THE PROPULSION OF THE ASTOR FORTUNE
At the time of his father's death, William B. Astor, the chief heir of
John Jacob Astor's twenty million dollars, was fifty-six years old. A
tall, ponderous man, his eyes were small, contracted, with a rather
vacuous look, and his face was sluggish and unimpressionable. Extremely
unsocial and taciturn, he never betrayed emotion and generally was
destitute of feeling. He took delight in affecting a carelessly-dressed,
slouchy appearance as though deliberately notifying all concerned that
one with such wealth as he was privileged to ignore the formulas of
punctilious society. In this slovenly, stoop-shouldered man with his
cold, abstracted air no one would have detected the richest man in
America.
Acquisitiveness was his most marked characteristic. Even before his
father's death he had amassed a fortune of his own by land speculations
and banking connections, and he had inherited $500,000 from his uncle
Henry, a butcher on the Bowery. It was said in 1846 that he possessed an
individual fortune of $5,000,000. During the last years of his father he
had been president of the American Fur Co., and he otherwise knew every
detail of his father's multifarious interests and possessions.
WILLIAM B. ASTOR'S PARSIMONY.
He lived in what was considered a fine mansion on Lafayette place,
adjoining the Astor Library. The sideboards were heaped with gold plate,
and polyglot servants in livery stood obediently by at all times to
respond to his merest nod. But he cared little for this show, except in
that it surrounded him with an atmosphere of power. His frugality did
not arise from wise self-control, but from his parsimonious habits. He
scanned and revised the smallest item of expense. Wine he seldom
touched, and the average merchant spent more for his wardrobe than he
did. At a time when the rich despised walking and rode in carriages
drawn by fast horses, he walked to and from his business errands. This
severe economy he not only practiced in his own house, but he carried it
into every detail of his business. Arising early in the morning, he
attended to his private correspondence before breakfast. This meal was
served punctually at 9 o'clock. Then he would stride to his office on
Prince street. A contemporary writer says of him:
He knew every inch of real estate that stood in his name, every
bond, contract and lease. He knew what was due when leases
expired, and attended personally to the matter. No tenants could
expend a dollar, or put in a pane of glass without his personal
inspection. His father sold him the Astor House [an hotel] for the
sum of one dollar. The lessees were not allowed to spend one cent
on the building, without his supervision and consent, unless they
paid for it themselves.
In the upper part of New York hundreds of lots can be seen
enclosed by dilapidated fences, disfigured by rocks and waste
material, or occupied as [truck] gardens. They are eligibly
located, many of them surrounded by a fashionable population....
Mr. Astor owned most of these corner lots but kept the corners for
a rise. He would neither sell nor improve them.... He knew that no
parties can improve the center of a block without benefiting the
corners.
He was sombre and solitary, dwelt alone, mixed little with general
society, gave little and abhorred beggars.[143]
It was a common saying of him "when he paid out a cent he wanted a cent
in return;" and as to his abject meannesses we forbear relating the many
stories of him. He pursued, in every respect, his father's methods in
using the powers of city government to obtain valuable water grants for
substantially nothing, and in employing his surplus wealth for further
purchases of land and in investments in other profitable channels. No
scruples of any kind did he allow to interfere with his constant aim of
increasing his fortune. His indifference to compunctions was shown in
many ways, not the least in his open support of notoriously corrupt city
and State administrations.
This corruption was by no means one existing despite him and his class,
and one that was therefore accepted grudgingly as an irremediable evil.
Far from it. Corrupt government was welcomed by the landholding, trading
and banking class, for by it they could secure with greater facility the
perpetual rights, franchises, privileges and the exemptions which were
adapted to their expanding aims and riches. By means of it they were not
only enabled to pile up greater and greater wealth, but to set
themselves up in law as a conspicuously privileged body, distinct from
the mass of the people.
THE PURCHASE OF LAWS.
Publicly they might pretend a proper and ostentatious horror of
corruption. Secretly, however, they quickly dispensed with what were to
them idle dronings of political cant. As capitalists they ascribed their
success to a rigid application and practicality; and being practical
they went about purchasing laws by the most short-cut and economical
method. They had the money; the office-holders had the votes and
governmental power; consequently the one bought the other. It was a
systematic corruption springing entirely from the propertied classes;
they demanded it, were responsible for it and kept it up. It worked like
an endless chain; the land, charters, franchises and privileges
corruptly obtained in one set of years yielded vast wealth, part of
which was used in succeeding years in getting more law-created sources
of wealth. If professional politicians had long since got into the habit
of expecting to be bought, it was because the landholders, traders and
bankers had accustomed them to the lucrative business of getting bribes
in return for extraordinary laws.
