America's Secret Aristocracy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Chapman’s next targets were New York City’s saloons. Chapman was not a Dry, but many saloons had become centers of Tammany influence, and since saloons were subject to licensing and inspections, they offered splendid opportunities for bribery and graft. Liquor regulation, blue laws, and Sunday closings of bars had become powerful political weapons used by both parties, and there were certainly a great many saloons in the city—by 1890, there was one for every two hundred citizens. In 1896, the Republican administration of the state had pushed through the Raines Liquor Law to meet the demand for Sunday closings. According to the new law, only hotels and restaurants serving food could serve liquor on the Lord’s Day. To comply with this law, saloons merely began calling themselves restaurants and offered “Raines Law sandwiches” of cheese or peanut butter, which no one ever ate. Others restyled themselves hotels and let out upstairs rooms at hourly rates to prostitutes and other guests without luggage.

  As secretary of the Excise Reform Association, Chapman toiled for the repeal of the Raines Law. He published and passed out pamphlets and screeds and wrote letters to the editors of newspapers, itemizing the abuses of the Raines Law. He traveled to Albany to address the state legislature on the problem. He even managed to write and have published in the New York Times a new and more workable liquor law of his own devising. But after six years of feverish activity on Chapman’s part, the Raines Law remained the law of the land, and it would remain so until the advent of Prohibition in 1919.

  It had to be admitted that there was a certain logic to Chapman’s enthusiasms as he moved from one crusade on to the next. By his interpretation, his failure to defeat Tammany Hall was due to the situation in the saloons, and his failure to remodel the liquor law was due to—what else?—commercialism. Commercialism became his new villain. Everything that was wrong in America was due to the country’s overemphasis on commercialism. Commercialism explained why saloon keepers wouldn’t close their bars on Sunday. Publishers published bad books because trash made money. Artists painted banal and sentimental pictures because that was what sold. Cheap music made its way to vaudeville stages because that was what sold tickets, and so on. Culture in America was being defeated by commercialism. More pamphlets and screeds and handouts and letters to the editor appeared over John Jay Chapman’s signature decrying Americans’ submission to the Baal of commercialism, the false god Mammon. Of course, in a capitalist economy based on supply and demand, there was little hope that Chapman’s righteous indignation would have much effect on the scheme of things. And, after the failure of each new campaign, there was usually a breakdown.

  Minna Timmins Chapman died from complications following the birth of the couple’s third son, and for a while Chapman’s life seemed to have lost its emotional footing. But then he married the former Elizabeth Chanler, an old friend of the family. Elizabeth Chanler was a cripple and walked with a pronounced limp, but at least Chapman and Elizabeth became two disabled people who could lean on one another. Elizabeth had an additional, much more pleasant attribute. She was an Astor. Her mother, Mrs. Winthrop Chanler, was the granddaughter of William Backhouse Astor and his Livingston bride, and she brought Chapman financial independence from his parents, who had largely supported his activities up to then.

  She also brought with her a high-living, convivial, and somewhat dotty brother, William Astor Chanler, who had some ideas that immediately interested his new brother-in-law. Among Chanler’s theories were these: that President Wilson had promised to support the pope and make Catholicism the official American religion in return for the use of the Vatican’s spy system; that the League of Nations was a Jewish plot to rule the world; and that Wilson’s Fourteen points had been written by Jacob Schiff, Judge Louis Brandeis, and the Jews.

  Chanler’s rantings served to uncover in Chapman an unpleasant streak of anti-Semitism that had always been seen lurking there. To be fair, however, social anti-Semitism was commonplace in America in the 1920s, and even the famously democratic Eleanor Roosevelt had been known to make slurring comments about Jews. But what really excited Chapman most were his brother-in-law’s sentiments about the Catholic Church. Anti-Catholicism became his new crusade, and a new barrage of literature and letters emerged from Chapman’s pen. Catholicism, with its emphasis on commercialism—think of all those religious stores that sold crucifixes and rosaries and votive candles and icons depicting the Blessed Virgin!—was to blame for America’s dangerous swing toward commercialism. The pope wanted to take over America! Because of its anti-Catholic stance, Chapman found himself publicly praising (of all things, for a member of a great abolitionist family) the activities of the Ku Klux Klan.

  The Klan, he felt, could profit from a bit of refinement and gentrification, and a coalition between the Klan and the eastern establishment might accomplish this. Wrote Chapman, “Being an old agitator, I see the game so clearly—the needs of the moment—i.e., to connect up the Ku Klux element with the better element in the East. The K.K. are on the right track, i.e. open war, and the rest of the country is in a maze of prejudice against the K.K. due to R.C. manipulation of the Eastern Press.”

