transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries, with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe to bring the past alive. The story of New York's precipitous rise as a world financial center can be read in structures and symbols all over town. But in two very different corners of Manhattan, objects hidden in plain sight reveal a more specific tale, the ascent of a single family that would leave an indelible mark on the city itself. In the opulent lobby of the newly reopened Waldorf Astoria, New York, stands a clock like no other. Built for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, its surface is crammed with meaning. Reliefs of presidents, Washington, Jackson, Harrison, Lincoln, Grant, Cleveland, alongside Queen Victoria, the Brooklyn Bridge, even scenes of American sport. Above its four faces, birds stretch their wings. At the tippy top, Lady Liberty presides. It is a nation of a sort, in miniature. Gilded in gold. By contrast, far downtown on the edge of the East Village, in a dank concrete tunnel beneath the streets, are the decorative ceramic tiles of a subway station, each bearing a quaint motif, the image of a beaver in the wild. Installed high on the walls, the tiles are missed by most passengers waiting on platform. One gleams, the others are covered in grime. Together these objects frame the remarkable rise of one of America's most important and influential families, the Astors of New York. Greetings all, I'm Don Wildman, and today we investigate a family which was, for a long time, the wealthiest in America. Leaders of New York society, shapers of the city and the nation. Who were the Astors, and from whence did their riches arise, and what divisive dramas came with the territory they occupied? For this, we are guided by a best-selling novelist and historian, Katherine Howe. Welcome to American History Hit, Katherine Howe. You've written so much about the Gilded Age. Can you define the period and why it fascinates you?

Speaker 2:
[02:50] Well, it's actually not my definition, the Gilded Age. The term the Gilded Age was coined by the famous American humorist, Mark Twain. And Mark Twain called the Gilded Age, gilded in contrast to a golden age. Because of course a golden age, like the one we associate with Elizabeth I, is of precious metal all the way through. But something that is gilded is a thin patina of gold overlaying something base.

Speaker 1:
[03:17] Right.

Speaker 2:
[03:18] So ironically enough, the term the Gilded Age is a criticism rather than a celebration. But from a periodicity standpoint, broadly speaking, the Gilded Age stretches from the years after the Civil War until the beginning of the Progressive Era, which is the 1910s. So we're talking about the early 1870s, the Civil War ended in the mid 1860s, and it took some time for the nation to start getting back on the track to recovery. So the Gilded Age overlaps with the period that we also call Reconstruction after the Civil War, and extends, we probably mostly associate it with the 1880s and the 1890s. And so in the United States, the term Gilded Age is sometimes used interchangeably with the Victorian era. But of course, we don't have a Victorian era because we did not have Queen Victoria. So we're talking, broadly speaking, about the last couple of decades of the 19th century.

Speaker 1:
[04:11] Yeah. I think of robber barons and a New York society, of gowns and debutante balls, and the families.

Speaker 2:
[04:19] Of course.

Speaker 1:
[04:19] The top of the society page would be the Astors. But it didn't start that way. So let's go back to the beginning. John Jacob Astor, his life runs from 1763 to 1848. German-born migrates to the US after the American Revolution. Was not a wealthy man. He is following the American dream. Take us through his arrival.

Speaker 2:
[04:41] John Jacob Astor came from a town in Germany called Waldorf, which you will probably recognize from the name the Waldorf Astoria, which is pretty small and now known mainly for having an industry in white asparagus, and also for the fact that John Jacob Astor came from there. He came carrying some flutes with him because first he stopped over in London, where he worked for a time helping to sell pianos. And then he journeyed over to end up eventually in New York with some flutes to trade and having picked up the sharp tip that there was a lot of money to be made in furs. So New York at this time, if we think about the frontier or we think about the wilderness, I think we typically associate the term frontier with the West. But in John Jacob Astor, the first lifespan, the frontier began on the other side of the Hudson River. It really began in New York state. And so one of the things that made Astor such a canny business person, he married a woman who was very sharp at trading as well. They would pick up furs kind of out and about trading with people in the city. And then Astor realized that he could do a lot better if he eliminated the middle man and went fur trapping himself and went trading himself. And Astor ended up having a really good ear for languages. And so he could negotiate with indigenous people on his own. He ended up speaking something like four or five indigenous languages. He was just a really sharp business man who had a really good sense of timing. He ended up eventually being in charge of the largest fur trapping and trading kind of conglomerate in the entire country. And he was trying to expand all the way to the Pacific. In fact, the town Astoria in Oregon, which you may associate with the movie The Goonies, that's set in Astoria, Oregon, is named for John Jacob Astor because he was actually trying to establish kind of a mirror United States on the West Coast where he could trade unrestrictedly with the Pacific Rim.