Since the men of wealth, or embryo capitalists who by hook or crook
raised the funds to bribe, were themselves ready at all times to buy
laws in common councils, legislatures and in Congress, it naturally
followed that each of them was fully as eager to participate in the
immense profits accruing from charters, franchises or special grants
obtained by others of their own class. They never questioned the means
by which these laws were put through. They did not care. The mere fact
that a franchise was put through by bribery was a trite, immaterial
circumstance. The sole, penetrating question was whether it were a
profitable project. If it were, no man of wealth hesitated in investing
his money in its stock and in sharing its revenue. It could not be
expected that he would feel moral objections, even the most attenuated,
for the chances were that while he might not have been a party to the
corrupt obtaining of this or that particular franchise, yet he was
involved in the grants of other special endowments. Moreover, money
making was not built on morality; its whole foundation and impetus lay
in the extraction of profits. Society, it is true, professed to move on
lofty moral planes, but this was a colossal pretension and nothing less.
THE INVERTED NATURE OF SOCIETY.
Society--and this is a truth which held equally strong of succeeding
decades--was incongruously inverted. In saying this, the fact should not
be ignored that the capitalist, as applied to the man who ran a factory
or other enterprise, was an indigenous factor in that period, even
although the money or inventions by which he was able to do this, were
often obtained by fraud. Every needed qualification must be made for the
time and the environment, and there should be neither haste in
indiscriminately condemning nor in judging by the standards or maturity
of later generations.
Yet, viewing society as a whole and measuring the results by the
standards and ideas then prevailing, it was undoubtedly true that those
who did the world's real services were the lowly, despoiled and much
discriminated-against mass of mankind. Their very poverty was a crime,
for after they were plundered and expropriated, either by the ruling
classes of their own country or of the United States, the laws regarded
them as semi-criminals, or, at best, as excrescences to whom short
shrift was to be given. They made the clothes, the shoes, hats, shirts,
underwear, tools, and all the other necessities that mankind required;
they tilled the ground and produced its food. Curiously enough, those
who did these indispensable things were condemned by the encompassing
system to live in the poorest and meanest habitations and in the most
precarious uncertainty. When sick, disabled or superannuated they were
cast aside by the capitalist class as so much discarded material to eke
out a prolonged misery of existence, to be thrown in penal institutions
or to starve. Substantially everywhere in the United States, vagrancy
laws were in force which decreed that an able-bodied man out of work and
homeless must be adjudged a vagrant and imprisoned in the workhouse or
penetentiary. The very law-making institutions that gave to a privileged
few the right to expropriate the property of the many, drastically
plunged the many down still further after this process of spoliation,
like a man who is waylaid and robbed and then arrested and imprisoned
because he has been robbed.
On the other hand, the class which had the money, no matter how that
money was gotten, irrespective of how much fraud or sacrifice of life
attended its amassing, stood out with a luminous distinctness. It
arrogated to itself all that was superior, and it exacted, and was
invested with, a lordly deference. It lived in the finest mansions and
laved in luxuries. Surrounded with an indescribably pretentious air of
importance, it radiated tone, command and prestige.
But, such was the destructive, intestinal character of competitive
warfare, that even this class was continually in the throes of
convulsive struggles. Each had to fight, not merely to get the wealth of
others, but to keep what he already possessed. If he could but frustrate
the attempts of competitors to take what he had, he was fortunate. As he
preyed upon the laborer, so did the rest of his class seek to prey upon
him. If he were less able, less cunning, or more scrupulous than they,
his ruination was certain. It was a system in which all methods were
gauged not by the best but by the worst. Thus it was that many
capitalists, at heart good men, kindly disposed and innately opposed to
duplicity and fraud, were compelled to adopt the methods of their more
successful but thoroughly unprincipled competitors. And, indeed,
realizing the impregnating nature of example and environment, one cannot
but conclude that the tragedies of the capitalist class represented so
many victims of the competitive system, the same as those among the
wageworkers, although in a very different way. Yet in this bewildering
jumble of fortune-snatching, an extraordinary circumstance failed to
impress itself upon the class which took over to itself the claim to
superior intelligence and virtue. The workers, for the most part,
instinctively, morally and intellectually, knew that this system was
wrong, a horror and a nightmare. But even the capitalist victims of the
competitive struggle, which awarded supremacy to the knave and the
trickster, went to their doom praising it as the only civilized,
rational system and as unchangeable and even divinely ordained.
THE PREVAILING CORRUPTION.
