Certainly he was a very unique type of millionaire, much akin to Stephen Girard. He had a clear notion (for he was endowed with a highly analytical and penetrating mind) that in giving a few coins to the abased and the wretched he was merely returning in infinitesimal proportion what the prevailing system, of which he was so conspicuous an exemplar, took from the whole people for the benefit of a few; and that this system was unceasingly turning out more and more wretches.
Long after Longworth had become a multimillionaire he took a savage, perhaps a malicious, delight in doing things which shocked all current conceptions of how a millionaire should act. To understand the intense scandal caused by what were considered his vagaries, it is only necessary to bear in mind the ultra-lofty position of a multimillionaire at a period when a man worth $250,000 was thought very rich. There were only a few millionaires in the United States, and still fewer multimillionaires. Longworth ranked next to John Jacob Astor. On one occasion a beggar called at Longworth's office and pointed eloquently at his gaping shoes. Longworth kicked off one of his own untied shoes and told the beggar to try it on. It fitted. Its mate followed. Then after the beggar left, Longworth sent a boy to the nearest shoe store, with instructions to get a pair of shoes, but in no circumstances to pay more than a dollar and a half.
This remarkable man lived to the age of eighty-one; when he died in 1863 in a splendid mansion which he had built in the heart of his vineyard, his estate was valued at $15,000,000. He was the largest landowner in Cincinnati, and one of the largest in the cities of the United States. The value of the land that he bequeathed has increased continuously; in the hands of his various descendants to-day it is many times more valuable than the huge fortune which he left. Cincinnati, with its population of 325,902,[168] pays incessant tribute in the form of a vast rent roll to the scions of the man whose main occupation was to hold on to the land he had got for almost nothing. Unlike the founder of the fortune the present Longworth generation never strays from the set formulas of respectability; it has intermarried with other rich families: and Nicholas, a namesake and grandson of the original, and a representative in Congress, married in circumstances of great and lavish pomp a daughter of President Roosevelt, thus linking a large fortune, based upon vested interests, with the ruling executive of the day and strategically combining wealth with direct political power.
The same process of reaping gigantic fortunes from land went on in every large city. In Chicago, with its phenomenally speedy growth of population and its vast array of workers, immense fortunes were amassed within an astonishingly short period. Here the growth of large private fortunes was marked by much greater celerity than in the East, although these fortunes are not as large as those based upon land in the Eastern cities.
MARSHALL FIELD AND LEITER.
The largest landowners that developed in Chicago were Marshall Field and Levi Z. Leiter. In 1895 the Illinois Labor Bureau, in that year happening to be under the direction of able and conscientious officials, made a painstaking investigation of land values in Chicago. It was estimated that the 266 acres of land, constituting what was owned by individuals and private corporations in one section alone—the South Side,—were worth $319,000,000. This estimate was made at a time when the country was slowly recovering, as the set phrase goes, from the panic of 1892-94, and when land values were not in a state of inflation or rise. The amount of $319,000,000 was calculated as being solely the value of the land, not counting improvements, which were valued at as much more. The principal landowner in this one section, not to mention other sections of that immense city, was Marshall Field, with $11,000,000 worth of land; the next was Leiter, who owned in that section land valued at $10,500,000.[169] It appeared from this report that eighteen persons owned $65,000,000 of this $319,000,000 worth of land, and that eighty-eight persons owned $136,000,000 worth—or one-half of the entire business center of Chicago. Doubling the sums credited to Field and Leiter (that is to say, adding the value of the improvements to the value of the land), this brought Field's real estate in that one section to a value of $22,000,000, and Leiter's to nearly the same. This estimate was confirmed to a surprising degree by the inventory of Field's executors reported to the court early in 1907. The executors of Field's will placed the value of his real estate in Chicago at $30,000,000. This estimate did not include $8,000,000 worth of land which the executors reported that he owned in New York City, nor the millions of dollars of his land possessions elsewhere.
FIELD'S MANY POSSESSIONS.
MARSHALL FIELD.
Field left a fortune of about $100,000,000 (as estimated by the executors) which he bequeathed principally to two grandsons, both of which heirs were in boyhood. The factors constituting this fortune are various. At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the executors made their inventory, by a multitude of bonds and stocks in a wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining corporations. The variety of Field's possessions and his numerous forms of ownership were such that we shall have pertinent occasion to deal more relevantly with his career in subsequent parts of this work.