Speaker 1:
[06:48] Right.

Speaker 2:
[06:48] And so it's hard to overstate Astor's good timing and also Astor's ability to recognize opportunity when it arose. Now, some of his trading strategies were pretty ruthless. He would control the voyagers who worked for him basically with company stores along the routes where they would have to do their trading with him, and they'd have to buy their supplies from him. He was not ashamed to use alcohol to try to bribe indigenous people to get better rates for what he wanted. And then the other insight that John Jacob Astor had was, he happened to be present just at the time when New York City was really beginning to grow. And so Astor, like a lot of the early robber barons, ended up making not one fortune but two. His first fortune was in fur trapping and trading, which is why the beavers are in the Astor subway station. But then his second fortune came from buying up real estate. He very quickly recognized that Manhattan had a limited amount of land, and he started plowing his fur trapping profits into buying up every square inch of real property that he could get in Manhattan. And he also pioneered both the hotel industry to some degree in Manhattan because he founded Astor House, which was one of the first grand hotels in the very early 19th century, all the way downtown, not far from where modern day City Hall is. But he also pioneered essentially tenement housing because he would build as close together on his lots as he possibly could, and then lease to a sub-landlord who was then responsible for any sort of maintenance or for building on the property or improving the property. So he was a ruthless, ruthless businessman.

Speaker 1:
[08:38] Yes, and we're going to get into detail about several of those things. I'm just curious about the ability of these guys at this time in America to have seen this future for themselves in such a full sense. Did he come with a plan or are these guys unfolding this as it goes along and they realize, oh my goodness, there's more and more resource beyond FERS. Now I can do real estate. It's just always curious how these super businessmen got their plan in mind back when there was so few models.

Speaker 2:
[09:08] Well, I think some of it has to do with happy accidents of timing. I mean, in some respect, we're living through a second Gilded Age now. I think recently I read a quote by Craig Newmark, who was the founder of Craigslist, who pretty much said that he attributes a lot of his success. He's a billionaire and he attributes his success to a happy accident of timing. Would Bill Gates be Bill Gates if he hadn't been at Stanford in the early 1980s right at the beginning of the personal computing boom? So I think a lot of it has to do with that. Certainly, you have to have the capacity, but I think you have to have the timing too, because I don't know that Astor would have had the opportunity to make a fortune in real estate if he hadn't had capital, a lot of capital, at that specific moment in time in Manhattan's history.

Speaker 1:
[09:52] In the glory days of the Hatted Man, when there was a lot of product to sell. We're going to talk about the whole family tree here, and I just want to warn people, there's a lot of confusions. There's variations of the names that Astor gets all over the place. So we'll try to keep it all straight. But John Jacob Astor's the anchor of it all, as far as we're concerned, and we move on from there. The Astors are often called America's first old money dynasty. Can you explain the difference in those terms, old money versus new money back then? How would that matter in America?

Speaker 2:
[10:24] I think in some respect that is a triumph of Astor self-promotion. Because, of course, what is old in this context? One of the books that I co-wrote with Anderson Cooper was on the Vanderbilt family. One of the things that I was surprised to learn when we started working on that book was that in the Gilded Age, the Vanderbilts, despite the fact that the Vanderbilt family arrived in North America in the 17th century, were not considered to be old money, because the money itself was new. Of course, by the time we get to Caroline Astor and her iron-fisted rule over New York Gilded Age society, she's considered old money, and I'm putting that in ironic scare quotes, because they are two generations removed from John Jacob Astor the First, which is not all that long, all things considered. I think the question of new and old is relative in this regard.

