WILLIAM WALDORF ASTOR.
Now a British Subject, Self-Expatriated. He Derives an Enormous Income from His American Estate.
We have seen how at William B. Astor's death in 1876 the Astor fortune amounted to at least $100,000,000, probably much more. Within sixteen years, by 1892, it had more than doubled in the hands of his two sons. How was it possible to have added the extraordinary sum of $125,000,000 in less than a decade and a half? Individual ability did not accomplish it; it is ludicrous to say that it could have done so. The methods by which much of this increase was gathered in have already been set forth. A large part came from the rise in the value of land, which value arose not from the slightest act of the Astors, but from the growth of the population and the labor of the whole body of workers. This value was created by the producers, but far from owning or even sharing in it, they were compelled to pay heavier and heavier tribute in the form of rent for the very values which they had created. Had the Astors or other landlords gone into a perpetual trance these values would have been created just the same. Then, not content with appropriating values which others created, the landlord class defrauded the city of even the fractional part of these values, in the form of taxation.
Up to the present generation the Astors had never set themselves out as "reformers" in politics. They had plundered right and left, but withal had made no great pretenses. The fortune held by the Astors, so the facts indubitably show, represents a succession of piracies and exploitation. Very curious, therefore, it is to note that the Astors of the present generation have avowed themselves most solicitous reformers and have been members of pretentious, self-constituted committees composed of the "best citizens," the object of which has been to purge New York City of Tammany corruption. Leaving aside the Astors, and considering the attitude of the propertied class as a whole, this posing of the so-called better element as reformers has been, and is, one of the most singular characteristics of American politics, and its most colossal sham. Although continuously, with rare intermissions, the landholders and the railroad and industrial magnates have been either corrupting public officials or availing themselves of the benefits of corrupt politics, many of them, not in New York alone, but in every American city, have been, at the same time, metamorphosing themselves into reformers. Not reformers, of course, in the true, high sense of the word, but as ingenious counterfeits. With the most ardent professions of civic purity and of horror at the prevailing corruption they have come forward on occasions, clothed in a fine and pompous garb of righteousness.
THE QUALITY OF "REFORMERS."
The very men who cheated cities, states and nation out of enormous sums in taxation; who bribed, through their retainers, legislatures, common councils and executive and administrative officials; who corruptly put judges on the bench; who made Government simply an auxiliary to their designs; who exacted heavy tribute from the people in a thousand ways; who forced their employees to work for precarious wages and who bitterly fought every movement for the betterment of the working classes—these were the men who have made up these so-called "reform" committees, precisely as to-day they constitute them.[160]
If there had been the slightest serious attempt to interfere with their vested privileges, corruptly obtained and corruptly enhanced, and with the vast amount of increment and graft that these privileges bought them, they would have instantly raised the cry of revolutionary confiscation. But they were very willing to put an end to the petty graft which the politicians collected from saloons, brothels, peddlers, and the small merchants, and thereby present themselves as respectable and public-spirited citizens, appalled at the existing corruption. The newspapers supported them in this attitude, and occasionally a sufficient number of the voters would sustain their appeals and elect candidates that they presented. The only real difference was that under an openly corrupt machine they had to pay in bribes for franchises, laws and immunity from laws, while under the "reform" administrations, which represented, and toadied to, them, they often obtained all these and more without the expenditure of a cent. It has often been much more economical for them to have "reform" in power; and it is a well known truism that the business-class reform administrations which are popularly assumed to be honest, will go to greater lengths in selling out the rights of the people than the most corrupt political machine, for the reason that their administrations are not generally suspected of corruption and therefore are not closely watched. Moreover, corruption by bribes is not always the most effective kind. There is a much more sinister form. It is that which flows from conscious class use of a responsive government for insidious ends. Practically all of the American "reform" movements have come within this scope.
This is no place for a dissertation on these pseudo reform movements; it is a subject deserving a special treatment by itself. But it is well to advert to them briefly here since it is necessary to give constant insights into the methods of the propertied class. Whether corruption or "reform" administrations were in power the cheating of municipality and State in taxation has gone on with equal vigor.[161]
A VAST ANNUAL INCOME.
The collective Astor fortune, as we have said, amounts to $450,000,000. This, however, is merely an estimate based largely upon their real estate possessions. No one but the Astors themselves know what are their holdings in bonds and stocks of every description. It is safe to venture the opinion that their fortune far exceeds $450,000,000. Their surplus wealth piles up so fast that a large part of it is incessantly being invested in buying more land. Originally owning land in the lower part of Manhattan, they then bought land in Yorkville, then added to their possessions in Harlem, and later in the Bronx, in which part of New York City they now own immense areas. Their estate is growing larger and larger all the time.