America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  For several years, the rivalry between the Bridlespur set and the Country Club set merely simmered, amounting to little more than mutual disdain. But then, in 1932, things heated up considerably when it was learned that Prince Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern, the grandson of Germany’s former kaiser, would be touring in America and that one of the cities the prince planned to visit would be St. Louis.

  With bona fide royalty looming on the social horizon, the competition over which club would have the privilege of entertaining His Royal Highness became fierce. To the chagrin of the Country Club, and to the everlasting joy of Bridlespur, the prince responded that he would rather do some fox hunting than play golf. And even though the prince himself showed up for the hunt in shockingly improper attire—an ordinary business suit, a foulard tie, and a brown felt fedora—it was a resounding victory for Bridlespur and August Busch, and a humiliating defeat for the Old Guard.

  Over the years, Bridlespur has made it a point to entertain distinguished horse people from out of town along with other visiting celebrities, and all this has resulted in fulsome coverage of Bridlespur—and Busch—in the local press. The club has never quite topped its historic coup with Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, but it has tried, and on at least one occasion it has been host to a bogus nobleman introduced to St. Louis as Lord Forkingham of Duncington.

  Lord Forkingham was the sly creation of Bridlespur members James Busch Orthwein (August Busch’s nephew) and Andrew Shinkle and was actually Mr. Russell Forgan, a stockbroker from New York who had agreed to go along with the prank. Forgan was able to muster a passable English accent, and as Lord Forkingham, he spent several days being wined and dined by le gratin of St. Louis, who never bothered to consult an atlas, where they would have found that there was no such place as Duncington. On the morning His Lordship (who St. Louis had decided should be addressed “Your Grace”) was scheduled to join the hunt, Orthwein and Shinkle, knowing that Forgan had not sat on a horse in decades, supplied him with the most reliable and best-mannered mount in Shinkle’s stable. In his borrowed pink coat and topper, His Grace set off after the hounds. He managed quite well until he reached his first fence, where horse and rider unceremoniously parted company. While the other members of the hunt gathered solicitously around, His Grace picked himself up, dusted himself off, and said, “Certainly the worst beast that I have had the misfortune to ride in twenty years!”

  The result was that the joke backfired on Mr. Shinkle. “For weeks afterward,” says James Orthwein, “everyone went around talking about that marvelously sporting Lord Forkingham and that lousy horse of Shinkle’s. Shinkle was wild, but it was like the priest who shot a hole in one on Sunday. The joke had gone over so well that we were afraid to tell the truth. The others might have made trophies out of our backsides.”

  As St. Louis expanded after World War II, the Bridlespur Hunt was forced to look for further, less settled land beyond the city. This they found to the west, in the rural reaches of the town of New Melle, where the club purchased a hundred pristine new acres in 1954. At about this time, too, since a number of Bridlespur members—including August Busch—had comported themselves with distinction in wartime service, the two principal clubs in St. Louis decided that they might as well bury the hatchet. And so the mountain came to Mohammed: the St. Louis Country Club issued a gracious invitation to August A. Busch, Jr., to join its membership. Mr. Busch accepted with equal graciousness.

  It was, they say in St. Louis, the only thing he really wanted in the first place. It was also proof that it is usually folly to try to impede the momentum of big money in America. And it was proof, as has been demonstrated again and again throughout America’s history, that if old money is to survive with even a shred of dignity, it must, at some point, come to terms and make its peace with the new.

  17

  O Pioneers!

  “Everyone knows,” says Mr. Gorham Knowles of San Francisco, “that Jimmy Flood’s grandfather was a bartender, and that his grandmother was a chambermaid. That doesn’t matter here. What matters today is that the Floods are ladies and gentlemen.”

  In just three generations’ time, the Floods of California have become an aristocracy—of sorts. Like moneyed families in Chicago, Denver, Dallas, and Oklahoma City, this California aristocracy is not very old, not very secret (indeed, quite conspicuous), and has decided to turn what might elsewhere be considered a minus into a plus. San Francisco’s elite may, as they say here, all be “descended from prospectors and prostitutes.” But they can also take pride in the fact that the aristocracy that has evolved from this is older than that of either Los Angeles or San Diego.

