Chapter 2

When the original store was abandoned for the Stewart "Palace" the old apple woman with her box, basket and umbrella were tenderly taken along, too.

John Jacob Astor had no such belief in luck omens, portents, or mascots as had A. T. Stewart. With him success was a sequence--a result--it was all cause and effect. A. T. Stewart did not trust entirely to luck, for he too, carefully devised and planned. But the difference between the Celtic and Teutonic mind is shown in that Stewart hoped to succeed, while Astor knew that he would. One was a bit anxious; the other exasperatingly placid.

Astor took a deep interest in the Lewis and Clark expedition.

He went to Washington to see Lewis, and questioned him at great length about the Northwest. Legend says that he gave the hardy discoverer a thousand dollars, which was a big amount for him to give away.

Once a committee called on him with a subscription list for some worthy charity. Astor subscribed fifty dollars. One of the disappointed committee remarked, "Oh, Mr. Astor, your son William gave us a hundred dollars."

"Yes," said the old man, "But you must remember that William has a rich father."

Washington Irving has told the story of Astoria at length. It was the one financial plunge taken by John Jacob Astor.

And in spite of the fact that it failed, the whole affair does credit to the prophetic brain of Astor.

"This country will see a chain of growing and prosperous cities straight from New York to Astoria, Oregon," said this man in reply to a doubting questioner.

He laid his plans before Congress, urging a line of army posts, forty miles apart, from the western extremity of Lake Superior to the Pacific. "These forts or army posts will evolve into cities," said Astor, when he called on Thomas Jefferson, who was then President of the United States. Jefferson was interested, but non-committal. Astor exhibited maps of the Great Lakes, and the country beyond. He argued with a prescience then not possessed by any living man that at the western extremity of Lake Superior would grow up a great city. Yet in Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-six, Duluth was ridiculed by the caustic tongue of Proctor Knott, who asked, "What will become of Duluth when the lumber crop is cut?" Astor proceeded to say that another great city would grow up at the southern extremity of Lake Michigan. General Dearborn. Secretary of War under Jefferson had just established Fort Dearborn on the present site of Chicago. Astor commended this, and said: "From a fort you get a trading post, and from a trading post you will get a city."

He pointed out to Jefferson the site, on his map, of the Falls of St. Anthony. "There you will have a fort some day, for wherever there is water-power, there will grow up mills for grinding grain and sawmills, as well. This place of power will have to be protected, and so you will have there a post which will eventually be replaced by a city." Yet Fort Snelling was nearly fifty years in the future and St. Paul and Minneapolis were dreams undreamed.

Jefferson took time to think about it and then wrote Astor thus, "Your beginning of a city on the Western Coast is a great acquisition, and I look forward to a time when our population will spread itself up and down along the whole Pacific frontage, unconnected with us, excepting by ties of blood and common interest, and enjoying like us, the rights of self-government."

The Pilgrim Fathers thought land that lay inward from the sea as valueless. The forest was an impassible barrier. Later, up to the time of George Washington, the Alleghanies were regarded as a natural barrier. Patrick Henry likened the Alleghany Mountains to the Alps that separated Italy from Germany and said, "The mountain ranges are lines that God has set to separate one people from another."

Later, statesmen have spoken of the ocean in the same way, as proof that a union of all countries under an international capital could never exist.

Great as was Jefferson, he regarded the achievement of Lewis and Clarke as a feat and not an example. He looked upon the Rocky Mountains as a natural separation of peoples "bound by ties of blood and mutual interest" but otherwise unconnected. To pierce these mighty mountains with tunnels, and whisper across them with the human voice, were miracles unguessed. But Astor closed his eyes and saw pack-trains, mules laden with skins, winding across these mountains, and down to tide-water at Astoria. There his ships would be lying at the docks, ready to sail for the Far East. James J. Hill was yet to come.

A company was formed, and two expeditions set out for the mouth of the Columbia River, one by land and the other by sea.

The land expedition barely got through alive--it was a perilous undertaking, with accidents by flood and field and in the imminent deadly breech.

But the route by the water was feasible.

The town was founded and soon became a centre of commercial activity. Had Astor been on the ground to take personal charge, a city like Seattle would have bloomed and blossomed on the Pacific, fifty years ago. But power at Astoria was subdivided among several little men, who wore themselves out in a struggle for honors, and to see who would be greatest in the kingdom of heaven. John Jacob Astor was too far away to send a current of electricity through the vacuum of their minds, light up the recesses with reason, and shock them into sanity. Like those first settlers at Jamestown, the pioneers at Astoria saw only failure ahead, and that which we fear, we bring to pass. To settle a continent with men is almost as difficult as Nature's attempt to form a soil on a rocky surface.

There came a grand grab at Astoria and it was each for himself and the devil take the hindermost--it was a stampede.

System and order went by the board. The strongest stole the most, as usual, but all got a little. And England's gain in citizens was our loss.

Astor lost a million dollars by the venture. He smiled calmly and said, "The plan was right, but my men were weak, that is all. The gateway to China will be from the northwest. My plans were correct. Time will vindicate my reasoning."

When the block on Broadway, bounded by Vesey and Barclay Streets, was cleared of its plain two story houses, preparatory to building the Astor House, wise men shook their heads and said, "It's too far uptown."

