Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

“It began—as great fortunes often do—with blood.”

This dramatic flourish at the end of the Introduction serves partly as a cliffhanger, inviting continued reading to learn more. “Blood” here refers most directly to trapping beavers and killing them for their fur but also hints at the way the Astors exploited other people (including trappers and explorers who lost their lives while contributing to the Astor fur trade).

“Butchers were predators, in a manner of speaking, making their living by slitting throats and letting blood and by rendering animal muscle and sinew into cuts of salable meat. Trappers were predators, too. Both the trade Astor was trained for and the one he embraced after arrival in New York relied on the ability to render living flesh and skin into money.”

Cooper and Howe omit the fact that Astor was a trader rather than a trapper in order to portray him as a predator and therefore a man who inspired fear. While Astor generally did not directly kill animals, much less people, this metaphorically refers to his eagerness to find new opportunities to make money and his lack of concern for the suffering he might cause in doing so.

“This country of John Jacob Astor’s imagination might have been a Pacific Rim power from its inception, rich with furs, initially, and then with porcelain, spices, satins, and more from trading around the Pacific, with no middlemen and no need to round the Horn. He would have named this country for its founder, and mastermind: himself. He would have called it Astoria.”

This description of John Jacob Astor’s Pacific vision shows the extent of his ambition. The idea of naming it after himself as a “mastermind” implies megalomania. Cooper and Howe use his conception of Astoria as a new country (albeit one friendly with the US) to undermine the myth of Astor as a great American and a positive example of fulfilling the American Dream. He did not have the loyalty to his adopted country to make his new venture part of it (even though it had the US government’s support and was built on land the US claimed after the Louisiana Purchase).

“The more money he accumulated, the more bitterly he complained about any expenditure and the more he tried to trim the wages he paid his employees.”

This description of the elderly John Jacob Astor exemplifies how wealth can corrupt a person and warp the mind. In addition, it also helps solidify the Astor protagonists as dislikeable characters. Of course, Astor likely had some degree of mental deterioration as a consequence of aging.

“John Jacob Astor died perched atop a veritable mountain of wealth, money squeezed out of the landscape by his own hands and his calculating mind.”

This line near the end of Chapter 2 sums up the accomplishment of the Astor fortune’s founder. He created prodigious wealth, but the word choice of “squeezed” and “calculating” imply something unpleasant or not quite honest about how he did so.

“Before long, it came time for William to marry. Despite his looks and lack of charm, he did possess that single characteristic that guarantees access to as glittering an array of social butterflies as any could possibly imagine in New York: money.”

The authors report contemporary negative descriptions of the appearance, intelligence, and manners of most of the Astor men that is echoed here in the references to William’s lack of good looks or social graces. Money made these traits inessential. This reflection on William’s marriage prospects helps mark the text’s shift from the making of the Astor fortune to the Astors using it to dominate high society.

“European tastes were a marker of class and social status, and so, calling the theater an opera house—for Italian opera specifically—sent a message to the people of New York. And that message was: This is probably not for you.”

The Europeanization of US elite society is a recurring point of emphasis in the book and an implicit challenge to the myth of the American Dream. The snobbish decision to build an “opera house” here is the first of many events that led average New Yorkers to storm the opera house, only to be shot down by the authorities.

“The name ‘Astor’ had come to stand for something new: In some quarters of New York, it had come to mean injustice.”

The Astor Place Riot took its name from Astor Place (the street on which it occurred) and the Astor Place Opera House (the theater on which it centered) rather than directly from the Astor family. However, the neighborhood was associated with the Astor family, and the riots dramatically illustrated class tensions in New York and the way the Astor name began to enter into popular culture and the everyday fabric of the city. The authors link these two important points in this quotation through the claim that “Astor” began to signify injustice.

“She had understood that in the uneasy years of reconstructing the union, someone would have to decide what made American society American. Someone had to set the standard. Some had to decide what constituted American taste. Someone had to stand ready to demonstrate that the United States need not be overshadowed by the old societies of Europe. New York, after all, was the city of the future, and the United States was the country that held New York.”

