December 14, 2022 • 45 mins
John Jacob Astor came to the U.S. from Germany not long after the colonies gained their independence as a nation. He made his first fortune in the fur trade, and then diversified his income and built a legendary fortune.
Research:
- Irving, Washington. “Astoria, Or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains.” G.P. Putnams Sons. 1861. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Astoria/DAzBRmfcZloC?hl=en&gbpv=0
- “ROMANCE OF THE HISTORIC EDEN FARM OWNED BY ASTOR FAMILY SINCE 1803.” New York Times. Feb. 29, 1920. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1920/02/29/118265256.html?pageNumber=80
- Shachtman, Tom. “The Founding Fortunes: How the Wealthy Paid for and Profited from America's Revolution.” St. Martin's Press. 2020.
- “John Jay’s Treaty, 1794–95.” U.S. Department of State. Office of the Historian. https://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/jay-treaty
- Youngman, Anna. “The Fortune of John Jacob Astor.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 16, no. 6, 1908, pp. 345–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1820664
- Youngman, Anna. “The Fortune of John Jacob Astor: II.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 16, no. 7, 1908, pp. 436–41. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1820843
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "John Jacob Astor". Encyclopedia Britannica, 13 Jul. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Jacob-Astor-American-businessman-1763-1848
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "American Fur Company". Encyclopedia Britannica, 28 Dec. 2018, https://www.britannica.com/topic/American-Fur-Company
- Ziak, Rex. “The Astor Dynasty.” The Astorian. Dec. 7, 2018. https://www.dailyastorian.com/news/the-astor-dynasty/article_d9163297-dfb7-5c77-83d8-3db1340017f7.html
- Madsen, Axel. “John Jacob Astor: America's First Multimillionaire.” Wiley. 2001.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So the
name John Jacob Astor is one that comes up throughout
US history. They're not all the same one. When you
(00:23):
hear that name, there were several there a lot um
and it's one of those names that I feel like
is a shorthand for super rich person. Yeah, and just
the Aster part two. Yeah. Yeah, But because there have
been so many, sometimes people may not realize that that
they're talking about different ones. This leads to some confusion
(00:44):
when you're actually talking to someone about who he was.
The one we most recently mentioned on the podcast, which
was in our Charles Shapen episode when we talked about
newspaper coverage of the Titanic was John Jacob Aster, the
fourth who famously died on the ship. But the families
fortune and name recognition began well before that with the
first John Jacob Astar, who came to the U S
(01:06):
from Germany not long after the colonies gained their independence
as a nation. And today we're going to talk about
that start of what is now called an American dynasty
and how Astor became the first millionaire in the United States.
Quick heads up, A lot of this involves the fur trade.
So if the discussion of animals being used as fur
is distasteful to you, maybe you want to skip this one.
(01:28):
But I will say we're not talking about any of
the details of how that's accomplished. There's a brief mention
of numbers of animals late in the episode, but uh,
a lot of fur trade and trapping talk just in general.
So John Jacob Astar was born July seventeenth, seventeen sixty
three in Waldorf, Germany. His father, Johann Jacob Austar, was
(01:50):
a butcher. The family was working class. His mother was
Maria Magdalena Vofelder. Maria and Johan had gotten married in
seventeen fifty. Some accounts indicated that John Jacob was the
youngest of three sons, but the Astors also had more children.
One son died in infancy. It appears there were several
(02:12):
sisters as well, although they really have not been given
much attention at all in the historical record. No I
saw like a reference to a Christina getting married, and
that was kind of all that I ran up against
in my research. Uh, John Jacob was christened Johann Jacob
like his father, but we'll use his anglicized name here
to retain clarity, and we'll talk about when he made
(02:35):
that switch officially. And when John Jacob was three, his
mother Maria died when Johann Jacob remarried to a woman
named Christina Barbara. The second marriage produced six more children,
and that was a situation that led to a lot
of strife. Obviously, that meant that there were a lot
of people being supported on a pretty meager income. But
(02:56):
also most accounts indicate that there was a pretty clear
vision between Johann Yakum's children from his first marriage and
his children from the second marriage, and that those two
family groups never really were able to integrate in a
harmonious way. All of the kids from the first marriage
are said to have moved out as soon as they
were able to, and John's case, for a brief period
(03:20):
of time, his father tried to teach him to be
a butcher, and John hated it. His father had a
reputation for being a very good butcher, but also kind
of a hard man to get along with, and John
didn't especially like the work itself. His older brother George
had moved to London and was doing well as a
(03:40):
flute maker, and his brother Henry had become a butcher
in New York. Both of John's older brothers wrote to
him and encouraged him to join them in their respective
locations and trades, and the unhappy John Jacob broke from
his father and went to London to make musical instruments
with his brother George Urge. It was in London that
(04:02):
he started to go by the anglicized version of his name. Also,
he would later just go by the initials J. J. Yeah,
there's a kind of sad circumstance here where even though
he hated the butcher trade, he was apparently very good
at it um and it was one of those things
like you would be fine, you would have a job
(04:22):
for life, and it's like, yeah, but I hate it.
It just seems like a line of work that would
be particularly unpleasant if you really hated it, right and grueling.
And also I think he probably associated it with his dad,
who he had problems with. Um. John lived in London
for four years making wind instruments with his brother, and
during that time his brother Henry wrote really frequently about
(04:44):
the many opportunities that were available to a young man
in the newly formed US so in se three at
the age of twenty. That's one of those things that
gets a little weekly in the historical record his exact age,
but most places report twenty John Jacob Bordered a ship
headed to North America. The move from London to the
U S has also led to Astor sometimes being identified
(05:07):
as English American instead of noting his birth in Germany.
Just as an f y I. If you see him
as an UH English American or UM British American, he
was German. UH. This trip that he made normally took
about two months, but this particular one took four because
the ship had to drop their route and moved south
(05:29):
to avoid pack ice that was forming in the Atlantic.
It was springtime, but it was they had some late freezes.
The ship actually got frozen in ice in Chesapeake Bay.
Despite all of this maneuvering to try to avoid that problem,
after the ice got thick enough that people could walk
on it, some passengers walked the rest of the way.
There's some discrepancy in accounts of whether Astor did this.
(05:54):
Some accounts suggest that he waited for the ice to
break up so that he could go ashore with all
of his cargo, included some instruments that he had packed
to sell in New York. Others indicate that he eventually
gave up on waiting and made the walk on the
ice to Baltimore. However he got there. He stayed in Baltimore,
Maryland for several weeks. He made friends with a shop
(06:16):
owner there who helped him sell several instruments. Once he
had made a little money, he headed to New York
to meet his brother Henry and Henry's wife, Dorothea. When
he arrived in New York City in four it had
roughly twenty three thousand residents. That blows my mind. We'll
talk about that a little bit in the The Friday
(06:39):
episode because I'll talk about how I, in my frame
of reference, made that number makes sense, and then you
think I'm ridiculous. But so, John Jacob opted not to
work in the butcher trade with his brother Henry. Instead,
he ended up working as a street vendor for a
little while for a confect scenery shop. So he sold
(07:01):
bake sweets from a cart, which sounds a little bit dreamy.
Although probably not very heavy on the money making. Then
he moved on to work as an assistant to a
Quaker fur dealer named Robert Brown, and this was work
that Astor really took to, even though initially all he
really did in terms of his job requirements or his
(07:23):
duties was beat the first to keep moths at bay.
But his boss really liked him and saw that he
was very smart and he had a lot of initiative
in terms of learning the trade, and so he soon
upped his weekly pay from the original two dollars a
week that he was giving him, and he also the
boss also gave him an engraved silver pocket watch, so
there was very clearly an affinity between these two men.
(07:46):
Astor was still selling flutes during this time as a
second income, and as he made money, he lived fairly frugally.
His fur job included room and board. The money he
saved up was invested in more flutes to sell, as
well as in animal skins that he prepared and put
into storage. Once he had a large stock of them,
(08:07):
he would travel back to London briefly to sell the
first through a consignment shop and pick up a fresh
stock of flutes from his brother He also made deals
with two piano manufacturers to act as their New York salesperson.
John was obviously savvy when it came to business, he
started to do really well for himself. On September nineteen,
(08:29):
seventeen eighty five, Astor married Sarah Cox, the daughter of
his landlady. Over the course of the next seventeen years,
they had eight children. Magdalen was born in seventeen Sarah
was born in seventeen ninety but died in infancy. John
Jacob the Second or John Jacob Jr. You'll sometimes see
him listed, was born in seventeen ninety one. William Backhouse
(08:52):
was born in seventeen ninety two, Dorothea in seventeen ninety five,
and then Henry was born in seventeen ninety seven but
died sevent so just a toddler. Their daughter, Eliza was
born in eighteen o one, and a son who lived
only a few days, was born in eighteen o two.
