ROBBER BARONS
CHAPTER FOURTEENTHE ROBBER BARONS
THE newly rich who had so quickly won to supreme power in the economic order enjoyed an almost universal esteem for at least twenty years after the Civil War. Their glory was at its zenith ; during this whole period they literally sunned themselves in the affection of popular opinion. The degree in which they had won a general public consent is reflected in many a candid and even naively ecstatic chronicle in the press, a press with which they of course maintained the warmest and most inspiring relations. The type of the successful baron of industry now presented itself as the high human product of the American climate, the flower of its own order of chivalry, much wondered at, envied or feared in foreign lands whose peers had arrived somewhat earlier at coronets, garlands and garters. Though the American parvenu was “roughhewn,” he was certainly “nature’s nobleman,” as the sage of Wall Street, Henry Clews, exclaimed ; and what a splendid showing he made when compared with the “English parchment nobility” or any other ! “The modern nobility springs from success in business,” Clews solemnly avowed, and a thousand native philosophers shouted assent to him.
The historian of the house of Vanderbilt wrote :
America is the land of the self-made man—the empire of the parvenu. Here it is felt that the accident of birth is of trifling consequence ; here there is no “blood” that is to be coveted save the red blood which every masterful man distills in his own arteries ; and here the name of parvenu is the only and all-sufficient title of nobility.
Was it not self-evident that these “owners and managers of colossal capitals,” as Tilden said in a public address, worked better than they knew for the benefit of the people ? And who had disputed with Jay Gould when he, bristling before the Senators who inquired into his private affairs, had cried : “We have made the country rich, we have developed the country. . . .”?
But to tell only how the captains of industry “made themselves and the country rich” would be to leave out much of the story. We must turn aside from their purely mercenary operations to picture to ourselves for a moment how these barons of coal, iron, or pork, by a natural and concomitant effort to which many interests led them and many voices called them, extended their sway throughout the social order ; how like earlier invading hosts arriving from the hills, the steppes or the sea, they overran all the existing institutions which buttress society ; how they took possession of the political government (with its police, army, navy), of the School, the Press, the Church ; and finally how they laid hands upon the world of fashionable or polite society, which in all times seems to persist as a “kept class” attached to the ruling power yet holding a subtle sway over this power as well as over the manners and opinions of the people.
These virile parvenus who had become the “controllers of enormous industrial wealth” in their mature years, wrote Murat Halstead, a reputable Middle Western editor, were not the representatives of money bags merely, but
the types of that American pluck and enterprise and those traits of industry that have built up the greatness of the nation. As such he would indeed be bold who would challenge their right to sit in the highest assembly of the country as representatives of the American people.
Although he plainly required neither defense nor urging, the claim was constantly made for the baron that he might rightfully take command of the popular institutions ; or, as another spokesman termed it, “without hesitation or apology assume the place to which he is entitled in commerce or the industrial arts, in professional life or society.” So like the landed gentry, the military chieftains, or the priestly class of old, Veblen tells us, the new captain of industry in his turn now received “the deference of the common people,” became the “keeper of the National Integrity,” and with a becoming gravity offered himself as philosopher and friend to mankind, as “guide to literature and art, church and state, science and education, law and morals—the standard container of the civic virtue.”
In short order the railroad presidents, the copper barons, the big dry-goods merchants and the steel masters became Senators, ruling in the highest councils of the national government, and sometimes scattered twenty-dollar gold pieces to newsboys of Washington. But they also became in even greater number lay leaders of churches, trustees of universities, partners or owners of newspapers or press services and figures of fashionable, cultured society. And through all these channels they labored to advance their policies and principles, sometimes directly, more often with skillful indirection.
The booty of so many providentially profitable engagements was, then, “God’s Gold,” as John T. Flynn has said in his biography of Rockefeller ; and in part, at least, the barons carried it back to do glory to God, and to pay Him His due. Some of them surpassed each other in presenting Him with gifts of barbarous magnificence ; others, whose evangelical faith forbade such archaic displays, expended even greater sums to build sacred edifices of noteworthy plainness and severity. In either case they hastened to confer substantial parts of the booty taken in successful raids, as if fearing that God would be angry unless much money were paid. The mighty churches of New York and Chicago were filled to bursting with the Astors, the (younger) Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Wanamakers, the Morgans, the Armours, the Pullmans and all their kin, who paid for these churches.
In certain of the more aggressive of the money lords, as the penetrating Thorstein Veblen notes, the system of devout observances, the faith in an “animistic propensity of things” reflected very clearly a survival of predatory traits, like those of the raiders and plunderers of earlier ages of Christendom. This view is certainly borne out in the case of men like Henry Frick and Pierpont Morgan, who both tended toward those patterns of worship which were more glamorous and archaic than that of the Calvinists. Frick, who was the child of Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors, as his friend George Harvey tells us, ended by departing from the plain Lutheran faith of his fathers and “later in life, attending the Protestant Episcopal Church, whose form of service appealed more strongly to his sense of dignity, harmony and beauty.” Here all that “regime of status,” as Veblen so aptly interprets it, the hierarchic system of master and slave, dominant and subservient, drawn from an early, predatory scheme of society, might well please a Frick or a Morgan.
Morgan was known to be “imperiously proud,” rude and lonely, intensely undemocratic toward his fellows, and was equal to throwing articles of food or clothing at his servants when they nodded and forgot his wants. Endowed with “gorgeous, Renaissance tastes,” the master of the yacht Corsair loved to surround himself as much with men and women of physical beauty as with the plunder of ages of culture. Flouting opinion, he appeared in public before newspaper reporters with one of his favorites, and lived openly with another, according to one of his recent biographers, Mr. John Winkler. Yet this man who brooked no interference with his private pleasures or financial undertakings, and who sinned much by his own lights, derived a genuine satisfaction from religious devotion of the most ritualistic category. Leaving his office at 23 Wall Street upon afternoons, he would go to kneel in St. George’s Church, and sing hour upon hour his favorite hymns played by his favorite organist. And when he brought trophies to propitiate the Lord they were gifts of barbaric extravagance, such as that of $500,000 for the erection of St. John the Divine, vastest of all the contemporary religious monuments at the time.
Pierpont Morgan soon became the great lay figure of the Episcopal Church of his day ; when conventions were held, he appeared as a deputy from New York, bearing all the important visiting prelates, divines and lay guests, in a private “palace car” on one of his railroads to the convention city, and entertaining them upon the most lavish scale in a private house which he rented. But most of all was Pierpont Morgan thrilled by the splendors of Rome during his foreign tours ; the pomp, the marble spaces, the gilt and tapestry of the Vatican and of St. Peter’s awed him. He would have bought the Sistine Chapel if it were for sale ; he wished that he might have a bed to sleep there and gaze at the frescoes. He felt most at home in the Eternal City, visited it more and more frequently, and there he died. His last will and testament would be headed with a profession of his faith. Like all men he had been born in sin, and the only hope of salvation lay in the doctrine of the Atonement. “His beliefs were to him precious heirlooms. He bowed before them as the Russian bows to the Ikon . . .” the rector of Morgan’s church has told us of this most devout of the money masters.