This quotation describing the ambitions of Mrs. Caroline Astor show one way that John Jacob Astor’s earlier grandiose ambitions continued in the Astor family but now increasingly focused on their social standing rather than simply money. In addition, the passage demonstrates how the Astors often thought of themselves as filling a nationalist, patriotic role.

“But the Waldorf was about to transform how things were done. It would invite the public to dine at the Astors’ table.”

Among the most significant shifts in elite society was the transformation from the private to public eye. The hotel’s determination to be a respectable public place for the elite to gather—even women, to the scandal of their elders—helped make this transformation happen. In doing so, it also helped open society to those who could pay to figuratively dine at the table of the city’s most famous hostess and her family.

“Jack Astor had won the battle, but the damage to his reputation made him lose the war. He and his mother were revealed as cold, heartless, and indifferent.”

This passage about the John Galvin case shows how the Astors not only were callous about how they made their money but also continued that lack of empathy for the needy when they had a direct encounter with one of them. Cooper, as a journalist, is sensitive to the power of the press once the rich enter the public gaze and makes a point of delving into newspaper-fueled scandals like this one and explaining how they affected the Astor reputation.

“We look to examples like Cornelius Vanderbilt and John Jacob Astor as proof positive that resounding wealth and success are theoretically within anyone’s reach, provided that person has enough gumption. But we also want to punish them for their success. The two patriarchs remind us of what is possible and underscore everything that we haven’t been able to achieve for ourselves.”

This key passage explains the authors’ view about why people want to read about the rich elite like the Astors and the Vanderbilts. They note that typical American readers admire yet resent the self-made man. The structure of their book builds on this conception of their audience by undermining the ideal of the American Dream, emphasizing how the Astors took advantage of others, and elaborating how despite their wealth most of them died unhappy deaths that were a fitting way to “punish them for their success.”

“No matter how high and mighty he rose, no matter how fine his homes and fabrics, William Waldorf Astor couldn’t shake off the stench of bloody fur.”

Part 1 ends with British newspapers mocking the new viscount as an upstart of humble ancestry. The authors’ apparent sympathy for this point of view suggests that generational separation cannot erase the dubious ways the Astors (and other elites) made their fortune. This quote closes the section on the Astors’ “Rise,” indicating that a British hereditary aristocrat (rather than a true American) was the natural end of the Astors’ self-fashioning and that it was not a happy end. By ignoring subsequent British Astors, the authors write off the Waldorf branch as having reached its peak—technically at the top of society but despised by most people.

“Rokeby was full of ghosts, and so the ground was laid for the creation of a strange, unique world in which the Chanler children lived surrounded by the shadows of their forebears.”

This passage exemplifies the book’s sometimes dramatic, almost Gothic, language. Here, it creates an unearthly mood, foreshadowing Archie Chanler’s claim of psychic powers and setting up the Astor legacy as a burden (“shadows of their forebears”) on the family’s descendants during its “Fall” in Part 2.

“The stories told about him have overwritten the reality of his life. Like the other passengers on the Titanic, he has been transformed from a living, breathing person into a symbol.”

The Astors became as a much a symbol of the wealthy American elite as real people in the public eye. The evolving series of reports and then movies about Jack Astor on the Titanic helped illustrate that process.

“This was, after all, the same Jack Astor who had insisted on charging a destitute tramp with felony burglary for falling asleep in his servants’ quarters twenty years before. He was accustomed to getting what he wanted from the people he outranked.”

The authors argue for the least flattering portrait of Astor on the sinking Titanic. They frequently use this method of deducing personality from better-recorded events and scandals to offer informed speculation about motivation or gaps in our knowledge.

“In many respects, his incredible story is part of the long-standing myth about America—that it is a beacon of equal opportunity for anyone with enough grit and determination to make a go of it for himself. But the other John Jacob Astor also lived an immigrant’s story in the United States of America.”