When John and Sarah married, the two of them continued
(09:12):
to live at the boarding house, but they had two
rooms of their own. One was their living area and
the other was set up as a show room for
John's musical instruments. Sarah and John were similarly driven when
it came to business, and she both assisted in his
business work and encouraged him to try new ventures. Yeah,
you'll often see her mentioned as though she was really
(09:35):
kind of his right hand. Took care of a lot
of administrative and managerial duties for his business as it grew.
There are some debates over the nature of their union,
whether or not um he had married her for her
dowry and is kind of a really good business arrangement,
but they stayed together a very long time. He later
told his children that he married her because she was
(09:58):
the prettiest girl he had ever seen, even though most
accounts say she was not especially pretty. So it's unclear
how much their relationship was um romantic versus uh union
through business interests um. But they made a life together
for sure. In autumn of five so not long after
(10:20):
he became a husband, John jacob Astor made his first
fur trading trip to Albany. This meant that he was
going directly to trappers to acquire furs, rather than purchasing
skins from vendors in the city, which is what he
had done up to that point. According to lore, he
would make his way into the woods and then traded
and became friendly with just about every trapper he encountered.
(10:41):
He got to no local Native American tribes and purchased
from them, remember that according to lore phrasing here. And
he also did business with European trappers. When he had
a full load of furs, he would take them to
Albany and pack them on barges and travel with them
back to New York. He made a lot of profit,
but he still had to keep his business kind of
(11:03):
small because he was a one man operation and he
really wanted to expand, and so after gathering more funds,
he was able to expand his efforts beyond Albany to Montreal,
which he visited for the first time in late summer
of So so far, this all just sounds like a
guy from humble means who hustled a lot to build
an empire. That's not wrong, but it also does not
(11:26):
tell the whole story. Because John Jacob asked her, had
a reputation for being ruthless. It said that nobody could
ever get the upper hand and a deal with him
when it came to dealing with indigenous people. He used
a lot of different manipulations, including only making deals with
Native American trappers after he had first gotten them drunk.
(11:50):
He also fast talked a lot of people to make
them think they were getting the better of him while
he was actually landing an agreement that weighed really heavily
in his own favor. Yeah. I read one account this
was an ongoing problem that a lot of trappers were
selling or giving Native American tribes alcohol before they started negotiations,
(12:11):
and so some posts were actually outlawing that, and if
they did, he was like, well, I'm not going there anymore.
Like that was one of his key tools. Um. So
just no, there's a lot of undocumented behavior that is
not cool in here. Um. Coming up, we're going to
talk about how J. J. Astor expanded his wealth by
taking advantage of really just about every opportunity he saw.
(12:34):
But before we do that, we will pause for a
quick sponsor break. When the j Treaty was signed, it
opened up new options for Astor in terms of scale.
So the j Treaty was an agreement between the US
(12:56):
and Great Britain that was not especially popular in the US,
but it did put to rest a number of outstanding
issues that were still lingering from the Revolutionary War, and
one of the elements of this treaty, and the one
which was significant for Astor, was a change in export permissions.
So prior to Britain could send exported goods to the
(13:16):
US without much limitation, and it did, but the US
couldn't reciprocate because there were steep tariffs and restrictions on
items shipped into Britain from the US. Additionally, northwestern posts
in North America that had remained occupied by the British
were finally turned over to the US. So this meant
that for J. J. Astor, who traded furs in the
(13:37):
northeastern parts of the US and into Canada, he was
just going to have a much easier time traveling around
to purchase skins and ship them back to New York,
and then once those skins were ready, he could export
them as a good on their own in bulk instead
of having to travel to London and work through consignment
dealers on a small scale. As he expanded his business
(13:59):
in this way, Master also started to diversify his revenue streams.
He invested in real estate. By the start of the
nineteenth century, John Jacob Astor had accumulated two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars, and he put that money to work.
By continuously investing, he increased his real estate holdings that
(14:19):
just about every opportunity. At this point, which was the
year eighteen hundred, New York City had more than doubled
in size. From the time he arrived there, it had
about fifty thousand residents. Astor saw that the population was
only going to keep growing, and he knew that if
he bought property, it would increase in value as more
(14:41):
and more people needed places to live. So he bought
and bought. If an orchard or a farm was struggling,
he bought it and often just let it sit. He
bought property up and down the Hudson River, even property
that no one saw any value in. Yeah, he sort
of infamously was known to just by swamp end and
be like, it's gonna be something one day, somebody's gonna
(15:02):
need this. Uh. He was not wrong. His next move
in terms of diversifying his income was to start trading
in China. So, just as he had done in sending
first to Europe and bringing flutes back, he started sending
first to China and bringing silk and tea. Back on
April six eight, Astor established the American Fur Company in
(15:23):
New York. It would not only exist in New York,
had had offices in many places, and he eventually set
up a kind of a headquarters in m Machina Island,
which is now part of Michigan because it was closer
to the fur but as a as a business entity,
it's home base with New York. Now. Up to this point,
when he started American for he had a number of
(15:44):
different kind of small businesses that were sort of specialized
in who they traded with. But when he founded American Fur,
he consolidated all of those smaller businesses under one big umbrella.
This would eventually lead to a monopoly on the fur trade,
as competitors were either destroyed by outbidding that was enabled
by Astor's wealthy company, or they just got absorbed. At
(16:06):
a time when the fur trade was rapidly expanding throughout
the country, it seemed that Astor always managed to out
maneuver anyone who was trying to carve out a territory
of their own. The American Fur Company is often cited
as the first business monopoly in the United States. The
formation of the larger company was, of course a strategic
(16:27):
business move motivated in part by the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Astor had read all about the famous expedition and in
eighteen ten decided to start a fur trading network on
the West coast. The idea was that this new venture
at the Pacific Fur Company would give J. J. Astor
a major advantage in dealings with China. The Pacific Fur
(16:51):
Company could send a ship to the coast of what's
now Oregon, set up a fort, and then get for
in the Pacific Northwest, and have it on ships much
faster than any other fur company could get on its
way from Montreal to China via New York. At the
nexus of this web was the town of Astoria, founded
(17:12):
in eighteen eleven on land that Astor claimed for the
United States and of course was named after him. But
early into the efforts to establish this hub, the War
of eighteen twelve started between the US and Britain. During
this conflict, Astoria was captured by the British. Astor's trading
(17:32):
network was unable to ever become established. He was always
ready to capitalize on a tragedy, though, so Astor bought
a lot of skins very cheap from trappers in the
Northwest who were eager to get out of the business
and out of the area as hostilities ramped up. Yeah,
he took advantage of everything. A story of Oregon still exists,
(17:53):
by the way, it just never became his his fur
trading nexus that he had hoped. The War of eighteen
twelve was of course costly for the United States, and
the U. S. Treasury was seeking ways to come up
with the money to pay for it. So entered John
jacob Astor and too rich associates Stephen Gerard and David Parrish.
(18:14):
In what has been called the first bond syndicate in
the United States and the start of investment banking in
the United States. These millionaires bought government bonds worth a
hundred dollars at the price of eighty eight dollars each
in massive sums. I have seen various numbers reported, but
it all seems to average out to about ten million
dollars each that they spent. To be clear, Aster, even
(18:38):
though he had grown his business a lot, he didn't
have that cash in ready. Money. He borrowed some from banks,
with some of his real estate holdings as collateral. And
per the terms of the bonds, which is different than
what the Treasury had initially offered, but what they negotiated,
the full one hundred dollar value would be paid to
the bond holder over the course of thirteen years. This
(19:00):
was essentially alone, with very clear terms on how the
interest was going to come back. Some of the bonds
were resold as an immediate money back for these investors,
but Astor held onto a lot of his These bonds
dropped in value initially, though, When Washington City was burned
by the British in the Chesapeake Campaign, bonds flooded the
(19:22):
market as people thought that if they did not sell
them for something, they would never see any return on
their eighty eight dollar per bond investment, and asked Or
bought and bought and bought, and just waited for the
tide to turn so he could collect the full hundred
dollars on each of them. As the US Treasury made
(19:42):
good on its deal. Newspaper editor Horace Greeley once estimated
that through some cloaked bond buyouts, in addition to his
on the book's transactions, J. J. Astor may have made
all his money back plus another fifty percent. I mean again, weasel,
(20:04):
but astute. Uh. And though he made a name for
himself and the beginning of his fortune in fur trade
and deals like his war financing, the real source of
Astor's financial success and what really enabled him to start
essentially a dynasty, was his astute real estate investments in
New York City. We mentioned already that he had bought
(20:25):
a lot of property in New York. He owned an
estimated three percent of all of New York. Three percent
may not sound like much, but we're talking about one person,
uh So it is actually pretty significant. And by the
late nineteen teens, Astor's various enterprises and holdings had grown
so much that he made his son, William Backhouse, returned
(20:47):
from studying abroad to help him run things. William didn't
especially want to get into the family business. He was
kind of shy. He was more interested in art and
literature than he was in his dad's business. But once
he was in charge of things, he was as ruthless
as his father, and some historians have even characterized him
as more ruthless. One of the big legacies of John
(21:10):
Jacob and William Backhouse Astor was the construction of huge
tracts of tenements. And this is a situation where in
a lot of ways they very carefully put together business
deals that protected them. They never built any tenements. William
became an expert in the ins and outs of property law.