Speaker 1:
[11:20] It's a way of controlling the society, which is itself a form of power, and the connections that are there. They kind of created, or at least Carolyn Schemerhorn, Astor, leads society into what's called the 400 during this time, during this period. But I'm fascinated by the idea. It's so much of the way the cut goes down to, did you come at the revolution? Have you been here from the beginning?

Speaker 2:
[11:45] Well, this is maybe the unexpected point. Strictly speaking, the Vanderbilt family had been in North America. A couple of generations longer than the Astor family had. What mattered was not the pedigree, per se. What mattered was the money. Because the Vanderbilt family, before Commodore Vanderbilt, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who made his money in railroads, well, first in shipping and then in railroads. So he's another one who actually made two fortunes instead of one. Before that, the Vanderbilt family had been farmers. And so there wasn't much glamor or intrigue attached to farming. Caroline Astor is a fascinating character because her maiden name was Skirmihorn. She went by Lena when she was younger. And the Skirmihorns were an older family pedigree-wise than the Astor family was. And so Caroline, in addition to having the pedigree and in addition to marrying into the money, Caroline also had a unique insight of her own. And her unique insight had to do with the formation of an American identity following the Civil War. So the question, the Civil War is an interesting dividing point along many axes. Of course, the most important axis is the liberation of enslaved people. That is the most important one. But the Civil War is the moment when we go to being the United States instead of these United States. And Caroline Astor had the insight that they were living through a moment in which American culture was to some degree being decided upon or invented. And she saw entertainment and refinement as her venue for power and as a way to express this kind of nationalist ideal. So believe it or not, Caroline Astor treated throwing parties and leading New York society as a nationalist enterprise. This was a time when American culture was considered to be a kind of backwater or second rate to European culture. And one of Caroline Astor's projects was to change that dynamic, to kind of advance American society until it was on par with Europe.

Speaker 1:
[14:16] Interesting. Yes. Another pressure on everybody was keeping up with Europe. Since we're on the subject of Caroline, let's focus on her. She's the Mrs. Astor.

Speaker 2:
[14:25] The Mrs. Astor.

Speaker 1:
[14:27] The Mrs. Astor. 1830 to 1908, which is really the critical period here. She becomes the New York Society Hostess. She's also known as Lena. This is another angle on society. She's from a Dutch background. Of course, Skammerhorn is a Dutch name, descending from those original settlers even before the Revolution. She is a true Knickerbocker, blue blood, gatekeeper of the 400. I want to talk about this 400. Where did that number come from?

Speaker 2:
[14:57] That is an amazing number and another triumph of branding. Caroline Astor was married to William Backhouse Astor, who was one of the grandsons of John Jacob Astor. And so he's kind of the crucial moment. William Backhouse Astor was the generation that really starts to spend the money. I don't know if you've ever heard the phrase, three generations back to the plow, but there's the generation that makes the money, the generation that grows the money, and then the generation that spends the money. And William Backhouse Astor was the spending generation. Caroline Astor, in the course of recognizing that she had this opportunity to kind of become the taste maker or the person who got to define what qualified as the best that American culture had to offer. She had an assistant in this process, and that assistant was a man named Ward McAllister. Ward McAllister was kind of the original society walker. He was from Georgia, and he was the guy you would talk to about hiring the best chef. He traveled widely in Europe. He presented himself as the advisor who could tell you who was making the most fashionable dresses, what were all the new silhouettes in Europe, what were the most fashionable flower arrangements to have. And so, Caroline Astor, working together with Ward McAllister, made New York Society their personal project. And it was Ward McAllister who coined the term the 400. The 400 ostensibly came about as being the number of people who could fit in Caroline Astor's ballroom. This was when Caroline Astor's townhouse stood on 34th Street and 5th Avenue. Now, eventually, Caroline Astor's house with the famous ballroom would be knocked down and replaced with the original Astoria Hotel, which was half of the original Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Then when the original Waldorf Astoria Hotel was knocked down in 1929, it would be replaced with, do you know what?

