America's Secret Aristocracy (19 page)

Still, despite such attempted inroads and uprisings, it had to be admitted that Fulton and Livingston had revolutionized American transportation. The trip by sailboat from Manhattan to Albany had taken anywhere from a week to ten days, depending on the tides, the winds, and the weather. Now it could be done in just over twenty-four hours, and as refinements to Fulton's invention were developed, the length of the journey was cut to less than half of that. Soon there was overnight service, and a popular song called “Why Do They All Take the Night Boat to Albany?”

The steamboat also had a profound effect on the environment of the Hudson River valley and of other peaceful river valleys across the United States. Gone were the sleek and stately Hudson River sloops that, with tall masts and broad sails, plied their silent way up and down the river. In their place were the noisy steamboats, blowing raucous whistles and belching steam. Soon, along the riverbanks, would come even noisier and dirtier railroad trains, and in the wake of the railroads would follow the superhighways, with the exhaust from internal combustion engines despoiling the air.

But the steamboat was the first mode of transportation to open up the city to the surrounding countryside. Steam-driven ferries and private yachts made Manhattan an easy commute from such outlying river communities as Tarrytown, Hastings-on-Hudson, and Dobbs Ferry.

John Jacob Astor may have helped invent high-powered Manhattan real estate deals. But Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton had helped invent suburbia.

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When New York's First subway system was being planned, it was discovered that much of the earth through which the city planned to tunnel was the property of Astor heirs.

*
In 1801, President Jefferson had offered the chancellor the position of minister to France with the specific assignment of negotiating with Napoleon for the purchase of “Louisiana,” which then meant the Florida Panhandle and the port of New Orleans. Two years later, however, Livingston's negotiations with France were still dragging on with no agreement in sight. To assist him, Jefferson then dispatched James Monroe and, just two days after Monroe's arrival, Napoleon startled the entire world by offering the United States not only the land it wanted but the entire Louisiana Territory—825,000 square miles, an acquisition that would double the size of America. Then, most unwisely, Livingston had decided to claim full credit for the purchase, and to do so altered the dates in his calendar so that it appeared the French offer had been made
the day before
Monroe's arrival. He issued a self-serving statement to the press to that effect, which, needless to say, was immediately and indignantly denied by the White House. Livingston was summarily removed from his French post, and—humiliation piled on humiliation—was replaced by his brother-in-law John Armstrong. Livingston spent the next year and a half wandering about Europe, sulking and licking his wounds.

13

Endangered Species

The American aristocracy wasn't very old before its members were complaining that things just weren't what they used to be. The basis of their lament was that “new money,” such as Mr. Astor's, was forcing the concept of “old family” into the shadows and that precious standards of gentility and manners and probity and public service were disintegrating in the process. One of the first to sound the alarm was the New York diarist and gentleman George Templeton Strong, who started recording his impressions of a diminished social scene in 1835 and who bemoaned:

How New York has fallen off during the last forty years! Its intellect and culture have been diluted and swamped by a great flood-tide of material wealth … men whose bank accounts are all they can rely on for social position and influence. As for their ladies, not a few of who were driven in the most sumptuous turnouts, with liveried servants, looked as if they might have been cooks or chambermaids a very few years ago.

A generation later, in 1867, Mrs. Elizabeth Ellet echoed the same sentiments in a book titled
The Queens of American Society
, in which she lovingly celebrated the lives of bygone ladies named Livingston, Jay, Morris, Roosevelt, Beekman, Van Rensselaer, Van Cortlandt, Adams, and Otis—and rather pointedly omitted any mention of Astors or Vanderbilts. Of these families, who were Mrs. Ellet's contemporaries, she had nothing at all nice to say:

