by Honor Moore
Almost as soon as I knew anything about grown-up life, I knew my grandfather was a lawyer and businessman, that he had “disapproved” of my father’s decision to become a priest, but that my grandmother had encouraged her second son in his unconventional choice. My father’s older brother remembers the controversy differently. He says that my grandfather was perfectly supportive of my father’s decision to go into the church, but wanted him to work in finance for a year “to learn about what he had.” My father believed the family’s money was limitless, that there was no reason to learn anything about it—the chief thing to do with it was to use it for the human good. “A cross of gold,” Bobby Potter told me. He was my father’s lifelong best friend. “That money was always his cross of gold.”
Gramps seemed so weak sitting there in his big chair that I couldn’t imagine him intimidating my father, who was so tall and seemed so transcendently powerful. By the time I understood such things, the argument between them had gone underground; all that survived were signifiers. My father’s study in Jersey City was hung with a silver cross given to him by a Greek Orthodox prelate, my grandfather’s library adorned with talismans of another kind: the chrome model of a jet presented to him on his retirement from the board of Republic Aviation, the company he had a hand in starting; an inscribed photo of President Eisenhower enshrined in a silver frame, rendering my parents’ proud votes for Adlai Stevenson fragile protest against something permanent. My father so dismissed his father’s accomplishment that I was surprised when I saw evidence of it. I remember solemnly watching a television documentary about Republic Aviation with Gramps—the tale of his investment in Seversky, who invented the low-wing metal aircraft, how the enterprise nearly bankrupted him, only to conclude in triumph.
More important to me was evidence I found the Christmas I was seven or eight, behind a painted screen in the dining room. The sleekly polished mahogany box the size of a small suitcase bore a brass plaque which identified it as a gift to my grandfather from the National Biscuit Company, which Great-grandfather Moore and his brother, Hobart, had assembled from a dozen local bakeries that had names like “Uneeda Biscuit” and “Lorna Doone.” In the box was a gorgeous array of every kind of Nabisco cookie. Day after day, I returned to it, stealing first a Lorna Doone, then a sugar wafer, then as many Oreos as I could remove leaving no trace.
My grandparents’ enormous and beautiful brick house rested in a hollow on a hundred acres of pasture and forest. There was a pond where mallard ducks and geese swam, an ample vegetable garden, stables, barns, and three enormous greenhouses where flowers grew all year round. At Hollow Hill, my grandmother oversaw a Noah’s Ark of a farm populated by a herd of Guernseys, flocks of hens and attendant roosters, bantam cocks, pheasants, pigs, turkeys, horses, and a kennel where she bred championship dalmatians. From a perfectly ordinary country road, you turned through discreet brick gates at a sign that said Hollow Hill and drove down a driveway past the stables to the house—lawn, apple trees, a pair of larger-than-life wrought-iron dalmatians painted to look real, my grandmother’s Buick convertible with her initials on the doors.
If you walked in the front door of the house and passed through the long entrance hall, you could go out the French doors onto the terrace where a pair of apple trees had been espaliered to form a canopy for shade, fuchsia plants hanging from their branches in the summer. The terrace gave way to a lawn that ran the entire width of the house; edging it was a perennial border about five feet deep—I remember delphiniums and snapdragons, phlox and baby’s breath, artemesia and lady’s mantle—a cutting garden that never ran out of blooms. From the terrace where my grandmother served tea every day at four, your eye fell to a half-moon flight of brick steps that dropped to a lower lawn, descending to another set of steps, and another. When Gramps still walked, there were three holes for golf—putting greens, sandtraps, and the rest—ingeniously placed on the descending levels of lawn and on fields across the road near the tennis court; by playing the holes three times in different configurations, you’d get a nine-hole game.
But for me the stables at the top of the hollow were the center of life there. They were built around the courtyard where my father had learned to ride and where I and every grandchild first sat astride a pony, Christie, the groom, holding the bridles and instructing in his Scottish burr—press in your knees, hold in your heels, sit up straight. There were stalls for twenty horses, but when I was riding there were many fewer: Jackson, a chestnut gelding; Bill, my father’s seventeen-hand thoroughbred named for his brother; Mademoiselle, a smaller bay mare I usually took when Christie and I rode out every morning I was there, hours along bridle paths through the forest.
