After they lunched with husbands and children, society ladies were off in their carriages again on the obligatory round of calls. For a quick stop at one house, they held their long skirts and climbed the steep steps to the front door, nodded to the parlor maid who answered, and advancing no farther than the vestibule, dropped an engraved card on the silver tray, then left. But at the homes of friends or neighbors like the Tredwells, they presented their card and asked to see the lady of the house. A quick glimpse in the hall mirror to check their hair, and they were ushered into the front parlor. While they sat on the new French sofa waiting for their hostess to come down, they took in the furnishings of the room. Their eyes darted from the whale-oil lamps on the marble mantel over the fireplace to the bronze gas chandelier hanging from the high ceiling, to the square piano and the French carpet woven to look like Roman frescoes. A ten-minute chat with their friend, some good gossip, a critique of the nine-course dinner party they attended the night before, and they were off again in their carriages. A few blocks away they stopped for tea with a dowager, a chance for the young debutante to say a few clever words; a nod from their hostess could only help.
In the evenings, they attended theaters such as Wallack’s on Broadway and chuckled at Lester Wallack, starring in the new English comedy The Bachelor of Arts, or they went for a more thought-provoking production at the National Theater, where Uncle Tom’s Cabin was playing to packed houses, and every night the audience sobbed over Little Eva’s plight. At the Broadway Tabernacle, Theodore Eisfeld conducted the Philharmonic Society, and at Metropolitan Hall or the Astor Opera House the sopranos sang while audience members pulled out their opera glasses and spied on one another.
The only thing New Yorkers enjoyed more than making money was dancing, and the most important events were the season’s parties, dances, and balls. Hetty’s cousin William, just three years older, might accompany her, but his mother or his sister always chaperoned, while their husbands sometimes stayed home.
As their carriages drew up to the townhouse and the men jumped down, the ladies alighted, climbing up the front stoop and following the rest of the women up the carpeted stairs to their hostess’s bedroom. Adding their coats and capes to the pile on the bed, they removed their heavy boots, slipped on their dainty shoes, and turned their attention to the mirror. All around Hetty, small cliques of women who had grown up, gone to school, or summered together laughed and whispered knowingly as they smoothed their hair and pinched their cheeks to make them pink. A glance at Hetty showed them a tall young woman with blue eyes and peach complexion, dressed in a smart new gown. Handsome, yes. But an outsider, decidedly. Even the most attractive young woman might lose her confidence in their midst.
They smiled at their men, who waited outside the door and escorted them down. In the drawing room, exchanging pleasantries, everyone seemed to know everyone, except for the young girl from out of town. If dancing followed the supper, the ladies were asked for a waltz or a polka, but only the best were invited to do the quadrille. It could be a long evening for a young woman from New Bedford, but the sparkling Hetty was often asked to dance.
Hostesses sent an endless stream of invitations for dances, costume parties, and masked balls, but without a doubt, the event of the year was given by Mrs. William Schermerhorn. The current rage was for fancy dress balls where costumes ranged from nuns and devils to Ivanhoes and harlequins. The craze was declared “insane and incoherent” by George Templeton Strong, the Wall Street lawyer on everyone’s invitation list.
Mrs. Schermerhorn announced something different: a themed costume ball in the style of Louis XV. Important households fluttered with excitement as the women studied paintings of French palace life, men wondered what to do about their whiskers in the clean-shaven court, and everyone ordered their seamstresses in Paris to stitch up clothes like those worn in the mid-eighteenth century.
The night of the ball, a long line of hansom carriages with liveried coachmen drew up in front of the Schermerhorn mansion on Great Jones Street. Servants dressed in court costumes and white wigs welcomed the six hundred guests, the cream of the city’s fashionable set. Astors, Aspinwalls, Brevoorts, Rhinelanders, and Knickerbockers gushed when they saw the dark, heavy interior transformed into a light and fanciful Versailles. The walls shimmered in their coats of wedding-cake white with gold trim, the crystal chandeliers glittered over graceful rococo furnishings, vases and baskets burst with elaborate flower arrangements, and gilded mirrors reflected the spectacularly costumed guests.
