Part 18 (2/2)
Was any criminal action ever inst.i.tuted 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 cla.s.ses 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 fas.h.i.+ons--all of these were either parties to this continuous process of fraud or benefited by it. The same is true of this cla.s.s to-day; for the frauds in taxation are of greater magnitude than ever before. It was not astonis.h.i.+ng, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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, pa.s.sed 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 circ.u.mstances 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR.
Now a British Subject, Self-Expatriated. He Derives an Enormous Income from His American Estate.]
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 cla.s.s 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-const.i.tuted 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 att.i.tude of the propertied cla.s.s 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 cla.s.ses--these were the men who have made up these so-called ”reform” committees, precisely as to-day they const.i.tute 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 att.i.tude, 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-cla.s.s reform administrations which are popularly a.s.sumed 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s. Whether corruption or ”reform” administrations were in power the cheating of munic.i.p.ality 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 s.p.a.cious ball-room and picture gallery, b.a.l.l.s 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 ma.s.ses of gold borders. Directly above the center of the table are painted garlands of flowers and cl.u.s.ters of fruit. In the hub of this representation is Mrs. Astor's monogram in letters of gold. From the ma.s.sive 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.
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