  The Floods of San Francisco are one of the city’s Irish Big Four families, otherwise known as the Silver Kings: James C. Flood, William S. O’Brien, James Graham Fair, and John William Mackay, four men who were not so much unscrupulous as plain lucky. Big Jim Flood, described by social historian Dixon Wector as a “poor gamin of the New York Streets,” came to San Francisco with the gold rush and found work as a bartender at the Auction Lunch Rooms, so called because the gold exchange was right around the corner. In the kitchen of this establishment worked Will O’Brien, who earned local renown for his Irish fish chowder, which he made extra thick with potatoes. Out in front, Jim Flood was known for serving generous slugs of whiskey, and the Auction Lunch Rooms became a popular watering hole for prospectors coming in from the fields. Neither Flood nor O’Brien knew anything about prospecting for precious metals, but, as drinks flowed—and tongues were loosened—Jim Flood kept his ears open. It wasn’t long before he had heard of a promising site in the Comstock area near Virginia City, Nevada. Recruiting two other Irishmen, John Mackay and Jim Fair, to provide additional financial backing for the trip, Flood and O’Brien set off for Virginia City to stake a claim.

  The Comstock Lode was a unique event in mining history: a bonanza discovered by a prospector on his very first dig. What the boys unearthed was the biggest single pocket of silver ever found in the entire world, a long vein of shiny metal fully fifty feet wide. When it was discovered, the Comstock Lode was estimated to be worth $300 million. That estimate proved to be on the low side. From the time of its discovery in 1859 until the mine’s depletion ten years later, the Comstock poured some $500 million worth of silver into the pockets of the four original investors.

  San Francisco’s other Big Four royalty, the so-called Railroad Kings of the Central Pacific, were Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. They were a truly unsavory quadrumvirate without redeeming social value who fit into the robber baron category of the era comfortably. It was Huntington who, as the railroad’s lobbyist in Washington, persuaded Congress to pay his company, out of taxpayers’ money, $16,000 per mile for track laid over flatland and $32,000 per mile for track laid over foothills and mountains. It then occurred to Huntington to redraw the map of California, adding mountain ranges all over the place, on the gamble that nobody in Washington knew anything about the state’s actual topography; his hunch was quite correct. It was Mark Hopkins, the bookkeeper of the foursome, who proposed that the Central Pacific pay its imported Chinese coolie labor force in cash, thus eliminating the need to keep any books. It was the huge, red-bearded Crocker who was the company’s muscle man. He kept the railroad’s workers in line by marching up and down their ranks with a pistol in one hand and a bullwhip in the other. The dignified-looking Leland Stanford was in charge of political matters in California. He was a useful front man because he at least looked honest. As governor of the state, he kept Sacramento out of his company’s hair. Though it was hard to say, exactly, since no books were kept, it was estimated that the Central Pacific cost about $27 million to build. The railroad foursome was able to divide up about three times this sum without ever having to invest a penny of their own money.

  These men may be said to have laid the groundwork, financially and socially, for modern California and its famous freewheeling style. From them, it seems only a short
step to the land of freeways, oil wells, backyard pools, custom-built cars parked along South Rodeo Drive, and power lunches in the Polo Lounge. But there is also an older, much more grand, and much more gracious California that some California families remember. This was a world that came into existence nearly a hundred years before the gold rush and lasted until well after it was over: a world of vast tracts of land stretching for miles along the seacoast and for miles inland to the Sierra foothills, land covered with golden grass and wild mustard where huge herds of beef cattle grazed—twenty-five thousand to fifty thousand head was the size of the average herd—where Thoroughbred horses were corralled, and where jackrabbits the size of dogs leapt through the underbrush. It was a world of week-long family fiestas and ferias, of rodeos and roping contests and horse races. It was a world of vast adobe haciendas with ballrooms big enough to hold three hundred dancing couples, where string ensembles provided mood music at mealtimes, where desserts were frappéed with ice imported from Alaska, where women’s gowns were fitted by couturières from Paris and where men’s tweeds were ordered from Savile Row and Bond Street. We are talking, of course, of the century-long era of the true Californios, the first white settlers, the rancheros who brought with them in their veins the true sangre azul of the Catalan and Castilian grandees of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Spain and who used the ennobling titles of Don and Doña. Many of their descendants still do, because, as elsewhere, the original aristocracy has not died out. It has just gone underground.

