Don't cry for Brooke Astor

Millionaire philanthropist Brooke Astor was declared virtually a saint by the capitalist media when she died at the age of 105. The obituaries barely mentioned that the Astors were the greatest slumlords in the hemisphere.

John Jacob Astor founded the American Fur Co. in 1808. This first big U.S. monopoly became the greatest exploiter of Native peoples.

A beaver skin bought for a dollar’s worth of overpriced goods could be sold in London for $6.25. Astor’s army of fur traders also ripped off Native people by charging up to 400 percent interest on English steel knives and other imported goods.

Everywhere west of Detroit was ravaged by American Fur and its subsidiaries. Astor gave a $35,000 bribe to Michigan territorial governor Lewis Cass in 1817. Cass later became the Democratic presidential nominee in 1848.

Astor also became a drug pusher. In 1816 he smuggled 10 tons of opium to China on the packet ship “Macedonian” in violation of Chinese laws.

Astor plowed his millions into New York City real estate. Starting on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Astor bought up property in Yorkville, Harlem and a big part of the Bronx. The Astoria neighborhood in Queens is named after this robber baron.

Native lands were robbed by Astor so that rent could be gouged from African-American, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Latin@ and other people. The miser ruthlessly evicted those who couldn’t pay. As he lay dying in 1848, John Jacob Astor demanded that a woman tenant be forced to pay back rent.

Astor’s $20 million fortune was the greatest of that time. It was equal to half the size of the U.S. budget.

John Jacob’s descendants constantly bought up more property. One hundred thousand people had to pay rent to the Astors or their middlemen. In 1907, 750,000 people were crowded into Manhattan below 14th Street. Twenty thousand people lived in cellars.

Rent continues to be a major source of surplus value—commonly called profit— to ruling-class families including the Rockefellers. According to Deutsche Bank, 30 percent of families in New York City pay at least half of their income in tribute to landlords. Much of this loot ends up in the banks that often own the landlord’s mortgage.

William B. Astor, son of John Jacob, became a partner of the Vanderbilts in controlling the New York Central Railroad. The families’ Astor Trust Co. changed its name to Bankers Trust, which has now been gobbled up by Deutsche Bank.

Neither robbing Native peoples nor becoming the biggest slumlords prevented the Astors from becoming the first family of the New York financial aristocracy. As the Roman emperor Vespasian said after he inaugurated pay toilets in the forum, “Money does not smell.”

Brooke Astor married into the Astor fortune. Her father, John H. Russell Jr., became the commandant of the Marine Corps. In 1917-1918 Russell was in charge of Marines who occupied Haiti. Haitian resistance leader Charlemagne Péralte was assassinated by a Marine officer in 1919.

It was Brooke Astor who welcomed Ronald Reagan to her New York apartment for dinner after he won the 1980 election.

The former matinee idol and FBI stoolpigeon started his presidential campaign that year in Philadelphia, Miss. Civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner had been murdered there by the Ku Klux Klan. Reagan didn’t mention these martyrs in his speech. He used the racist slogan of “states’ rights” instead.

Brooke Astor may have been an amiable person who might even have had some liberal instincts. She gave away almost $195 million. But every cent of her charity was surplus value that was stolen from the working class, which includes the unemployed.

Don’t cry for Brooke Astor, even if her son, ex-CIA agent Anthony Marshall, mistreated her. She was 105 when she died at Holly Hill, her 68-acre country estate.

Mourn instead for Charlemagne Péralte, who was just 33 when he was murdered, or Patrice Lumumba, who was 35 when he was assassinated by the CIA. Mourn for the miners killed in Utah and construction workers killed virtually every week in New York City. And fight like hell for the living.