(21:30):
They owned the land, then leased it to developers. Then
those developers would sub let it to basically slum lords
who would build out the entire twenty five by one
foot lots with buildings that could house dozens of families.
Keep in mind that surveyed lot size of twenty five
hundred feet that seven point six by thirty point five
(21:52):
meters was based on how much space the surveyors of
New York City initially thought would be adequate for a
single emily. But because this was all operated by sub letters,
the Asters who enjoyed a life of just extraordinary luxury
by this point, we're twice removed from any real responsibility
and could claim ignorance when problems related to the poor
(22:15):
quality of life and the tenements was brought up. It.
We'll talk a little bit more about that on the
behind the scenes on Friday. It becomes its own whole story.
And I didn't want to sidetrack the entire John Aster
things since William was really in a lot of cases
spearheading these initiatives. But it's it makes me very angry. Um.
On April four, four, Astor returned to New York aboard
(22:38):
the passenger ship Utica, coming from England after having been
at a wedding. It had been kind of a terrible voyage.
It was full of delays, but the news that Astor
received at the dock was worse than anything he had
endured to see. He learned that his wife, Sarah had
died a week earlier. Maybe the timing on this is
(22:58):
something that becomes really hard to pin down. That story
is one way it's relayed, But the date of Sarah's
death is kind of all over the place, um, when
you see it in different accounts. Sometimes it's listed as
eighteen thirty two, sometimes eighteen thirty four, and sometimes And
I think this is a result of a good old
fashioned typo eighteen forty two, But that type of was
(23:20):
in a place that people took as gospel and repeated
it a whole lot. One of those early eighteen thirties
dates is almost certainly correct. There is even a very
well reviewed Astor biography that I read that list the
eight thirty four date, but then later mentions Astor being
a widower in eighteen thirty two, So keep all of
that in mind before we get into Astor's life after
(23:44):
Sarah's death. We will take a quick break and hear
from the sponsors that keeps stuffy missed in history Glass going.
In June four, John Jacob Aster sold his interest in
(24:04):
the American Fur Company. It was at the time the
largest commercial organization in the US, and there have been
some characterizations that Astor lost his interest in business when
Sarah died, and that a lot of his behavior in
the years that followed her death was driven by grief,
and he did certainly grieve for her. He had felt
especially bad that he was not home when she died.
(24:26):
He had similarly been absent for the deaths of other
family members, and the accumulated guilt over that was something
that he wrote about to his friend Wilson Price Hunt.
But there were definitely other factors involved in the decision
to liquidate his business interests. American Fur Company had been
capturing and killing animals for their skins for years. At
(24:48):
this point. It was estimated in one Ledger report that
the company had sold an average of twenty six thousand
buffalo skins a year and twenty five thousand beaver skins
a year for fifteen consecutive years. There's numbers are pretty staggering.
There was no thought in the trade for sustainability. Additionally,
(25:09):
styles and tastes were shifting. He noted on a trip
to London in the eighteen thirties that men's top hats
were being made of silk instead of beaver, and silk
from China was no longer at the same level of
demand because European textile houses were making gorgeous fabrics of
their own. Animal pelts were also seen with increasing suspicion
(25:31):
as a possible disease vector. At a time when Cholero
was spreading rapidly in short, Astor saw that the revenue
streams that had brought him so much wealth were soon
going to slow to a trickle or even dry up.
That would mean he would lose money instead of making it,
and he just was not interested in that. No, he
(25:53):
was interested in building a hotel. Though. This is interesting because,
as we said, he didn't really build much of an anything,
but he really wanted to make a hotel. Um he
decided to take on the project of building a six
story luxury hotel on Broadway between Barclay and Vessey Streets.
That's the area where the World Trade Center complex would
(26:13):
eventually be built. Using distract of land mint that he
had to tear down existing homes, which he bought out.
It also meant tearing down Astor's home, so he had
another built at the corner of Broadway and Prince, But
the resulting Astor House Hotel was a three hundred room
luxury hotel that drew a lot of famous visitors over
the years, including Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allen Poe, who stay
(26:38):
inspired the story The Mystery of Marie Rouge, and Charles Dickens,
who found the hotel itself to be lovely but the
pigs eating garbage on the street outside to have kind
of ruined the whole thing. We've talked before on the
show about how dirty New York could be during this time.
Once he retired, Astor made a deal with Washington Irving
to write his biography. I've done a show on Washington
(27:01):
Irving before. Irving would not take payment from Aster and
instead negotiated to have the books publishing rights in their entirety.
His reasoning he would later write, was that quote. He
was too proverbially rich a man for me to permit
the shadow of a pecuniary favor to rest on our intercourse.
(27:22):
Irving did, however, ask Astor to pay for his research assistant,
his nephew, Pierre Monroe Irving, who received three thousand dollars
for going through all of Aster's papers assembling an outline
and an organizational structure to the work. Irving incidentally tried
to get a good sense of how the trapping business
had worked and had been perceived from the Native American perspective,
(27:45):
although it's unclear what information he may have gotten, as
he asked for that information from Samuel G. Drake, who
was a white man who was considered to be an
expert on the matter. Yeah, that struck me as interesting
because it's like, I don't trust your version of the story,
but the expert I'm gonna ask is also a rich
(28:06):
white guy who probably doesn't really understand what's what was
going on there. But the resulting book that Irving wrote,
a Storia or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains,
came out in the fall of eighty six, and this
book sold a lot of copies, and it got a
lot of praise, and that sounds great, but Washington Irving
(28:27):
was a little embarrassed by the whole thing. His book,
despite having taken no money, uh and to try to
stay objective, was really soft on Astor. It made him
seem like a great guy, and he knew that he
had kind of rushed it. And there were definitely critics
who called it out as being Astro propaganda. But the
book remained very popular, and it was published in several translations,
(28:49):
and all of this made J. J. Aster very pleased.
Although he was not actively working after selling American for Company,
Aster continued to make money in real estate. When a
massive fire during a particularly cold winter took out most
of the tenements on Astor's land, he lost nothing because
of the way those deals had been set up. The
(29:11):
Lessies were responsible for the buildings, not Aster rebuilding was
it their expense, and if they opted not to rebuild,
Aster just rented that to someone else. During economic crashes,
Aster always sailed through, often buying mortgages for deeply discounted
rates when others were struggling, and never hesitating to seize
(29:32):
the property when the original owner defaulted. Yeah he was.
That was like a thing he did a lot of, like, oh,
you you need a loan, or you need a little
help with a mortgage. Yeah, I got you. Oh you
can't make your payments, it's mine now, Like he was
not the least bit um hesitant in that. There is
also a very wild story about how Astor got a
(29:55):
massive chunk of midtown Manhattan in a real estate deal
and flipped it for an exorbitant sum. In eighteen o three,
a whiskey distiller named Mediev Eden had fallen into financial
trouble took out a mortgage on his family's property, which
was known as Eden Farm, and that sat on Bloomingdale
Road that's now known as Broadway, and the farm stretch
(30:17):
from present day forty to forty six streets, and it
took up the space from Bloomingdale West to the Hudson River.
So if you know the the island of Manhattan, you
get a sense of how big this was. And also
if you know New York City, you know that Times
Square sits right in that space. Now, so seeing the
value of this property. J. J. Astor in eighteen o
(30:39):
three had paid twenty five thousand dollars to buy out
one third of the mortgage. Over time, Eden defaulted and
Astor took control of it. Over the years, there was
a lot of lengthy legal battle over the property between
Astor and Eden's airs, because they claimed that that wasn't
really a fully legal transaction, but ultimately the millionaire settled
(31:00):
with the family for a mere nine thousand dollars. That
probably seemed like a lot then, but over time he
leased some of the lots, and he also sold off
lots from the property, leaving the farm itself largely intact.
And even though he hadn't sold all of it, he
still made five point one million dollars off of it,
off of what had been a thirty four thousand dollar
(31:23):
investment if you count both his initial buy out and
the nine thousand dollars settlement. It wasn't until after Astor's
death even that the remaining sections of that chunk of
land were sold by Aster's heirs. By the late eighteen forties,
Aster had a number of health issues. His health was
really pretty feeble. He had digestive problems, he had trouble sleeping,
(31:47):
he had experienced some paralysis. John Jacob Master died in
New York City on March eighteen forty eight, at the
age of eighty four. His fortune at the time of
his death was estimated to be between twenty thirty million dollars.
That was roughly one fifteen of all the personal wealth
in the US at the time. This was actually difficult
(32:09):
to calculate, despite a lot of people wanting to know
this number, but because so much of his wealth was
tied up in real estate at a level that nobody
had really seen before, it took a long time to
just tabulate this whole thing. And the years from eighteen
forty to his death, he had made more than one
point to million dollars and rental income alone that far
(32:32):
outpaced his spending and acquiring new real estate. Yeah. I
had read one figure that he had spent like seven
hundred and fifty thousand to eight hundred thousand dollars, and
it's like, yeah, but he was just making tons of
money like he had no It was all black in
his ledger. There was no no red h If you
have ever been to the New York Public Library, which
is lovely, you could say you've benefited from one of
(32:55):
the bequeathments of John Jacob Astor. In his will when
he died, he allocated more than four hundred thousand dollars
of his fortune for the creation of a public library.
