by Honor Moore
“Will the Moores succeed in getting out to the squeeze all right?” the reporter asked him.
“As to that I cannot say. It is, of course, their own matter. But as to the probable effect upon other interests I don’t think there is the slightest cause for apprehension.”
In fact there was plenty of cause for apprehension. It seems unlikely that Great-grandfather knew nothing of Diamond Match’s forays in Europe, but it is possible he was ignorant of the extent to which Hobart, in supporting the stock’s ascent, had strained the brothers’ resources and the goodwill of their investors. At the end of the crash, the Moores themselves were out six million Gilded Age dollars, not including debts of four million they owed ruined investors. (The equivalent of $254 million in 2006 dollars.) After the telegram on the golf course, Great-grandfather apparently caught a train to Chicago. A newspaper sketch places him at the center of a cabal of Chicago financiers around a table, Mr. Armour to one side. CAPITALISTS TAKE MEASURES TO PREVENT THE SPREAD OF TROUBLE, a headline read the next day, reporting the group’s decision to shut down the Chicago Stock Exchange (it stayed closed for three months, sending shock waves through the New York and London markets). Great-grandfather hung fire: “We are a long way from financially dead,” he declared. “We’ll be on top again.”
In my imagination, these events unspool as a sequence of images that underplays the scandal’s reverberation through my father’s generation of Moores and on to mine. My father boasted, even marveled, as he told the story: the intensely green golf course, the gleam of the butler’s silver tray, the making and losing of a fortune, the closing down of the Chicago Stock Exchange, the triumphant recovery. But decades later, reading disintegrating clippings in the red book, I began to understand the Republican fealty in generations of Moores: why my uncle the banker, turning a blind eye to a president playing fast and loose with spending, still voted Republican in 2004; why my father’s lurch to the Democrats appalled his father; and why, perhaps, my father, when he was young, “always” thought of the burden of his vast inheritance as “a cross of gold.”
I don’t know how much attention my handsome, six-foot-tall, clean-shaven great-grandfather paid to William Jennings Bryan, but at least one Chicago financial daily had fun with the collision between “Judge” Moore and “the boy orator from Platte.” The run-up of Diamond Match stock happened in the wake of Bryan’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech which he had delivered at the 1896 Democratic Convention in Chicago that July. “When you come before us and tell us that we are about to disturb your business interests,” the congressman from Nebraska declaimed, gesturing to supporters of the gold standard, “we reply that you have disturbed our business interests by your course.”
My grandmother explained the gold standard to me one afternoon as she drove me around the farm in the pony cart. It was a hot September day, and the pony was walking as we passed the grape arbor near the greenhouses and she assured me that every dollar bill had equivalent gold locked up in Fort Knox. She would not have agreed with Bryan, who was battling the gold standard because it meant tight money and tight money made interest impossibly high when small farmers in the West and South tried to get short-term loans to tide them over until harvest—a common situation in the mid-nineties which caused farms to fail and laborers to lose their jobs. “Free silver”—that is, a money system based on both gold and more plentiful silver or just on silver—would make money more abundant and therefore easier to borrow. At the convention, Bryan directed the consideration of “gold bug” Eastern Democrats to the fate of farmers and laborers, or, as he put it, “the producing masses.” When he was triumphantly nominated, the Democrats became the party of “free silver” progressives set against the gold-standard Republicans, who had nominated William McKinley, a conservative congressman from Ohio.
Republican capitalists like my great-grandfather supported McKinley and vehemently opposed “free silver,” but Bryan’s New Testament-laced rhetoric was irresistible to those who shared his condemnation of Gilded Age economic injustice: “You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” he said at the convention, and the standing ovation went on and on. Great-grandfather was exactly the sort of man Bryan assailed when he declared “the attorney in a country town is as much a businessman as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis.” But, like Rockefeller and Carnegie, Great-grandfather saw himself as an architect of American commerce and American production, and considered his enormous fortune legitimate remuneration for the stability these enhanced companies brought to American commercial life. He founded a tradition in our family that my father inherited; my grandmother explained it all to me one afternoon at Hollow Hill, a Gibson in her hand: We were stewards of the money we were fortunate enough to have. It was ours to live on, ours to share with others more in need than we, ours to pass on to our children.