Still others, however, among the great parvenus approached the institution of organized religion in the more rational spirit of low-churchmen or even of skeptics. To James Hill, the Western railroad leader, there resided in the church a miraculous controlling force for the masses of people, whose value could scarcely be measured. Himself a Protestant, and somewhat negligent in his observance, he suddenly donated a million dollars for the establishment of a Roman Catholic theological seminary in St. Paul. To those who wondered why he should make such offerings to a church of which he was not a member, he said :
No nation can exist without a true religious spirit behind it. Laws that forbid teaching Christianity are the weakest things in our government. . . . I do not care what the denomination may be.
And further :
Look at the millions of foreigners pouring into this country to whom the Roman Catholic Church represents the only authority that they either fear or respect. What will be their social view, their political action, their moral status if that single controlling force should be removed ?
This “undigested mass of foreign material” for whose migration to the prairies of the Northwest Hill, mighty colonizer that he was, was more responsible than anyone else, should be dealt with, adds his biographer, by those who alone have the power to mold it ; in short, by the anointed agents of the only authority it understands or obeys. “This,” concludes Hill’s official apologist, “is as much a matter of business as is the improvement of farm stock or the construction of a faultless railroad bed.” More candidly than any of his contemporaries Hill has suggested to us the immense and varied services which the religious institution was expected to perform. The Church was to buttress the new regime of status, it was to control, to pacify, to console, to “render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s.” Was it not imperative, then, that the new rulers come generously to the support of the Church ? And while the barons of lard or oil or coke invoked the beneficence of the churchly power, the officers of the Church in their turn now gave themselves over to a free and excited pursuit of the barons.
A new species of pastor flourished in the church of Luther and Calvin, the church of “holy poverty.” In Minneapolis, toward 1888, the young preacher Frederick T. Gates had met with much success in raising huge sums of money among certain flour magnates for churches and universities. At a meeting with Rockefeller, Gates’s mixture of fanatical zeal and business sense had cast its spell over the oil baron, who at this time was beginning to suffer the embarrassment of his grotesque wealth : his earnings could scarcely be spent or even reinvested adequately, and at the same time they brought upon him the universal reproaches, the ignominy of a long succession of public trials, castigations and prosecution. Now Gates showed himself a counselor able to guide Rockefeller both in this world and the next ; as his confidential business agent he negotiated for him several remarkable transactions, such as the purchase of the limitless iron ore fields of the Merritt brothers (“the seven iron men”) in Minnesota, which were bought during an emergency for a bagatelle ; at the same time Gates, as the mentor of Rockefeller’s soul, directed his prodigious investments in public charities which begun in 1890, were conducted upon a scale befitting the man’s princely power, and most certainly fitted him to scale Heaven’s walls. For the support of the college in Chicago, which had been languishing since 1856, Rockefeller was induced to subscribe $600,000 alone, on condition that the pork-packers and dry-goods merchants of the Western metropolis contribute together an equal sum.1
At the time of Rockefeller’s fabulous gift, a convention of the American Baptist Educational Society was being held in Boston. William D. Lloyd, watching these events with the eye of a profound skeptic, recalls the wild thrill of joy which swept over all Baptist Christendom. There was a “perfect bedlam of applause, shouts and waving of handkerchiefs. One of the godly men present sprang to his feet exclaiming, ‘God has kept Chicago for us ! I wonder at His patience !’” The audience rose spontaneously and sang the Doxology. And soon afterward everywhere from the pulpit and the religious press it was said or written : “ The oil trust was begun and carried on by Christian men. They were Baptists. . . .” The president of the oil combination was worth twenty-five millions, “but he neither drinks nor smokes tobacco. . . . Few men lead plainer lives than he. . . .” Moreover the “four most prominent men in the oil trust are eminent Baptists, who honor their religious obligations and contribute without stint to the noblest Christian and philanthropic objects. . . . All of them illustrate in their daily lives their reverence for living Christianity.” The monarch of oil had won ardent defenders at a time when they were sorely needed. “People charge Mr. Rockefeller with stealing the money he gave to the church,” said the pastor of the Euclid Avenue Baptist Church, Cleveland, “but he has laid it on the altar and thus sanctified it.”
These words fell like music upon the ears of the harried John Rockefeller. He was convinced that he had taken the right course ; this cautious, calculating man began to give with a generosity the world had never seen before to all the religious and missionary and educational institutions which caught his eye. The excited pastors now swarmed about, hat in hand, emulating Frederick Gates. Clergymen of other sects raced to surpass the Baptists ; one such of a competing denomination approached one of the Baptist chieftains of the Standard Oil with a call for a subscription.
“But I am not of your church,” said the great man.
“That does not matter,” said the minister ; “your money is orthodox.”
But one of the most favored departments of all this labor of conservation was to be the establishment of the Young Men’s Christian Association, first sponsored by that great layman John Wanamaker. Here (as in the universities) a popularization of salutary physical sports was rapidly furthered, sports in which Veblen has seen embodied those traits of force and ruse which were most pleasing to the new barons. Thus the aggressive Harriman, founder of the Boys’ Club in New York’s East Side, could be found at regular intervals directing the young, chiefly in the “manly art” of boxing.
In the universities and colleges, the older of which originally had mainly been theological seminaries, the spirit of conservatism had been notably strong ; the trustees who endowed or directed the universities were of course, from the beginning, the most opulent and also the most “respectable” members of the community. Now as the overlords of beef, department stores, banks and especially of railroads began to assume leadership in educational affairs—though almost none of them, except Pierpont Morgan, ever boasted a university education—a revolution in policy was effected which is generally pictured as the triumph of technology and applied science over the classical humanities. Willingly, the Armours, McCormicks, Pullmans and many other industrialists gave their moneys to the establishment of the new “institutes of technology” or to scientific schools and various polytechnic institutes which augmented year by year the economic resources of the nation. Although much could be said under this head upon the social usefulness of this policy, here it is more pertinent to trace the increasing sphere of influence of the barons.
In the world of learning, the janissaries of oil or lard potentates, with a proper sense of taste and fitness, sought consistently to sustain the social structure, to resist change, to combat all current notions which might thereafter “reduce society to chaos” or “confound the order of nature.” As a class, they shared with their patrons the belief that there was more to lose than to gain by drastic alterations of the existing institutions, and that it was wisest to “let well enough alone.” While ministers of the Baptist Church defended the Trusts as “sound Christian institutions” against “all these communistic attacks,” the managers of Rockefeller’s Chicago University also championed the combinations year by year. One professor of economics, Dr. Gunton, especially distinguished himself on this score ; and another, a teacher of literature ostensibly, declared Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Pullman “superior in creative genius to Shakespeare, Homer and Dante,” a declaration which made a lively impression at the time. In the meanwhile, a third teacher, a Professor Bemis, who happened to criticize the action of the railroads during the Pullman strike in 1894 was after several warnings expelled from the university for “incompetence.”