Speaker 1:
[17:09] The Empire State Building.

Speaker 2:
[17:11] The Empire State Building. So Caroline Astor's ballroom with the 400 was really at the beating heart of Manhattan. The number itself is really arbitrary. This was a number that Ward McAllister came up with and leaked to the press. Because one of the other things that made New York society possible during the Gilded Age was the growth and expansion of basically of the gossip press, of gossip press and fashion magazines. This was during this period that magazines began to be widely illustrated and so you could see what outfits were fashionable and what outfits people were wearing. Think about Harper's Weekly or Godey's Ladies Book, any of these illustrated magazines. There were gossip magazines in this time period as well, including the famous magazine Town Topics, which is a really fun read. And so Ward McAllister and Caroline Astor kind of created this sense of there being an exclusive number to which people might belong. And for years, Ward McAllister declined to name exactly who the people were on the list of 400, which was Caroline Astor's visiting list at that time period. Another invention of Ward McAllister's was an organization called the Patriarch's Balls, which sounds very old and like it's been around since the dawn of time, but was actually a fresh new invention of Ward McAllister, which was a venue for society girls to have their debuts in society. There were family circle dancing classes that led to the Patriarch's Balls. So it was a conscious created structure that was made to look organic.

Speaker 1:
[18:57] I'll be back with more American History after this short break. So much of our definition of being rich in America comes rooted in this time period. But also the contrast that we have at different kind of America that comes along in 20th century is versus this, which is such a fascinating dynamic in defining American culture, but it really is rooted in so much of this stuff. I want to find the roots of her as well by going back a little bit towards that original money, you know, where a lot of this came from with John Jacob Astor. We mentioned it already about his moving into real estate, and rather controversial, at least in history, because it becomes a difficult story to understand how they did this. I mean, it's really important, I think, to talk about how the behavior of the rich at this time was not guided by the, I guess, morals or principles that we now embrace later on, because we've kind of mixed it all up as culture has matured in America. But back then, you could, Robert Barron is, it was a predatorial world for these guys, right?

Speaker 2:
[20:09] Absolutely.

Speaker 1:
[20:09] You grabbed as much as you could, however you could, and that was celebrated.

Speaker 2:
[20:14] Yes. Well, so think about, think about Astor's real estate. Think back, for instance, to, perhaps you've seen the film The Gangs of New York, which is a Martin Scorsese film.

Speaker 1:
[20:25] Sure.

Speaker 2:
[20:25] Gangs of New York is set in New York City in the 1850s and into the beginning of the 1860s in a notorious slum called the Five Points, which was a real place. It was located kind of proximate to modern-day Chinatown in Manhattan. One of the things that's kind of hard to realize or hard to accept, so there are waves of immigration coming mainly from Ireland, but from Europe in the 1850s and into the 1860s, partly due to changes in political structures that were happening in Ireland, partly due to the potato famine that was happening in Ireland. And one thing that was tricky was everyone came pouring into Manhattan, and Manhattan at that time was just incredibly dense. And part of it was because we didn't really have, Manhattan is actually very hilly and it's built on really tough bedrock. And so until you have the technology to level some of those hills, it was actually very hard to expand uptown. And so you had in the 1850s and 1860s, waves upon waves upon waves of immigrants, cramming in to the same few square miles. And part of the reason that Astor was able to make so much money, it was paradoxically much more profitable to own a slum than it was to build and own middle-class housing or upper-class housing. Partly because it was simply a numbers game. And Astor realized that if he owned the underlying land, he could lease that land to a sub-landlord, make that sub-landlord responsible for building shoddy housing on it, pack in as many people as possible, and then no one had any incentive to maintain that housing, repair that housing, assure that that housing was safe from fire, assure that that housing had enough windows, that it had enough clean air. And so Manhattan in this time period, some neighborhoods in Manhattan in the 1850s and the 1860s had a death rate of one in 19, which is simply staggering. So when we think about squalid urban conditions, I think a lot of us think about Dickens' London. Dickens' London was much healthier a place to live than lower Manhattan, than slum Manhattan in the same time period. And part of the reason was because Astor had the incentive to make as much money as possible, to wring as much money as possible out of very desperate people.