This is one of those things that sounds deeply benevolent,
but it's really him making good on a promise that
he had made the city leaders a decade before he died.
But though he had said, yes, we're building a library,
(33:16):
he had then dithered on where to put the building,
what collections he thought should be purchased for it, and
who should be involved in the project, and it dragged
on and on. It kind of seemed like while he
was alive he didn't want to give up that chunk
of money. But with the money from the will, that
project was finally carried out, and then in the Astor
(33:36):
Library was consolidated with the Lennox Library with additional money
from the Tilden Foundation to form the New York Public Library.
As a point of note, though, that central building for
the New York Public Library, which is pretty iconic, was
not built until nineteen eleven, though so well after he
had died. Aster's will was unique in that it was
just incredibly wildly. He left money for various knee needs
(34:00):
and support of his family. His oldest son, John Jacob Jr.
Was not going to inherit the bulk of it or
take on the family business. It's not clear exactly what
the situation was, but based on some pretty hazy accounts,
it appears that John Jacob Jr. May have had some
sort of developmental disability or some other illness like something
(34:22):
going on. Yeah, the descriptions of him call him varying
things like even even things that are outside of the
completely inappropriate and outdated language. It's like he was a
very weak boy, Like what does that mean? Yeah, we
don't know, but there was. It seems like that was
he was definitely um not talked about very much, So
we don't have great information. So William had always been
(34:46):
John jacob seniors intended protege, but asked. He also truly
adored William's son. John Jacob asked her the third and
wanted to leave him a significant part of the fortune.
But he also didn't trust government laws to basically stay
the way that they would to protect that actual trust.
(35:07):
Seemed like the law could change and that trust would
no longer be safe. There were laws in place that
limited trusts. So Astor left his son William half of
the bulk of his fortune, and the other half went
into a trust for John Jacob the Third. He also
asked William to make a will with this same set up,
(35:27):
with John Jacob the Third getting half the family fortune
and John Jacob the Third's oldest son, who was not
yet born, getting the other half of the trust. This
was intended to prevent the family money from ever transferring
to anyone in one lump sum that could then be
mismanaged or otherwise lost. Three generations of Astor's followed suit
(35:50):
before great grandson William Waldorf broke this chain. Even with
his savvy arrangements, it took more than four decades for
all of Astor's will, which included a lot of smaller
sums for various charities, to be fully settled. That will
had a lot of very sort of odd and nebulous
bequeathments of like I want to give money to the
(36:13):
elderly of Waldorf, Germany for their care, and it's like, okay,
but there's nothing set up to handle this, uh, And
so his executors had to create a lot of new
funds and smaller trusts and accounts that could handle some
of his his charitable bequeathments which were, considering his im
men's fortune, pretty pretty tiny really, um Ah, John Jacob Astar.
(36:41):
I have to simultaneously admire his intellect and absolutely loathed
his attitude about other people and how they should be
taken advantage of every opportunity. It's an I'll talk about
it behind the scenes. I have a juxtaposition of another
(37:02):
wealthy man we have talked about before in the show
that I actually like. But in the meantime, I have
listener mail. This is from our listener Alessandra, who has
a question about pronunciation. She writes, high There, I love
your podcast and your perspectives on history. You convey a
lot of respect to the cultures and people you discuss.
I really enjoyed your recent episode on Pauline Johnson and
(37:23):
love the anecdotal inclusion of the house with identical entrances
front and back. Such a beautiful example of blending and
honoring two cultures in one family. I'm a born in
bred Vancouver right and I don't know anything about her,
so thank you. You seem to take a lot of
care in French pronunciation, which is lovely. I've noticed that
you apply French pronunciation to Italian names. I know the
(37:44):
last episode of The Mancini Sisters is a poor example
to give because they are Italians that moved to France.
But even in giving the birth names, you say Italian
names in a French way, it can be distracting. I
find I just skipped the episodes with Italian subjects. Now
she gives some examples which I'm not going to do.
You won't like it anyway. I'm likely coming across as
a supercar in but I love my other language and
(38:05):
wanted to share in case you didn't know. In tribute,
I attached photos of Luke and Newfoundland Bilbo are sweet
Gray Prince and Butterfly, the cat who likes to shower
with his humans. I'd include a picture of him showering,
but I can't seem to get one without including body
parts you might want to see. I know that trial
I had a cat that used to shower with me. Um.
Here's the both Tracy and I have only ever formally
(38:28):
studied French as another language. I grew up speaking it
a little bit, so that's always my default on anything. Yeah,
Like I took three years of French in high school,
and then six units of French and college and then
have been really trying to like refresh my French through
(38:49):
duo lingo. There was a break in there because I
couldn't concentrate on anything because of the early pandemic months,
but like you know, my duo lingo fell apart at
that point in time. I'm much better with the due
lingo now, So I think it's like not unreasonable to
expect the one non English language that we've had formal
study into to like kind of bleed into some other
(39:11):
things that we try to say. But I started typing
an answer to the same email and was like, I'm
honestly not share what you mean, because I researched this
particular episode that prompted the email um and there were
various audio lectures and presentations and things like that from
people who have either studied the Mancini family or the Mazarinists,
(39:33):
or who work for archives and libraries that have stuff
about them and their collections and like their pronunciations. We're
basically what we followed. I think probably one of the
examples that was in here was Giovanni, And I'm pretty
sure the way I said that was informed way more
by having studied the work of Nikki Giovanni, who pronounces
(39:56):
that name much differently than an Italian person would than
having ever studied French. There's a a wonderful I mean,
here's the thing, right, Like, it's not that we're taking
more care in French pronunciation. I think it just comes
more naturally to both of us. The other thing is that, um,
I if it makes you feel any better, there are
(40:17):
French people that don't like the way we've pronounced things either. Yeah,
We've also gotten emails from people who say, I'm not
listening to any episode you do that involves French because
your French pronunciation is overpronounced and annoying. And I don't
to be clear, Alessandra, I don't want this to sound
like we're piling on you, but as an explanation and
exploration of how different languages and pronunciations work. I this
(40:38):
is a bit of a divergement, but I hope everyone
will come on this journey with me. There is a
u a TikTok creator who is like a master bartender.
He designs cocktail programs for like Michelin Star restaurants named
Chris Louder. Check him out if you want, and he
had a wonderful thing when recently the negroni spaggliato became
like the thing in pop culture with prosecco in it.
(41:00):
With I mean by saying spoggliato, that's what you're saying,
you're actually saying a messed up negroni because baggliato means mistake. Um,
that is neither here nor there. But there were some
people that were complaining that people weren't pronouncing spargliato correctly,
and he was like, but if we all know that
that's what we're getting at, maybe we could just get
(41:23):
past that and recognize that we're all trying to connect
about something. And doesn't that sound like more fun? And
I was like, I kind of love this up to
do it too. Yeah, I think that sounds great. I mean,
you know, it's it's kind of like when somebody is
is not from your city, even though like we all
speak English, uh for example, or most of us in
(41:45):
the U s speak English, but like they will come
to Atlanta and we have a street in Atlanta that
looks like it should be Poston and it is constantly
on and so I always find it quite charming when
people mispronounce it. And I think it's sweet because I
know exactly where they're talking about, and I don't you know. Yeah,
(42:05):
I promise we're trying real hard to say things as
well as we can always always, I mean, I never
want to offend anyone. Italian is very hard for me.
On the other show, I host Criminalia, I grew up
speaking French my coast. On that show, Maria is from
an Italian family and grows speaking Italian, and we crack
each other up because we just we gotta meet in
(42:26):
the middle because she has She struggles with French and
I struggle with Italian. But it's like the what really
gets me a lot of the time in Italian is
where the accent on a word goes is not natural
to me at all, and so then if I try
to hit it, I sound really really silly. But we're
always trying. I promise, I promise, I promise, no matter
what language you speak, that we have butchered. I promise
(42:46):
we are always always trying and trying to be respectful.
We are basically always gonna sound like beginners with trying
to promoun to pronounce most languages because because we are
and we can practice and practice and practice, and we're
still beginners. Yeah. I mean part of that, right is
that like if we were to set aside the history
(43:07):
research and only spend the time learning the languages, we
would not be able to do history ships. Sometimes I
feel like that's what I've done. It's tricky. It's tricky.
Tracy does so much better with Native American language than
I do. Um, and I always feel really guilty about it.