At Syracuse University in western New York, to mention only one instance, a gifted young instructor in economics, John Commons, was similarly dismissed by the Chancellor. His strongest interests were discovered to lie in the rising labor movement, and the university, endowed by Mr. John Archbold of the Standard Oil family, frowned upon such learning. Here the students sang, according to John T. Flynn :
We have a Standard Oil pipe running up to John Crouse Hall,
And a gusher in the stadium will be flowing full next fall.
We need the money, Mr. Archbold,
We need it right away.
And in Chicago, upon news of further gifts of three millions they sang :
John D. Rockefeller
Wonderful man is he.
Gives all his spare change
To the U. of C.
He keeps the ball a-rolling
In our great varsity.
But in his philanthropies, Rockefeller gave money in many ways strange and wonderful, often known only to himself. Some of the largest of his bequests to “sociological foundations” in later years, it was noted, were directed to the mitigation of “crimes against property.” At times it was difficult to understand the guiding principle which fostered extensive missionary work in China at a moment when the workers of his Colorado Fuel & Iron Company were being shot down or burnt alive in industrial war. But in such cases, especialy among the great Protestant donors, the distributions were made with that full “liberty of conscience” which had been used in the process of accumulation. Rockefeller himself once stated with complete candor :
I believe the power to make money is a gift of God . . . to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money, and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.
2
All accounts speak to us of the new “gold rush” of the ’80s and ’90s, in which the men and women who had gathered incalculable wealth from the mines of California, the forges of Pittsburgh, the mountains of Montana, moved upon the old cities of the East as a conquering army which laid siege to its most inaccessible social fastnesses. “With no qualifications other than the fortunes they had obtained,” as a society matron commented invidiously, but better armed and provisioned than ever any besieging force had been, the New Rich now marched upon the “social capitals” of the nation. From the West and from the South and from everywhere, the “silver-gilts,” the “climbers,” the nouveaux riches, came to assault the citadels of society, and were soon thronging the heights so carefully guarded. This latter-day invasion is described with tremulous emotion in the memoirs of a woman of the New York aristocracy, Mrs. J. Van Rensselaer King :
The West was yielding tremendous riches. . . . Steel barons, coal lords, dukes of wheat and beef, of mines and railways, had sprung up from obscurity. Absolute in their territory, they looked for new worlds to conquer. The newspaper accounts of New York society thrilled the newly rich. In a great glittering caravan the multimillionaires of the midlands moved up against the city and by sheer weight of numbers broke through the archaic barriers.
Why did they come to the East as in a returning wave ? Why did the barons, fortunate in their own baronies, and the wives of the barons clamor for the “social capitals,” for the “more advanced civilization of the East,” for New York, and her near-by summering or watering places such as Newport, or the “far-famed spa” of Saratoga ? After the unremitting labor and vigilance of their own or their parents’ lives, after the prosaic, flat surroundings of home, as Clews tells us, they came to take their ease, to live if possible a regal and courtly life, replete with delicate luxuries and extravagances and charmingly artificial or archaic customs. New York, Saratoga, Newport or Long Branch opened for the first time unknown vistas to these miners’ and railroad-owners’ families. They were thrilled with the “rustle and perfume, the glitter and show, the pomp and circumstance,” of a world of costly refinement. Everywhere they beheld splendid mansions, great emporiums of dry goods and fancy articles of all sorts, jewels and plate and flowers and embroidery. Soon they must discard their two-button gloves, their ginghams and calicos, as they did the airs of the provincial midlands, donning the French silks, the genuine laces, the arm-length gloves as well as the regards and poses of their Eastern sisters. And above all New York, drawing them as a great magnet, soon formed their spirit, as Henry Clews relates,
by its restless activity, its feverish enterprise and opportunities . . . but more particularly by its imperial wealth, its Parisian, indeed almost Sybaritic luxury and social splendor . . . the roll of splendid equipages in the “Bois de Boulogne of America,” the Central Park ; the constant round of brilliant banquets, afternoon teas and receptions . . . beautiful women and brave men threading the mazes of the dance ; scenes of revelry by night in an atmosphere loaded with the perfumes of rare exotics, in the swell of sensuous music. . . . Soon nothing remains for the wives of the Western millionaires but to purchase a brownstone mansion, and swing into the tide of fashion with receptions, balls and kettledrums, elegant equipages with coachmen in bright-buttoned livery, footmen in top-boots, maid-servants and man-servants, including a butler, and all the other adjuncts of fashionable life in a great metropolis.
Here they might stay and equal or surpass the foremost of the predecessor aristocrats in “conspicuous waste,” demonstrating to all those who did not know them in person the enormous wealth possessed in their own right, the ability to pay, the ability to “sustain large pecuniary damage” without discomfiture.
What is “society,” the final charmed circle of the “polite world,” or “court,” if not a survival of a feudal institution ? In ancient times the bravest and most faithful of a ruling prince’s vassals lived with him in his castle to defend him with their arms and to serve him with their hands. Later, in the age of the Renaissance, at the palace of the Italian or French prince the functions of the courtiers were but relics of those necessary rôles they filled in earlier centuries. Instead, elegance, wit, fashion flourished in the salon of the allpowerful monarch, and set the tone for the superior caste, the “aristocracy” of the society at large. A Louis XIV at Versailles was preëminent in courtly manners ; but under his dullard heirs the charm of the court faded swiftly, and the “tone” was set for society in the brilliant salons of Paris by the great landowners, the receivers-general, the holders of royal and monopolistic business concessions. . . .
So Washington’s failure to become the court or social capital for America toward the end of the nineteenth century was symptomatic of the profound shift of power from the political leader to the industrial chieftain. Almost never elegant or aristocratic before the Civil War, society at the political capital was found even more disappointing after the war by visiting foreigners. They mourned the absence of theaters and opera, and remarked at presidential receptions not only their lamentable informality, but their real crudeness. Even in the years of Grant, an Englishman describing a “crush” at the White House complains of the manner in which the hundreds of guests maul and shove each other to consume “six dozen chickens,” and “green seal whiskey by the gallon and dozens of gallons.”
But then there had been no veritable monde in the young republic, whose traditional splendor and authority outshone the rest. For all that was said, the world of Boston and Philadelphia and New York merchants or landowners had represented only a staid, provincial society. New York and its old Dutch “Knickerbockers” had been given to pretensions of “exclusiveness, refinement, courtesy and public dignity.” Yet its social life was as ingenuous as that of the other cities before 1870 ; the gatherings for picnics and rustic festivals were as much a characteristic form of entertainment as the gatherings in parlors.
But the strategic economic advantage of the Erie Canal, as it had made New York the largest commercial center, had made it eventually the social metropolis of the nation. Among its “old families,” the descendants of butchers, fur-dealers and land-jobbers, who possessed no aristocratic tradition of social customs and intercourse with each other, the dominant pecuniary standard had finally established its own mold ; nowadays their wives confronted each other wearing diamond tiaras, “dog-collars” and “sunbursts,” and the waltz (earlier considered “indecent”) had become the mode even in the stuffy circles of the Knickerbockers toward 1876. And finally after strenuous competition Mrs. William B. Astor, “gifted with marvelous social talent,” as Ward McAllister said, had “by the acclamation of society itself” risen above her competitors to the position of queen at a “supreme court of social appeals” and polite fashion.