If corruption was flagrant in the early decades of the nineteenth
century, it was triply so in the middle decades. This was the period of
all periods when common councils all over the country were being bribed
to give franchises for various public utility systems, and legislatures
and Congress for charters, land, money, and laws for a great number of
railroad and other projects. The numerous specific instances cannot be
adverted to here; they will be described more appropriately in
subsequent parts of this work. For the present, let this general and
sweeping observation suffice.
The important point which here obtrudes itself is that in every case,
without an exception, the wealth amassed by fraud was used in turn to
put through more frauds, and that the net accumulation of these
successive frauds is seen in the great private fortunes of to-day. We
have seen how the original Astor fortune was largely derived by the use
of both force and fraud among the Indians, and by the exercise of
cunning and corruption in the East. John Jacob Astor's immense wealth
descends mostly to William B. Astor. In turn, one of the third
generation, John Jacob Astor, Jr., representing his father, William B.
Astor, uses a portion of this wealth in becoming a large stockholder in
the New York Central Railroad, and in corrupting the New York
Legislature still further to give enormously valuable grants and special
laws with incalculably valuable exemptions to that railroad. John Jacob
Astor, Jr., never built a railroad in his life; he knew nothing about
railroads; but by virtue of the possession of large surplus wealth,
derived mainly from rents, he was enabled to buy enough of the stock to
make him rank as a large stockholder. And, then, he with the other
stockholders, bribed the Legislature for the passage of more laws which
enormously increased the value of their stock.
It is altogether clear from the investigations and records of the time
that the New York Central Railroad was one of the most industrious
corrupters of legislatures in the country, although this is not saying
much in dealing with a period when every State Legislature, none
excepted, was making gifts of public property and of laws in return for
bribes, and when Congress, as was proved in official investigations, was
prodigal in doing likewise.[144]
In the fourteen years up to 1867, the New York Central Railroad
had spent upward of a half million dollars in buying laws at Albany and
in "protecting its stockholders against injurious legislation." As one
of the largest stockholders in the road John Jacob Astor, Jr., certainly
must have been one of the masked parties to this continuous saturnalia
of corruption. But the corruption, bad as it was, that took place before
1867, was rather insignificant compared to the eruption in the years
1868 and 1869. And here is to be noted a significant episode which fully
reveals how the capitalist class is ever willing to turn over the
managing of its property to men of its own class who have proved
themselves masters of the art either of corrupting public bodies, or of
making that property yield still greater profits.
BRIBERY AND BUSINESS.
In control of the New York and Harlem Railroad, Cornelius Vanderbilt had
showed what a remarkably successful magnate he was in deluging
legislatures and common councils with bribe money and in getting corrupt
gifts of franchises and laws worth many hundreds of millions of dollars.
For a while the New York Central fought him; it bribed where he bribed;
when he intimidated, it intimidated. But Vanderbilt was, by far, the
abler of the two contending forces. Finally the stockholders decided
that he was the man to run their system; and on Nov. 12, 1867, John
Jacob Astor, Jr., Edward Cunard, John Steward and others, representing
more than thirteen million dollars of stock, turned the New York Central
over to Vanderbilt's management on the ground, as their letter set
forth, that the change would result in larger dividends to the
stockholders and (this bit of cant was gratuitously thrown in) "greatly
promote the interests of the public." In closing, they wrote to
Vanderbilt of "your great and acknowledged abilities." No sooner had
Vanderbilt been put in control than these abilities were preeminently
displayed by such an amazing reign of corruption and exaction, that even
a public cynically habituated to bribery and arbitrary methods, was
profoundly stirred.[145]
It was in these identical years that the Astors, the Goelets, the
Rhinelanders and many other landholders and merchants were getting more
water grants by collusion with the various corrupt city administrations.
On June 14, 1850, William B. Astor gets a grant of land under water for
the block between Twelfth and Thirteenth streets, on the Hudson River,
at the ridiculous price of $13 per running foot.[146] William E. Dodge
likewise gets a grant on the Hudson River. Public opinion severely
condemned this practical giving away of city property, and a special
committee of the Board of Councilmen was moved to report on May 15,
1854, that "the practice of selling city property, except where it is in
evidence that it cannot be put to public use, is an error in finance
that has prevailed too frequently; indeed the experience of about eleven
years has demonstrated that sales of property usually take place about
the time it is likely to be needed for public uses, or on the eve of a
rise in value. Every pier, bulkhead and slip should have continued to be
the property of the city...."[147]
WATER GRANTS FROM TWEED.