These leaders of gayety flutter in the admiring gaze of the stupid and ignorant masses, but they are not worthy to be named in the same category with those who can boast better claims to distinction than merely the possession of money. It is not worth our while to treasure the names of ladies of this order, who have made themselves conspicuous entirely by the extravagance of their entertainments, the excessive costliness of their dress, or their disregard of all feminine discretion. It is very easy to create a sensation in New York, or any large city. Where there is a display of unbounded wealth, such old-fashioned articles as morality and good taste are often despised.… The wildest stories are extant in current gossip about these dames of the gay world. One, who is building a splendid house near Central Park, is said to get herself up with hasheesh for dissipation. Another, overturned in a pony drive, and almost swooning, faintly exclaimed, “Take me to my children!”—“She'll have to be introduced to them,” observed a cynical bystander. To rise and reign among the money-worshiping idiots of this kind of fashion in New York … it is only necessary to possess millions and scatter money lavishly for show. No matter how the riches are obtained: dishonesty, cruelty, repudiation of debts, even fraud, provided it comes not under the ban of law, are lost in the brightness with which wealth covers its possessor. But such worse than vulgar parvenues dare not aspire even to admission to the society ruled by ladies such as are illustrated in this volume.…

Still, despite her obvious outrage, Mrs. Ellet was able to see a ray of hope in the situation. Cream, she believed, would always rise to the top. Of the vulgar parvenues, she wrote:

The really excellent will never mingle with them. Their day to shine must be short, even among the golden-calf idolaters of New York. That city, as well as others, can boast her pure-blooded, pure-mannered aristocracy, deserving respect as well as admiration, and exercising a healthy influence over all grades.

Mrs. Ellet also defended the title of her book, and in a preface to the volume she noted that certain of her friends had
commented that elevating her book's subjects to the status of royalty “seems out of place in the society of a republic.” But, said Mrs. Ellet,

We are all accustomed to hear of any leading lady that she is “a perfect queen,” the “queen of society,” a “reigning belle,” the “queen of the occasion,” &c. The phrase is in every one's mouth, and no one is misled by it. The sway of Beauty and Fashion, too, is essentially royal: there is nothing republican about it. Every belle, every leader of the
ton
, is despotic in proportion to her power; and the quality of imperial authority is absolutely inseparable from her state. I maintain, therefore, that no title is so just and appropriate to the women illustrated in this work as that of “queens.”

Meanwhile, twenty years before those words were penned, another celebrated Manhattan diarist, Philip Hone, had interred New York's regal families in two short sentences. From an 1847 entry in Hone's
Diary:

Died yesterday, Mr. James Roosevelt, in the eighty-eighth year of his age; a highly respectable gentleman of the old school, son of Isaac Roosevelt, the first president of the first bank of New York,
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at a time when the president and directors of a bank were other sort of people from those of the present. Proud and aristocratic, they were the only nobility we had—now we have none.

The American aristocracy would continue writing its obituary for the next 150 years. Perhaps this was because the concept itself seemed a collective oxymoron, a contradiction in terms, and that therefore, having been illicit from the start, it had always been an endangered species, doomed to extinction. And yet, as it would turn out, both Mr. Hone and Mrs. Ellet were wrong in their predictions. The aristocracy had not died out with the above-mentioned Mr. Roosevelt, nor would the “pure-blooded, pure-mannered aristocracy” be able to resist the social inroads of the parvenus for very long. After all, the aristocracy could not go on marrying its cousins or
other close relatives forever. As this intramural marital pattern had already done in England, it began to produce some very odd people indeed in the United States.

A case in point is the Roosevelt family, who showed a fondness for marrying Alsops, Livingstons, Robinsons, an occasional Astor (Franklin D. Roosevelt's half brother, James Roosevelt, married Helen Astor), and Delanos, but mostly other Roosevelts. The paternal great-great-great-great-grandfathers of both Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor, for example, were brothers, and when Franklin D. was running for the presidency in 1931,
Fortune
magazine, attempting to unravel the Roosevelts, worked it out that his son James was “his own sixth cousin once removed.” Meanwhile, Eleanor Roosevelt's father was Franklin D. Roosevelt's godfather.

