,000 in charitable bequests. In 1841 there appeared a line that Nicholas Girod, of New Orleans, died leaving $400,000 to "various objects," and a scant notice of the death of William Bartlett, of Newburyport, Ma.s.s., coupled with the fact that he left $200,000 to Andover Seminary. It is entirely probable that none of these men were millionaires; otherwise the fact would have been brought out conspicuously. Thus, when Pierre Lorillard, a New York snuff maker, banker, and landholder, died in 1843, his fortune of $1,000,000 or so, was considered so unusual that the word millionaire, newly-coined, was italicized in the rounds of the press. Similarly in the case of Jacob Ridgeway, a Philadelphia millionaire, who died in the same year.

The pa.s.sing away now of a man worth a mere million, calls forth but a trifling, pa.s.sing notice. Yet when Henry Brevoort died in New York City in 1848, his demise was accounted an event in the annals of the day. His property was estimated at a valuation of about $1,000,000, the chief source of which came from the ownership of eleven acres of land in the heart of the city. Originally his ancestors cultivated a truck farm and ran a dairy on this land, and daily in the season carried vegetables, b.u.t.ter and milk to market. Brevoort, the newspaper biography read, was a "man of fine taste in painting, literature and intellectual pursuits of every kind. He owned a large property in the fashionable part of the city, where he erected a splendid house, elegantly adorned and furnished in the Italian style; for he was quite a connoisseur in the arts."

It can be at once seen in what transcendent degree Astor's wealth towered far above that of every other rich man in the United States.

ASTOR'S TOWERING WEALTH.

His fortune was the colossus of the times; an object of awe to all wealth-strivers. Necessary as manufactures were in the social and industrial system, they, as yet, occupied a strikingly subordinate and inferior position as an agency in acc.u.mulating great fortunes.

Statistics issued in 1844 of manufactures in the United States showed a total gross amount of $307,196,844 invested. Astor's wealth, then, was one-fifteenth of the whole amount invested throughout the territory of the United States in cotton and wool, leather, flax and iron, gla.s.s, sugar, furniture, hats, silks, ships, paper, soap, candles, wagons--in every kind of goods which the demands of civilization made indispensable.

The last years of this magnate were pa.s.sed in an atmosphere of luxury, laudation and power. On Broadway, by Prince street, he built a pretentious mansion, and adorned it with works of art which were more costly than artistic. Of medium height, he was still quite stout, but his once full, heavy face and his deep set eyes began to sag from the encroachments of extreme advanced age. He could be seen every weekday poring over business reports at his office on Prince street--a one-story, fireproof brick building, the windows of which were guarded by heavy iron bars. The closing weeks of his life were pa.s.sed at his country seat at Eighty-eighth street and the East River. Infirm and debilitated, so weak and worn that he was forced to get his nourishment like an infant at a woman's breast, and to have exercise administered by being tossed in a blanket, he yet retained his faculty of vigilantly scrutinizing every arrear on the part of tenants, and he compelled his agent to render daily accounts. Parton relates this story:

One morning this gentleman [the agent] chanced to enter his room while he was enjoying his blanket exercise. The old man cried out from the middle of his blanket:

"Has Mrs. ---- paid that rent yet?"

"No," replied the agent.

"Well, but she must pay it," said the poor old man.

"Mr. Astor," rejoined the agent, "she can't pay it now; she has had misfortunes, and we must give her time."

"No, no," said Astor; "I tell you she can pay it and she will pay it. You don't go the right way to work with her."

The agent took leave, and mentioned the anxiety of the old gentleman with regard to this unpaid rent to his son, who counted out the requisite sum, and told the agent to give it to the old man, as if he had received it from the tenant.

"There," exclaimed Mr. Astor when he received the money. "I told you that she would pay it if you went the right way to work with her."[141]

THE DEATH OF JOHN JACOB ASTOR.

So, to the last breath, squeezing arrears out of tenants; his mind focused upon those sordid methods which had long since become a religion to him; contemplating the long list of his possessions with a radiant exaltation; so Astor pa.s.sed away. He died on March 29, 1848, aged eighty-four years, four months; and almost as he died, the jubilant shouts of the enthusiastic workingmen's processions throughout the city resounded high and often. They were celebrating the French Revolution of 1848, intelligence of which had just arrived;--a Revolution brought about by the blood of the Parisian workingmen, only to be subsequently stifled by the stratagems of the bourgeoisie and turned into the corrupt despotism of Napoleon III.

The old trader left an estate valued at about $20,000,000. The bulk of this descended to William B. Astor. The extent of wealth disclosed by the will made a profound impression. Never had so rich a man pa.s.sed away; the public mind was not accustomed to the sight of millions of dollars being owned by one man. One New York newspaper, the "Journal,"

after stating that Astor's personal estate amounted to seven or nine million dollars, and his real estate to perhaps more, observed: "Either sum is quite out of our small comprehension; and we presume that with most men, the idea of one million is about as large an item as that of any number of millions." An entirely different and exceptional view was taken by James Gordon Bennett, owner and editor of the New York "Herald;" Bennett's comments were the one distinct contrast to the ma.s.s of flowery praise lavished upon Astor's memory and deeds. He thus expressed himself in the issue of April 5, 1848:

We give in our columns an authentic copy of one of the greatest curiosities of the age--the will of John Jacob Astor, disposing of property amounting to about twenty million dollars, among his various descendants of the first, second, third, and fourth degrees.... If we had been an a.s.sociate of John Jacob Astor ...

the first idea that we should have put into his head would have been that _one-half of his immense property--ten millions at least--belonged to the people of the city of New York_. During the last fifty years of the life of John Jacob Astor, his property has been augmented and increased in value by the aggregate intelligence, industry, enterprise and commerce of New York, fully to the amount of one-half its value. The farms and lots of ground which he bought forty, twenty and ten and five years ago, have all increased in value entirely by the industry of the citizens of New York. Of course, it is plain as that two and two make four, that the half of his immense estate, in its actual value, has accrued to him by the industry of the community.