McKinley was no match for Bryan as an orator, but his candidacy was promoted by big business, and one of the oil industry’s great tacticians, the Ohio mining tycoon Mark Alonzo Hanna, was his campaign manager and raised an unprecedented three and a half million dollars from corporate stakeholders who believed that government should serve industry and that industry was best represented by its owners, men like Hanna himself, who famously articulated his point of view in a letter he later wrote to a young Republican candidate: “You have been in politics long enough to know that no man in public office owes the public anything.” In the meantime, uneasy Democratic financiers abandoned Bryan, leaving him with a campaign purse of only fifteen thousand dollars, but tireless and inspired, he traveled sixteen thousand miles, carrying his own suitcase, holding forth from the backs of trains, hotel balconies, and town-square bandstands, illumination by pink flashlight powder and calcium light canonizing him the savior of farmer and laborer. Hanna, on the other hand, unbridled by ethics or altruism, boldly tailored campaign literature to particular constituencies, ominously recalling for voters the bloodshed and chaos of the Homestead and Pullman strikes of the early 1890s and warning that a President Bryan would bring anarchists and socialists into the government. Republican campaign funds were deployed to get out or purchase the vote and trains hired to bring hundreds of voters to Canton, Ohio, where McKinley sat on his front porch instructing his visitors on the virtues of the gold standard and promising each workingman “a full dinner pail.” By the end of the campaign, Hanna had positioned “free silver” as bounty for the idle—“something for nothing”—and McKinley was on his way to victory.
But not soon enough to blunt the impact of Bryan’s rhetoric on the fortunes of Diamond Match. By late July, when the stock was hitting its highs, the markets began to respond with what came to be called the “Bryan panic”—if free-silver policies were enacted, loans based on the gold standard would not be repaid with currency of gold-standard value and those who had borrowed to buy stock at speculative prices would be ruined. Investors riding the surge of Diamond Match stock became abruptly cautious: “Purse strings were closed with a twang,” wrote one reporter, “vault doors snapped on loads of money.”
We are a long way from financially dead. We’ll be on top again. Great-grandfather’s prediction was correct. William McKinley was elected in a rout, William H. Moore repaid his debts and earned back his fortune, and fourteen years later William’s son Paul, my grandfather, married Fanny Hanna, Mark Hanna’s niece, who, wearing a white dress, had sat on McKinley’s knee during more than one of his porch perorations. Mark Hanna, in effect, had feathered his niece’s nest; McKinley’s election was no small element in the restoration of Great-grandfather’s fortune; indeed Republican monetary policies allowed him to continue creating trusts, untrammeled, at least until McKinley was assassinated in 1901 and succeeded by Teddy Roosevelt, the first president of that surname to thin the flow of money into the pockets of the rich.
The Moores’ recovery took four years. Rising phoe
nix-like from the ashes of Diamond, the brothers restored their stature by organizing two new companies. Nabisco was achieved by reorganizing New York Biscuit as a trust called the National Biscuit Company. The new company, capitalized at $55 million, promptly absorbed its competition, three trusts that between them owned 114 cracker bakeries. The Moore brothers’ second company, American Tin Plate, capitalized at $50 million, brought them dizzying gains when it was one of the companies subsumed in the consolidation of U.S. Steel by Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, and others, one of the great feats of the Gilded Age. For the formation of Nabisco and American Tin, each brother reportedly received a total of $16 million ($409 million in 2006 dollars) in stock “for the cost of cigars smoked making the deal,” as one reporter put it.