Always a “silent power,” recognized even by the “solid, old quiet element,” McAllister relates, possessing good judgment and great administrative capacity for her rôle, Mrs. Astor had sought to unify society, to blend together the “solid respectable element of the community,” so as to prevent anybody else from forming a dictatorship over social events. In this work, Mr. Ward McAllister, a dandy of mellowest Southern and Yankee race, had become grand-vizier and arbiter elegantiarum, ruling on precedence, limiting the number of guests or players in the aristocratic stage to “Four Hundred,” a mystical and significant number fixed at the famous Centennial ball of 1876. Society in New York became concentrated and centralized like the railroads or the slaughterhouse system ; and New York’s social court overshadowed all others. “Not to have received an invitation to an Astor ball ; not to have dined at Mrs. Astor’s,” as the minister of a fashionable church reported, was in the polite world equal to a sentence of banishment for life.
“We wanted the money power,” Ward McAllister, inventor of the Four Hundred relates ; then adds wistfully, “but not to be controlled by it.” The terms of admission were not exacting. For how could they be, in a nation of roturiers ? A Jay Gould, widely feared, might be excluded from a fashionable yacht club, but his son George was easily admitted. The profane and scornful old parvenu Cornelius Van der Bilt was unthinkable in a parlor ; but his grandson William K. Vanderbilt would see all doors open to him in time.
It was not hard to make up the roll of the “400”—actually six hundred by most accounts—who were to be en évidence the whole year round, until, as Mrs. John Drexel said, “we society women simply drop down in harness.” There were few pork-packers’ or ironmongers’ wives who could not, after employing a suitable genealogist, prove connection with King John or King William the Conqueror, or at least one of the early Huguenots, or “First Families of Virginia.” “Four generations of gentlemen” were declared adequate by New York’s Autocrat of Drawing Rooms, McAllister. And in some meritorious cases the process was visibly hastened ; for the gold standard and pecuniary tastes of the time were imposing themselves with implacable force everywhere. Once somewhat circumspect in their manner, the leaders of the mercenary society now gave themselves over to a frenzied race of display and consumption ; so that, as the irrepressible dandy McAllister said : “A fortune of a million was now nothing. One needed a fortune of ten, fifty, one hundred millions to be counted rich.”
Franklin’s apophthegm, “Time is money,” was nowadays applied in a thousand ways not only by the millionaire materialists, but by their votaries and retainers. In the press a man’s income at various stages of his life would be reckoned by the month, day and hour—“in the impressive method of calculating revenues which has of late come so much in vogue,” as Croffut writes in 1885. Thus of a certain railroad president it would be said that in his youth he earned “$12,000 a year, or $1,000 a month, or $34 a day, or $1.42 an hour,” counting the hours during which he slept ! And with a further effect of literary conceit these precise numerical valuations were used as the most effective adjectives by which bridges, houses, dogs, parties, yachts, horses might be qualified and described. We are told now that Mr. Gould’s “$500,000 yacht” has entered a certain harbor, or that Mr. Morgan has set off upon a journey in his “$100,000 palace car,” or that Mr. Vanderbilt’s “$2,000,000 home” is nearing completion, with its “$50,000 paintings” and its “$20,000 bronze doors.”
Mr. W.H. Vanderbilt’s palace and the adjoining one of his daughter on Fifth Avenue, extending the full block from Fifty-first to Fifty-second Street, like the mansions of the Astors was the visible trophy, the monument of a triumphant dynasty. Constructed in the style known as “Greek Renaissance,” the building of the William H. Vanderbilts’ home was prolonged for nearly two years before the eyes of the wondering New Yorkers. It would have taken longer ; but with a premonition of approaching death Vanderbilt ordered that native brownstone be used instead of imported marble. And so it had been completed, and furnished with Italian tapestries, marble balustrades, Japanese lanterns, medieval armor, and bric-a-brac and art treasures to suit every fancy, in time for his declining years. After 1880 the two great houses, and the French chateau of William Kissam Vanderbilt close by, filled the surrounding streets of the city with their brilliant illumination ; they gave warning that the owners of two hundred millions would soon make a drive toward “the top of the social heap.” Yesterday, the peasant-like William Vanderbilt had been haggling with his father over the price of scows of dung from the Vanderbilt horsecar stables ; today his son’s wife prepared festivals which were to “surpass in splendor, in beauty . . . in luxurious and lavish expense any scenes before witnessed in the New World.”
The preparations for Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt’s fancy-dress ball of March 26, 1883, had been so stunning, so formidable that the highest circles of the “solid old” society were filled with alarm. For many weeks, histories, novels and illustrated books had been ransacked for authentic details, while costumers and milliners in the larger Eastern cities toiled away at their tasks.
Up to this moment, we must recall, Mrs. William Astor had never called upon any of the Vanderbilts, and none of the Astors were invited to the coming ball. The court of society’s queen was therefore convulsed in a great social crisis. No one knew what should be done. Then at last, the queen saw that there was no escape from the dilemma. Amid a general sensation throughout the plutocratic world, as the historians of the affair report, “Mrs. Astor unbent her stateliness,” went to call upon Mrs. Vanderbilt, “and in a very ladylike manner made the amende honorable !”
The fancy-dress ball of 1883 signalizes a historic peace and “combination” between the Astors and Vanderbilts. For this memorable evening, fulsomely described in the press of two continents, Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt was costumed as a Venetian princess, Mr. Cornelius Vanderbilt as Louis XVI, and his spouse as “The Electric Light,” in white satin trimmed with diamonds, and with a superb diamond headdress. In the drawing-rooms of the Vanderbilt palace, with its cluttered interiors in Japanese or in French style, hung with flowing masses of pale red velvet, drapery which was embroidered with foliage and jeweled butterflies, the noble throng ate, drank, and danced through the night. For the six quadrilles which represented the high moments of the ball, the dancers formed in the gymnasium on the third floor, moved down the grand staircase of Caën stone (fifty feet high), and swept through the great hall (sixty-five by twenty feet) into a drawing-room (forty by twenty feet whose whole wainscoting of carved French walnut had been torn from a French chateau and hauled across the ocean). A memorable evening which, as it broke the last barriers between the Astors and Vanderbilts, also broke all bounds for “conspicuous consumption.”
3
In New York, “nature’s noblemen” all joined in the frenzied contest of display and consumption. Mansions and chateaux of French, Gothic, Italian, barocco and Oriental style lined both sides of upper Fifth Avenue, while shingle and jigsaw villas of huge dimensions rose above the harbor of Newport. Railroad barons and mine-owners and oil magnates vied with each other in making town houses and country villas which were imitations of everything under the sun, and were filled with what-nots, old drapery, old armor, old Tudor chests and chairs, statuettes, bronzes, shells and porcelains. One would have a bedstead of carved oak and ebony, inlaid with gold, costing $200,000. Another would decorate his walls with enamel and gold at a cost of $65,000. And nearly all ransacked the art treasures of Europe, stripped medieval castles of their carvings and tapestries, ripped whole staircases and ceilings from their place of repose through the centuries to lay them anew amid settings of a synthetic age and a simulated feudal grandeur. Such demands made the fortune of decorators, furniture-dealers and art-dealers, who sold trainloads of second-hand furniture and shiploads of “old” paintings.