  Naturally, the Klan was delighted with this praise from a member of the eastern aristocracy. And yet, as Emerson wrote, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and Chapman could be nothing if not inconsistent. While extolling the wisdom of the Ku Klux Klan, he was simultaneously taking up the cudgel against his alma mater, Harvard, for its refusal to let a Negro student live in a freshman dormitory. In a letter to the New York World, Chapman accused Harvard of trying “to keep alive the idea of white supremacy,” and added that “such negroes among us as can receive a college education must be offered one that is without stigma.”

  There is also the touching episode of his pilgrimage to the little town of Coatesville, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1911. Reading an account of the lynching of a black man named Walker, John Jay Chapman was so moved that he decided to journey immediately to Coatesville and to conduct a memorial prayer service there for Mr. Walker. Arriving in the still-tense town the day after the lynching, the outsider Chapman, and his mission, were viewed with understandable wariness. The local newspaper refused to print an announcement of the prayer service, but Chapman went gamely around the town tacking up notices announcing it anyway, despite the fact that his posters were quickly torn down. He rented a vacant storefront, brought in chairs, and labored with his usual fervor over the sermon he planned to deliver.

  Two people—an aged black woman who may have been a relative of the victim and a white man who had been appointed as the town spy to report on what went on—attended the service.

  Chapman had just recovered from his longest and most severe breakdown. It had begun in 1902, when he was forty, and lasted nearly a decade. Most of this period he spent at Rokeby, the Chanler family estate on the Hudson. (Originally, Rokeby had been a Livingston house, but with the Livingston-Astor union it had passed into the hands of Astor heirs.) During much of this time, Chapman was bedridden, claiming he had lost the use of his legs, curled in a fetal position, his legs drawn up under his chin, babbling incoherent prayers, quoting snatches of poetry, demanding absolute silence, solitude, and darkness. For most of this time, he was unable to feed, clothe, bathe, or otherwise care for himself, and it must have been painful for his long-suffering wife to see her husband, when he did emerge from his bed, crawling about naked on the floor on all fours like a baby. Why he was never hospitalized during these years is unclear, except that perhaps his Astor in-laws’ declaration that Chapman was “sane, though imaginative” carried some weight. If it was just imaginativeness that pushed the man into these horrible straits, his must surely be the longest case of feigned insanity in history. During these years he grew his long, black beard that made him look like Jove or a Hebrew prophet from the Old Testament.

  Following the Coatesville fiasco, it might be presumed that John Jay Chapman would have felt utterly defeated by life. But he was not. He went on writing lette
rs to editors, putting out pamphlets, writing essays and poetry (paying for the publication of much of this himself), turning out his curious plays about fairy princesses, ogres, and fire-breathing dragons, translating and adapting Greek classics. He managed to meet, and be impressed by, a number of leading figures of his day, including the analyst Carl Jung and the philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. Henry James was his friend, and the novelist admired him as an American original, which indeed he was. During the 1920s, Chapman and his wife made several trips abroad, where—as an Astor and a Jay—they were welcomed at a number of stately homes, châteaux, and palazzi. In between, to be sure, there were more bouts with that undiagnosed “illness” that Chapman had always suffered from, whatever it was.

  In 1933, though, when he was seventy-one, there was something at last diagnosable—cancer of the liver. He died in November of that year, with his ever-loyal Elizabeth at his side. In his final moments, his thoughts seemed to have returned to his first obsession, the violin. Half conscious, he clutched at Elizabeth’s hand and said, “I want to take it away, I want to take it away!” “What,” she asked him, “the pillow?” “No,” he said, “the mute, the mute. I want to play on the open strings.”

  And so, in the end, he died not defeated in his ambitions, but by them. He was always haunted. But that was perhaps the price one had to pay for being born a Jay. It was as though those mighty ghosts from the past that possessed Jay Farm kept rising up to say to him, “Excel … try harder … do more … no, you STILL haven’t got it right!”

  John Jay Chapman’s widow had already brought some peculiarly haunted characters with her into the Jay family circle, though her relatives did not display the aristocratic curse as violently as her late husband did. And Rokeby, the estate on the Hudson, had already been put to some unusual family uses before it became a sort of private sanatorium for John Jay Chapman. Elizabeth Chanler Chapman had been one of the famous “Astor orphans,” the nine great-grandchildren of John Jacob Astor who, when their parents both died young, each fell heir to roughly one million dollars. Rokeby had then been turned into a luxurious private orphanage where the children were raised by nurses and governesses and private tutors and where, since the nurses and governesses and private tutors were, in a very real sense, the employees of the children, the orphans were allowed to lay down the rules. The results of this form of upbringing were some rather unusual—to say the least—adult human beings. It is said in the Chanler family that there was nothing wrong with the blue of the Chanler blood until it became mixed with the yellow of the Astor gold. Yellow mixed with blue of course results in green, and in the case of the orphans it was not always an attractive shade of green.