In 1900, as Great-grandfather was in the midst of negotiating the Moores’ participation in U.S. Steel, the climate in Illinois turned against the consolidation of companies. In a dramatic gesture, he asserted himself. Every clerk and lawyer at work on the new company, and his family if he had one, boarded a hired train to New York, accompanied by every desk and file, every ticker-tape machine and glass-faced bookshelf. Work did not slow, ticker running even on the journey, and when the train arrived at Pennsylvania Station, employees and equipment were taken to a handsome two-floor office space, families were moved into houses and apartments and the unmarried into boardinghouses. William and Ada—by then their three sons were at St. Paul’s and Yale—put up at Collier’s Hotel, where they resided until a Stanford White house at 4 East Fifty-fourth Street was ready—on one of his trips to New York to oversee the New York Biscuit Building going up on Tenth Avenue, William purchased the half-built house, commissioned and abandoned by W.E.D. Stokes, for $325,000. Hobart stayed in Chicago, as William took on New York, and by the time Great-grandfather died in 1923, his handiwork included not only Nabisco and U.S. Steel and the American Can Company, but a seat on the founding board of the Bankers Trust Company.
It was in a conference room high up in the old Bankers Trust building on Wall Street that my father passed on a sliver of his cross of gold to me, a portion of his grandfather’s legacy which had passed tax-free to the third generation. The spring before my twenty-first birthday, there was a solemn meeting with two bankers who were well aware that I was William Moore’s great-granddaughter. I wore a suit, stockings, high heels, perhaps even gloves, having flown down from Boston on the shuttle to meet my father, who flew up from Washington, where he was then suffragan bishop. I felt as if I were being initiated into a rite that would finally make me truly a Moore, at last as much my father’s daughter as my mother’s. Sitting at the table, the bank executives explaining disbursements and trusts in sonorous voices, I felt like a princess. I did not consider the money a license for my own independence, but rather the source of some greater, more mysterious obligation. Suddenly it seemed more important to contemplate what would happen to me. What would I do with my life? What could I now do with my life? All I thought to do right then was to buy a car, a Corvair my cousin Alex ordered for me, customized with dual pipe exhaust.
My father sat calmly and proudly through the meeting. As we left the bank, he had only one piece of financial advice. “Never lend money to friends,” he said. “It’s better to give it away.”
My father gave money away to support the ideas and people he believed in, and he usually gave it anonymously. His philanthropy was the only financial aspect of his life that he was conscientious about. He taught me that giving away money was virtuous, that spending it was fun, that holding on to it was unnecessary. What he didn’t teach was what his father had begged him to learn—financial literacy that would have enabled him both to engage in philanthropy and maintain his fortune. But my father’s ethics conspired with a spirit that loved luxury, and he thumbed his nose at paternal authority. The bromides that the very rich traditionally passed on to their legatees—Never invade principal. Live with moderation, on your income—seemed to my father limitations on his freedom and irritated him as much as any curb on corporate profit had exasperated his grandfather. As he grew older and the dollar lost value, my father’s philanthropic capacity decreased. His relationship to money always remained uncomfortable. In spite of his genuine concern for the poor, he seemed unable to grasp the idea of frugality—what his mother called being “Scotch.”
But the very qualities that enabled “Judge” Moore to build the fortune which made my father’s life and work possible—we didn’t live on a parson’s salary—gave him the power and independence to take political positions that owed more to William Jennings Bryan than to Mark Alonzo Hanna. When New York City went bankrupt in the 1970s and corporations began to depart their old New York headquarters for sprawling glass buildings in the suburbs, my father launched a campaign. He was by then bishop of New York and his bully pulpit crowned the nave of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, built with robber baron money on Morningside Heights at the borders of Harlem. As his grandfather would have, my father met with associates who supported his enterprise—in this case, friends, also in high places, who were willing to help him hone the message and set the stage in the newspapers. From the pulpit on Easter Sunday 1976, six feet five in a flowing white chimere and a scarlet rochet, pounding the lectern, my father denounced the dog-eat-dog methods employed for decades by those who emulated tycoons like William H. Moore. “Hope is dying,” he asserted. “The rats are leaving the sinking ship; businesses are leaving the city.” Instead, he exhorted, companies should help their wounded city rise from the ashes of the burned-out tenements that lined the streets of the Bronx. Correspondence with the Easter story of Christ’s resurrection was no accident.
