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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part III: The Good We Do
Daniel Gross
02/02/2004
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Neither John Jacob Astor’s son, William Backhouse Astor, nor his children—William Jr. and John Jacob III—felt any more inclined than the patriarch toward good works, even as the inexorable rise in Manhattan real estate made them still wealthier. William Jr. married Caroline Schermerhorn, whose lavish balls defined Gilded Age society and set new standards of snobbery. (She was known as the Mrs. Astor.) But John Jacob III’s wife, Charlotte Augusta, began a new tradition. Deeply religious, Augusta supported Charles Loring Brace’s pioneering Children’s Aid Society, and spurred her husband to give $250,000 to support the construction of the Memorial Hospital for the Treatment of Cancer.
Augusta’s nephew, Vincent Astor, the grandson of William and Caroline, preserved this fragile tradition. Born in 1891, he was, as Astor family biographer Derek Wilson acidly notes, "a hitherto unknown phenomenon in America: an Astor with a highly developed social conscience." A stroke of fate put him in charge of the family fortune at a young age. His father, Jack, went down with the Titanic in 1912, after chivalrously helping his second wife and several other women into lifeboats. And so, not yet 20, Vincent dropped out of Harvard and found himself in charge of an $87 million fortune.
He was intent on changing the family image from that of tight-fisted, high-living, aloof slumlords. Influenced by the various urban reform movements of the early 20th century, Vincent began to divest the family’s slum holdings in lower Manhattan. He built a significant housing complex in the Bronx, complete with a large children’s play area, and transformed a valuable plot in Harlem into a playground.
He funneled the cash raised from real-estate sales into other ventures, amassing stakes in publicly held banks and shipping companies and purchasing Newsweek in the 1930s. In 1948, the childless Vincent created the Vincent Astor Foundation, which began making grants to hospitals and children’s homes.
In 1953, after his second marriage broke up, the 62-year-old Vincent met the recently widowed Brooke Marshall, a vivacious, well-bred woman who worked at Conde Nast’s House and Garden. It was she—Brooke Astor—who would finally carve out for the family an important place on the map of great philanthropists.
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