  “Each of these families knows who the others are,” says Mrs. Michel François Amestoy II of Los Angeles, a descendant of one of the first California families, “but you don’t read about their doings, unless it’s for charity. Many are certainly successful, but the brash competitiveness that sets the business tone in California is not their tradition.” These are the families who brought their proud Spanish culture to California, who introduced agriculture to the region, who founded the major cities, and who forged the state constitution. And, though their domain, which once stretched from San Diego in the south to Monterey in the north, has shrunk considerably, it is not true, as is often assumed, that the old Spanish land grant families “lost all their land,” though some did, and for a variety of reasons, as we shall see. Many were able to keep their land, and there are Spanish families in California today that are collectively richer than the Floods and Crockers.

  The mellifluous old ancestral names are Avila, Alvarado, Carrillo, de la Guerra, Nieto, Ortega, Serrano, Sepulveda, Verdugo, Vallejo, Yorba, Cota y Asuna, Cordero, Dominguez, Osuna, and Amador. Many of these are descendants of the first party of white men who entered California overland from Mexico in 1769 with Father Junipero Serra and Gaspar de Portolá. Their mission was to discover the port of Monterey, about which fabulous reports had been heard, and to Christianize the Indians. One of the party’s first encampments in “Alta California” was at the mouth of a creek that they christened Dos Pueblos—they found two Indian villages there—a few miles west of the present city of Santa Barbara. Of these original pioneers, fourteen men decided to remain and establish themselves, and their womenfolk were sent for. And of these first fourteen, at least nine have descendants scattered throughout California today.

  One of these first fourteen was José Roberto Carrillo. Another was José’ Francisco de Ortega, who married Maria Antonia Victoria Carrillo, José Carrillo’s niece, one of the first of many dynastic marriages between California’s founding Spanish families. Ortega was a man of particular stature in the group. With the rank of sergeant, he commanded the advance guard and was chief scout and pathfinder for the company in its search for Monterey Bay. His duty was to scout ahead of the company, then retrace his steps, and collect his soldiers for the next day’s march. This probably meant that he was a man of education and could read and write, for he was expected to keep careful records. It also meant that he was expected to deal with the native Indians. This proved fairly easy, since the Canaliño Indians of Southern California were a docile and submissive group who quickly accepted the Spaniards as their masters. For one thing, the Spaniards had firearms, and it did not take long to demonstrate to the Indians what a gun was capable of doing. The Indians were almost equally impressed with the Spaniards’ horses, creatures the Canaliños had never seen before. Still, José de Ortega was considered the linchpin of the group. Father Serra himself wrote of him, “His soldiers would be replaced, but Ortega never.”

  Meanwhile, the search for Monterey Bay proved frustrating. In 1542, the Portuguese navigator Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo had sailed up the California coast in search of the Northwest Passage, the legendary navigable saltwater canal that imaginative mapmakers had assumed must stretch across North America to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Cabrillo had failed to find the alleged trans-American waterway, but he had reported glowingly of a magnificent bay and harbor he had entered, which he had named Monte Rey in honor of his king. But Cabrillo’s navigational instruments had been primitive. And if the bay in question was where Cabrillo had said it was supposed to be, it was certainly a disappointment, not at all fitting Cabrillo’s description when Ortega reached it. (Monterey Bay is more a roadstead, a gentle indentation in the shoreline, than a protected bay.)