But when the Tweed "ring" came into complete power, with its unbridled
policy of accommodating anyone who could pay bribes enough, the
landowners and merchants rushed to get water grants among other special
privileges. On Dec. 27, 1865, William C. Rhinelander was presented with
a grant of land under water from Ninety-first to Ninety-fourth street,
East River.[148] On March 21, 1867, Peter Goelet obtained from the
Sinking Fund Commissioners a grant of land under water on the East River
in front of land owned by him between Eighty-first street and
Eighty-second street. The price asked was the insignificant one of $75 a
running foot.[149] The officials who made this grant were the
Controller, Richard B. Connolly, and the Street Commissioner, George W.
McLean, both of whom were arch accomplices of William M. Tweed and were
deeply involved in the gigantic thefts of the Tweed ring. The same band
of officials gave to Mrs. Laura A. Delano, a daughter of William B.
Astor, a grant from Fifty-fifth to Fifty-seventh street, Hudson River,
at $200 per running foot, and on May 21, 1867, a grant to John Jacob
Astor, Jr., of lands under water between Forty-ninth and Fifty-first
streets, Hudson River, for the trivial sum of $75 per running foot. Many
other grants were given at the same time. The public, used as it was to
corrupt government, could not stomach this granting of valuable city
property for virtually nothing. The severe criticism which resulted
caused the city officials to bend before the storm, especially as they
did not care to imperil their other much greater thefts for the sake of
these minor ones. Many of the grants were never finally issued; and
after the Tweed "ring" was expelled from power, the Commissioners of the
Sinking Fund on Feb. 28, 1882, were compelled by public agitation to
rescind most of them.[150] The grant issued to Rhinelander in 1865,
however, was one of those which was never rescinded.
During its control of the city administration from 1868 to 1871 alone,
the Tweed "ring" stole directly from the city and county of New York a
sum estimated from $45,000,000 to $200,000,000. Henry F. Taintor, the
auditor employed by Andrew H. Green to investigate Controller Connolly's
books, testified before the special Aldermanic Committee in 1877, that
he had estimated the frauds during those three and a half years at from
$45,000,000 to $50,000,000.[151] The committee, however, evidently
thought that the thefts amounted to $60,000,000; for it asked Tweed
during the investigation whether they did not approximate that sum, to
which question he gave no definite reply. But Mr. Taintor's estimate, as
he himself admitted, was far from complete even for the three and a half
years. Matthew J. O'Rourke, who was responsible for the disclosures, and
who made a remarkably careful study of the "ring's" operations, gave it
as his opinion that from 1869 to 1871 the "ring" stole about $75,000,000
and that he thought the total stealings from about 1865 to 1871,
counting vast issues of fraudulent bonds, amounted to $200,000,000.
PROFITING FROM GIGANTIC THEFTS.
Every intelligent person knew in 1871 that Tweed, Connolly and their
associates were colossal thieves. Yet in that year a committee of New
York's leading and richest citizens, composed of John Jacob Astor, Jr.,
Moses Taylor, Marshall O. Roberts, E. D. Brown, George K. Sistare and
Edward Schell, were induced to make an examination of the controller's
books and hand in a most eulogistic report, commending Connolly for his
honesty and his faithfulness to duty. Why did they do this? Because
obviously they were in underhand alliance with those political bandits,
and received from them special privileges and exemptions amounting in
value to hundreds of millions of dollars. We have seen how Connolly made
gifts of the city's property to this class of leading citizens.
Moreover, a corrupt administration was precisely what the rich wanted,
for they could very conveniently make arrangements with it to evade
personal property taxation, have the assessments on their real estate
reduced to an inconsiderable sum, and secure public franchises and
rights of all kinds.
There cannot be the slightest doubt that the rich, as a class, were
eager to have the Tweed regime continue. They might pose as fine
moralists and profess to instruct the poor in religion and politics, but
this attitude was a fraud; they deliberately instigated, supported, and
benefited by, all of the great strokes of thievery that Tweed and
Connolly put through. Thus to mention one of many instances, the
foremost financial and business men of the day were associated as
directors with Tweed in the Viaduct Railroad. This was a project to
build a railroad on or above the ground _on any New York City street_.
One provision of the bill granting this unprecedentedly comprehensive
franchise compelled the city to take $5,000,000 of stock; another
exempted the company property from taxes or assessments. Other
subsidiary bills allowed for the benefit of the railroad the widening
and grading of streets which meant a "job" costing from $50,000,000 to
$60,000,000.[152] This bill was passed by the Legislature and signed by
Tweed's puppet Governor Hoffman; and only the exposure of the Tweed
regime a few months later prevented the complete consummation of this
almost unparalleled steal.
