The Family

by Kitty Kelley

  Walker’s screed was published in the place that had given rise to Dred Scott, the slave whose lawsuit to obtain his freedom had precipitated the Civil War. Being the crossroads between North and South, and free states and slave states, gave St. Louis a colorful but contentious history. During the Civil War, Walker was a southern sympathizer who, according to family recollections, hired someone to join the Union Army in his place. As co-founder of Ely, Walker and Company, the largest wholesaler of dry goods west of the Mississippi, he spent the war years amassing a fortune supplying goods to J. C. Penney and other similar companies, and built the biggest warehouse in St. Louis, a block-long building on Washington Street south of Tucker. He and his son George Herbert Walker, known as Bert, bought land in Kennebunkport, Maine, so the family could escape the industrial heat of Missouri summers, and he wintered in Santa Barbara, traveling to California by private train. He drove motorcars and raced horses and became a pillar of St. Louis society. By the time of his death in 1918 at the age of seventy-eight, D. D. Walker had piloted his family into the Social Register, no small feat for the penniless son of a failed farmer from Bloomington, Indiana.

  Several years before he died, he started giving away money; within four years he had disposed of $300,000 ($3.6 million in 2004). His two sons, who stood to inherit his great wealth, were incensed. They went to court in St. Louis to declare their father insane and obtain a writ of prohibition against any further disbursements of his estate. Bert Walker, who testified that his father was “squandering” his money, asked the court to find him mentally incompetent and to appoint a legal guardian to manage his financial affairs. D. D. Walker then sued his sons as well as Ely, Walker and Company for money he said he was owed. After Bert’s court testimony, the jury found that his seventy-year-old father “was of unsound mind.” This finding was overturned by a higher court judge for technical reasons, and the matter was returned to probate court for retrial in St. Louis. D.D. appealed to the state supreme court, arguing that since he lived in California, his sanity could not be tried in Missouri. The appeal of the jurisdictional issue was pending when D.D. died on October 4, 1918, in Kennebunkport. The next day The St. Louis Republic reported that his two sons, George Herbert and David Davis Junior, “were too ill last night to discuss funeral arrangements.”

  To the very end of his life D. D. Walker believed he was a just man who gave every man a fair shake. He never acknowledged that life’s playing field might have been more level for the rich and healthy than for the poor and handicapped whom he wanted killed at birth. His large grave site in Calvary Cemetery, the resting place of St. Louis Roman Catholics, attests to his sense of self-righteousness. Flocked by elaborate granite crosses, adoring cherubs, and all sorts of praying angels, David Davis Walker is buried under the words he said he lived by: “All Through His Life He Tried to Give Everyone a Square Deal.”

  His forty-three-year-old son, George Herbert Walker, the fifth of six children, defied his father at every turn. His anger toward the unforgiving D.D. drove Bert to the unbounded success that eventually made the Walker family the financial ballast of the Bush dynasty.

  Bert Walker had attended school in England, at the behest of his ferociously religious father, who prayed he would return a priest. Instead, he came back a defiant anti-Catholic and fell in love with Lucretia “Loulie” Wear, a Presbyterian from St. Louis.

  “If you marry her in a Presbyterian church, you’ll go straight to hell,” D. D. Walker told his son.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” replied Bert. “I’ll go straight to hell if I don’t marry her.”

  Bert married her out of the Catholic Church, and his father refused to attend the wedding.

  Bert rejected his father’s Democratic politics; he even turned his back on his own friend Franklin Roosevelt and joined the Republican Party.

  D. D. Walker had boycotted the Union Pacific Railroad because he said its owner, “E. H. Harriman, was hogging all of the railroads in the country.” Bert Walker went into business with Harriman.

  Bert abandoned his father’s dry-goods business to build his own investment empire, topping his father’s fortune many times over. He, too, drove motorcars, but his were Rolls-Royces. He became the first president of the Automobile Club of Missouri. He also raced horses, but surpassed his father by buying his own stables (Log Cabin Stud) to breed champions. He served as a New York state racing commissioner. He helped found the Racquet Club in St. Louis and the Deepdale Golf Club in Great Neck, Long Island. He became president of the U.S. Golf Association and donated the three-foot silver trophy for amateur golf that became known as the Walker Cup.

