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Updated: June 26, 2025
I find a letter concerning a contract with Joseph Rolette, of Prairie du Chien, for furnishing the troops at Fort Snelling with fresh beef. "The Commissary General directs that Mr. Rolette shall give a bond duly signed by him, that Colonel Snelling may designate and transmit it to this office, with the understanding that the Messrs. Astors, of New York, will unite with him in the bond."
Like the Astors, he was cynical, distrustful, secretive and parsimonious. He kept his plans entirely to himself. In his business dealings he was never known to have shown the slightest mercy; he demanded the last cent due.
Had the Astors or other landlords gone into a perpetual trance these values would have been created just the same. Then, not content with appropriating values which others created, the landlord class defrauded the city of even the fractional part of these values, in the form of taxation. Up to the present generation the Astors had never set themselves out as "reformers" in politics.
The difficulty was Anthony Eden, British Foreign Minister, who was opposed to fascist aggressions because he feared they would eventually threaten the British Empire. Eden would certainly not approve of strengthening fascist countries and encouraging them to still greater aggressions. At one of the carefully selected little parties the Astors invited Eden.
It is very likely, if the truth were fully known, that the stupendous sums in total that the Astors cheated in taxation, would have been more than enough to have constructed a whole group of railroads, or to have bought up whole sections of the outlying parts of the city, or to have built dozens of palaces.
They have escaped the criticism which has been directed against us, who with our old-fashioned and conservative notions have continued without such expansion of capitalization. There is nothing strange or miraculous in all this; it was all done through this natural law of trade development. It is what the Astors and many other large landholders did.
And without a knowledge of what happened during the talks in those historic two days and what preceded them, the world can only puzzle over an almost incomprehensible British foreign policy. Present at this week-end gathering, besides the Astors and the Prime Minister and his wife, were the following: Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Defense.
Great merchants, like the Lawrences of Boston and the Astors of New York, became the objects of emulation everywhere, and they in turn set the fashion of giving liberally of their means to the cause of education or the founding of hospitals, which has been a distinctive feature of the social history of the last thirty years.
Edgar Allan Poe, wearing his life out in extreme poverty, William Lloyd Garrison, thundering against chattel slavery from a Boston garret, Robert Dale Owen spending his years in altruistic endeavors these men were contemporaries of the Astors of the second generation.
Meanwhiles, the buck Vanderbilt is drivin' the outfit all over an' 'round the cantonments, the entire bunch as sassy an' as flippant as a coop o' catbirds. It's all the Astors can do to keep from goin' plumb locoed. The Vanderbilts win. "One mornin', when Florer an' me has jest run our brands onto the fourth drink, an old buck comes trailin' into the store.
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