When I was very little, Seaton Pippin was still alive. Gramps had inherited his father’s Hackney farm down the road from Hollow Hill, and Pippin had been its equine prodigy. Gami, and later my father’s sister Polly, drove her to Best in Show five years running at Madison Square Garden. Years after making a bronze portrait of her, Katharine Lane Weems, the animal sculptor, wrote of seeing Pippin again: “She has real glamour now & temperament & stage presence like a prima donna. She needs no check rein & makes the other hackneys look like machines. She has won 65 championships & more blues than any living horse.” Of the sculpture, my grandfather exclaimed to the artist in a letter, “What we want is Pippin & you have given her to us.” After Pippin’s farewell competition, the band played “Auld Lang Syne” as she circled the ring, a giant horseshoe of flowers around her neck.
On the other side of the stable, beyond the tack room and office where blue ribbons hung thickly over the desk, was the carriage house. It was always dark inside, coaches and landaus and rigs of all kinds resting there, barely visible in the light that made its way through the windows at the top of the wide doors. The ceiling was high, like a church, the doors and window frames were painted dark green, and the floor was a pale tan, almost yellow, of bricks arranged in a zigzag pattern, the room fragrant with fresh paint and varnish. I remember the huge spokes of the wheels, and once when Gami showed me the carriages, Christie opened a brougham door and took my hand, helping me up and inside where I sat back on the chamois upholstery and breathed in the old air. The coaches were shipped to Hollow Hill from Prides Crossing after my great-grandmother died, their lacquered exteriors like sleek skin, the colors painstaking—dark, dark green, tan, bright white—the brass lanterns and locks brightly polished.
Gami didn’t explain what she meant when she said proudly that this was the “brougham” that belonged to “Great-grandfather.” He had died in 1923 at the age of seventy-five, but his wife, my father’s adored grandmother whom we called Great-granny, had lived till I was ten. Great-grandfather seemed like a character in a fairy tale. He had raced the coaches, Gami said, “four-in-hand.” The only driving I’d ever seen was when Christie harnessed Sally to the pony cart and my grandmother drove me around the farm, her hands on the reins, once in a while letting me drive, carefully guiding my fingers to the proper position or demonstrating how little pressure it took to send Sally to the right or left. Once, visiting my uncle and his wife, both then almost ninety, I complimented them on the enormous brass-trimmed mahogany bucket in which they kept magazines.
“Do you know what that is?” my Uncle Bill asked.
“No.”
“A feed bucket. Your great-grandfather had one of these for each horse.”
“And these went to England when he raced?”
“Believe it or not.”
There was a photograph that turned up whenever we moved—four horses, one of them gray, the white-haired driver in a top hat holding all four reins in one hand. “That’s your great-grandfather,” my father said once at Bank Street. In the years leading to the First World War, Great-grandfather took his brougham across the Atlantic to race in England—grooms, trainer, horses, harnesses, all of them on a ship—and in 1911 won the private coach division, racing from Hyde Park t
o Richmond, his coach pulled by horses named Minerva, Hinocker, Abigail, and Bismarck. A photograph in a faded newspaper clipping makes clear why he was a champion—horses galloping, coach hurtling forward, the tall, powerful driver calm in the midst of a furor, in charge, it seemed, of all the force in the world.
Great-grandfather, whose name was William Henry Moore, established the family wealth, making the millions that purchased Rockmarge, the creamy mansion on the sea, the Stanford White house on East Fifty-fourth Street, and Hollow Hill, his wedding present to his youngest son. What my grandfather inherited made it possible for him to live in great luxury not only at Hollow Hill but in two apartments at 825 Fifth Avenue, an Addison Mizner house at Palm Beach, and to purchase, with five friends, the fifteen-thousand-acre hunting and fishing camp in the Adirondacks. The inherited wealth of the women who married Moores was supplemental—it was the fortune her husband left that Great-granny passed on when she died; plenty remained after her thirty years of enterprising widowhood—world travel, the collecting of Chinese paintings, Persian artifacts, and Babylonian cylinder seals, and her funding of the construction of museums at Persepolis and Corinth.
