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About Omaha daily bee. (Omaha [Neb.]) 187?-1922 | View Entire Issue (Aug. 21, 1904)
Marvelous Increase in Millionaires ft: 1 TCopyrifrht, 1304, by John Gllmor Speed.) lIVK me rvelther riches nor pov.' crty," Oio wise King Solomonv' prayed In the olden time. Ho often that is the prayer nowiW days I do not know, but I am persuaded that nearly ail men of ambillon In the modern world are etruggUng fop woalth with might and main. And what U more, In tho United Slutes at leapt, more men achieve rlchea than was eveB: Uie case before in tho history of thd IWorld. ( To be a millionaire Is still a distinc tion, but there are now so many of theraj that the presence of one of them, even! tn a remoto rart of the country, docs not creato a very great sensation. The In-1 creaso In the numbers of this class has been more marked In the past decade)' than previously, but 'this class has bced trowing for more than half a century. X. am not going to say how many there arej to do this would be guessing even for the best Informed banker In the country. But that there are ten where there was one) thirty years ago Is surely true, as true. Indeed, as the other fact that cannot be disproved, that there are 100 today where there was one sixty years ago. This statement, which is not made a an exercise In guessing or merely for the purpose of creating surprise, shows how wonderfully this country has grown la wealth In a comparatively short space of time. If the millionaire have become; more numerous, the well-to-do the happy well-to-do, according to King Solomon tiave Increased In numbers also and the. thrifty poor have removed themselves fur-' ther from tho worst pains of poverty. The; well-to-do, the thrifty nnd the Industrious prosper with the rich. It 1b Inevitable that they should and a study of savings bank deposits and real estate statistics In tho census returns will convince any man who is capable of recognizing results and seeing facts In their real relations to one another. And yet in the colonial days or the early federal days it Is doubtful if there was any great man In the whole country whJ could be called a millionaire. It used to be the right thing to say that George Washington was the richest man of his day in America. I very much doubt It. lie was careful and thrifty and always knew how he stood In his affairs, but he probably had very little money; nor did. his estate, even when combined with that of the Widow Curtis, have those potenti alities of wealth from which great riches come by what Henry George called "un earned Increment." Washington's wealth could not have beon nearly so considerable as the Patrooa Van Rensseiucr'a of that day, for he owned thirty miles square on either side of the Hudson river at, above and below, Albany, besides a very considerable estate In New York City. There were potential ities of wealth In this Van Rensselaer property, and what Is more, they were realized, for In the '40s the estate o Stephen Van Rensselaer, the last of the patroons, was estimated to be worth 10,t 000,000, and this property was considered only to be less in valuo than that of John; Jacob Astor, that marvelous money-maker, whose enterprises and Investments were more lucky even than the dreams of Al naschar of "Arabian Nights" memory. This remarkable Astor, from humble be ginnings In 1783 when his career In this country begun, until 1848, when he died, made the accumulation of money the one main object of his life. And no man up to his time, In America at least, ever suc ceeded so abundantly. When he died he left some $26,000,000 to his sons and daught ers, $400,000 to found a public library anl an annuity of $200 to his frU;nd, the poet Fits Green Hallcck. The fortune estab lished by the first Astor has grown into something so Immense that his helm can not spend the income; so the fortune Is getting larger all the while, and utterly ' refutes the saying which a generation ago was accepted in this country ns an axiom: "la America it Is on'.y three generations from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves." But there were many wealthy men In America sixty years ago, and notably many in New York city, which was then the metropolis as it Is now, but not so far ahead as at present of Philadelphia and Huston. In 1846 Moses Y. Beach, then tho owner of the New York Sun, compiled, With the assistance of commercial, rail estate und bajiklng friends, a list of the rich men and women in tho metroilla. The standard as to wealth was not then so high as It is now, for a person who then hud 1100,000 or its equivalent In property was considered rich enough to be notable. This list embraced 1,024 names, some of them undivided estates. Of these the fol lowing were set down as worth a million or moro: John Jaob Astor $25.MO.PO0 William H. Astor 6.iKt,iii0 Jlenry ISrevoort, Jr l.neiu"") Jsiiiuj Hronson (estate) l.E'O.WO William H. Crosby l.&M.wiO William 1. Kumiss l,(W,0n9 John Haggerty , l,0iM'iO j'etM- Harmony 1,Gi,(ik) Jonathan Hunt I.hoiM) Samoa liiox 3.(Xi,"0 04r. Jacob l.orlllard l.ut ,( peter LorllUrd. Jr 1,uk).0i John Mhs.iii (estate) l.Ct'ii f 0 Oouverneur Morris l.MM fei. Ilcrpont (oslate) 1,wj,0.0 - V : X' V I r K v, ! f v . i v ' ! ' i r . . , i ; T Joel Post (estate) 1,000,000 Peter Schemcrhorn 2.50O,ik:0 Li. Salles (estate) 1.0OOi l'eter O. Sluyvesant 4,W0.(X0 Herman Tborne l,6"0,flw) Cornelius Vamierbllt l.m.W) Btephen Vsn Hensdclaer (estate).. 