George Gould, the son of Jay (who had successfully eluded imprisonment in days gone by), was another of those who slept in a bed priced at $25,000. In the country, outside of New York, he had built himself amid sunken Italian gardens and fountains a villa called Georgian Court, the main section of which was 250 feet long, ornate with marble staircases and columns, vast mural paintings, glittering chandeliers, and Louis XIV furniture.
A Mr. Darius Ogden Mills, former storekeeper and mine-owner, arrived in New York one day with his gold from the Sierras, and paid the highest price ever paid for land in New York, at Fifth Avenue opposite St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
After purchasing it [Clews relates] Mr. Mills gave carte blanche orders to a noted decorator of New York and during a trip to California the work of decoration was done. On his return he at once took possession of a mansion of which a Shah of Persia might have been proud. He was delighted with all that had been wrought . . . the richly carved woodwork, the gorgeously picturesque ceilings, the inlaid walls and floors and the tout ensemble of Oriental magnificence. His contentment was complete. But a surprise awaited him. It was the decorator’s bill for $450,000. This, it is said, slightly disturbed his serenity. It caused him to look with a critical eye on the splendid decorations which constituted a study of the fine arts at such high rates of tuition.
But Mr. Mills, who at least lived and flourished in his new home, was more fortunate than his saturnine fellow Californian, Collis Huntington. In New York, the master of the Southern Pacific system built, at an expense of two millions, the impressive grey stone pile which stood long at Fifty-seventh and Fifth, a monument to the new feudalism and the great baronage. “But after it was completed he could never be persuaded to live in it,” Gustavus Myers relates. “His reason was a belief in the superstition that men build houses only to die in them.” (This had been the fate of William H. Vanderbilt a few years earlier.)
The newcomers, arriving in New York, one by one fell under the spell of the marble grandeur they saw. Riding in Fifth Avenue in 1880 with his young friend Andrew Mellon, the coke master, Henry Frick, pointed out one of the best residences of the city (that of a Vanderbilt), and mused : “I wonder what the upkeep of the one on that corner would be ? . . .” Three hundred thousand dollars a year ? It was all he had ever hoped to possess. Yet the nouveau-riche Frick was already accustomed only to having “always the best,” his biographer tells us. The day came when the home of George Vanderbilt slipped from his hands to those of the Pittsburgh millionaire.2
Yet it was not enough for the barons to reside in marble halls of a splendor suitable to their station. In such surroundings it was requisite to consume in a manner that Lucullus would have understood and approved. Of themselves the Vanderbilts, Mills, Mackays and Goulds could have dispatched but small quantities of edibles, beverages, tobaccos and perfumes and favors. It was requisite that they call in whole companies of servants to man their houses and aid in the general consumption of superfluities. And as the problem of expenditure of so much quickly gotten wealth pressed upon them, new ways of consumption must be devised from season to season ; a never-ending game of invention and excitement must be pursued in which the aid of great crowds of one’s friends and competitors and their wives must be invoked as witnesses and participants in the ceremonials. These might behold how the man of force and ruse had become finally, as Veblen terms it, a discriminating connoisseur “in creditable viands . . . manly beverages, and trinkets, in seemly apparel and architecture, in weapons, games, dances and narcotics.” To bring them together it was necessary to resort to the giving of rich presents, high banquets and prolonged entertainments. Thus there arose the unique sumptuary organization of the American multimillionaire home, where stupendous feats of prodigality were carried off with the utmost ease and dash. The home of a Mr. D.O. Mills, for instance, was directed by his commissaries like a vast hotel. At an hour’s notice his retainers were ready to serve one hundred guests for lunch or dinner.
The number of servants, of course, was the most direct measure of the refinement and superfluity of one’s art of life. McAllister, the Reverend Dr. Nichols and other social arbiters show us that in the mansion of the genteel captain of industry there must be five or six servants to receive you, as well as a butler. The butler and three servants in livery served the dinner. Orchids, “being the most costly of flowers, were introduced in profusion.” To serve a cup of tea two servants were necessary. A stable of from six to ten horses was considered proper for a variety of carriages, ranging from the opera bus and the four-in-hand to the one-horse cabriolet and the basket phaëton for young ladies.3
During dinner, McAllister says :
Soft strains of music were introduced between the courses, and in some houses gold replaced silver plate and everything that skill and art could suggest was added to make the dinners not a vulgar display but a great gastronomic effort, evidencing the possession by the host of both money and taste.
The truth is that once arrived in the metropolis of fastidious luxury, installed at last in the palace of Dives, the nobility of American business seemed bored, bewildered, lost. The excitement of empire building and destroying had gripped them like a powerful drug, so long as it had lasted ; but it had not prepared them in any sense for an art of leisure, or for cultivated intercourse with each other, such as was practiced successfully in the courts of sixteenth-century Italy or the salons of eighteenth-century France. Few of them knew how to talk, or knew what to do with themselves. Perhaps one or two individuals in all the crowd, a Henry Villard or a William C. Whitney, possessed education or were innately cultured.
Whitney, a young lawyer-politician who had married the daughter of a Standard Oil magnate, had known surpassing triumphs both in politics, as Secretary of the Navy to Cleveland, and in high finance as a member of the Yerkes-Ryan-Widener traction ring. His great palace on Fifth Avenue at Fifty-seventh Street was immediately one of the landmarks of New York, and his fantastically lavish entertainments were the private sensation of the Four Hundred, to which he had been admitted at once by grace of his old Yankee pedigree. Tall, slender, distinguished-looking, magnetic in his talk as he was mysterious in his financial operations, Whitney, as Henry Adams recollects, “after having gratified every ambition and swung the country almost at his will . . . had thrown away the usual objects of political ambition like the ashes of smoked cigarettes ; had turned to other amusements, satiated every taste, gorged every appetite, won every object that New York afforded, and not yet satisfied, had carried his field of activity abroad, until New York no longer knew what most to envy, his horses or his houses. . . .” Adams held Whitney to have been one of the few educated men of his own generation who had gained a signal social success. The day came when, after long-repeated trials, he had won the English Derby, to cap all his triumphs. There was then truly nothing left to live for.
But against the instance of Whitney or the diverting H.H. Rogers, who was the friend of Mark Twain, the masters of money and industry such as Morgan, Vanderbilt, Harriman, Stillman, William Rockefeller, were all of them typically “great silent men” with little enough to say in polite conversation, save on the score of their business operations. James Stillman, the narrow-eyed “sphinx” of the banking world, rigid in manner, and wearing always the “cold smile of a Japanese statesman,” confessed in his last years, when he had gone into retirement, that he knew not how to enjoy himself. “I have never in all my life done anything I wanted,” he said, “and cannot now.” Stillman relates that his friend William Rockefeller, who was almost as rich as John, would sit in perfect silence at home with him, for fifteen minutes on end, and assured the banker that he loved him because he did not have to speak to him at all. Harriman too wore a mask of silence perpetually. One night he asked Stillman to leave the opera with him between the acts and return to his “den.” Stillman thought that Harriman was going to unfold some great affair to him. But the railroad nabob merely sat smoking silently for long minutes. Fatigued, evidently craving company or consolation of some sort, he nevertheless had nothing to say, and his colleague parted from him with scarcely a word. But the most laconic of all these men was J.P. Morgan, who carried his manner to a systematic rudeness.