Merchants, lawyers, and real estate tycoons ordinarily seen in tall hats, high pointed shirt collars, shapeless black waistcoats, and black broadcloth frock coats—“a fearful sight,” according to Walt Whitman—became Louis XV or his courtiers for the night. Their heads covered in powdered wigs nipped at the nape with velvet bows, they waltzed in with long panniered coats and frilly shirts, lace cravats and lace cuffs spilling out from under their embroidered coat sleeves. On their limbs they showed off silk stockings and satin breeches; on their hips some carried sheathed swords.
The rich businessmen’s wives and daughters, transformed into aristocrats, dazzled with their diamonds and colored jewels. Hairdressers had worked for hours arranging their huge wigs, curled and powdered to perfection, and on their faces they had carefully painted beauty marks. Fluttering their fans, bending this way and that to show off their swelling breasts, they pirouetted in their broad panniers and ruffled satin gowns, each a perfect Madame Pompadour.
To make the occasion more memorable, the costumed musicians played the German cotillion, and guests arranged in small circles followed the intricate calls as they paired, flirted, parted, and paired with someone else. Two hours of the German cotillion: unheard of! Supper offered an extravagance of crystal and silver gleaming on crisp white damask: a banquet table laden with creamed soups, plump oysters, jellied fish, roasted meats, citrus sorbets, sweetmeats, rich cakes, and spun sugar confections. Everyone pronounced the Schermerhorn ball a triumph. It would be remembered for years to come.
While Mrs. Schermerhorn drew accolades for her party, one of the guests, her husband’s cousin Caroline, was beginning to stir some interest of her own. Four years older than Hetty Robinson, Caroline Schermerhorn grew up just a few doors down from the Grinnells in a family of wealth and lineage. With a childhood that was the polar opposite of Hetty’s, “Lina” enjoyed the role of family pet. The youngest of eight, she was fussed over as an infant by a slew of nurses and nannies, was schooled by a French tutor, spent weeks every year in Europe, and was introduced to society at a ball in her parents’ stately home. Then, only a few months before Mrs. Schermerhorn’s ball, at the age of twenty-four, the plain-faced and pudgy Lina married William Backhouse Astor Jr., heir to the vast fur and real estate fortune. Their posh wedding at Grace Church raised more than a few eyebrows. Did she do it for money? gossipers asked. And why did he marry her?
In a prenuptial agreement, it was later revealed that William received a trust fund from his parents with $185,000 in securities plus income from property at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street, site of the future Empire State Building; the agreement stipulated that after his death, Caroline would receive $75,000 a year for life.
Descended from two of the earliest Dutch families in New York—a seventh-generation Van Cortland on her mother’s side and fourth-generation Schermerhorn on her father’s side—Lina knew the old Knickerbocker maxim “Live handsomely but not lavishly.” But she felt otherwise. She was developing a taste for Parisian gowns by designers such as Worth, precious jewels with aristocratic provenance, a box at the opera, and parties on a lavish scale. Her husband could provide it all. And she could provide him with a pedigree.
William Astor grew up in a family obsessed with making money. His grandfather John Jacob Astor, a coarse-spoken man with crude manners, felt it was his mission in life to amass a fortune and pass it on to his heirs. Like Edward Mott Robinson, he lived to accumulate dollars and loved enlarging the
pile. He expected his son William Backhouse to do the same.
In the course of his life, William Backhouse doubled his father’s fortune. He developed rows of tenements and crammed the toiletless firetraps with hordes of the Irish, Jewish, and German immigrants flooding New York. He knew every piece of property he owned, was familiar with all the details in his leases, and had an aptitude for increasing the value of his real estate holdings. But as rich as he was, he held his money as tightly as a beggar clutching a tossed coin. He bought coal for his house in the middle of summer when prices were at their lowest, refused to ride in a carriage, and walked wherever he could. Waste was wicked; frugality was his watchword.