Speaker 1:
[23:02] But it's a distinction that's interesting. He's more the land owner than the building's owner. He's renting that land out to people who then build their own properties on there and manage them themselves. It's the classic slum landlord scenario there or not. He's the land owner and then there are landlords.

Speaker 2:
[23:20] But then by the way that he structured the leases, he would then own whatever properties were built on that land. So the sub-landlord would build the buildings, and then they would revert in their ownership back to Astor himself. So he got him coming and going.

Speaker 1:
[23:35] Okay. Astoria, is that early in his real estate? That's later on, I would imagine, right?

Speaker 2:
[23:41] Which Astoria? Oregon or Queens?

Speaker 1:
[23:44] Queens, Astoria Queens. Is that an Astor?

Speaker 2:
[23:46] Astoria Queens, ironically enough, is not an Astor property. Astoria Queens was, I forget the original name of that neighborhood, but that was named in order to try to attract Astor investment. So it is, I know, it's funnily enough, one of the things that Anderson and I explored in the book, Astor, was the way that the word Astor eventually becomes decoupled, to some degree, from the family and starts to just mean something completely different.

Speaker 1:
[24:13] Wow.

Speaker 2:
[24:14] And Astoria Queens is one of those examples.

Speaker 1:
[24:16] How fascinating. So much, you mentioned five points, so much of what made New York so squalid that the likes of a Teddy Roosevelt later on, Jacob Rees and all those guys, these reformers, are really reacting to what John Jacob Astor had set in motion earlier on, yeah?

Speaker 2:
[24:33] Yes, exactly. And so in some ways, this might be jumping the gun in our conversation a bit, but eventually the Gilded Age starts to curdle. It begins to curdle in the 1890s and really starts to pull apart by the time we get into the 19 aughts and 19 teens, which is what we might call the Progressive Era. And part of it is because public tolerance for conspicuous consumption really starts to turn.

Speaker 1:
[25:02] You've already mentioned the most famous piece of real estate in New York, which is 34th and 5th Avenue. There sat the Waldorf Astoria Hotel. Of course, it's the site today of the Empire State Building, but the Waldorf Astoria, which later comes, you know, is moved uptown, was the product of two members of this family, John Jacob Astor IV and his cousin William Waldorf. Can you take us through the founding of this hotel and the family dynamic?

Speaker 2:
[25:31] Absolutely. John Jacob Astor IV was Caroline Astor's son, and he was known as Jack. And he and William Waldorf were cousins. They were first cousins, and they both ran the kind of Astor family office. And so the family office was basically the counting house where they managed all of the different properties that the family held. And they had townhouses right next door to each other. And the funny thing about them is they did not get along. William Waldorf was after having kind of an abortive attempt at a political career, eventually is the man who went and founded the branch of the Astors living in the United Kingdom. And so he decided he was done with New York. And one of the ways that he really showed that he was done with New York was he tore down his townhouse and built a hotel. And he named it ostensibly after the town that they came from in Germany, Waldorf. But really, he named it after himself because his name was William Waldorf Astor. Now, as you can imagine, this made Caroline Astor, Jack Astor's mother, who was living in the same townhouse with him, absolutely furious because all of a sudden, all these hoi polloi are coming in front of her house all day long. And so she and Jack couldn't quite figure out what they should do about it. And in fact, they were toying with the idea of tearing down their townhouse and building a stable so that the smell of horse manure would bother everyone who was going to and from the Waldorf Hotel. But that was before- Yes, very classy. But that was before Jack discovered how much money William was making from the Waldorf Hotel. And so they brokered an arrangement where Jack would tear down his townhouse and build the Astoria Hotel. The Waldorf Hotel and the Astoria Hotel were connected by a series of corridors, one of which was called Peacock's Alley, which was an arcade, sort of a 19th century, in the 19th century term for arcade. An arcade in which you could go and display all your finery. And this is an interesting moment because this is the time when, and this happened in, I think, around 1897. And this really marks the moment when Gilded Age Entertaining moves from the private realm to the public realm. In fact, in the Astoria portion of the hotel, they retain a simulacra of Caroline Astor's ballroom. And so this is when we start to see debutante balls being held in the hotel or fancy dinners being held in the hotel, whereas before, much entertaining at this level would happen in the home. And so-