There were subjects of course upon which they could talk freely either in private or in general society. Carnegie playing golf with the publisher of books, Frank Doubleday, asked him : “How much did you make last month, Frank ?” It was impossible to tell but once a year, the publisher replied. “I’d get out of it !” said Carnegie firmly. The immortal donor of free libraries who was the most articulate of the industrialists had no further thoughts upon the making of books than the cash profit to be derived from them.
These men were scarcely fit to bring up their own children. They, who expended all their energy in the exploiting of a railroad system, of machinery, of a power plant for the new continent, had “had no time for thought,” as Henry Adams said. William Lloyd recalls having heard one of the greatest business geniuses of the country say to his son : “I will be perfectly satisfied with you if you will only always go to bed at night worth more than when you got up this morning.” Yet unlike Roman fathers they reared their sons in most cases as indolent princelings. Jay Gould, for instance, brought up his eldest son George “in the lap of luxury,” as befitted the heir of a railroad and telegraph monarch ; in a manner which caused even the denizens of Wall Street to raise their eyebrows. . . .
The lives of the colossally rich were generally “no more worth living than those of their cooks,” said Henry Adams, who respected both money and social position. His friend Cabot Lodge, the scion of New England “Brahmins,” professed himself shocked by the emptiness and the vulgarity of the talk he heard everywhere in society. It was no longer taboo to speak of one’s own money or one’s neighbors’, of the cost of Mrs. Belmont’s “rope of pearls” or Mrs. Drexel’s “sunburst” or Mr. Morgan’s notorious Raphael—was it genuine ?—or Mr. So-and-So’s disease. Even the beauty of land and sea, as at a Florida beach, or the thought of unprospected Heaven itself, as Frederick Townsend Martin tells us in his “Passing of the Idle Rich,” brought up suggestions of railway projects still to be carried out ! Theodore Roosevelt, a vivacious and imaginative descendant of New York Knickerbockers, admitted to feelings of intense boredom in the presence of the giants of trade :
I am simply unable to make myself take the attitude of respect toward the very wealthy men which such an enormous multitude of people evidently really feel. I am delighted to show any courtesy to Pierpont Morgan or Andrew Carnegie or James J. Hill, but as for regarding any one of them as, for instance, I regard Prof. Bury, or Peary, the Arctic explorer, or Rhodes, the historian—why, I could not force myself to do it even if I wanted to, which I don’t.
But Charles Francis Adams, the brother of the brooding philosopher and dandy Henry, who had struck out for a railroad career long ago, speaks even more bitterly. Swallowing his compunctions, he had proceeded to make and lose much money for twenty-five years. Better than Theodore Roosevelt he had known Jay Gould, Russell Sage, Sidney Dillon, Tom Scott, Pierpont Morgan and James Hill, as friends and enemies ; and in his autobiography he speaks of them in retrospect with remarkable forthrightness :
Indeed, as I approach the end, I am more than a little puzzled to account for the instances I have seen of business success—money-getting. It comes from rather a low instinct. Certainly so far as my observation goes, it is scarcely met with in combination with the finer or more interesting traits of character. I have known and known tolerably well, a great many “successful” men—“big” financially—men famous during the last half century, and a less interesting crowd I do not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to meet again either in this world or the next ; nor is one associated in my mind with the idea of humor, thought or refinement. A set of mere money-getters and traders, they were essentially unattractive. The fact is that money-getting like everything else calls for a special aptitude and great concentration, and for it I did not have the first in any marked degree, while to it I never gave the last. So, in now summing up, I may account myself fortunate in having got out of my ventures as well as I did.
Limited in their capacity of enjoyment and bored, yet prompted to outdo each other in prodigality, the New Rich experimented with ever new patterns or devices of consumption. In the late ’70s, the practice of hiring hotel rooms or public restaurants for social functions had become fashionable. At Delmonico’s the Silver, Gold and Diamond dinners of the socially prominent succeeded each other unfailingly. At one, each lady present, opening her napkin, found a gold bracelet with the monogram of the host. At another, cigarettes rolled in hundred-dollar-bills were passed around after the coffee and consumed with an authentic thrill. . . . One man gave a dinner to his dog, and presented him with a diamond collar worth $15,000. At another dinner, costing $20,000, each guest discovered in one of his oysters a magnificent black pearl. Another distracted individual longing for diversion had little holes bored into his teeth, into which a tooth expert inserted twin rows of diamonds; when he walked abroad his smile flashed and sparkled in the sunlight. . . .
As the years pass new heights of fantasy and extravagance are touched. One season, it is a ball on horseback which is the chief sensation. To a great hotel the guests all come in riding habit ; each of the handsomely groomed horses, equipped with rubber-padded shoes, prances about bearing besides its millionaire rider a miniature table holding truffles and champagne. Finally a costume ball given by Bradley Martin, a New York aristocrat, in 1897, reached the very climax of lavish expenditure and “dazed the entire Western world.” “The interior of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel was transformed into a replica of Versailles, and rare tapestries, beautiful flowers and countless lights made an effective background for the wonderful gowns and their wearers. . . .” One lady, impersonating Mary Stuart, wore a gold-embroidered gown, trimmed with pearls and precious stones. “The suit of gold inlaid armor worn by Mr. Belmont was valued at ten thousand dollars.” The affair, reported in the new “yellow” press of Pulitzer and Hearst, caused a general storm among the citizens of New York, and its sponsors felt obliged to take sudden refuge in England.
The press now followed the festivals of the “plutocrats” with a persistent fascination as rumors of shadier ceremonies were spread about, at which shapely theater queens burst forth from pies carried to the table upon the shoulders of servants ; or, clad only in spangles and scales, swam in a huge glass tank of elaborate construction.
But in the search for novelty the holiday-makers ended by arriving at effects of allegory more significant still, which dramatized their own humble beginnings. Thus a coal baron would hold a great party one day in a simulated coal mine. Or a gold king would alter his banquet hall to resemble the interior of a gold mine. Food was brought by waiters clad like miners, picks and shovels decorated all the walls.
Finally, against the outcries of moral blue-noses in times of hardship, the modern Sybarites declared that their carnivals were designed to create employment, and that the proceeds were to be devoted to charities. Such a view was plausible enough. In a sense the pressure upon the New Rich to gormandizing and jollification but reflected the need for “draining away” the surplus wealth which was concentrated in their hands by the existing system of industrial organization. Thus in later years the “Poverty Social” came strongly into vogue. At one such reunion held at the home of a Western millionaire, the thirty guests came attired in rags and tatters. At a cost, of $14,000, as F.T. Martin relates,
scraps of food were served on wooden plates. The diners sat about on broken soap boxes, buckets and coalhods. Newspapers, dust cloths and old skirts were used as napkins, and beer served in a rusty tin can . . . !