  Though there is no way of knowing, it is more than likely that the bay Cabrillo was describing was San Francisco Bay, nearly a hundred miles north of Monterey. Almost forty years after Cabrillo, in 1579, Sir Francis Drake had sailed right past the entrance to San Francisco Bay and never noticed it, probably because the Golden Gate strait was shrouded in one of its famous fogs. But when, nearly two hundred years later, José Francisco de Ortega was exploring the coastline northward on horseback, he arrived at the Golden Gate and could go no farther. Though he reported finding, inside the harbor entrance, “a bay big enough to hold the ships of all the navies in the world” and would be credited with having discovered the Golden Gate along with one of the world’s greatest seaports, he believed that his expedition had been a failure. He had been blocked from venturing farther northward by an impassable arm of water. And San Francisco Bay still did not fit the description of the bay Cabrillo had named Monte Rey.

  In 1784, King Carlos III of Spain, through his viceroy in Mexico City, began handing out grants of land to the first soldier-settlers and their families who had come up from Mexico to help establish Spain’s historic claim to the California territory. In all, some twenty-three land grants were made between 1784 and 1821, and since California’s land seemed limitless, the tracts bestowed on the pioneer families were truly princely in size. José Francisco de Ortega’s grant, which he received in 1795, was—perhaps because of his failure to rediscover Cabrillo’s bay—relatively small, a mere 26,000 acres. Others were considerably larger. Juan José Dominguez, one of the original fourteen, was given 76,000 acres, which he named Rancho San Pedro. It included thirty square miles of what is now Los Angeles County, most of Los Angeles Harbor and Terminal Island, Redondo Beach, the Palos Verdes Peninsula, part of what is now the city of Long Beach, and what are now the entire cities of Carson, Torrance, and Compton. There was a slight hitch to these royal grants of land, which no one paid much attention to at the time but which would become important later on: They were essentially just permission to graze livestock on the ranchos. Water rights and rights to minerals that might lurk underground were not included. Still, considering that this land today sells for as much as $100,000 an acre, the Spanish rancheros had been given some nice real estate, and even then, they were on their way to becoming very rich.

  “Don José de la Guerra’s house in Santa Barbara had forty rooms, all grand,” says one of his descendants, the splendidly named Dr. Juan de la Guerre y Noriega Barrett, whose other, non-Spanish grandmother was a Randolph of Virginia. “Whatever culture or stability California has, you have to attribute to these Spanish families. They brought their silver and crystal. Their sons were sent to Europe to be educated. They lived on their ranchos in a style that, outside of the S
outh, was little enjoyed in early America.”

  Actually, Dr. Barrett understates the situation. By 1850, when California became a state, its economy was based almost entirely on the raising of beef cattle, despite the gold rush. In fact, the gold rush only created a period of inflation, which caused the price of beef to rise, and besides, when a ranchero had forty thousand head of beef cattle grazing on permanent pasture, fluctuation in beef prices, upward or downward, meant little. Here is the way just one family, that of Don Nicolàs Den, and his wife, Doña Rosa Antonia Hill de Den, and their family lived on their Rancho Los Dos Pueblos, outside Santa Barbara, in that halcyon period between 1840 and 1860. It was quite typical.

  Don Nicolàs was an educated, pre-Famine Irishman who had studied medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, and come to America in 1834 to seek his fortune in the Land of Golden Opportunity. In California, he had met and married Rosa Antonia Hill, the daughter of Don Daniel Hill and Rafaela Louisa Sabrina de Ortega de Hill, who was a granddaughter of the original José Francisco de Ortega. (By the nineteenth century, it was commonplace for the daughters of the older Spanish families to marry later-arriving Irishmen, who had a reputation for being good and pious Catholics; as a result, many California descendants from the distaff side of land-grant families have names like McGettigan, Brady, Donohue, Donohoe, and FitzGerald.)

  Doña Rosa and Don Nicolàs, like their peers and contemporaries, believed in large families and had produced ten healthy children out of eleven pregnancies. Despite all her childbearing, Doña Rosa had kept her trim, girlish figure, and since she had been married at sixteen, she was only in her early thirties when her last child was born. Doña Rosa was proud not only of her looks and figure but also of her reputation, throughout Southern California, as a hostess. In this career, her large family was absolutely no encumbrance to her. She had literally a legion of servants to attend to her every need.