Speaker 1:
[28:29] They invent the catering business.

Speaker 2:
[28:31] They essentially invent the catering business. The world of fashion moves further uptown. The Astors build a very fine mansion on Fifth Avenue in the 60s, and the landscape of New York City entertaining changes. But one thing that I think is amusing about the original Waldorf Astoria is that because the relationship between Jack and William was so rocky and tenuous, they made it so that at any point they could slice off the corridors and divide the hotels back into two in case they had to dissolve the business relationship between them.

Speaker 1:
[29:04] Right. It wasn't like they were suddenly getting along, these two cousins.

Speaker 2:
[29:07] No, no.

Speaker 1:
[29:08] They still only talked through agents.

Speaker 2:
[29:09] They did only talk through agents, but they also both enjoyed making a lot of money.

Speaker 1:
[29:13] Yes, exactly. We did an episode a long time ago about the hotel industry in New York, and really so much of the money making that's in hotels roots right back to the Waldorf Astoria's first iteration, and then gets to a whole other level when they take it uptown. How does it get uptown, by the way?

Speaker 2:
[29:31] Well, I think that it's partly a result of the stock market crash of 1929. The Waldorf Astoria that certainly that I grew up with was an art deco masterpiece on Park Avenue in, I think it was in the 50s. It was north of Grand Central Station and it was built in the 1930s. Sure.

Speaker 1:
[29:51] It comes out of the whole thing of tearing up Park Avenue in many different iterations, which was originally very much a park. Then suddenly there's a lot more life up there and a lot more money, and the Waldorf Astoria becomes what it is today. I'll be back with more American History after this short break. Katherine, what happened to Jack, the John Jacob Astor involved in all of this?

Speaker 2:
[30:21] So Jack Astor, after he tears down his townhouse and builds the Astoria Hotel and moves uptown with his mother, his mother, Caroline Astor, dies in 1908. And shortly after her death, Jack lives through a scandal because he goes through a divorce and then marries his second wife, Madeleine Force Talmage, I believe is her name. And she was a teenager. She was a friend of his daughters. And as you can imagine, the press is in a frenzy over this scandal because this was a time when divorce simply was not done. I mean, that was beginning to change at the beginning of the 20th century in this class of people, but it was still very new and very scandalous. And so Jack spirits his new bride away to Europe to escape all the press scrutiny. And when they feel like the press scrutiny has finally started to die down, they've been away for a few months, they arrange to sail back to New York because Madeline discovers that she's going to have a baby and she wants to have her baby back in New York. So they buy very expensive first class tickets on the finest ship ever to plow the seas. And as you probably guess where this is going, that ship is the Titanic. Jack Astor ends up going down on the Titanic. He is the wealthiest person, the wealthiest passenger among many wealthy and prominent passengers. Who goes down on Titanic? Madeline ends up being rescued, has her Titanic baby safely when she's back in New York. He was also named John Dick of Astor, but he goes by Jakey. And it's at that point when the head of the Astor family becomes Vincent Astor. And poor Vincent is only about 21 years old when he's asked to step into these large shoes that have been vacated by his father, Jack. And Vincent winds up being kind of the last of the Astors. It's Vincent who begins to actually give a lot of the Astor money away. Vincent, despite being by all accounts a somewhat difficult person, he nevertheless leaves a huge mark of philanthropy all across New York. And it's also largely through the efforts of his last wife, Brooke Astor. Brooke Astor, who passed away only a few years ago. So the fact that you see the Astor name all over the New York Public Library, all over the zoo, all over museums and institutions, all over New York, all over playgrounds. Vincent is the first in the line of Astors to divest of real estate, partly because he discovers that he owns decrepit things that he doesn't think should function in the way that they're functioning.