His son William joined the family business, married Caroline Schermerhorn, and would father several children and retreat from the New York world. He would seek investments in other cities and women in other ports. But he would provide his wife, Caroline, who had huge social ambitions, with the vast wealth to carry them out.
While Caroline thrived on New York’s social whirl, Hetty sought escape from the city’s commotion. While Caroline gushed with friends over the latest fashions, Hetty cocked an ear toward the men conversing on finance. While Caroline was intent on enhancing her position, Hetty was focused on expanding her fortune. The debutantes’ world held little attraction for her: she may have enjoyed dancing, and she may have indulged in gossip, but she had no taste for frothy teas, no craving for fussy clothes, no liking for luxuries that money could buy. Hetty hungered for money itself.
Money served as a substitute for her family’s love, a sweetener that satisfied her gnawing need for affection. She knew that money pleased her father; what she yearned for more than anything else was that her father be pleased with her. An astuteness for money might win his respect. Writing to him from her cousins’ house, she told him she had had a gay time in New York, but she was tired of the round of parties and balls. Could she have his permission to return to New Bedford? She was soon on the steamer headed for Massachusetts.
“My father was as pleased to see me as I was to be back,” she said later, though she admitted he was surprised that she cut her trip short. When he asked her why she still had money in her New York bank account, she told him that with the $1,200 he had given her, she had bought $200 worth of clothes. The rest, she proudly announced, she had invested in bonds that had already grown in value. “That investment turned out so well that I soon made others,” she told an acquaintance. Her lack of interest in clothes may have dismayed her aunt, who enjoyed dressing up even with nowhere to go; she accused her niece of looking “like one of the orphans of some sailor lost at sea.” Hetty may not have won her aunt’s admiration, but by pursuing her father’s interests she not only won his praise, she shared his pleasure in making money. She was not alone.
Chapter 4
America Booming
Money was on everyone’s mind. Ever since President Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the country in 1803, Easterners lusted after wealth in the remote new areas in the West. After the Mexican-American War in 1848, when the United States won control over Texas and the area that would comprise Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Wyoming, the desire for land increased.
After the first successful gold strikes in the Sierra foothills that year, tens of thousands more hankered to go out west. Factory men in New England, immigrants in New York, farmers in the South left their homes and families to seek their fortunes with picks and shovels. They may have left for paradise, but they went through hell to get there.
If the deepest reaches of the earth coursed with golden veins, the surface of the country was clotted with rugged routes. Many crammed into ships, determined to make their way west on the two-ocean, months-long journey that brought illness and queasy stomachs for long stretches on rough seas. Some went overland from the Midwest along the Oregon Trail in stagecoaches or covered wagons, bouncing along through parching droughts, drenching rain, blistering heat, and freezing snow.
A fortunate few took trains, the most efficient form of travel. With heated cars, upholstered seats with spring cushions, oil lamps for light, and even toilet rooms, trains made travel easier and lowered the cost and time of transporting goods and people. At the start of the gold rush, however, most rail lines ran only in the Northeast, and few lines existed west of Chicago; no tracks ran for longer than 250 miles; and no railroad crossed the continent.
From the 1840s, small rail lines reached north from New York to Maine and south from New York to Atlanta. Trains carried cotton grown in Georgia all the way to New Bedford, where the Wamsutta Mills turned out finished textiles that were transported back to New York. After its opening in 1851, the Erie Canal connected the Hudson River with Lake Erie and short rail lines linked New York with the Midwest; other lines joined Pennsylvania with Ohio, and Chicago with the Mississippi River. But no lines ran to the Pacific Ocean.
The only long-haul carriers that reached the Far West were sailing packets and steamer ships conveying goods, passengers, and the mail down one coast, across the Isthmus of Panama, and up the other side. But the ships that plied these seas took several months at best; at worst they were waylaid by weather and sank in storms. In the rush to open up the West, better transport was needed, and better transport required men to make it.
Thousands of workers were hired to mine the iron ore used to build new railroad tracks, and tens of thousands of workers were employed to construct them. New tracks required new towns where the lines met and workers and travelers could stay; new towns, such as Dallas, Denver, and Oklahoma City, needed people to settle them and goods and services to provide for the settlers.