The book continually explores the contrast between the Astors’ lifestyle and that of the average American, foregrounding the themes of The Myth of the American Dream and Social Privilege Deriving from Exploitation. Here, the authors build on a 1910 human-interest newspaper story to explicitly emphasize the “other” John Jacob as a more realistic counterpoint to the “long-standing myth” of the American Dream.

“One wonders if he thought much about the days when the city around him burned, when men like him, young and angry and hungry and tired, torched the buildings and people they blamed for their condition, only to see rich men like his distant cousins just build it back up again and, somehow, make even more money doing so.”

The authors frame the New York City Draft Riots in empathetic terms: The rioters were “hungry” and “tired,” and their expression of anger only resulted in their rich oppressors profiting even more. By speculating that the “other” John Jacob Astor sympathized with the rioters when he first arrived in New York, especially after having noted the difficulties he faced in his life, the text invites sympathy with the rioters, overlooking, for example, the riots’ racist elements, which the authors mention only in passing.

“Still, for several generations, the bar had served as a gathering place for gay men from all over the city, the country, and even the world—the right side of an oval, which has no sides. It was a universally known queer space that was invisible to anyone unaware of the secret codes used by gay men before Stonewall. But for all those decades, all that time, the name ‘Astor’ meant one thing for gay men: community.”

This brief, positive mention of the public appropriation of the Astor name marks a wistful break from the book’s normally negative associations of the name. The Astor bar—with “no sides”—metaphorically offers a vision of utopian unity that is challenged by the reality of the elites abusing authority to exploit others (as happened when an extortion ring targeted this gay community).

“By the time of Vincent’s birth in 1891, money had wreaked its inexorable influence on the Astors. His parents’ marriage was famously unhappy, and, according to one historian, ‘Vincent realized early on this mother could hardly bear the sight of him.’”

The word choice here reflects one of the book’s major themes: The Corrupting Influence of Wealth. Vincent Astor’s family was unhappy not merely because of personalities or ordinary challenges in marriage but because of money that “wreaked” (a word more often used in referring to acts of war) “inexorable” (irresistible and often merciless) negative power.

“‘People say that the British Astors are a branch of the family,’ Jakey Astor was quoted as saying after his battle with Brooke was settled. ‘That is no longer true. Today they are the trunk and we are the branch.’”

The family squabble in which Jack Astor’s second son (the Titanic baby) lost his chance to inherit most of the Astor fortune marked the last opportunity for a New York Astor to maintain the legacy for future generations. The only other potential heir to the elder son, Vincent, was his stepson Tony Marshall, whom both Vincent and his mother refused to accept into the Astor clan. Jakey Astor’s remark summarizes the reduced status of the New York Astors as they headed toward obscurity, while acknowledging the continued existence of the British Astors after they lost their New York connection.

“Looking down on the withered figure under thin hospital blankets, unable to take a full breath on his own, they saw a broken old man, a man being crushed by time and his own collapsing life. They may also have seen, as many did who followed his trial, the wasting away of the towering Astor legacy: gutted, made petty and small, and coughing its slow way to its inevitable end.”

This description of the parole board’s considering compassionate release for Tony Marshall wraps up the final chapter of the Astor saga. In parallel to how the authors portrayed the first John Jacob Astor’s normal elderly infirmity as a physical manifestation of his moral decay, they now refer to the illness of the last (failed) claimant to the Astor fortune as an embodied metaphor for the family’s financial and moral decay. An unintentional irony here is that the authors sensationalize an elderly man’s physical condition after critiquing him for disrespecting his mother’s aged infirmities.

“In some respects, we all already live in Astoria, in that we walk every day through spaces that were owned or leased or imagined or willed into being by this family who lived the American self-made myth that we have all imbibed for so long. The immigrant who arrived with nothing (he did not; remember the flutes), who saw a world in the process of its remaking (it was already made), who leached value from the labor of all the successive waves of our arrivals and our dreams.”

This passage sums up the authors’ interpretation of the Astor legacy. The family left an indelible mark on the physical fabric of New York City but were overall a negative, parasitic influence on the soul of its citizens (“who leached value from […] our dreams”). Their appeal to the American Dream is only a manufactured myth concealing how the rich exploit others.