10,WMi,o;0 Stephen Whitney 6,000,(00 Here we have seventeen Individuals and six estates set down as being above the million mark. How accurate these esti mates were I cannot know. It may have been that they were very accurate or not at all o. Mr. Beach was probably a good deal of a gossip, and as ho contributed his own name to the list, saying frankly that he was worth $300,000. he probably was not restrained by any feeling of delicacy tn pursuing his Inquiries, for It Is evident that he saw no hurm In publishing to the world a statement as to what he was worth and how he had acqulied It. I have an idea, however, that tho amount set down In many cases was rather larger than less what it Fhould have been or would have been If the money had been counted and the property appraised. The population of New York city was then SOO.000, and of course it was a big place. It was not so big. however, that every man of consequence could not know every other man. It may be depended upon that they did know they knew of their incomings and their outgoings just ns now they know In small towns and country villages. But any one who has had experience of coun try lif knows that the estimates placed popularly upon the wealth of any man who Is making money, and has more than he noeds to spend or seems to require for his own wants, is vastly exaggerated. Any man who has more than ho needs seems , GEORGE IL GOULD MOUNTED AND WAITING FOR HI3 POLO TEAM. ones grew under the management of the owners of 1846 or that of their successors. The Rbinelander fortune, for Instance, Is now Immense, nnd mainly by the Increase In the value of real estate. Mr. Beach says: "The Rhinclanders, for fifty years past among the richest of the rich in this city, were but humble tailors and shoemakers in the Revolution, and with tho Tories whe stayed In the city feathered their nests under the protection of the British flag. Another chronicler tells this story of the Rhlnelander fortune: "In the colonial times an Englishman named Rogers had a farm in the neighbor hood of what is now Fourteenth street and the Hudson river. Rogers needed a farmhand nnd so he employed a newly ar rived German Immigrant. What this Ger man Immigrant's name was I do not know and the neighbors between Greenwich and Chelsea villages did not seem to care. But he came from the Rhine country, nnd so they called him the Rbinelander. In time tho hired man married the daughter of Farmer Rogers, and also Inherited the farm and begat a family. The farm In creased in value and is now worth a great many millions of dollars, most of it, by the way, having been kept in the family." Theso stories seem on the surface to be Inconsistent. But they are not. Farm lands where bread Fourteenth street. New York, now runs to the river were not valuable In the revolutionary period, and it is not at all unlikely that the owners of such lands at that time should have plied the honest trades of tailoring and Bhoemaklng. Nearly all of the earlier fortunes, how ever, were made In merchandising and in creased by the rise in real estate holdings. Borne were founded on the piracy that flourished in the Colonial era and the slave trade, which had not perished when Mr. Beach compiled his list. The most sub stantial and most lasting were those In vested In land, which was then mainly unimproved, but which is now in the very heart of the metropolis. During the civil war period men made fortunes quickly, but comparatively few of them have endured. The old adage, "come easily, go easily," may be applied to most of them. But in the period that Immediately followed very, great fortunes were made In the extension of rallroadX It was then that the great Vandebilt wealth Increased by leaps and bounds. The assessors' books In New York at that time did not show that there was such a multitude of tremendously rich men as Mr. Beach's chronicle of two decades before indicated. In J867 the tax list placed these ten as having property tn excess of 11,000.000: William B. Astor $18.114 009 Williim C. Rhlnelander 7,745,000 A. T. Stewart 6 OHl.OdO Peter und Robert Goelet 4,417,000 James Lenox 4,W),0(O I'eter Lorillard 4.243,0(10 John V. Wolfe 3,!W7,0o0 M. M. Henilrick l,K).0i;0 Ilufus L. Lord 1,600,004 C. V. S. Roosevelt 1,340,000 It is not likoly that the tax books la were more than an index as to the CLARENCE W. MACKAT AND HI3 BEST POLO PONT. to be rich to one who has less than he re quires. And so a man whoso wealth is really Bay $50,000 is put down at four times that sum, and a man who really has $-00,-000 is reckoned a millionaire. But Mr. Beach did not belong to the needy class; he was a rich man by his own confession. Bo it Is quite likely that his spectacles were not powerful magnifying glasses, but like those of the gentle Tltbottotn, who, when he put them on, saw things exactly as they were. So let us concede that these were rich men in their time, even though their wealth was set down In good round figures. Some of theso fortunes have been dissi pated, some have been divided among heirs in fo many shares that none of them are notably large, while others, notably the Astors and Vanderbilts, have grown into colossal proportions. And among the lesser fortunes mentioned by Mr. Beach many have also becomo princely in magnitude. For instance Mr. Beach put down August Belmont's fortune at $300,000; that of Wil liam Colgate (described as "a very worthy man in the business of a taJlow chandler") nt $2j0.0tX; that of I'eter Cooper at $100,. 000; Mrs. John Delmonlco's at $00,000; J. W. He Peyster's at $4,000; Amos R. Eno's nt $150,000; Preserved Fish's at $250,000; the estate of F. Gebhard at $. 00,000; Pi ter Ooe. let's at $400,000; five families of Hendricks at $1,500,000; Anson O. Phelp's at $500,000; the Rhlnelander family at $1,050,000; Alex ander T. Stewnrt's at $S'10,000; Llsprnard Stewart's at $5oo,0i)0, and Moses Taylor's at fcOO.OOd. Any reader may guess ail well as I Into what great sums these comparatively lesser (Continued on Page Eight)