Realtor Astor

JOHN JACOB ASTOR--Arthur D. Howden Smith--Lippincott ($3.50).

The Man. He was the first to say: "The first hundred thousand--that was hard to get, but afterwards it was easy to make more." So, too, was he the first to experiment with the form of financial organization known as a holding company. Later, his holding company became a trust, perhaps the first.

He was, obviously, a Pioneer. He knew, in 1820, that goats would not graze forever in Manhattan's meadows. Thus he bought bits of wasteland and a few swamps. He foresaw the day when the Oregon wilderness would be important. Thus he flung a fur company through the Indian lands to raise a flag over the Pacific.

Conventionally, he was an immigrant boy who spoke broken English and whose Teutonic gutturals never entirely left him. Like Jay Gould, who followed him as the "Enemy of the People," he was gentle and generous in his home, hard and rapacious in his dealings with the world. Unlike Gould, he outlived his home and his own great vitality. He could not outlive his rapacity.

One by one, facile biographers are writing the stories of America's industrial pioneers. If these books are lined in a row on some bookseller's stand, the intelligent shopper might well buy them all and add to his library a fairly complete record of the U. S. on the make. The record is of course important and the U. S. could not be understood without it. And traditionally, it is instinct with romance. The times were vigorous and full-blooded. It was almost as easy to carve an empire as a chicken. Adventure and enterprise rode westward with the caravans.

Strangely, the life of John Jacob Astor communicates little of this excitement. It is ironic and pitiful that when he was dying he alternated sips of breast-milk--all he could retain--with demands that tenants should pay their rent, but it is scarcely picaresque. Here was a buccaneer whose prizes were real estate values and the pelts trapped by debauched Indians. Here was the founder of a great fortune and a prolific line, but neither Astor's money nor his descendants made much mark in the world. It is doubtless useful to know that he tweaked girls' ears, played fair checkers and chose small lumps of sugar for his coffee, but it is not calculated to make young men see visions.

The Author. Arthur D. Howden Smith has been office boy, war correspondent, political writer for Manhattan newspapers. Turned biographer, he has exploited Commodore Vanderbilt and The Real Colonel House. Publishers J. B. Lippincott Co. hint but do not reveal, in their jacket blurb, "whether or not his biography on House was the cause of the latter's break with Wilson."