The organization of “conspicuous waste” by the owners of masses of money may be said in fact to have had a clear economic justification. Yet to effect a redistribution of wealth in this fashion was a stupendous and well-nigh impossible task which was never to be completed.
4
One of the most prominent forms of consumption resorted to in time came to be the “grand tour” of Europe, which in itself gave birth to many further mediums of consumption. It was the American woman of the ’80s and ’90s, and not the often dour, brusque, fatigued captain of industry, who stormed the fastnesses of culture beyond the sea. It was the wife and daughter of the lord of bathtubs or sausages who went rushing about the palaces and museums of the mother continent, while the industrialist himself, “bored, patient, helpless,” pathetically dependent upon his women, as Henry James and Henry Adams have pictured him, wondered “what all these things must have cost” a Lucullus or a Francis I.
In the grand tour, the women promptly absorbed antiquity and culture with highest speed ; they imported European tutors, dancing masters and painters who flattered them. They ended by importing the last, lingering descendants of Europe’s noblest houses, and so mingling their plain American blood with the blue blood of Italian, Hungarian and Balkan princes, not to speak of English peers. Out of the grand tours came the famous transatlantic marriages which made such sensation in the era after the Civil War. The high point in this wave of international weddings was the union of Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt’s daughter Consuelo with the Duke of Marlborough in 1895, whereby Blenheim House with its two hundred servants became one of the “frozen assets” of the New York Central. By 1909, Gustavus Myers calculates that more than 500 American women had married titled foreigners, and that the draining away of a surplus of some $220,000,000 became possible as a consequence.
It is perhaps a significant coincidence that during the heyday of the international marriage, the leisure activities of the American baronial caste—more closely affiliated with the leisure class of Europe—now reached a higher stage of perfection. Hitherto the new multimillionaires had known the pressing need of covering broad wall spaces or vast floors, and had purchased at reasonable cost European or even native oil-paintings by the yard. Sir Joseph Duveen, for instance, who was formerly a dealer in second-hand furniture and objets d’art, had been wont to send down from New York truckloads of Louis XV chairs, Renaissance chests, Houdon busts, Oriental rugs and European tapestries for the home of the street-car magnate, Peter Widener, in Philadelphia. Long ago, the clamor for antiques, for “old things,” for all sorts of broken-down furniture, murky paintings and worm-eaten volumes, had arisen from the quickly enriched, who thereby simulated a long-existent status of apparently hoary old age. Yet necessary though these decrepit articles might be, almost as necessary as the coat-of-arms or heraldic bearings which were everywhere produced for the families of industrial barons, they would long have balked at paying a king’s ransom for worn pieces of painting or sculpture by Old Masters which were no larger nor heavier than similar products freely offered in commerce. But at length the suggestions of noble kin may have introduced an element of refinement and self-consciousness to the fashions in decoration ; while the unremittingly emulative race may have further spurred the Americans to new efforts.
Soon each owner of a trunk line or chain of coal mines must have his private art collection and his art gallery attached to his home. Like the successful military chieftains of old times, whose progeny were being united to their own in these days, the captains of industry began to fill their own castles with the loot and plunder of the ages ; the paintings, the tapestry, the china, the ancient illuminated manuscripts began to flow as in a torrent to the western shores of the Atlantic as William Vanderbilt, Pierpont Morgan, Henry Frick, Whitney, Stillman, Havemeyer, Widener and many others began to bid against each other. The physical seizure of the “spoils” of civilization, as Henry James called them—trophies, as Veblen, his contemporary, said—assumed proportions both huge and grotesque.
One of the first in the race for accumulation of paintings toward 1870 had been William H. Vanderbilt, the sluggish, unhappy and fabulously wealthy heir of Cornelius. His apologists assure us of the sound taste and judgment with which Vanderbilt the Younger bought paintings and equipped his art gallery. He insisted, Croffut tells us, that he would not buy pictures against his will. “He liked pictures,” as Croffut relates, “which told a story, with either strong or cheerful subjects.” “Other things might be very fine,” he would say, “but until I can appreciate its beauty I shall not buy it.”
Undoubtedly the pictures and the business of gathering them in amused and distracted the hard-driven capitalist. He would stare at them for long hours in solitude. There is an infantile pleasure always to be derived from the play of story and color in paintings of a certain type, such as Vanderbilt usually purchased. These, according to a critic in the Nineteenth Century Magazine for October, 1898, were by Millet, Detaille, Meissonier, Rosa Bonheur, Bouguereau, Jules Breton, Daubigny, Fromentin and others of their caliber—all military and battle scenes and rustic subjects. There were also besides the rubbish of a now forgotten style of French art, works by American and English painters, such as Samuel Coleman, James Hart, Tait, Beard, and Guy, and also divers Germans of the nineteenth century. Vanderbilt paid fat prices, especially for the Bonheurs and for the huge pictures by Meissonier which treated of the Napoleonic period : “Arrival at the Château” cost the unprecedented sum of $40,000 ; a war painting by Meissonier brought $50,000, and a group of portraits, including that of the railroad magnate himself, netted $188,000. In the judgment of posterity Vanderbilt’s whole collection contained only one good painting, a Delacroix. Yet he came to reckon himself a connoisseur of art in his own right.
Asked by a famous artist which of his pictures he enjoyed most, he gave the astonishing reply : “I enjoy them all.” Nudes and all representations of the partly undraped human figure he eschewed and banned from his collection, while enjoying thoroughly the naked beasts of toil drawn by Rosa Bonheur. Standing one day before a painting of oxen at the plow, this peasant of Staten Island said : “I don’t know whether it is art. But those oxen are right.” Just so he himself had seen and worked with them many a time.
He had never fancied the work of Corot, who was highly favored in the Gilded Age. But at length he purchased two small examples by the Barbizon painter, “because he was tired of having people tell him he must.” For all this doubtful collection which overflowed the “floridly grandiose” Vanderbilt home the railroad baron paid up to the time of his death in 1885 the colossal sum of $1,500,000. The pictures were not purchased “as a speculation,” we are told by his official biographer ; but then it is remarked with satisfaction that the money was “well invested,” as paintings “increase in value with age and especially after the death of the artists.”
Drawn by the gold of America, the works of art continued to pile up and to be measured exactly like barrels of pork, bales of cotton, or railroad stocks and bonds. Colonel George Harvey in his “Henry Frick the Man” cites a most illuminating phrase of the coke baron : “Railroads are the Rembrandts of investment.” For railroads would always go up ! Likewise the paintings for which Gould competed with Vanderbilt, or Stillman with Havemeyer or Morgan. Were not Rembrandts, by the same token, the railroads of artistic merchandise, the invaluable jewels among all commodities ? Even during possession some paintings were seen to increase sometimes a hundred, a thousand fold more rapidly than the certificates of the best-managed joint-stock companies.
With the highest optimism, William Vanderbilt and his rivals purchased tons of the bright, strident canvases of the French romantic school, which had been bought en masse by dealers from the Paris studios, garnished with expensive frames, and sold dear. “I have seen pictures,” writes a contemporary art critic, “hanging on the walls of private buyers in the United States so similar (all being in the French style) and so mannered, though by different artists, that one would think they were all by one man who had entered into a contract to furnish the walls.”