All American Roosevelts descend from a common ancestor, a Dutch immigrant to Nieuw Amsterdam named Klaes Martensen Van Rosenvelt who arrived on these shores in 1644, some thirty years before the first Robert Livingston. The Roosevelts' rise, however, was not as rapid and spectacular as the Livingstons', and both Roosevelts who became U.S. presidents emphasized the populist point that their common ancestor was “very common” and could not even spell his name. For four generations, American Roosevelts busied themselves in trade, farming, and real estate management, and prospered modestly. It was not until the fifth generation that the family produced a really rich Roosevelt. He was James Roosevelt I, a wealthy hardware merchant. He was followed by his son Isaac, who in addition to becoming a bank president also built New York's first sugar refinery and became the first family politician as a member of the New York State Senate. After Isaac, it became something of a Roosevelt family tradition to enter public service. In all, there have been five Roosevelts who have held the post of assistant secretary of the navy. These have been Henry Livingston Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Theodore Douglas Robinson.

In the nineteenth century, the Roosevelt name acquired additional luster—and money—through James Henry Roosevelt, who, like his collateral descendant Franklin, was stricken with polio in the prime of his life and who, like Franklin, refused to let his illness defeat him. A brilliant lawyer, he continued to practice law from his sickbed and, when he died,
was the first Roosevelt multimillionaire. Since he had never married, most of his fortune was left to found New York's Roosevelt Hospital, to the distress of his many nieces and nephews.

But, at the same time, some peculiarities were beginning to show up in the Roosevelt family tree. There was the case of the battling Roosevelt brothers, for instance. These were the two sons of Robert Barnwell Roosevelt: Robert Barnwell, Jr., and John Ellis Roosevelt, whose rivalry erupted into a nineteenth-century tabloid scandal. Both brothers had built large places adjacent to each other on Long Island, but in order to protect their respective domains from each other both erected tall and ugly spite fences—topped with jagged pieces of broken glass and barbed wire—around their houses. Both brothers married twice, and both of their two marriages ended in divorce. By his first wife John Ellis had two daughters, one of whom married her second cousin, Philip Roosevelt, and the other of whom married a man named Fairman Dick, who was killed in a hunting accident. For his second wife, John Ellis chose the daughter of a Navy paymaster who was twenty-five years his junior and also the sister of his brother's second wife. This marriage was soon in the divorce courts, and the case reached the newspaper headlines when Robert Barnwell Roosevelt, Jr., took the witness stand to testify against his older brother, describing the “unprintable” language of a stevedore that he had heard John Ellis use to verbally abuse his young wife in drunken rages.

Drink was becoming something of a family curse, particularly in the Roosevelt line that was also graced by Livingstons. Philip (“The Signer”) Livingston's grandson, Edward Livingston, had a daughter, Elizabeth, who married Edward Ludlow. Their daughter, Mary Livingston Ludlow, married Valentine Hall, Jr., whose considerable inheritance came from a British land grant. Valentine Hall had been an alcoholic and had led a life of wild carousal and dissipation as a youth. But then he had reformed and, in the process, had found God. He hired a full-time preacher to live with his wife and family in his gloomy mansion on the Hudson, and to whomever would listen, he and his live-in clergyman would deliver sermons together on the evils of drink and the joys of joining hands with Jesus. His relatives dreaded the periodic visits that were required to this dour household and the hellfire-and-brimstone homilies that inevitably went with them.

Valentine Hall was an autocratic man who dominated his wife and demanded only that she be beautiful and bear him children. The latter she did six times, producing four daughters and two sons. The oldest of the girls, Anna, would become Eleanor Roosevelt's mother. All the Hall children were in one way or another peculiar.

The two boys, probably in rebellion against their sermonizing, teetotaling father, both became alcoholics and were members of the high-living nineteenth-century crowd that moved in the wake of Diamond Jim Brady. Both were guests at the notorious “Jack Horner Pie” dinner that was tossed in Brady's honor by James L. Breeze in the 1890s. A stag affair for twelve guests only, its highlight came when a huge pie was rolled in, out of which stepped a naked dancing girl who was presented to Brady. Lest the other guests be disappointed, she was soon joined by eleven other ladies, similarly unclad.