Speaker 1:
[33:15] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[33:16] And so that is really the kind of the end of the American Astors as we know them.

Speaker 1:
[33:21] Yes. And earlier on, you mentioned the curdling of the Gilded Age Society. In a way, the Astor family is really representative of the sort of changes in American society, even at the highest levels of its elites. You know, in that this name goes from being, you know, this slumlord beginnings, this predatorial idea of capitalism towards a philanthropic one, and they really lead the way in redefining it, that role for the richest families, isn't it?

Speaker 2:
[33:51] I mean, they certainly, by the time we get to Vincent, but of course Vincent doesn't come along until the 20th century. There are many other, Carnegie's for instance, found libraries all throughout the Midwest. The Rockefellers, the only Gilded Age family who managed to hold on to their money. The Rockefellers are responsible for arts funding and through their various foundations and philanthropic efforts. Even the Vanderbilts, the least philanthropic of all the Robert Barons arguably, Commodore Vanderbilt ends up giving his money to the university that bears his name, Vanderbilt University, through the efforts of his second wife.

Speaker 1:
[34:27] Was there a sense, I mean, in your studies, was there a sense back then when the height of that time period of the Gilded Age, so-called, that this intensely capitalistic model, left unchecked would build a stronger society in their mind? Was that the ideal of America as far as they were concerned?

Speaker 2:
[34:47] I hesitate to ascribe impulses to people who are living through the past. I mean, I think that my impression is that for most of the people who were involved in this, it wasn't a matter of idealism so much as it was a matter of power. It was a matter of what can be gotten away with and to what extent. And in a funny way, I feel like we're seeing some of that play out in our culture now, except that in the second Gilded Age that we're living through, instead of bespoke couture from Paris, billionaires wear bespoke spacesuits.

Speaker 1:
[35:20] Yes, right. All of this Gilded Age comes crashing down in the 1900s, the rise of Teddy Roosevelt's progressive era policies, World War I, Great Depression, FDR's New Deal. It all contributes to a complete redefinition of what America is. And now many people are clamoring to try to reach back to that. Where did the Astors all finally end up? I mean, where did that name land finally? Where are they? Did they go to Levittown?

Speaker 2:
[35:51] Oh, well, interestingly, so Vincent Astor, so Jack's cousin William moved to England, managed through Hook and Crook and scattering lots of money around, managed to essentially buy himself into a peerage. And so there is a titled Astor family in the UK that traces its origins to the Astor fortunes of New York during the Gilded Age. The United States branch actually ends with Vincent. Vincent had mumps as a child, which left him sterile. And so he never had any offspring. Brook had some sons, but they were not granted any of the Astor money. And as far as I am aware, are perfectly lovely private individual people.

Speaker 1:
[36:41] Katherine Howe is a New York Times bestselling historian and novelist. She is the co-author, as mentioned, with Anderson Cooper of the books Vanderbilt and Astor, and is currently writing another What's on the Horizon for you right now? And how can folks find out what's going on with that?

Speaker 2:
[36:55] Well, people, thank you for asking. People can keep up with me on my sub stack, which is called The Howe and The Why. And I've been puzzling through a new Gilded Age novel, which I'm in the process of chipping away at, albeit somewhat slowly. I'm doing some teaching and a lot of writing. So if anyone wants to keep track of me, I have a website, katherinehowe.com. My sub stack is The Howe and The Why, and it's free. And I have an Instagram.

Speaker 1:
[37:21] Excellent. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 2:
[37:23] Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1:
[37:26] Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes, dropping Mondays and Thursdays. All kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.