Like we there's there are always places where like any
(43:29):
one person is going to struggle more with one or
another just based on how they're their their pellet and
tongue come together to make noise. But we also have
a lot of examples where like there is an American
English pronunciation for something that is taught in schools and
is in American dictionaries, but is not how a person
from another place would say it at all, Like Newfoundland
(43:53):
beause I had as a vocabulary word pronounced Newfoundland when
I was in fourth grade. Listen, I will never for
get the crayon worse, those were trying times. If I
just said it in a way you don't like, I'm
so so sorry. I please, I'm not trying to instigate anything.
In any case, I hope that clarifies. Like I said,
I'm totally not trying to pile on. It's just seemed
(44:13):
like a good, a good jumping off point to talk
about how kind of tricky it can be to cover
all these these linguistic shifts that come up in the podcast. Um,
if you would like to write us tell me how
I just said crayon the incorrect way, you can do
that if you want. Uh that's it History podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on
(44:34):
social media as missed in History, or you can subscribe
to Stuffy miss in History Class on the i heeart
radio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(44:56):
you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. So the
name John Jacob Astor is one that comes up throughout
US history. They're not all the same one. When you
(00:23):
hear that name, there were several there a lot um
and it's one of those names that I feel like
is a shorthand for super rich person. Yeah, and just
the Aster part two. Yeah. Yeah, But because there have
been so many, sometimes people may not realize that that
they're talking about different ones. This leads to some confusion
(00:44):
when you're actually talking to someone about who he was.
The one we most recently mentioned on the podcast, which
was in our Charles Shapen episode when we talked about
newspaper coverage of the Titanic was John Jacob Aster, the
fourth who famously died on the ship. But the families
fortune and name recognition began well before that with the
first John Jacob Astar, who came to the U S
(01:06):
from Germany not long after the colonies gained their independence
as a nation. And today we're going to talk about
that start of what is now called an American dynasty
and how Astor became the first millionaire in the United States.
Quick heads up, A lot of this involves the fur trade.
So if the discussion of animals being used as fur
is distasteful to you, maybe you want to skip this one.
(01:28):
But I will say we're not talking about any of
the details of how that's accomplished. There's a brief mention
of numbers of animals late in the episode, but uh,
a lot of fur trade and trapping talk just in general.
So John Jacob Astar was born July seventeenth, seventeen sixty
three in Waldorf, Germany. His father, Johann Jacob Austar, was
(01:50):
a butcher. The family was working class. His mother was
Maria Magdalena Vofelder. Maria and Johan had gotten married in
seventeen fifty. Some accounts indicated that John Jacob was the
youngest of three sons, but the Astors also had more children.
One son died in infancy. It appears there were several
(02:12):
sisters as well, although they really have not been given
much attention at all in the historical record. No I
saw like a reference to a Christina getting married, and
that was kind of all that I ran up against
in my research. Uh, John Jacob was christened Johann Jacob
like his father, but we'll use his anglicized name here
to retain clarity, and we'll talk about when he made
(02:35):
that switch officially. And when John Jacob was three, his
mother Maria died when Johann Jacob remarried to a woman
named Christina Barbara. The second marriage produced six more children,
and that was a situation that led to a lot
of strife. Obviously, that meant that there were a lot
of people being supported on a pretty meager income. But
(02:56):
also most accounts indicate that there was a pretty clear
vision between Johann Yakum's children from his first marriage and
his children from the second marriage, and that those two
family groups never really were able to integrate in a
harmonious way. All of the kids from the first marriage
are said to have moved out as soon as they
were able to, and John's case, for a brief period
(03:20):
of time, his father tried to teach him to be
a butcher, and John hated it. His father had a
reputation for being a very good butcher, but also kind
of a hard man to get along with, and John
didn't especially like the work itself. His older brother George
had moved to London and was doing well as a
(03:40):
flute maker, and his brother Henry had become a butcher
in New York. Both of John's older brothers wrote to
him and encouraged him to join them in their respective
locations and trades, and the unhappy John Jacob broke from
his father and went to London to make musical instruments
with his brother George Urge. It was in London that
(04:02):
he started to go by the anglicized version of his name. Also,
he would later just go by the initials J. J. Yeah,
there's a kind of sad circumstance here where even though
he hated the butcher trade, he was apparently very good
at it um and it was one of those things
like you would be fine, you would have a job
(04:22):
for life, and it's like, yeah, but I hate it.
It just seems like a line of work that would
be particularly unpleasant if you really hated it, right and grueling.
And also I think he probably associated it with his dad,
who he had problems with. Um. John lived in London
for four years making wind instruments with his brother, and
during that time his brother Henry wrote really frequently about
(04:44):
the many opportunities that were available to a young man
in the newly formed US so in se three at
the age of twenty. That's one of those things that
gets a little weekly in the historical record his exact age,
but most places report twenty John Jacob Bordered a ship
headed to North America. The move from London to the
U S has also led to Astor sometimes being identified
(05:07):
as English American instead of noting his birth in Germany.
Just as an f y I. If you see him
as an UH English American or UM British American, he
was German. UH. This trip that he made normally took
about two months, but this particular one took four because
the ship had to drop their route and moved south
(05:29):
to avoid pack ice that was forming in the Atlantic.
It was springtime, but it was they had some late freezes.
The ship actually got frozen in ice in Chesapeake Bay.
Despite all of this maneuvering to try to avoid that problem,
after the ice got thick enough that people could walk
on it, some passengers walked the rest of the way.
There's some discrepancy in accounts of whether Astor did this.
(05:54):
Some accounts suggest that he waited for the ice to
break up so that he could go ashore with all
of his cargo, included some instruments that he had packed
to sell in New York. Others indicate that he eventually
gave up on waiting and made the walk on the
ice to Baltimore. However he got there. He stayed in Baltimore,
Maryland for several weeks. He made friends with a shop
(06:16):
owner there who helped him sell several instruments. Once he
had made a little money, he headed to New York
to meet his brother Henry and Henry's wife, Dorothea. When
he arrived in New York City in four it had
roughly twenty three thousand residents. That blows my mind. We'll
talk about that a little bit in the The Friday
(06:39):
episode because I'll talk about how I, in my frame
of reference, made that number makes sense, and then you
think I'm ridiculous. But so, John Jacob opted not to
work in the butcher trade with his brother Henry. Instead,
he ended up working as a street vendor for a
little while for a confect scenery shop. So he sold
(07:01):
bake sweets from a cart, which sounds a little bit dreamy.
Although probably not very heavy on the money making. Then
he moved on to work as an assistant to a
Quaker fur dealer named Robert Brown, and this was work
that Astor really took to, even though initially all he
really did in terms of his job requirements or his
(07:23):
duties was beat the first to keep moths at bay.
But his boss really liked him and saw that he
was very smart and he had a lot of initiative
in terms of learning the trade, and so he soon
upped his weekly pay from the original two dollars a
week that he was giving him, and he also the
boss also gave him an engraved silver pocket watch, so
there was very clearly an affinity between these two men.
(07:46):
Astor was still selling flutes during this time as a
second income, and as he made money, he lived fairly frugally.
His fur job included room and board. The money he
saved up was invested in more flutes to sell, as
well as in animal skins that he prepared and put
into storage. Once he had a large stock of them,
(08:07):
he would travel back to London briefly to sell the
first through a consignment shop and pick up a fresh
stock of flutes from his brother He also made deals
with two piano manufacturers to act as their New York salesperson.
John was obviously savvy when it came to business, he
started to do really well for himself. On September nineteen,
(08:29):
seventeen eighty five, Astor married Sarah Cox, the daughter of
his landlady. Over the course of the next seventeen years,
they had eight children. Magdalen was born in seventeen Sarah
was born in seventeen ninety but died in infancy. John
Jacob the Second or John Jacob Jr. You'll sometimes see
him listed, was born in seventeen ninety one. William Backhouse
(08:52):
was born in seventeen ninety two, Dorothea in seventeen ninety five,
and then Henry was born in seventeen ninety seven but
died sevent so just a toddler. Their daughter, Eliza was
born in eighteen o one, and a son who lived
only a few days, was born in eighteen o two.
When John and Sarah married, the two of them continued
(09:12):
to live at the boarding house, but they had two
rooms of their own. One was their living area and
the other was set up as a show room for
John's musical instruments. Sarah and John were similarly driven when
it came to business, and she both assisted in his
business work and encouraged him to try new ventures. Yeah,
you'll often see her mentioned as though she was really
(09:35):
kind of his right hand. Took care of a lot
of administrative and managerial duties for his business as it grew.
There are some debates over the nature of their union,
whether or not um he had married her for her
dowry and is kind of a really good business arrangement,
but they stayed together a very long time. He later
told his children that he married her because she was
(09:58):
the prettiest girl he had ever seen, even though most
accounts say she was not especially pretty. So it's unclear
how much their relationship was um romantic versus uh union
through business interests um. But they made a life together
for sure. In autumn of five so not long after
(10:20):
he became a husband, John jacob Astor made his first
fur trading trip to Albany. This meant that he was
going directly to trappers to acquire furs, rather than purchasing
skins from vendors in the city, which is what he
had done up to that point. According to lore, he
would make his way into the woods and then traded
and became friendly with just about every trapper he encountered.
