Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

When the Titanic sank in 1912, newspapers focused mostly on one casualty: Colonel John Jacob “Jack” Astor IV, the son of Caroline Astor. He was returning to New York with his new 18-year-old wife, Madeleine Force, after the scandal of divorcing his first wife. Newspaper stories portrayed him as heroically helping his wife into a lifeboat and then getting out to allow another woman to take his seat. They reported that he last appeared stoically leaning on the rail as the lifeboat went out. The first film of the tragedy, the 1912 In Nacht und Eis, reproduced that selfless image. The 1943 Nazi film Titanic cast Jack Astor as the villain, a corporate master of greed whose stock schemes helped cause the tragedy and showed the evils of Anglo-American capitalism. In a 1953 film, he became a reformed husband. The 1997 film Titanic reduced him to a minor symbol of elite decadence, though it indicated that he did not try to board a lifeboat.

Considered less than brilliant, Jack still brought a meticulous precision to business and to his hobby of tinkering with machines. He loved the new automobiles and yachts, though he wrecked prize specimens of both. He preferred the office to being home with his wife, Ava, a renowned beauty and spoiled heiress who treated him with cold contempt after their marriage in 1891. He volunteered in the Spanish-American War, where he was given the rank of colonel. When Caroline died in 1908, ending her supervision of the family’s reputation, Jack began divorce proceedings. He married Madeleine in 1911 and stayed overseas to avoid his scandalized peers until Madeleine told him that she was pregnant.

The couple booked passage on the Titanic so that she could return home for the birth. When the ship began to sink, he helped his wife board the lifeboat and asked if he could accompany her in light of her pregnant condition. Upon being told “no” by a ship’s officer, he asked for the number of the lifeboat. One witness thought Astor wanted it to help locate her later; the officer thought he wanted the information to make a complaint. The book takes the stance that the latter portrayal was more in character for him. No one knows how he passed his final moments. Vincent, his son from his first marriage, received the bulk of his fortune. His daughter, Alice, his new wife, and their unborn baby, John Jacob VI (or “Jakey”) each received a few million.

Two years before the Titanic sank, newspapers seized on the death of another John Jacob Astor as an entertaining social interest piece contrasting the lives of two radically different New Yorkers bearing the same name. This John Jacob came from Walldorf, the same German town as the original immigrant, and may have been a distant relative. Like the first immigrant, he came to New York in his 20s to seek his fortune. Unlike the first immigrant, however, he spent his life rolling cigars for a pittance until his eyesight failed and he entered the City Home for Elderly Disadvantaged People on Blackwell’s Island, where he died. His is a less popular story than the rags-to-riches immigrant saga of the Astor fortune, but is by far the more common immigrant story.

This John Jacob arrived in 1863 to find a city packed with immigrants living in claustrophobic slums, competing for jobs that paid a dollar a day, and facing the prospect of being drafted into the Union Civil War army. Multiple families crowded into two-room, 136-square foot tenement suites (including those owned by the Astors). Without the technology that later bridged the Hudson River, created mass transportation, and carved out Manhattan’s rocky crags, thousands of immigrants had to funnel into a few square miles of living space on the island so that they could walk to work. Given the congested conditions and lack of sanitation, Manhattan had the world’s highest death rate.

Many New York workers in 1863 had a dismal view of the Civil War, fearing competition from former slaves if they were freed and doubting that the Union would even win. The draft was the last straw for many desperate men. They rose up in a riot. The Draft Riots lasted for days before the army quelled them, though hundreds of casualties resulted. The riots caused more than a million dollars’ worth of damage and victimized the city’s Black population. One wounded Black man found refuge in the Astor Hotel, which Confederate sympathizers later tried to burn down. No records indicate that the other John Jacob Astor had anything to do with the Draft Riots, though it is possible that he did.

This other John Jacob was traceable through the census and other official documents. He became a naturalized citizen in 1868. By 1870, he was married to a woman named Theresa. They had no children. A decade later, they moved uptown and took in boarders for extra money. By 1900, however, he had disappeared from the census, although a John Astor appeared in a city near Boston. In 1901, he entered an almshouse on Blackwell’s Island for the first time. He was alone, unhoused, and destitute. He was in and out of the almshouse over the next decade, scraping together odd jobs at the hospital when they could use him, until he died in 1910.