Considering the fact that the richest and most influential and
respectable men were direct allies of the Tweed clique, it was not
surprising that men such as John Jacob Astor, Jr., Moses Taylor, Edward
Schell and company were willing enough to sign a testimonial certifying
to Controller Connolly's honesty. The Tweed "ring" supposed that a
testimonial signed by these men would make a great impression upon the
public. Yet, stripping away the halo which society threw about them
simply because they had wealth, these rich citizens themselves were to
be placed in even a lower category than Tweed, on the principle that the
greater the pretension, the worst in its effect upon society is the
criminal act. The Astors cheated the city out of enormous sums in real
estate and personal property taxation; Moses Taylor likewise did so, as
was clearly brought out by a Senate Investigating Committee in 1890;
Roberts had been implicated in great swindles during the Civil War; and
as for Edward Schell, he, by collusion with corrupt officials, compelled
the city to pay exorbitant sums for real estate owned by him and which
the city needed for public purposes. And further it should be pointed
out that Tweed, Connolly and Sweeny were but vulgar political thieves
who retained only a small part of their thefts. Tweed died in prison
quite poor; even the very extensive area of real estate that he bought
with stolen money vanished, one part of it going in lieu of counsel fees
to one of his lawyers, Elihu Root, United States Secretary of State
under Roosevelt.[153] Connolly fled abroad with $6,000,000 of loot and
died there, while Sweeny settled with the city for an insignificant sum.
The men who really profited directly or indirectly by the gigantic
thefts of money and the franchise, tax-exemption, and other measures put
through the legislature or common council were men of wealth in the
background, who thereby immensely increased their riches and whose
descendants now possess towering fortunes and bear names of the highest
"respectability."[154]
The original money of the landholders came from trade; and then by a
combination of cunning, bribery, and a moiety of what was considered
legitimate investment, they became the owners of immense tracts of the
most valuable city land. The rentals from these were so great that
continuously more and more surplus wealth was heaped up. This surplus
wealth, in slight part, went to bribe representative bodies for special
laws giving them a variety of exclusive property, and another part was
used in buying stock in various enterprises the history of which reeked
with corruption.
From being mere landholders whose possessions were confined mainly to
city land, they became part owners of railroad, telegraph, express and
other lines reaching throughout the country. So did their holdings and
wealth-producing interests expand by a cumulative and ever-widening
process. The prisons were perennially filled with convicts, nearly all
of whom had committed some crime against property, and for so doing were
put in chains behind heavy bars, guarded by rifles and great stone
walls. But the men who robbed the community of its land and its
railroads (most of which latter were built with _public_ land and money)
and who defrauded it in a thousand ways, were, if not morally
exculpated, at least not molested, and were permitted to retain their
plunder, which, to them, was the all-important thing. This plunder, in
turn, became the basis for the foundation of an aristocracy which in
time built palaces, invented impressive pedigrees and crests and
coats-of-arms, intermarried with European titles, and either owned or
influenced newspapers and journals which taught the public how it should
think and how it should act. It is one thing to commit crimes against
property, and a vastly different thing to commit crimes _in behalf_ of
property. Such is the edict of a system inspired by the sway of
property.
RENTALS FROM DISEASE AND DEATH.
But the sources of the large rentals that flowed into the exchequers of
the landlords--what were they? Where did these rents, the volume of
which was so great that the surplus part of them went into other forms
of investments, come from? Who paid them and how did the tenants of
these mammoth landlords live?
A considerable portion came from business buildings and private
residences on much of the very land which New York City once owned and
which was corruptly squirmed out of municipal ownership. For the large
rentals which they were forced to pay, the business men recouped
themselves by marking up the prices of all necessities. Another, and a
very preponderate part, came from tenement houses. Many of these were
also built on land filched from the city. And such habitations! Never
before was anything seen like them. The reports of the Metropolitan
Board of Health for 1866, 1867 and succeeding years revealed the fact
that miles upon miles of city streets were covered with densely
populated tenements, where human beings were packed in vile rooms, many
of which were dark and unventilated and which were pestilential with
disease and overflowed with deaths. In its first report, following its
organization, the Metropolitan Board of Health pointed out:
The first, and at all times the most prolific cause of disease,
was found to be the very insalubrious condition of most of the
tenement houses in the cities of New York and Brooklyn. These
houses are generally built without any reference to the health and
comfort of the occupants, but simply with a view to economy and
profit to the owner. They are almost invariably overcrowded, and
ill-ventilated to such a degree as to render the air within them
constantly impure and offensive.
Here follows a mass 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 lustre 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 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.)