(10:41):
He got to no local Native American tribes and purchased
from them, remember that according to lore phrasing here. And
he also did business with European trappers. When he had
a full load of furs, he would take them to
Albany and pack them on barges and travel with them
back to New York. He made a lot of profit,
but he still had to keep his business kind of
(11:03):
small because he was a one man operation and he
really wanted to expand, and so after gathering more funds,
he was able to expand his efforts beyond Albany to Montreal,
which he visited for the first time in late summer
of So so far, this all just sounds like a
guy from humble means who hustled a lot to build
an empire. That's not wrong, but it also does not
(11:26):
tell the whole story. Because John Jacob asked her, had
a reputation for being ruthless. It said that nobody could
ever get the upper hand and a deal with him
when it came to dealing with indigenous people. He used
a lot of different manipulations, including only making deals with
Native American trappers after he had first gotten them drunk.
(11:50):
He also fast talked a lot of people to make
them think they were getting the better of him while
he was actually landing an agreement that weighed really heavily
in his own favor. Yeah. I read one account this
was an ongoing problem that a lot of trappers were
selling or giving Native American tribes alcohol before they started negotiations,
(12:11):
and so some posts were actually outlawing that, and if
they did, he was like, well, I'm not going there anymore.
Like that was one of his key tools. Um. So
just no, there's a lot of undocumented behavior that is
not cool in here. Um. Coming up, we're going to
talk about how J. J. Astor expanded his wealth by
taking advantage of really just about every opportunity he saw.
(12:34):
But before we do that, we will pause for a
quick sponsor break. When the j Treaty was signed, it
opened up new options for Astor in terms of scale.
So the j Treaty was an agreement between the US
(12:56):
and Great Britain that was not especially popular in the US,
but it did put to rest a number of outstanding
issues that were still lingering from the Revolutionary War, and
one of the elements of this treaty, and the one
which was significant for Astor, was a change in export permissions.
So prior to Britain could send exported goods to the
(13:16):
US without much limitation, and it did, but the US
couldn't reciprocate because there were steep tariffs and restrictions on
items shipped into Britain from the US. Additionally, northwestern posts
in North America that had remained occupied by the British
were finally turned over to the US. So this meant
that for J. J. Astor, who traded furs in the
(13:37):
northeastern parts of the US and into Canada, he was
just going to have a much easier time traveling around
to purchase skins and ship them back to New York,
and then once those skins were ready, he could export
them as a good on their own in bulk instead
of having to travel to London and work through consignment
dealers on a small scale. As he expanded his business
(13:59):
in this way, Master also started to diversify his revenue streams.
He invested in real estate. By the start of the
nineteenth century, John Jacob Astor had accumulated two hundred and
fifty thousand dollars, and he put that money to work.
By continuously investing, he increased his real estate holdings that
(14:19):
just about every opportunity. At this point, which was the
year eighteen hundred, New York City had more than doubled
in size. From the time he arrived there, it had
about fifty thousand residents. Astor saw that the population was
only going to keep growing, and he knew that if
he bought property, it would increase in value as more
(14:41):
and more people needed places to live. So he bought
and bought. If an orchard or a farm was struggling,
he bought it and often just let it sit. He
bought property up and down the Hudson River, even property
that no one saw any value in. Yeah, he sort
of infamously was known to just by swamp end and
be like, it's gonna be something one day, somebody's gonna
(15:02):
need this. Uh. He was not wrong. His next move
in terms of diversifying his income was to start trading
in China. So, just as he had done in sending
first to Europe and bringing flutes back, he started sending
first to China and bringing silk and tea. Back on
April six eight, Astor established the American Fur Company in
(15:23):
New York. It would not only exist in New York,
had had offices in many places, and he eventually set
up a kind of a headquarters in m Machina Island,
which is now part of Michigan because it was closer
to the fur but as a as a business entity,
it's home base with New York. Now. Up to this point,
when he started American for he had a number of
(15:44):
different kind of small businesses that were sort of specialized
in who they traded with. But when he founded American Fur,
he consolidated all of those smaller businesses under one big umbrella.
This would eventually lead to a monopoly on the fur trade,
as competitors were either destroyed by outbidding that was enabled
by Astor's wealthy company, or they just got absorbed. At
(16:06):
a time when the fur trade was rapidly expanding throughout
the country, it seemed that Astor always managed to out
maneuver anyone who was trying to carve out a territory
of their own. The American Fur Company is often cited
as the first business monopoly in the United States. The
formation of the larger company was, of course a strategic
(16:27):
business move motivated in part by the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Astor had read all about the famous expedition and in
eighteen ten decided to start a fur trading network on
the West coast. The idea was that this new venture
at the Pacific Fur Company would give J. J. Astor
a major advantage in dealings with China. The Pacific Fur
(16:51):
Company could send a ship to the coast of what's
now Oregon, set up a fort, and then get for
in the Pacific Northwest, and have it on ships much
faster than any other fur company could get on its
way from Montreal to China via New York. At the
nexus of this web was the town of Astoria, founded
(17:12):
in eighteen eleven on land that Astor claimed for the
United States and of course was named after him. But
early into the efforts to establish this hub, the War
of eighteen twelve started between the US and Britain. During
this conflict, Astoria was captured by the British. Astor's trading
(17:32):
network was unable to ever become established. He was always
ready to capitalize on a tragedy, though, so Astor bought
a lot of skins very cheap from trappers in the
Northwest who were eager to get out of the business
and out of the area as hostilities ramped up. Yeah,
he took advantage of everything. A story of Oregon still exists,
(17:53):
by the way, it just never became his his fur
trading nexus that he had hoped. The War of eighteen
twelve was of course costly for the United States, and
the U. S. Treasury was seeking ways to come up
with the money to pay for it. So entered John
jacob Astor and too rich associates Stephen Gerard and David Parrish.
(18:14):
In what has been called the first bond syndicate in
the United States and the start of investment banking in
the United States. These millionaires bought government bonds worth a
hundred dollars at the price of eighty eight dollars each
in massive sums. I have seen various numbers reported, but
it all seems to average out to about ten million
dollars each that they spent. To be clear, Aster, even
(18:38):
though he had grown his business a lot, he didn't
have that cash in ready. Money. He borrowed some from banks,
with some of his real estate holdings as collateral. And
per the terms of the bonds, which is different than
what the Treasury had initially offered, but what they negotiated,
the full one hundred dollar value would be paid to
the bond holder over the course of thirteen years. This
(19:00):
was essentially alone, with very clear terms on how the
interest was going to come back. Some of the bonds
were resold as an immediate money back for these investors,
but Astor held onto a lot of his These bonds
dropped in value initially, though, When Washington City was burned
by the British in the Chesapeake Campaign, bonds flooded the
(19:22):
market as people thought that if they did not sell
them for something, they would never see any return on
their eighty eight dollar per bond investment, and asked Or
bought and bought and bought, and just waited for the
tide to turn so he could collect the full hundred
dollars on each of them. As the US Treasury made
(19:42):
good on its deal. Newspaper editor Horace Greeley once estimated
that through some cloaked bond buyouts, in addition to his
on the book's transactions, J. J. Astor may have made
all his money back plus another fifty percent. I mean again, weasel,
(20:04):
but astute. Uh. And though he made a name for
himself and the beginning of his fortune in fur trade
and deals like his war financing, the real source of
Astor's financial success and what really enabled him to start
essentially a dynasty, was his astute real estate investments in
New York City. We mentioned already that he had bought
(20:25):
a lot of property in New York. He owned an
estimated three percent of all of New York. Three percent
may not sound like much, but we're talking about one person,
uh So it is actually pretty significant. And by the
late nineteen teens, Astor's various enterprises and holdings had grown
so much that he made his son, William Backhouse, returned
(20:47):
from studying abroad to help him run things. William didn't
especially want to get into the family business. He was
kind of shy. He was more interested in art and
literature than he was in his dad's business. But once
he was in charge of things, he was as ruthless
as his father, and some historians have even characterized him
as more ruthless. One of the big legacies of John
(21:10):
Jacob and William Backhouse Astor was the construction of huge
tracts of tenements. And this is a situation where in
a lot of ways they very carefully put together business
deals that protected them. They never built any tenements. William
became an expert in the ins and outs of property law.
(21:30):
They owned the land, then leased it to developers. Then
those developers would sub let it to basically slum lords
who would build out the entire twenty five by one
foot lots with buildings that could house dozens of families.
Keep in mind that surveyed lot size of twenty five
hundred feet that seven point six by thirty point five
(21:52):
meters was based on how much space the surveyors of
New York City initially thought would be adequate for a
single emily. But because this was all operated by sub letters,
the Asters who enjoyed a life of just extraordinary luxury
by this point, we're twice removed from any real responsibility
and could claim ignorance when problems related to the poor
(22:15):
quality of life and the tenements was brought up. It.
We'll talk a little bit more about that on the
behind the scenes on Friday. It becomes its own whole story.
And I didn't want to sidetrack the entire John Aster
things since William was really in a lot of cases
spearheading these initiatives. But it's it makes me very angry. Um.
