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 amassing 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 class. The result obviously was to increase and centralize still greater wealth in the circumscribed 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 class, 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 destitution, 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 class 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.