Entrepreneurs willing to build the rail lines prodded the federal government to grant them land along which they could lay the tracks. But even though the land was free, they needed money for payrolls and equipment. Smart investors and shrewd speculators could see the future whizzing before them. Tempted by the possibility of huge returns from railroads and from the development of the land surrounding them into towns, mining centers, and manufacturing hubs, they poured money into New York banks. A flood of new funds arrived from Boston and New Bedford, from Chicago and St. Louis, and from London, Paris, and Frankfurt. Awash in capital, the banks loaned money at easy interest rates to railroad promoters, mining prospectors, land speculators, merchants, and farmers.
The nation was bursting with new inventions and new markets and hungry for better transportation. Technology such as the steam engine quickened the pace of manufacturing and railroads. Samuel Morse’s new telegraph put cities in touch with one another and spurred a surge in communications. The discovery of metal ore in the West led to the invention of new tools and instruments like sewing machines and steam irons that were produced in the East. The newly improved cotton gin in the South meant more cotton for more goods that could be made better and faster in the North or exported overseas to England.
Factories sprouted everywhere: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, manufactured iron, glass, and textiles; Lowell, Massachusetts, made textiles and leather goods; New Haven, Connecticut, produced hardware, guns, and clocks; New York produced books, newspapers and magazines, chemicals, and clothing of all kinds. As a meeting point in the Midwest, Chicago grew at a furious rate, its rail lines stretching west and its population tripling, while New York became the country’s manufacturing center, its financial core, and its transportation hub.
Even a war in Europe benefited the nation. Grain from the Midwest, already in demand in the East, found new markets across the ocean when the Crimean War broke out at the end of 1853. The conflict, which pitted Russia against the Ottomans, the British, and the French, caused the czar to cut off wheat exports and forced Europeans to turn to America for their grain. Trains carried wheat and corn from Chicago to New York, where dockworkers on the Hudson River piers hurled the foodstuffs onto steamer ships bound for Europe.
Packet ships continued to carry goods and people and mail to Cali
fornia, and when the ships returned from the West, they brought back stacks of gold bars. But new trains sped hundreds of thousands of travelers westward faster and cheaper, and hauled more manufactured goods out from the East and more grain and food supplies back from the Midwest. The country was growing by the hour, proving almost daily its divinely ordained Manifest Destiny.
Everyone wanted a piece of the prosperity pie. Eager clients could almost taste their earnings as they bought shares of everything from the Crystal Palace, even as its stock was plummeting from 175 to 53, to the Reading Railroad to Pacific mining ventures. “You can’t lose,” stock salesmen promised naive clients. Trading in railroad stocks zoomed. Canny manipulators devised new instruments that enabled them to purchase more shares with less cash. In April 1854, Harper’s Magazine ridiculed the Wall Street operations of the firm of “Dry, Sly and Lye” and mocked its greedy customers who gambled on thin margin, bought puts and calls, and sold stocks short. It was no different from being at a roulette table, the editors said, not knowing how often future generations would repeat the scenario.
That same month Erie Railroad stocks started sliding. Soon after, investors were agog when the New Haven Railroad announced that its president, Robert Schuyler, a prominent member of New York society, had swindled the company of $2 million. More railroads slipped as confidence fell, and for a few months Wall Street, trading primarily in railroad stocks, ran gloomily off the track. But if speculators who had bought on margin were forced to sell their shares to cover their losses, shrewd investors like Commodore Vanderbilt and speculators like Jay Gould swooped up the stocks at low prices. Hetty Robinson would later do the same.
Railroads were falling, but a feverish rush for gold sent mining stocks soaring. Midwestern banks opened branches in New York so that customers could redeem their notes in the East. Five new bank buildings, commended for their graceful architecture, were under construction on Wall Street, and the total number of banks in the city was on its way to doubling. It seemed as though everyone was becoming rich.
The Richest Woman in America Page 4