On April four, four, Astor returned to New York aboard
(22:38):
the passenger ship Utica, coming from England after having been
at a wedding. It had been kind of a terrible voyage.
It was full of delays, but the news that Astor
received at the dock was worse than anything he had
endured to see. He learned that his wife, Sarah had
died a week earlier. Maybe the timing on this is
(22:58):
something that becomes really hard to pin down. That story
is one way it's relayed, But the date of Sarah's
death is kind of all over the place, um, when
you see it in different accounts. Sometimes it's listed as
eighteen thirty two, sometimes eighteen thirty four, and sometimes And
I think this is a result of a good old
fashioned typo eighteen forty two, But that type of was
(23:20):
in a place that people took as gospel and repeated
it a whole lot. One of those early eighteen thirties
dates is almost certainly correct. There is even a very
well reviewed Astor biography that I read that list the
eight thirty four date, but then later mentions Astor being
a widower in eighteen thirty two, So keep all of
that in mind before we get into Astor's life after
(23:44):
Sarah's death. We will take a quick break and hear
from the sponsors that keeps stuffy missed in history Glass going.
In June four, John Jacob Aster sold his interest in
(24:04):
the American Fur Company. It was at the time the
largest commercial organization in the US, and there have been
some characterizations that Astor lost his interest in business when
Sarah died, and that a lot of his behavior in
the years that followed her death was driven by grief,
and he did certainly grieve for her. He had felt
especially bad that he was not home when she died.
(24:26):
He had similarly been absent for the deaths of other
family members, and the accumulated guilt over that was something
that he wrote about to his friend Wilson Price Hunt.
But there were definitely other factors involved in the decision
to liquidate his business interests. American Fur Company had been
capturing and killing animals for their skins for years. At
(24:48):
this point. It was estimated in one Ledger report that
the company had sold an average of twenty six thousand
buffalo skins a year and twenty five thousand beaver skins
a year for fifteen consecutive years. There's numbers are pretty staggering.
There was no thought in the trade for sustainability. Additionally,
(25:09):
styles and tastes were shifting. He noted on a trip
to London in the eighteen thirties that men's top hats
were being made of silk instead of beaver, and silk
from China was no longer at the same level of
demand because European textile houses were making gorgeous fabrics of
their own. Animal pelts were also seen with increasing suspicion
(25:31):
as a possible disease vector. At a time when Cholero
was spreading rapidly in short, Astor saw that the revenue
streams that had brought him so much wealth were soon
going to slow to a trickle or even dry up.
That would mean he would lose money instead of making it,
and he just was not interested in that. No, he
(25:53):
was interested in building a hotel. Though. This is interesting because,
as we said, he didn't really build much of an anything,
but he really wanted to make a hotel. Um he
decided to take on the project of building a six
story luxury hotel on Broadway between Barclay and Vessey Streets.
That's the area where the World Trade Center complex would
(26:13):
eventually be built. Using distract of land mint that he
had to tear down existing homes, which he bought out.
It also meant tearing down Astor's home, so he had
another built at the corner of Broadway and Prince, But
the resulting Astor House Hotel was a three hundred room
luxury hotel that drew a lot of famous visitors over
the years, including Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allen Poe, who stay
(26:38):
inspired the story The Mystery of Marie Rouge, and Charles Dickens,
who found the hotel itself to be lovely but the
pigs eating garbage on the street outside to have kind
of ruined the whole thing. We've talked before on the
show about how dirty New York could be during this time.
Once he retired, Astor made a deal with Washington Irving
to write his biography. I've done a show on Washington
(27:01):
Irving before. Irving would not take payment from Aster and
instead negotiated to have the books publishing rights in their entirety.
His reasoning he would later write, was that quote. He
was too proverbially rich a man for me to permit
the shadow of a pecuniary favor to rest on our intercourse.
(27:22):
Irving did, however, ask Astor to pay for his research assistant,
his nephew, Pierre Monroe Irving, who received three thousand dollars
for going through all of Aster's papers assembling an outline
and an organizational structure to the work. Irving incidentally tried
to get a good sense of how the trapping business
had worked and had been perceived from the Native American perspective,
(27:45):
although it's unclear what information he may have gotten, as
he asked for that information from Samuel G. Drake, who
was a white man who was considered to be an
expert on the matter. Yeah, that struck me as interesting
because it's like, I don't trust your version of the story,
but the expert I'm gonna ask is also a rich
(28:06):
white guy who probably doesn't really understand what's what was
going on there. But the resulting book that Irving wrote,
a Storia or Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains,
came out in the fall of eighty six, and this
book sold a lot of copies, and it got a
lot of praise, and that sounds great, but Washington Irving
(28:27):
was a little embarrassed by the whole thing. His book,
despite having taken no money, uh and to try to
stay objective, was really soft on Astor. It made him
seem like a great guy, and he knew that he
had kind of rushed it. And there were definitely critics
who called it out as being Astro propaganda. But the
book remained very popular, and it was published in several translations,
(28:49):
and all of this made J. J. Aster very pleased.
Although he was not actively working after selling American for Company,
Aster continued to make money in real estate. When a
massive fire during a particularly cold winter took out most
of the tenements on Astor's land, he lost nothing because
of the way those deals had been set up. The
(29:11):
Lessies were responsible for the buildings, not Aster rebuilding was
it their expense, and if they opted not to rebuild,
Aster just rented that to someone else. During economic crashes,
Aster always sailed through, often buying mortgages for deeply discounted
rates when others were struggling, and never hesitating to seize
(29:32):
the property when the original owner defaulted. Yeah he was.
That was like a thing he did a lot of, like, oh,
you you need a loan, or you need a little
help with a mortgage. Yeah, I got you. Oh you
can't make your payments, it's mine now, Like he was
not the least bit um hesitant in that. There is
also a very wild story about how Astor got a
(29:55):
massive chunk of midtown Manhattan in a real estate deal
and flipped it for an exorbitant sum. In eighteen o three,
a whiskey distiller named Mediev Eden had fallen into financial
trouble took out a mortgage on his family's property, which
was known as Eden Farm, and that sat on Bloomingdale
Road that's now known as Broadway, and the farm stretch
(30:17):
from present day forty to forty six streets, and it
took up the space from Bloomingdale West to the Hudson River.
So if you know the the island of Manhattan, you
get a sense of how big this was. And also
if you know New York City, you know that Times
Square sits right in that space. Now, so seeing the
value of this property. J. J. Astor in eighteen o
(30:39):
three had paid twenty five thousand dollars to buy out
one third of the mortgage. Over time, Eden defaulted and
Astor took control of it. Over the years, there was
a lot of lengthy legal battle over the property between
Astor and Eden's airs, because they claimed that that wasn't
really a fully legal transaction, but ultimately the millionaire settled
(31:00):
with the family for a mere nine thousand dollars. That
probably seemed like a lot then, but over time he
leased some of the lots, and he also sold off
lots from the property, leaving the farm itself largely intact.
And even though he hadn't sold all of it, he
still made five point one million dollars off of it,
off of what had been a thirty four thousand dollar
(31:23):
investment if you count both his initial buy out and
the nine thousand dollars settlement. It wasn't until after Astor's
death even that the remaining sections of that chunk of
land were sold by Aster's heirs. By the late eighteen forties,
Aster had a number of health issues. His health was
really pretty feeble. He had digestive problems, he had trouble sleeping,
(31:47):
he had experienced some paralysis. John Jacob Master died in
New York City on March eighteen forty eight, at the
age of eighty four. His fortune at the time of
his death was estimated to be between twenty thirty million dollars.
That was roughly one fifteen of all the personal wealth
in the US at the time. This was actually difficult
(32:09):
to calculate, despite a lot of people wanting to know
this number, but because so much of his wealth was
tied up in real estate at a level that nobody
had really seen before, it took a long time to
just tabulate this whole thing. And the years from eighteen
forty to his death, he had made more than one
point to million dollars and rental income alone that far
(32:32):
outpaced his spending and acquiring new real estate. Yeah. I
had read one figure that he had spent like seven
hundred and fifty thousand to eight hundred thousand dollars, and
it's like, yeah, but he was just making tons of
money like he had no It was all black in
his ledger. There was no no red h If you
have ever been to the New York Public Library, which
is lovely, you could say you've benefited from one of
(32:55):
the bequeathments of John Jacob Astor. In his will when
he died, he allocated more than four hundred thousand dollars
of his fortune for the creation of a public library.
This is one of those things that sounds deeply benevolent,
but it's really him making good on a promise that
he had made the city leaders a decade before he died.
But though he had said, yes, we're building a library,
(33:16):
he had then dithered on where to put the building,
what collections he thought should be purchased for it, and
who should be involved in the project, and it dragged
on and on. It kind of seemed like while he
was alive he didn't want to give up that chunk
of money. But with the money from the will, that
project was finally carried out, and then in the Astor
(33:36):
Library was consolidated with the Lennox Library with additional money
from the Tilden Foundation to form the New York Public Library.