  Even as a young married, he lived better than most. The census of 1900 shows that when Bert was twenty-five, he and his wife and one baby had three live-in servants—a maid, a nanny, and a cook. Years later Bert outgrew St. Louis, and he moved his wife, two daughters, four sons, and four servants to a sumptuous residence in New York City. He eventually added to the size of his father’s property in Kennebunkport, purchased a mansion on Long Island, New York, with marble floors, butlers, and two Rolls-Royces, and bought the ten-thousand-acre Duncannon Plantation in South Carolina, which he used for shooting parties every Thanksgiving. With his own private railroad cars, he lived like the Maharaja of Missouri.

  A virtuoso wheeler-dealer, Bert Walker calibrated numbers faster than a riverboat gambler. Unhampered by business ethics, he embraced the frenzy of stock-market speculation and seized the financial advantages of short selling stocks, fee splitting, split-stock arbitrage, and buying on margin. He founded his own brokerage and ratcheted up commissions by trading on margin for securities that could then be highly leveraged. He made his fortune before insider trading became illegal. In 1929 he judged the stock market to be overpriced and sold short in the months before the crash, bolstering his riches. His business prospered so rapidly that before he was thirty, he was well known in financial circles for his ability to “make deals.”

  One of his “first and biggest killings” occurred when the St. Louis–San Francisco Railway Company went into receivership. Bert arranged for G. H. Walker and Company to acquire its principal subsidiary, the New Orleans, Texas, and Mexico Railway. He took commissions for negotiating the acquisition and then for selling it later at a stupendous profit.

  He never let anything stand in the way of making money, and that included political principles or religious beliefs. At the age of sixty-two, he was one of the Wall Streeters publicly rapped by then-Senator Harry S. Truman for “rampaging greed” and “the larger evil of money worship.” Bert flicked off the reprimand like a pesky mosquito and continued piling up large commissions from the various offices of G. H. Walker and Company in St. Louis, Clayton, and Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; Waterloo, Iowa; Chicago; New York City; Philadelphia; White Plains, New York; Bridgeport, Waterbury, and Hartford, Connecticut; Springfield and Boston, Massachusetts; and Providence, Rhode Island.

  Within a few years, Bert had built a financial empire that would become the family’s mother lode, bankrolling the fortunes of Walker and Bush sons and sons-in-law through the generations. At various times in various offices, the following members of the Walker-Bush tribe worked for G. H. Walker and Company: George Herbert Walker Sr., George Herbert Walker Jr., George Herbert Walker III, James Wear Walker, James Smith Bush, Louis Walker, John M. Walker, Jonathan James Bush, and Ray Carter Walker.

  Like a dog marking his territory, Bert Walker left his name as his imprint: the Walker Cup; Walker’s Point in Maine; G. H. Walker and Company; and, not incidentally, his son George Herbert Walker Jr.

  Bert became the amateur heavyweight-boxing champion of Missouri while in law school at Washington University. A man with an explosive temper, he head-butted his way through life, pummeling anyone who got in his way. “We left the holes in the ceiling in the dining room where Mr. Walker shot at a wasp that had stung him,” said Suzanne McMillan, whose family purchased Duncannon Plantation after World War II.


  Burly and barrel-chested, he looked like a bull encased in a Hathaway shirt. He was not a man to be trifled with. “He was a tough old bastard,” said his granddaughter Elsie Walker. “His sons hated him.”

  “It’s true,” said his youngest son, Louis Walker. “We were scared to death of him.”

  Louis once made the mistake of showing up for a tennis match “slightly inebriated.” His father, who worshipped sports, was determined to jackhammer “a respect for the game” into the boy. To punish him for disregarding the rules of American lawn tennis, Bert sent Louis to work in the coal mines in Bradford Township, Pennsylvania, which delayed his graduation from Yale by two years. “In our family, life was based on athletics,” said Louis.