Great-grandfather, namesake of his grandfather William Henry, was born in 1848 to Nathaniel Moore and Rachel Arvilla Beckwith Moore of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, and grew up one of two brothers in a large Georgian house in Greene, east of Utica, New York. These Moores first appear in public records in the person of Alexander Moore, who in the year 1708 was admitted as a “freeman” to the municipality of New York City, his occupation entered as “sadler.” Later he would be elected tax collector, then a tax assessor in the East Ward, and would serve as a vestryman at Trinity Episcopal Church on Wall Street. On the Beckwith side, the men were Congregational ministers in Litchfield, Connecticut, and Rachel’s grandfather, George, a fellow of the Yale Corporation. Rachel, whom her daughter-in-law, my great-grandmother, described as having a mind “almost masculine in its exactness and clearness of judgement,” had been sent as a child to live with her aunt after her mother died and her father remarried; it was in that household that she met Nathaniel, a fifth-generation descendant of Alexander, who would become “a merchant and a banker” and six times Greene’s justice of the peace. Less is made of my great-grandfather William’s career at Amherst College than of the job he held after his freshman year “holding a surveyor’s stick” for a local railroad that, as a financier, he would one day fold into a single company, the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railway.
Because of “ill health” William left Amherst after two years, and en route to California, where he planned to join cousins, he stopped in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Apprenticed there to a lawyer, Mr. Bartlett, he worked, as was the custom, for no salary but room and board. In letters throughout 1871, he begs his father to make good on a promise “to support me”—he has an offer from a “reputable” Eau Claire man, recently returned from Montana in search of partners, to come into business with him there. From the end of the Northern Pacific Railroad, they would ride horses into Montana, where they would start “a ranch for horses and cattle.” His father, conservative, devout, and fearful, refused his request—“It hurts me terribly for you to even dream I am dissipated,” William wrote back. He apparently stayed with Mr. Bartlett, because in 1872 he was admitted to the bar in Eau Claire, after which family legend tracks him to the Great Plains, where, as my father told the story, he became friends with Sitting Bull, who cautioned him to leave the West. By the time of Custer’s Last Stand in 1876, my great-grandfather was safely in Chicago, ensconced in the firm of Edward Alonzo Small, a corporate lawyer, and married to the boss’s daughter, my father’s adored grandmother Adelia, who was always called Ada. After Small died in 1883, William’s brother, Hobart, also a lawyer, became his partner, having married Ada’s sister, Lora.
Working with their father-in-law, the Moore brothers became fiercely clever at adapting the intricacies of Illinois corporate law to the advantage of their powerful clients—Pullman, American Express, Vanderbilt, and Frick among them. Great-grandfather proved so sharp at assessing stocks that he was called “Judge” Moore, and when the nickname endowed him with juridic legitimacy, no one protested: he seemed like a judge, keeping his own counsel, never giving an interview. This trait served him well as he and his brother began their own investing. Standard Oil, created by Henry Flagler and John D. Rockefeller in 1870, was a “vertical” trust, which meant that one company owned all the resources needed to get the product from the ground to the consumer. Eventually Great-grandfather and Uncle Hobart assembled “horizontal” trusts. They would raise money, purchase a small company, improve its performance, thereby driving up its stock price, then use its profits, along with loans they took as needed, to buy out its undercapitalized competitors. As soon as possible, they’d charter a new company made up of the smaller ones, offer its stock, realize multimillion-dollar fees or stock equivalents, join its board, and turn over the company to executives they handpicked. Frazer Axle Grease Company was their first promotion, followed by the American Strawboard Company, purchased “to control the manufacture of strawboard and wood pulp,” and New York Biscuit, the forerunner of Nabisco. But their promotion of the Diamond Match Company, which they bought and rechartered in Connecticut “to control the manufacture of matches,” put the Moore brothers on the map.
