Unsinkable: The Full Story of the RMS Titanic by Daniel Allen Butler Page A
Authors: Daniel Allen Butler
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epidemic proportions. 4
The Boat Train that pulled out of Waterloo Station that Wednesday morning was laden with several such Americans. Leaving with traditional British punctuality at exactly 9:30 A.M., the train left behind the fussy Victorian muddle of smoke-streaked buildings, now covered by a new steel and glass roof, that had made Waterloo Station at once a national joke and a national treasure. Within its deep blue broadcloth-upholstered cars with gold-tasseled trim and mahogany woodwork, or in a similar train in France simultaneously bound from Paris to Cherbourg, were more than a dozen men whose total net worth exceeded £300,000,000-men like John J. Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Charles M. Hays, or even the occasional woman like Mrs. J. J. Brown of Denver, Colorado, better known as “Molly” Brown.
Perhaps the epitome of the American plutocrat, John Jacob Astor, he of the long, narrow face and aquiline nose above which sat dark, sad eyes, was once described, not unfairly, as “the world’s greatest monument to unearned increment.” He was the great-grandson of the first John Jacob Astor (the family repeated the name through several generations; the man who would be sailing on the Titanic was John Jacob Astor IV), a poor Schwabian who had emigrated to the United States in 1783 and amassed a fortune in the fur trade, in turn investing his money in property in and around New York. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Astors held title to some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including the Astoria Hotel in New York, as well as some of the most deplorable slums on both sides of the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, since the Astors seemed to conduct their business with an attitude that stopped just short of divine right, this singular state of affairs neither alarmed nor embarrassed the family a whit.
Astor himself was certainly ambitious and, when need be, ruthless. Joseph Choate, one of the family’s lawyers, once remarked of him, “He knew what he wanted and how to get it.” He was also possessed of a great deal of vanity: during the Spanish-American War he had raised a regiment of volunteers (with himself as colonel of course) and though the unit saw only brief combat, ever afterward Astor enjoyed attending official functions in his uniform, and preferred to be addressed by his rank. Conspicuous consumption was nothing new to Astor: in his mansion at Newport, Astor had an eighteen car garage; and once, to satisfy a whim, he had even driven a locomotive on his private railway that drew a coach filled entirely with millionaires. His attitude toward money was suitably cavalier: he was once heard to remark that “a man who has a million dollars is almost as well off as if he were wealthy.”
Yet there was a side to Astor that the public rarely saw. He was a bit of an eccentric, and something of a tinkerer and inventor who was intensely interested in turbines, and he held patents on a bicycle brake, road construction machinery, and a storage battery. He had even written a science fiction novel, A Journey in Other Worlds, whose hero, Colonel Bearwarden, was contracted by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company to make the Earth’s axis perfectly vertical, creating perpetual springtime.
Astor was not invulnerable, though. In 1909 he had divorced his wife of eighteen years, Ava Willing Astor, in order to marry an eighteen-year-old girl, Madeline Force, who was actually younger than Astor’s son Vincent. Divorce in the Edwardian era carried with it an almost ineradicable social stigma—something only the lower orders indulged in—and after being viciously cut by all his friends and fellow socialites, Astor decided that it would be best if he and his new bride wintered abroad. It wasn’t until late 1911 that they had been married, as it had been nearly impossible to find a clergyman willing to perform the ceremony. To make the whole situation more scandalous, the new Mrs. Astor, who had
The Boat Train that pulled out of Waterloo Station that Wednesday morning was laden with several such Americans. Leaving with traditional British punctuality at exactly 9:30 A.M., the train left behind the fussy Victorian muddle of smoke-streaked buildings, now covered by a new steel and glass roof, that had made Waterloo Station at once a national joke and a national treasure. Within its deep blue broadcloth-upholstered cars with gold-tasseled trim and mahogany woodwork, or in a similar train in France simultaneously bound from Paris to Cherbourg, were more than a dozen men whose total net worth exceeded £300,000,000-men like John J. Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, Charles M. Hays, or even the occasional woman like Mrs. J. J. Brown of Denver, Colorado, better known as “Molly” Brown.
Perhaps the epitome of the American plutocrat, John Jacob Astor, he of the long, narrow face and aquiline nose above which sat dark, sad eyes, was once described, not unfairly, as “the world’s greatest monument to unearned increment.” He was the great-grandson of the first John Jacob Astor (the family repeated the name through several generations; the man who would be sailing on the Titanic was John Jacob Astor IV), a poor Schwabian who had emigrated to the United States in 1783 and amassed a fortune in the fur trade, in turn investing his money in property in and around New York. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Astors held title to some of the most expensive real estate in the world, including the Astoria Hotel in New York, as well as some of the most deplorable slums on both sides of the Atlantic. Not surprisingly, since the Astors seemed to conduct their business with an attitude that stopped just short of divine right, this singular state of affairs neither alarmed nor embarrassed the family a whit.
Astor himself was certainly ambitious and, when need be, ruthless. Joseph Choate, one of the family’s lawyers, once remarked of him, “He knew what he wanted and how to get it.” He was also possessed of a great deal of vanity: during the Spanish-American War he had raised a regiment of volunteers (with himself as colonel of course) and though the unit saw only brief combat, ever afterward Astor enjoyed attending official functions in his uniform, and preferred to be addressed by his rank. Conspicuous consumption was nothing new to Astor: in his mansion at Newport, Astor had an eighteen car garage; and once, to satisfy a whim, he had even driven a locomotive on his private railway that drew a coach filled entirely with millionaires. His attitude toward money was suitably cavalier: he was once heard to remark that “a man who has a million dollars is almost as well off as if he were wealthy.”
Yet there was a side to Astor that the public rarely saw. He was a bit of an eccentric, and something of a tinkerer and inventor who was intensely interested in turbines, and he held patents on a bicycle brake, road construction machinery, and a storage battery. He had even written a science fiction novel, A Journey in Other Worlds, whose hero, Colonel Bearwarden, was contracted by the Terrestrial Axis Straightening Company to make the Earth’s axis perfectly vertical, creating perpetual springtime.
Astor was not invulnerable, though. In 1909 he had divorced his wife of eighteen years, Ava Willing Astor, in order to marry an eighteen-year-old girl, Madeline Force, who was actually younger than Astor’s son Vincent. Divorce in the Edwardian era carried with it an almost ineradicable social stigma—something only the lower orders indulged in—and after being viciously cut by all his friends and fellow socialites, Astor decided that it would be best if he and his new bride wintered abroad. It wasn’t until late 1911 that they had been married, as it had been nearly impossible to find a clergyman willing to perform the ceremony. To make the whole situation more scandalous, the new Mrs. Astor, who had
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