Word: astor
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Story: An Autobiography, Astor...
After escorting his pregnant second wife to a lifeboat, coolly waving to her as the boat was lowered to the calm sea, jaunty, mustachioed Colonel John Jacob Astor IV went down with the unsinkable ship Titanic while the orchestra played "Hold me up, mighty waters, / Keep my eye on things above." That left a nervous, narrow-chested youth of 6 ft. 4 in., perhaps the greenest freshman at Harvard, to inherit a fortune of approximately $87.2 million, organized around vast and spreading holdings, including some of Manhattan's finest hotels-the Astoria. St. Regis, Knickerbocker. Cambridge and Astor House...
Indeed, the gales of social criticism were already blowing before young Vincent Astor fully comprehended that he, at 20, was heir to one of the U.S.'s least popular traditions-fortune founded by great-great-grandfather out of fur trading with the Indians and Manhattan real estate; fortune battened down by grandfather and father upon acres of New York tenements bitterly known as "Astor Flats"; fortune tarnished when half the family moved to England because the U.S. was not "a fit country for gentlemen to live...
...monstrous," read a letter young Astor got from Muckraker Upton Sinclair soon after leaving Harvard to administer his money. "The poor people see in the papers the picture of your magnificent and luxurious home and they realize that it is out of the rents that they pay." But Astor, wiser even then than he appeared to be, replied calmly: "I am not unmindful of the wrongs to be righted...
...eventful decade. Astor turned his social awareness toward politics. The focus: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Hudson Valley neighbor he had come to like while Astor was a naval officer in World War 1 and Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. With open pocketbook, with amateur's enthusiasm, Vincent Astor backed his neighbor for New York Governor, for U.S. President, took F.D.R. cruising on his $2,500,000 yacht Nourmahal after the election (TIME Cover. April 9, 1934). End result: disappointment. When F.D.R. went farther and farther to the left, Astor could not go along, and soon...