  Bert sent all of his sons to Yale because the men in his wife’s socially prominent Presbyterian family, her brothers, had graduated from there: Joseph W. Wear (1899), James H. Wear (1901), and Arthur Y. Wear (1902). Bert felt his sons needed the best education and social entrée money could buy, but he ignored his daughters’ wishes to go to Vassar, because he felt that college was unnecessary for girls. “It’s not ladylike,” he told them. “It will just make you hard and opinionated.” After the girls graduated from Mary Institute, the elite all-girls school in St. Louis, Bert sent them to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, known as a finishing school for rich girls, and then to Paris for six months with their aunt so they could polish their social skills and become more valuable on the marriage market.

  The two young women returned to St. Louis in the spring of 1919 because nineteen-year-old Nancy, the older, prettier, and more flamboyant of the sisters, had been selected to be First Maid to the Queen of Love and Beauty at the Veiled Prophet Ball. This was the equivalent of being named first runner-up in the Miss America pageant, the Mardi Gras carnival, and the Rose Bowl parade. “In its time, being the Veiled Prophet Ball Queen was probably the next-best thing to being crowned Queen of England,” said Ann Biraben, a native of St. Louis. “And being First Maid was almost as good as being Queen.”

  This was the first Veiled Prophet Ball to be held since World War I, so St. Louis was gearing up for a huge social season. The entire city was swept up in the excitement of the extravaganza that lionized the young women who would make their bows to society. Everyone was invited to participate in the torchlight parade of floats and bands that preceded the invitation-only ball, and crowds lined up for six miles to watch the festivities. The society pages of both of the city’s newspapers covered the teas, suppers, luncheons, and cocktail parties beforehand in breathless detail; little girls growing up in St. Louis could not be blamed for wanting nothing more in life than to be selected by the mysterious Veiled Prophet as the Queen of Love and Beauty at the ball.

  Responsibilities came with the title. Following her coronation, the Veiled Prophet Queen had to give up a year of college to devote herself to the daily social obligations of her reign. No Queen ever objected enough to give up the crown, although many years later Dorothy Walker, Nancy’s younger sister, said she found the entire social ritual “barbaric.”

  As the elder daughter of one of the city’s most prominent men, Nancy Walker was a natural selection for First Maid and practically stole the spotlight from the Queen in her Paris-made gown of white tulle spangled with brilliants. No one realized then that Nancy, who looked like one of the most eligible young women in St. Louis society, was not the marrying kind. After backing out of an engagement to a minister, the stylish young woman would eventually decide that no man in the world would ever take better care of her than her father.

  “She was the family’s most colorful character,” said Christopher Walker, who remembered his great-great-aunt as theatrical and a bit eccentric. Dorothy’s children would later refer to their vivid Aunt Nancy as “Flash.”

  “She wore bright red lipstick no matter the occasion and big flower dresses . . . I can still see her in the back of a limousine looking like a little painted doll in a fur wrap,” said Christopher Walker. “She is definite proof that the women in our family are far more interesting than the men.”

  Dorothy was never a Veiled Prophet Queen or even First Maid, but one little girl in St. Louis grew up wanting to be just like her anyway. “I had such a crush on Dotty,” said Mary Carter. “I used to ink the back of my hand with her initials and walk up and down and up and down to her house . . . She was absolutely my hero. I worshipped her . . . She was just wonderful [at sports] and so much better than anybody else. We used to have indoor tennis, and she was so far the best of our group.” Years later Mary Carter, who also graduated from Mary Institute and Miss Porter’s School, married Dorothy’s brother George Herbert Walker Jr., known to the family as Herbie, and became Dorothy’s best friend.

  Nan and Dotty, as they were known in the family, could not have been more dramatically different. Although polar opposites, they were loving sisters and good friends. Nancy was all fashion and lace and fur muffs; she enjoyed silver-service tea pourings and the luxuries of a finely appointed home. Dotty was the tomboy daughter of her sports-loving father and, like him, played to win, especially on the tennis court.