As a point of note, though, that central building for
the New York Public Library, which is pretty iconic, was
not built until nineteen eleven, though so well after he
had died. Aster's will was unique in that it was
just incredibly wildly. He left money for various knee needs
(34:00):
and support of his family. His oldest son, John Jacob Jr.
Was not going to inherit the bulk of it or
take on the family business. It's not clear exactly what
the situation was, but based on some pretty hazy accounts,
it appears that John Jacob Jr. May have had some
sort of developmental disability or some other illness like something
(34:22):
going on. Yeah, the descriptions of him call him varying
things like even even things that are outside of the
completely inappropriate and outdated language. It's like he was a
very weak boy, Like what does that mean? Yeah, we
don't know, but there was. It seems like that was
he was definitely um not talked about very much, So
we don't have great information. So William had always been
(34:46):
John jacob seniors intended protege, but asked. He also truly
adored William's son. John Jacob asked her the third and
wanted to leave him a significant part of the fortune.
But he also didn't trust government laws to basically stay
the way that they would to protect that actual trust.
(35:07):
Seemed like the law could change and that trust would
no longer be safe. There were laws in place that
limited trusts. So Astor left his son William half of
the bulk of his fortune, and the other half went
into a trust for John Jacob the Third. He also
asked William to make a will with this same set up,
(35:27):
with John Jacob the Third getting half the family fortune
and John Jacob the Third's oldest son, who was not
yet born, getting the other half of the trust. This
was intended to prevent the family money from ever transferring
to anyone in one lump sum that could then be
mismanaged or otherwise lost. Three generations of Astor's followed suit
(35:50):
before great grandson William Waldorf broke this chain. Even with
his savvy arrangements, it took more than four decades for
all of Astor's will, which included a lot of smaller
sums for various charities, to be fully settled. That will
had a lot of very sort of odd and nebulous
bequeathments of like I want to give money to the
(36:13):
elderly of Waldorf, Germany for their care, and it's like, okay,
but there's nothing set up to handle this, uh, And
so his executors had to create a lot of new
funds and smaller trusts and accounts that could handle some
of his his charitable bequeathments which were, considering his im
men's fortune, pretty pretty tiny really, um Ah, John Jacob Astar.
(36:41):
I have to simultaneously admire his intellect and absolutely loathed
his attitude about other people and how they should be
taken advantage of every opportunity. It's an I'll talk about
it behind the scenes. I have a juxtaposition of another
(37:02):
wealthy man we have talked about before in the show
that I actually like. But in the meantime, I have
listener mail. This is from our listener Alessandra, who has
a question about pronunciation. She writes, high There, I love
your podcast and your perspectives on history. You convey a
lot of respect to the cultures and people you discuss.
I really enjoyed your recent episode on Pauline Johnson and
(37:23):
love the anecdotal inclusion of the house with identical entrances
front and back. Such a beautiful example of blending and
honoring two cultures in one family. I'm a born in
bred Vancouver right and I don't know anything about her,
so thank you. You seem to take a lot of
care in French pronunciation, which is lovely. I've noticed that
you apply French pronunciation to Italian names. I know the
(37:44):
last episode of The Mancini Sisters is a poor example
to give because they are Italians that moved to France.
But even in giving the birth names, you say Italian
names in a French way, it can be distracting. I
find I just skipped the episodes with Italian subjects. Now
she gives some examples which I'm not going to do.
You won't like it anyway. I'm likely coming across as
a supercar in but I love my other language and
(38:05):
wanted to share in case you didn't know. In tribute,
I attached photos of Luke and Newfoundland Bilbo are sweet
Gray Prince and Butterfly, the cat who likes to shower
with his humans. I'd include a picture of him showering,
but I can't seem to get one without including body
parts you might want to see. I know that trial
I had a cat that used to shower with me. Um.
Here's the both Tracy and I have only ever formally
(38:28):
studied French as another language. I grew up speaking it
a little bit, so that's always my default on anything. Yeah,
Like I took three years of French in high school,
and then six units of French and college and then
have been really trying to like refresh my French through
(38:49):
duo lingo. There was a break in there because I
couldn't concentrate on anything because of the early pandemic months,
but like you know, my duo lingo fell apart at
that point in time. I'm much better with the due
lingo now, So I think it's like not unreasonable to
expect the one non English language that we've had formal
study into to like kind of bleed into some other
(39:11):
things that we try to say. But I started typing
an answer to the same email and was like, I'm
honestly not share what you mean, because I researched this
particular episode that prompted the email um and there were
various audio lectures and presentations and things like that from
people who have either studied the Mancini family or the Mazarinists,
(39:33):
or who work for archives and libraries that have stuff
about them and their collections and like their pronunciations. We're
basically what we followed. I think probably one of the
examples that was in here was Giovanni, And I'm pretty
sure the way I said that was informed way more
by having studied the work of Nikki Giovanni, who pronounces
(39:56):
that name much differently than an Italian person would than
having ever studied French. There's a a wonderful I mean,
here's the thing, right, Like, it's not that we're taking
more care in French pronunciation. I think it just comes
more naturally to both of us. The other thing is that, um,
I if it makes you feel any better, there are
(40:17):
French people that don't like the way we've pronounced things either. Yeah,
We've also gotten emails from people who say, I'm not
listening to any episode you do that involves French because
your French pronunciation is overpronounced and annoying. And I don't
to be clear, Alessandra, I don't want this to sound
like we're piling on you, but as an explanation and
exploration of how different languages and pronunciations work. I this
(40:38):
is a bit of a divergement, but I hope everyone
will come on this journey with me. There is a
u a TikTok creator who is like a master bartender.
He designs cocktail programs for like Michelin Star restaurants named
Chris Louder. Check him out if you want, and he
had a wonderful thing when recently the negroni spaggliato became
like the thing in pop culture with prosecco in it.
(41:00):
With I mean by saying spoggliato, that's what you're saying,
you're actually saying a messed up negroni because baggliato means mistake. Um,
that is neither here nor there. But there were some
people that were complaining that people weren't pronouncing spargliato correctly,
and he was like, but if we all know that
that's what we're getting at, maybe we could just get
(41:23):
past that and recognize that we're all trying to connect
about something. And doesn't that sound like more fun? And
I was like, I kind of love this up to
do it too. Yeah, I think that sounds great. I mean,
you know, it's it's kind of like when somebody is
is not from your city, even though like we all
speak English, uh for example, or most of us in
(41:45):
the U s speak English, but like they will come
to Atlanta and we have a street in Atlanta that
looks like it should be Poston and it is constantly
on and so I always find it quite charming when
people mispronounce it. And I think it's sweet because I
know exactly where they're talking about, and I don't you know. Yeah,
(42:05):
I promise we're trying real hard to say things as
well as we can always always, I mean, I never
want to offend anyone. Italian is very hard for me.
On the other show, I host Criminalia, I grew up
speaking French my coast. On that show, Maria is from
an Italian family and grows speaking Italian, and we crack
each other up because we just we gotta meet in
(42:26):
the middle because she has She struggles with French and
I struggle with Italian. But it's like the what really
gets me a lot of the time in Italian is
where the accent on a word goes is not natural
to me at all, and so then if I try
to hit it, I sound really really silly. But we're
always trying. I promise, I promise, I promise, no matter
what language you speak, that we have butchered. I promise
(42:46):
we are always always trying and trying to be respectful.
We are basically always gonna sound like beginners with trying
to promoun to pronounce most languages because because we are
and we can practice and practice and practice, and we're
still beginners. Yeah. I mean part of that, right is
that like if we were to set aside the history
(43:07):
research and only spend the time learning the languages, we
would not be able to do history ships. Sometimes I
feel like that's what I've done. It's tricky. It's tricky.
Tracy does so much better with Native American language than
I do. Um, and I always feel really guilty about it.
Like we there's there are always places where like any
(43:29):
one person is going to struggle more with one or
another just based on how they're their their pellet and
tongue come together to make noise. But we also have
a lot of examples where like there is an American
English pronunciation for something that is taught in schools and
is in American dictionaries, but is not how a person
from another place would say it at all, Like Newfoundland
(43:53):
beause I had as a vocabulary word pronounced Newfoundland when
I was in fourth grade. Listen, I will never for
get the crayon worse, those were trying times. If I
just said it in a way you don't like, I'm
so so sorry. I please, I'm not trying to instigate anything.
In any case, I hope that clarifies. Like I said,
I'm totally not trying to pile on. It's just seemed
(44:13):
like a good, a good jumping off point to talk
about how kind of tricky it can be to cover
all these these linguistic shifts that come up in the podcast. Um,
if you would like to write us tell me how
I just said crayon the incorrect way, you can do
that if you want. Uh that's it History podcast at
iHeart radio dot com. You can also find us on
(44:34):
social media as missed in History, or you can subscribe
to Stuffy miss in History Class on the i heeart
radio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts.
Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
visit the i heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
(44:56):
you listen to your favorite shows.
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Tracy Wilson
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