Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

The book’s Introduction recounts how Brooke Astor loved to tell the tale of John Jacob Astor as a “uniquely American” saga of a fortune made through hard work, daring, and sheer grit: He “came here with nothing, carved an empire out of the wilderness, and then helped build a great American city” (6). In the Epilogue, the authors reject this “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” (277). They reject the common idea of America as a land of opportunity where any person can come, work hard, and make it rich without any support or exceptional luck, and they reject the idea that one particular immigrant, John Jacob Astor, helped build the country in a positive way. This is a “myth” that they imply people have heard too long.

They attack the myth in three ways: by showing the advantages that John Jacob had, by highlighting the number of immigrants who worked hard without achieving riches, and by portraying high society as inherently parasitic. John Jacob was not the first member of his family to leave Germany. He found a home and a good job selling musical instruments with his uncle in England right after he left Germany, and those flutes and pianos were part of his initial seed money. In addition, his older brother in New York helped him get settled and gave him an initial $100 to begin his trading. To be fair, none of this made him rich to begin with, and many other immigrants had the same advantages. Furthermore, as Cooper and Howe note, John Jacob gained his initial edge over other fur traders through his willingness to travel into the wilderness in difficult conditions and his effort to learn various Indigenous American languages. He also had the business acumen to realize when it was time to shift from the fur trade to Manhattan real estate. Cooper and Howe acknowledge these aspects of his story that fit the American Dream mythos but emphasize the ones that don’t fit.

What ultimately distinguished John Jacob from later immigrants was timing. New York was, in one important sense, a world in the process of being remade. When John Jacob started buying Manhattan real estate, he could buy undeveloped land for relatively low prices. In their chapter on “the other” John Jacob Astor, Cooper and Howe emphasize that later immigrants no longer had that option, at least in New York City (their historical analysis is largely limited to this one city). This other John Jacob Astor came to New York in 1862 and appears to have worked hard his entire life, rolling cigars, without ever getting rich. The factory owners, faced with a glut of immigrant labor, could offer scanty pay (a dollar a day), while tenement owners (most notably the Astors) could demand exceptionally high rents as immigrants struggled to find shelter on the overcrowded island of Manhattan. The story of this other John Jacob Astor directly contrasts with the myth of America as a “beacon of equal opportunity” (179) that the first John Jacob Astor seemed to illustrate. This later immigrant found few opportunities and thus illustrates, per the book, that the immigrant stories in which a daring man pulls himself up by his own bootstraps are “fantasies” and the far more common immigrant story is that “[n]ot all bootstraps go up, no matter how hard you pull” (180). Through this second man’s life, as well as several other examples, the authors aim to show that the American Dream is often a delusion.

As in the theme of Social Privilege Deriving from Exploitation, the book links this failure of the American Dream to the rapaciousness of the rich. As in the 1862 immigrant’s experience, the rich leveraged their resources to underpay and overcharge the economically disadvantaged to line their own pockets. While this John Jacob worked hard to die in poverty, Jack Astor lived a life of leisure, sailing yachts for fun rather than doing anything productive, yet remained rich. Cooper and Howe devote little attention to whatever business work the later Astor men did and emphasize instead how even smart business ventures like the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel were driven in part by petty spite and made successful by others whom the Astors hired as managers. Riches remained with the family even without the hard work that the American ideal believes should underlie a fortune.