The art galleries, the auction rooms which exploited the new market in oil paintings teemed with frauds and fabrications. According to accounts of the period hundreds of nondescript or spurious canvases were imported and sold as “Old Masters.” To those who felt alarm at the passage of art from Europe, it was often said, “Europe is being relieved of works of art which are hearty good riddance.” At one time an American railroad magnate in Rome bought out a whole family collection of paintings, known as the “Massarenti collection”; and of this it was said by museum authorities at Berlin : “It would be difficult to name a second [collection] that is so void of good things and contains so many mediocre pictures and forgeries of great names . . .” In one case the owner was reported to have paid $1,000,000 for a property assessed at 200,000 francs, and so taxed, that is, valued at $40,000. Some paintings proved after brief examination through a lens to have three signatures, one on top of the other, and by American painters of the “Hudson River School” at that !
Into this new game or distraction no one plunged with more zest than Pierpont Morgan, and no one was, to begin with, gulled more often and thoroughly than he. In his New York and in his London mansions he had placed “art treasures” from every corner of Europe, “every sort of beautiful and artistic work,” as Hovey writes, from tiny miniatures set in little jeweled frames to great paintings by Old Masters, church ornaments, tapestries, porcelains, books and manuscripts.
One day a noted art-dealer showed the financier a small but exquisite Vermeer.
“Who is Vermeer ?” asked Morgan. Vermeer’s importance was explained to him, also there was added “the commercially speaking, important information that Vermeers were almost unobtainable by private collectors . . .” Whereupon Mr. Morgan asked the price, which was $100,000.
“I’ll take it,” he said, and he transferred a fortune to possess a painter of whose existence he had never heard, though he was one of the most illustrious names in European art, passed over in the hue and cry after Rembrandt.
It was in this way that Morgan also purchased his first, notorious “Raphael” which we are told was offered to all the great European galleries at a fraction of the price he paid for it, and refused as spurious. He was sometimes reproached for having been “indiscriminate,” and the “water” in his art collection was at one time compared favorably with that of his own masterly artistic creations : the steel and the shipping Trusts. There was at least one occasion in Morgan’s experience when he felt obliged to return a sacred object he had acquired to the Italian government from whose possession it had been stolen, and pocket the loss. Others acted according to the dictates of their conscience. But as an outcome of much dealing in spurious, falsified or stolen goods, there arose the “art expert” or professional agent, to prompt the tyros of culture in their first toddling steps. Men like Bernard Berenson of Boston were employed at high wages to scrutinize the pictures offered to our industrialists ; and Morgan in time, as Hovey reports, had his “agents in Antwerp, Vienna, Paris, Brussels, Rome—in fact, in almost every Continental city, whose business it is to buy for Mr. Morgan whatever they judge is a masterpiece.” By such measures much useful work was done at last in the transportation of the European treasures to the undecorated American continent.
By degrees not only Morgan, but his competitors, Widener, the former butcher and political ward-heeler, Frick the coke king, Altman the dry-goods colossus, Havemeyer the sultan of sugar, and others were tutored and instructed until they might each be hailed as “the most enlightened Maecenas of our time.” The process of costly education may be observed in the career of Henry Frick as an art patron. He, as Harvey admits, often bought paintings of “varying merits . . . many of which he subsequently disposed of.” The chronological list of his acquisitions shows him taking during the late ’80s and the ’90s chiefly the product of Nattier, Hoppner, Greuze, Bouguereau, Daubigny and the other Barbizon painters. Then after a dozen years have passed, toward 1899, under professional counsel, sounder works begin to fill out his growing collection, those of Velasquez, Van Dyck, Hals, Vermeer, Holbein, Rubens and even the rare El Greco.
In the history of human civilization there had been no such sweeping displacement of works of art, at any rate since the days when the successful military captain, Napoleon, had plundered the Italian cities. It was shown now that this great good work could be done by men without taste. With the ultimate transfer of these priceless collections to museums or permanent galleries open to the public there would be important consequences for American civilization itself. But one wonders if the native barons foresaw such effects on our painting and sculpture. In any case, contiguity with so many noble monuments of art, one would expect, should have worked toward the improvement or refinement of the patrons’ tastes and sensibilities. This however was rarely the happy outcome.
Morgan, who professed a love of literature, indulged this by expending many millions of dollars for the faded manuscripts of the sad Keats, the prolific Scott, and above all of the romantic Byron, after whose poem “The Corsair” he named his own yacht, and whose “Don Juan” was possibly not without effect upon his own private life. To round out his treasure store of sacred objects, ancient manuscripts, religious relics, miniatures, and objets d’art of every sort, he must have not only the Gutenberg Bible but the original manuscript of “Leaves of Grass.” During these years, Walt Whitman moldered and pined away in Camden, and a group of English writers, modest enough in means, such as Symonds and the Rossettis, collected a fund to keep body and soul together for the good gray poet. When he was buried, the manuscript of “Leaves of Grass” went naturally to repose in the Morgan library, the white marble Italian mausoleum of culture on the grounds of Morgan’s Madison Avenue home.
For these latter-day patrons culture was nothing organic, filling their own lives or the life about them with beauty, but something steeped in the dust of old palaces or museums, something touched with death. The presence of the noblest paintings left unchanged their aggressive and acquisitive appetites ; sleeping in priceless Renaissance beds once occupied by kings and their concubines, and in boudoirs decorated with Fragonard murals, softened them in no way, apparently. Sometimes they had the droll aspect of the aborigine who decorates his person with the disjecta membra of Western civilization, with pieces of tin can for his earrings, or a rubber tire for a belt. Such is the suggestion given to us by the unforgettable picture of the hard little Henry Frick, “in his palace, seated on a Renaissance throne under a Baldachino and holding in his little hand a copy of the Saturday Evening Post.”
1 To Thorstein Veblen, writing “The Theory of the Leisure Class” during the years of McKinley and Hanna, such an action as Rockefeller’s, such “conspicuous consumption” was unconsciously intended to call attention to his “successful predatory aggressions or warlike exploits.” The distribution of immense charities, no less than sumptuary extravagance showed “ability to sustain large pecuniary damage without impairing his superior opulence.” At the same time, in a most direct manner, the school and the Church were naturally passing under the sway of Rockefeller, Morgan, Hill and the others who had newly conquered the social system. The agreements in force were not evinced by direct pledges or legal contracts, but were tacit and maintained with a sensitive indirection.
2 After each boom, in a wave of money madness new peers arose who sought to outdo their predecessors. They cruised in glittering trains, they ordered a dozen portraits of themselves painted at once. One, a young banker, Otto Kahn, was reported to have established his home in Long Island under extraordinary circumstances. Finding the landscape flat, he had hundreds of tons of stone and sand hauled by train to make a hill or artificial bluff, from which his country house might have a vista over the sea !
3 It was a legend that one financier of persistently humble tastes who loved horses had pictures placed in his stables, and in general had them so handsomely decorated that he really preferred to spend most of his time there alone among his animals.