THE WONDER OF THE AGE.

The a.n.a.lyst might well be tempted to smile at the puerility of this logic. If Astor was ent.i.tled to one-half of the value created by the collective industry of the community, why was he not ent.i.tled to all?

Why make the artificial division of one-half? Either he had the right to all or to none. But this editorial, for all its defects of reasoning, was an unusual expression of newspaper opinion, although of a single day, and was smothered by the general course of that same newspaper in supporting the laws and inst.i.tutions demanded by the commercial aristocracy.

So the arch multimillionaire pa.s.sed away, the wonder and the emulation of the age. His friends, of whom he had a few, deeply mourned him, and his bereaved family suffered a deep loss, for, it is related, he was a kind and indulgent husband and father. He left a legacy of $400,000 for the establishment of the Astor Library; for this and this alone his memory has been preserved as that of a philanthropist. The announcement of this legacy was hailed with extravagant joy; yet such is the value of meretricious glory and the ideals of present society, that none has remarked that the proceeds of one year's pillage of the Indians were more than sufficient to found this much-praised benevolence. Thus does society blind itself to the origin of the fortunes, a fraction of which goes to gratify it with gifts. The whole is taken from the collective labor of the people, and then a part is returned in the form of inst.i.tutional presents which are in reality bits of charity bestowed upon the very people from whose exploitation the money has come. Astor, no doubt, thought that, in providing for a public library, he was doing a service to mankind; and he must be judged, not according to the precepts and demands of the scarcely heard working cla.s.s of his day with its altruistic aspirations, nor of more advanced present ideas, but by the standards of his own cla.s.s, that commercial aristocracy which arrogated to itself superiority of aims and infallibility of methods.

He died the richest man of his day. But vast fortunes could not be heaped up by him and his contemporaries without having their corresponding effect upon the ma.s.s of the people. What was this effect?

At about the time that he died there was in New York City one pauper to every one hundred and twenty-five inhabitants and one person in every eighty-three of the population had to be supported at the public expense.[142]

FOOTNOTES:

[134] "Reminiscences of John Jacob Astor," New York "Herald," March 31, 1848.

[135] Doc. No. 24, Proceedings of the [New York City] Board of a.s.sistant Aldermen, xxix. The Merchant's Bank, for instance, was a.s.sessed in 1833 at $6,000; it had cost that sum twenty years before and in 1833 was worth three times as much.

[136] Proceedings of the [New York City] Board of a.s.sistant Aldermen, xxix, Doc. No. 18.

[137] Many eminent lawyers, elected or appointed to high official or judicial office, were financially interested in corporations, and very often profited in dubious ways. The case of Roger B. Taney, who, from 1836, was for many years, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, is a conspicuous example. After he was appointed United States Secretary of the Treasury in 1833, the United States Senate pa.s.sed a resolution inquiring of him whether he were not a stockholder in the Union Bank of Maryland, in which bank he had ordered public funds deposited. He admitted that he was, but a.s.serted that he had obtained the stock before he had selected that bank as a depository of public funds. (See Senate Docs., First Session, 23rd Congress, Vol. iii, Doc.

No. 238.) It was Taney, who as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, handed down the decision, in the Dred Scott case, that negro slaves, under the United States Const.i.tution, were not eligible to citizenship and were without civil rights.

[138] These frauds at the polls went on, not only in every State but even in such newly-organized Territories as New Mexico. Many facts were brought out by contestants before committees of Congress. (See "Contested Elections," 1834 to 1865, Second Session, 38th Congress, 1864-65, Vol. v, Doc. No. 57.) In the case of Monroe vs. Jackson, in 1848, James Monroe claimed that his opponent was illegally elected by the votes of convicts and other non-voters brought over from Blackwell's Island. The majority of the House Elections Committee reported favoring Monroe's being seated. Aldermanic doc.u.ments tell likewise of the same state of affairs in New York. (See the author's "History of Tammany Hall.") Similar practices were common in Philadelphia, Baltimore and other cities, and in country townships.

[139] "The Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of the City of New York." By Moses Yale Beach.

[140] "Wealth and Biography of the Wealthy Citizens of Philadelphia." By a Member of the Philadelphia Bar, 1845.

The misconception which often exists even among those who profess the deepest scholarship and the most certainty of opinion as to the development of men of great wealth was instanced by a misstatement of Dr. Felix Adler, leader of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. In an address on "Anti-Democratic Tendencies in American Life" delivered some years ago, Dr. Adler a.s.serted: "Before the Civil War there were three millionaires; now there are 4,000." The error of this a.s.sertion is evident.

[141] Parton's "Life of John Jacob Astor":80-81.

[142] Proceedings of the Board of a.s.sistant Aldermen, xxix, Doc. No. 24.

This poverty was the consequence, not of any one phase of the existing system, nor of the growth of any one fortune, but resulted from the whole industrial system. The chief form of the exploitation of the worker was that of his capacity as a producer; other forms completed the process. A considerable number of the paupers were immigrants, who, fleeing from exploitation at home, were kept in poverty in America, "the land of boundless resources." The statement often made that there were no tramps in the United States before the Civil War is wholly incorrect.