The First Tycoon

FURS BY ASTOR by John Upton Terrell. 490 pages. Morrow. $6.95.

Folklore assumes that in the mind of the American Indian the Great White Father meant the President of the U.S. Not necessarily so, says John Terrell. During the 1820s and 1830s, at any rate, the Great White Father was a stumpy man with beaked nose, pursed mouth and billowing chins named John Jacob Astor.

As president of the American Fur Co., Astor ruled the closest thing to a private empire ever established in America. Most of the fur-trading tribes --the Winnebagos, Cherokees, Chickasaws and Sioux--were in perpetual hock to him, and they had a habit of going into battle with medals bearing his likeness strung about their necks. Astor's puffy face, in fact, was thought to be a more powerful talisman than a scalp or even a medicine bonnet.

The man was short of education and loutish of manner; even after he had become the richest man in the country and an intimate of statesmen, he ate ice cream and peas with his knife and wiped his fingers on his neighbors' clothing. But the territory he controlled was larger than Western Europe, its security was protected by strings of private forts erected and maintained by Astor, its commerce was served by a vast private fleet that carried countless thousands of furs to Europe, China, India and South America. In matters of border disputes over the fur trade, the government of Great Britain preferred to deal with Astor rather than with the Government in Washington.

Butcher's Son. Author Terrell tells the story of America's first tycoon in breathless prose that only hints at the character of the man but that traces his serpentine financial dealings in encyclopedic detail. Born the son of a butcher in the German village of Walldorf,* Astor took passage for America in 1783, when he was barely 19. Less than six months later, while he was serving as a baker's delivery boy, he bought his first fur pelt on the New York waterfront in exchange for some sugar buns. Aided by a loan from his older brother, Astor established headquarters in the Catskills and trekked westward and northward from there.

Astor was not a particularly original thinker, Author Terrell believes, but he thoroughly understood something his competitors did not--the value of political influence. In 1808 he appealed to the patriotism of Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York, pointing out to him that three-quarters of the furs purchased in the U.S. were supplied by Canadian companies. A company establishing its headquarters in New York and extending its operations to the Pacific, Astor pointed out, would have the advantage over the Canadians of shorter lines of communication, enabling it to secure the trade for the U.S. and to stabilize the territory.

Astor wanted a Government-sanctioned monopoly, but he was shrewd enough to know he would never get it from President Jefferson. But with the added respectability of the New York State charter granted him by Clinton, he requested Jefferson's approval of the American Fur Co., and got it in a warm letter praising the patriotic motives of the company.

Scant Records. With that kind of start, Astor never was headed. He poured liquor into the frontier areas on the theory that the trader with the whisky was certain of cornering the market. One by one, the independent dealers went out of business or merged with the American Fur Co. Astor's greed was enormous. If company furs were exported in his own ships, he charged the company for the freight. The trappers who supplied him had to buy their clothes and equipment at American Fur Co. posts at a 300%-to-400% markup. But Astor's personal fortune, which included enormous returns from his investments in Manhattan real estate, has never been accurately determined; he kept scanty records. A conservative estimate put it at $20 million at his death in 1848.

His political connections never failed him, and for good reason. President Monroe was so deeply in debt to Astor personally that he had to sell his slaves to repay him. In return, Monroe rescinded several executive orders damaging to Astor, including one forbidding the employment of foreigners in the fur trade (the American Fur Co. employed more foreigners than any other house). Under pressure from the Astor lobby, Congress obligingly laid extra duties on imported nutria skins, cony, wool and Russian hares, all of which competed with Astor's beavers and muskrats in the hatmaking industry.

Pious Coup. But his greatest coup was driving the Government out of the fur business entirely. Since the turn of the century, Government posts had been trading for furs at far more generous prices than Astor was prepared to pay. With the aid of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, he argued successfully that private enterprise was being threatened, and Congress ordered the Government out of the fur trade. Benton was on Astor's payroll as a "legal representative."

Unlike other American tycoons, Astor apparently never developed any social ambitions. His only real interest was the fur trade, and when that dwindled, so did Astor's energies. He correctly judged in the 1830s that the boom was over (in London he had encountered "hats of silk in place of beaver"), and he retired in ill health from the business. "All your wealth will do you no good in your grave," he wrote piously to a friend. And piously in 1848 he went to his grave.

*Which later lent its name to New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, originally built by William Waldorf Astor and John Jacob Astor IV, Astor's great-grandsons.

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