But the free bus that met all boats solved the difficulty, and gave the cue to hotel men all over the world. The hotel that runs full is a gold mine. Hungry men feed, and the beautiful part about the hotel business is that the customers are hungry the next day--also thirsty. Astor was worth ten million, but he took a personal delight in sitting in the lobby of the Astor House and watching the dollars roll into this palace that his brain had planned. To have an idea--to watch it grow--to then work it out, and see it made manifest in concrete substance, this was his joy. The Astor House was a bigger hostelry in its day than the Waldorf-Astoria is now.

Astor was tall, thin, and commanding in appearance. He had only one hallucination, and that was that he spoke the English language. The accent he possessed at thirty was with him in all its pristine effulgence at eighty-five. "Nopody vould know I vas a Cherman--aind't it?" he used to say. He spoke French, a dash of Spanish and could parley in Choctaw, Ottawa, Mohawk and Huron. But they who speak several languages must not be expected to speak any one language well.

Yet when John Jacob wrote it was English without a flaw. In all of his dealings he was uniquely honorable and upright. He paid and he made others pay. His word was his bond. He was not charitable in the sense of indiscriminate giving. "To give something for nothing is to weaken the giver," was one of his favorite sayings. That this attitude protected a miserly spirit, it is easy to say, but it is not wholly true. In his later years he carried with him a book containing a record of his possessions. This was his breviary. In it he took a very pardonable delight. He would visit a certain piece of property, and then turn to his book and see what it had cost him ten or twenty years before. To realize that his prophetic vision had been correct was to him a great source of satisfaction.

His habits were of the best. He went to bed at nine o'clock, and was up before six. At seven he was at his office. He knew enough to eat sparingly and to walk, so he was never sick.

Millionaires as a rule are woefully ignorant. Up to a certain sum, they grow with their acquisitions. Then they begin to wither at the heart. The care of a fortune is a penalty. I advise the gentle reader to think twice before accumulating ten millions.

John Jacob Astor was exceptional in his combined love of money and love of books. History was at his tongue's end, and geography was his plaything. Fitz-Greene Halleck was his private secretary, hired on a basis of literary friendship. Washington Irving was a close friend, too, and first crossed the Atlantic on an Astor pass. He banked on Washington Irving's genius, and loaned him money to come and go, and buy a house. Irving was named in Astor's will as one of the trustees of the Astor Library Fund, and repaid all favors by writing "Astoria."

Astor died, aged eighty-six. It was a natural death, a thing that very seldom occurs. The machinery all ran down at once.

Realizing his lack of book advantages, he left by his will four hundred thousand dollars to found the Astor Library, in order that others might profit where he had lacked.

He also left fifty thousand dollars to his native town of Waldorf, a part of which money was used to found an Astor Library there God is surely good, for if millionaires were immortal, their money would cause them great misery and the swollen fortunes would crowd mankind, not only 'gainst the wall, but into the sea. Death is the deliverer, for Time checks power and equalizes all things, and gives the new generation a chance.

Astor hated gamblers. He never confused gambling, as a mode of money getting, with actual production. He knew that gambling produces nothing--it merely transfers wealth, changes ownership. And since it involves loss of time and energy it is a positive waste.

Yet to buy land and hold it, thus betting on its rise in value, is not production, either. Nevertheless, this was to Astor, legitimate and right.

Henry George threw no shadow before, and no economist had ever written that to secure land and hold it unused, awaiting a rise in value, was a dog-in-the-manger, unethical and selfish policy. Morality is a matter of longitude and time.

Astor was a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, and yet he lived out his days with a beautiful and perfect disbelief in revealed religion.

He knew enough of biology to know that religions are not "revealed"--they are evolved. Yet he recognized the value of the Church as a social factor. To him it was a good police system, and so when rightly importuned he gave, with becoming moderation, to all faiths and creeds.

A couple of generations back in his ancestry there was a renegade Jew who loved a Christian girl, and thereby moulted his religion. When Cupid crosses swords with a priest, religion gets a death stroke. This stream of free blood was the inheritance of John Jacob Astor.

William B. Astor, the son of John Jacob, was brought up in the financial way he should go. He was studious, methodical, conservative, and had the good sense to carry out the wishes of his father. His son John Jacob Astor was very much like him, only of more neutral tint. The time is now ripe for another genius in the Astor family. If William B. Astor lacked the courage and initiative of his parent, he had more culture, and spoke English without an accent. The son of John Jacob Astor second, is William Waldorf Astor, who speaks English with an English accent, you know.

John Jacob Astor, besides having the first store for the sale of musical instruments in America, organized the first orchestra of over twelve players. He brought over a leader from Germany, and did much to foster the love of music in the New World.

Every worthy Maecenas imagines that he is a great painter, writer, sculptor or musician, side-tracked by material cares thrust upon him by unkind fate. John Jacob Astor once told Washington Irving that it was only business responsibility that prevented his being a novelist; and at other times he declared his intent to take up music as a profession as soon as he had gotten all of his securities properly tied up. And whether he worked out his dreams or not, there is no doubt but that they added to his peace, happiness and length of days. Happy is the man who escapes the critics by leaving his literary masterpiece in the ink.