  Few women in those days excelled in sports, but Dotty was a natural athlete. Her uncle Joe Wear, captain of the Davis Cup team in 1928 and 1935, told her that with a little practice, she could easily become a tennis great. As a runner-up in the first National Girls’ Tennis Championship in 1918 at the Philadelphia Cricket Club, Dotty was described by the newspaper as “a rattling good tennis player.” Her opponent won because “she possessed more strokes . . . and because she was the steadier of the two at critical stages of the match, but when Miss Walker has received a little more coaching there should be little to choose between them.”

  It was after one of her coaching sessions that eighteen-year-old Dotty bounced into the family home on Hortense Place in her ankle-length white tennis dress and was introduced to Prescott Bush, who was visiting her sister. He had stopped by to pick up opera tickets from Nancy and stayed for tea. Flora Bush’s “splendid boy,” who had just moved to St. Louis in the fall of 1919, had blossomed into an extraordinarily handsome twenty-four-year-old man. He was making one hundred dollars a month working for the Simmons Hardware Company, selling the Keen Kutter line of tools.

  “So like Pres to have met the debutante daughters of the town’s leading citizen, who just happened to belong to the St. Louis Country Club, isn’t it?” said one of his relatives. The sly observation was meant to gently deride the young man as a social mountaineer. Yet St. Louis, during its social season, opened its arms to eligible young men, especially those who had served in the Great War and graduated from Yale. This particular young man, more personable than most, was not the least intimidated by the stately mansion at 12 Hortense Place, where Loulie Wear Walker’s portrait dominated the drawing room. Bert Walker had commissioned Philip Alexius de László to paint his wife because he thought the Hungarian portraitist was the natural successor to John Singer Sargent. De László catered primarily to American socialites and European royals. He painted Mrs. Walker as he had Mrs. David Bruce, Mrs. James Duke, and Mrs. Harvey Firestone—with just enough hauteur to justify the $14,000 fee ($190,150 in 2004).

  Prescott Bush had met a peer in the young Dorothy Walker, at least on the tennis court, and the Walker sisters had met a charmer who just happened to share their father’s passion for golf. As a member of the St. Louis Country Club, Bert Walker reigned at the top of St. Louis society, for there was no more socially prestigious or discriminating club in the city. “This is Nirvana for St. Louis,” said Robert Duffy, the architectural critic for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, pointing out the rolling hills of golf greens, polo fields, tennis courts, and swimming pools that made up and still make up the exquisite enclave. The property was lined with lovely multimillion-dollar mansions, but just because you bought a home on the grounds of the country club did not mean you were allowed inside. For many years the St. Louis Country Club denied membership to all Jews, Catholics,
blacks, and brewers, including the fabulously wealthy Busches, the biggest name in beer.

  The covenant restrictions were so exacting in St. Louis at one time that even in the richest sections of town—Kingsbury Place, Pershing Place, Hortense Place, and Westminster Place—laws mandated how many sets of lace curtains each household had to have and how often they were to be laundered. At the time Prescott Bush rang the bell on the elaborate Beaux Arts door of 12 Hortense Place, lace curtains were hanging in every window, including in “the fainting room,” where trussed-up women were revived from the clutches of their corsets.

  Little is known about the romantic attractions of either Prescott or Dorothy before meeting each other in St. Louis, although it’s doubtful that Dorothy had had any suitors, other than the sweet attentions of Mary Carter, who was five years her junior.

  As for Prescott, he could not but have noticed the large number of his class who had married when they convened at his first Yale reunion after graduation. He had already ensured the marriages of his two younger sisters by introducing them to Yale colleagues: Margaret Bush married Stuart Clement (Yale 1917), and Mary Bush married Frank E. House Jr. (Yale 1913x). (An “x” following an individual’s Yale class number indicates the individual entered with that class but left early, either dropping out or graduating early.) House, according to Yale Alumni Office records, did not graduate. Prescott’s younger brother, Jim, a sophomore at Yale, would never need help in getting married. To Prescott’s everlasting shame (and fury), Jim Bush would marry four times, bringing further disgrace on himself and the family name with each scandalous divorce.