When the Astors Owned New York by Justin Kaplan Page B

and posthumous reputation. Willy concluded that the offending party in this systematic libel had been American democracy itself. Originally “the poor man’s country,” the United States had been undermined and betrayed in national purpose by envy, resentment, and a misguided hatred of wealth, distinction, and achievement. His great-grandfather’s “life and character,” Willy wrote, “have been distorted and caricatured until only an odd travesty survives. He has been continually derided and reviled with that spirit of pure malignity which pursued the successful man. It is not democratic to climb so high.” Contrary to Willy, during the 1890s, and probably at any other time as well, so far from reviling and deriding rich people, the American public could hardly get enough of them—except, of course, for a few people who might be described by guardians of the social order as malcontents, radicals, and other ideological levelers embittered by envy and their own inadequacy. According to Mark Twain, the appetite for news of the moneyed classes and their doings could be satisfied even by a page-one headline RICH WOMAN FALLS DOWN STAIRS, NOT HURT.
    Willy believed that it was the American press that led the vendetta against old John Jacob Astor. Journalists and popular biographers like James Parton deliberately transformed a man of “patient courage and masterful resolve: of forethought and suggestiveness and common sense” into an ogre about whom practically anything to his discredit could be believed.
    In 1896, nearly half a century after old Astor’s death, a Chicago lawyer named Franklin H. Head invented and put into circulation a brilliantly elaborated hoax. According to lawyer Head’s compelling story, the source of John Jacob Astor’s fortune, the acorn of his oak forest, was a rusty iron box, bearing on its lid the chiseled initials “W.K.” and long buried in a cave on an island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. The box supposedly contained the fabled treasure that the British pirate Captain William Kidd had squirreled away against his old age. In 1701, before he was able to retire from piracy and enjoy his wealth, Kidd’s countrymen hanged him, but not before he managed to leave Mrs. Kidd a cryptic note giving the location of his treasure chest. The search for this Monte Cristo trove of gold and jewels had been teasing the public imagination ever since Kidd’s fateful date with the hangman. It drove the plots of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, and now lawyer Head’s almost thoroughly credible tale.
    Old Astor was said to have acquired the box in a characteristically underhanded way through one of his French Canadian trappers. Until then, according to Head’s review of the bank records, Astor had been “simply a modest trader, earning each year by frugality and thrift two or three hundred dollars above his living expenses, with a fair prospect of accumulating, by an industrious life, a fortune of twenty or thirty thousand dollars.” But his acquisition of the box and subsequent sale of its contents to a London dealer in coins and precious stones coincided with a jump of about $1.3 million in his account, $700,000 of which he used to buy property in the city of New York.
    Head’s readers learned that in 1699 Winnepesaukee, head sachem of the Penobscot tribe, had deeded the island to Cotton Mather Olmsted, an Indian trader and ancestor of the distinguished landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, co-designer of Central Park. The place had remained in the family ever since. Frederick Law Olmsted, its eventual heir and a close friend of Head’s, allegedly sued the Astor estate for $5 million (the original $1.3 million plus accrued interest). Having been refused, he then demanded all the property in New York that John Jacob Astor, in effect a receiver of stolen goods, had