History of the Great American Fortunes Part 17

Here follows a ma.s.s of nauseating details which for the sake of not overshocking the reader we shall omit. The report continued:

The halls and stairways are usually filthy and dark, and the walls and banisters foul and damp, while the floors were not infrequently used ... [for purposes of nature] ... for lack of other provisions. The dwelling rooms are usually very inadequate in size for the accommodation of their occupants, and many of the sleeping rooms are simply closets, without light or ventilation save by means of a single door.... Such is the character of a vast number of tenement houses, especially in the lower part of the city and along the eastern and western border. Disease especially in the form of fevers of a typhoid character are constantly present in these dwellings and every now and then become an epidemic.[155]

"Some of the tenements," added the report, "are owned by persons of the highest character, but they fail to appreciate the responsibility resting on them." This sentence makes it clear that landlords could own, and enormously profit from, pig-sty human habitations which killed off a large number of the unfortunate tenants, and yet these landlords could retain, in nowise diminished, the l.u.s.tre of being men "of the highest character." Fully one-third of the deaths in New York and Brooklyn resulted from zymotic diseases contracted in these tenements, yet not even a whisper was heard, not the remotest suggestion that the men of wealth who thus deliberately profited from disease and death, were criminally culpable, although faint and timorous opinions were advanced that they might be morally responsible.

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 s.p.a.ce unoccupied: they rent sheds, bas.e.m.e.nts and even cellars to families and lodgers; they divide rooms by part.i.tions, 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 cla.s.ses. 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s virulently combated this agitation and these proposed laws. What happened next? Significantly enough a munic.i.p.al 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 cla.s.s, 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, Doc.u.ments 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] Doc.u.ments 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, Doc.u.ments 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 ama.s.sing 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 cla.s.s. The result obviously was to increase and centralize still greater wealth in the circ.u.mscribed 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 cla.s.s, 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 dest.i.tution, 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 cla.s.s 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.