Imagine a time when safe matches were an innovation, the paper book match brand-new. In the nineteenth century, when wooden matches went into mass production in England, they were manufactured with sulfur and white phosphorus, a toxic chemical that caused “phossy jaw,” a deterioration of the jawbone, contaminated the bones of the workers who made them, and deformed the skeleton of any child who mistakenly sucked on one. Matches made with sulfa and “red” phosphorous were finally introduced in Europe in the 1850s, and by the 1890s in the United States, Diamond Match had developed a method for mass production of these safer matches, including book matches, whose patent the Moores purchased from Joshua Pusey, the Philadelphia lawyer who invented them because he disliked the bulge that boxed wooden matches made in his waistcoat. Under their improved management and with their absorption of smaller match companies, the Connecticut company’s profits began to rise, and the Moores, taking advantage of the more sympathetic laws of their home state, expanded the capital available to them by forming the Diamond Match Company of Illinois. In early summer 1896, when it was announced that Diamond executives would travel abroad to seduce and acquire European match companies, Diamond’s stock began a spectacular ascent on the Chicago Exchange.
“His brother was named Hobart?”
“Yes, Hobart. He tried to corner the market on matches and almost ruined the whole thing,” said my uncle.
“Really?”
“It’s all right here.” He got up, disappeared into another room, and returned with a large red bound book.
DOWNFALL OF MOORES, reads a headline, and written in pencil across the clipping, orange and crisp with age, August 4, 1896. Great-grandfather was at Rockmarge for the summer and calmly playing golf at the Myopia Hunt Club when a butler approached across the putting green, carrying a silver tray on which lay a telegram announcing the disaster. FAILURE OF DIAMOND MATCH MAGNATES A SURPRISE, read another headline in the red book. “The fable,” my uncle, the retired banker, said, “was that Hobart, in Chicago, drove the speculation, and that Grandfather had to leave his vacation to repair the damage.” In family lore, William was the thrifty, responsible one, “Hobie” the profligate, given to such extravagances as hiring a train to transport a party of friends to Hot Springs for a week of pleasure. “My dear Papa,” my grandfather wrote his father in August 1896, “I am very sorry you lost your money. But we will not forget the good times we had, and shall have. Mamma told me all about it. Mamma and I feel very badly, but we can be brave though in trouble.”
Reading the clippings in the scrapbook Uncle Bill gave me, I was able to piece together the sto
ry. When Diamond announced a deal with Bryant & May, the British match company, Diamond stock was at $148, but during the following weeks, reports in the financial press of Diamond’s negotiations with the governments of Austria and France about acquiring their match manufacture caused the stock to soar. The brothers’ declared intention—to control the world match market—seemed within reach. In a wild surge of speculative buying, the price of Diamond stock went as high as $400. The word “on LaSalle Street” and among the investors Great-grandfather and Hobart had recruited assumed the brothers had access to enough cash to back the stock, and that their expertise was up to the task. Brokers continued to buy shares at high prices, which held the stock to the mid-$200s, and Hobart flooded the banks with shares priced at $170, unaware he and his investors were purchasing that very stock at $230. Soon a nervous investor broke rank, buying five hundred shares at the higher price (long) as one of the Moores’ investors and five thousand at the lower price (short) for his personal account. Forthwith the banks refused to lend any more cash, and on August 3 Moore Brothers declared itself insolvent. DOWN WENT DIAMOND MATCH STOCK, read another headline in the red book, LIKE A PUNCTURED BALLOON.
The Chicago business press attempted to head off full-scale catastrophe with reassurances from the financial establishment: BANKS ARE FULLY PROTECTED, one such headline asserted, and in the article Great-grandfather’s friend the meatpacker P. D. Armour was quoted: “I cannot see any signs of a panic over the Diamond Match matter. There will be no effect upon other securities.” Armour was one of the investors assembled by the Moores to promote Diamond stock.