The sermon was widely reported, and my father received letters from captains of industry, some of whom changed course and remained in the city. His brother Bill, named for their grandfather and chairman of the board of the Bankers Trust, reported that his fellow bankers had taken to calling each other “Brother Rat,” but also complained in a letter to my father about the sermon’s rhetoric: “I wish you would speak rationally once in a while.” The New York Times coverage, on the front page, jumped to a photograph of my father preaching from the granite pulpit of St. John the Divine. The praise of New Yorkers leaving the cathedral was amply quoted, as was disagreement. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that my father’s detractors remarked that such a tirade was hardly the sermon they expected from a bishop, especially on Easter Sunday.
9
The Oldest
* * *
KEEP CHILDREN OFF THE STREETS! GIANT BENEFIT FIELD DAY AT MARY BENSON PARK! shouts the flyer for the kickoff of the 1951 summer program at Grace Church. On the next page of the scrapbook is pasted a formal photograph of a group of people, white and black—documenting an “interracial rally” held Friday, November 16. hear walter white, famous negro leader, reads the flyer pasted opposite, mimeographed on pink paper. On another page, a photograph of a bishop in a miter and full regalia, my father to one side, Father Myers to the other: “the Bishop of Haiti,” my mother noted below it, “procession to open Field Day.”
That year a Life magazine photographer spent weeks at Grace Church, and pasted in the scrapbook; his cinematic black-and-whites bring back teenage boys wearing Grace Church baseball uniforms, pigtailed girls jumping rope, double Dutch. I remember jumping between the two ropes, keeping the beat with a chant, Dotty Gaston at one end, Stella Skipper’s sister, Joyce, at the other. I remember finding a five-dollar gold piece on the sidewalk, then losing it down a street drain next to the church, and I remember wearing bright gold wings and a long white gown each year as one of a dozen girl angels in the Easter procession.
My mother kept everything. The Vacation Bible School (July 16–21, 1951) achieved full attendance, a production of Rear Window, cast with neighborhood people, was performed in the parish hall, directed by my parents’ friend Freddie Bradlee, an actor from New York. That year, 1951, the 133 baptisms
performed at Grace Church during the two years since we’d arrived was “as many as between 1932–1949,” reported a note in my father’s handwriting, and a carefully pasted headline declares EPISCOPAL BOYS WIN BASEBALL TITLE; beneath it a photo of the team, the assistant mayor presenting a trophy cup. As I turned pages, years passed, 1951, 1952, 1953: I was as enthralled as if I were watching a movie. The Life article never ran, but Grace Church was attracting national attention among Episcopalians. “Anyone interested in changing the Episcopal Church in those days passed through Jersey City,” a student of my father’s work told me. “Grace Church was the working model for an Anglo-Catholic city parish.”
Every half volume or so in the scrapbooks, Jersey City memorabilia was interrupted by pages on which my mother had aligned sheafs of telegrams that applauded the newest addition to our family. Inevitably the greetings were followed by photographs of an infant in the gauzy family basinet, one of the older children standing nearby, beaming with pride. Visiting the rectory on Second Street recently, seeing the rooms that seemed large when I was a child reduced to their actual proportions, I could hardly believe that in 1955 it housed a family of five children with one on the way, in addition to one of the priests; Ledlie Laughlin, who had replaced Bob Pegram, lived in the biggest third-floor room. My sister Rosemary was born in 1952 in Jersey City, but for the next birth, my mother moved to Morristown Memorial Hospital, for which my grandparents had donated the land. In the shiny new hospital, ten minutes from Hollow Hill, three of us arrived by natural childbirth, my mother breathing as she’d learned at the La Maze classes she took with my father, who was in attendance in the delivery room. For her first four births, my mother was given anesthesia; this new method thrilled her. She was enthusiastic as she always was about a new adventure, and I never heard her mention pain, only the pleasure of being awake as the baby came, my father right there.