  John Jay Chapman’s brother-in-law, William Astor Chanler, when not spouting international Jewish-Papist conspiracy theories, was fond of big-game hunting in Africa, buying and selling racehorses, and enjoying the good life in general. He had lost a leg: not in a war but, it was said, as the result of a bordello brawl. During the 1920s, he was a well-known figure at Maxim’s in Paris. Entering the restaurant one day at lunchtime with a friend, he explained to the waiter that he would have to be served promptly, since he had a horse running at Longchamp that afternoon and needed to get to the track. When the service was not as speedy as he wished, African Willie, as he was known in the family, began to grumble, and presently his companion noticed him fumbling with something under the table. What emerged from below was African Willie’s artificial leg—shoe, sock, garter, and all—which he proceeded to hurl across the room at the waiter’s back, shouting in French, “Now may I have your attention!”

  People usually had no trouble paying attention to William Chanler’s brother, John Armstrong Chanler. Known as Uncle Archie, John Armstrong Chanler always wore a pair of binoculars in restaurants to keep track of waiters. His table manners, too, were hard to ignore. He would eat a piece of fish as though playing a harmonica or he would take a dozen pancakes, douse them with melted butter and maple syrup, and then drape them behind his ears like hibiscus blooms. Uncle Archie often dressed up as Napoleon, slept wearing a saber, and carried a silver-headed cane engraved with the words “Leave Me Alone.” At length, his brothers and Stanford White, a family friend, succeeded in having Uncle Archie declared insane and placed in Bloomingdale’s lunatic asylum in White Plains, New York. When Uncle Archie managed to escape from Bloomingdale’s in 1900, he wrote a courtly note to the superintendent, saying, “You have always said that I believe I am the reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte. As a learned and sincere man, you therefore will not be surprised that I take French leave.”

  A number of the Astor orphans and their descendants remained in the vicinity of Rokeby, in the village of Barrytown, New York, where they had the advantage of living in a community of townsfolk who were used to them and took the family’s eccentricities in stride, while Rokeby itself—once one of the statelier Hudson River mansions—began to show the signs of benign neglect. For years the official manager of Rokeby has been Richard Chanler Aldrich, a grandnephew of Uncle Archie and a grandson of Margaret Livingston Chanler Aldrich, who fought for the establishment of the U.S. Army Nursing Corps in World War I. Ricky, as he is called, has two principal hobbies. One is collecting and restoring antique iceboats. The other is studying Serbian, Croatian, and Polish grammar, an intricate and time-consuming occupation. Ricky actually studied in Poland for a while. Ricky’s other, and most legendary, characteristic is that he rarely bathes. Ricky is much loved in Barrytown, where it is often said, “Ricky would give you the shirt off his back, but who would want it?”

  Then there was John Jay Chapman and Elizabeth Chanler Chapman’s son, Chanler Chapman, who was Ricky Aldrich’s first cousin once removed. In Barrytown, Chanler Chapman invariably wore bib overalls and carried a slingshot. When asked to explain his slingshots, Chanler Chapman would reply, “They don’t make any noise.” He had been using ball bearings for ammunition but found them too expensive. So, for four dollars, he bought six hundred pounds of gravel. Armed with his slingshot and his gravel, he enjoyed taking aim and inflicting dimples on the bodywork of various of his relatives’ automobiles. Actually, the townspeople were relieved when Chanler Chapman converted to slingshots from guns. He at one point had a collection of 115 of these and liked hunting. But few of his neighbors cared or dared to go out hunting with him because of his habit of firing at anything that moved, even if it was another hunter. Fortunately, Chapman was a poor shot, and so a number of hunters’ lives were spared.

  For years, Chanler Chapman published the monthly Barrytown Explorer, a journal that most people in the village bought since it sold for only twenty-five cents an issue, cost four dollars for a year’s subscription, and was full of surprises. Chapman was the Explorer’s publisher, editor, and principal contributor, and you never knew what you might expect to read in the Explorer, whose slogan was “When you can’t smile, quit.” Readers would be treated to Chapman’s salty, if a little hard to follow, opinions such as, “You can abolish rectitude, you can abolish the laws of gravity, but don’t do away with good old American bullshit.”

  Each issue of the Explorer usually contained a sampling of Chapman’s output of poetry, which always gave the place and date of each composition—e.g., “Kitchen, Sept. 13, 7:15 A.M.” What might be called an advice column was another regular feature of the paper, where readers might encounter such a nugget as this: “Close the blinds at night, and lower the chances of being shot to death in bed.” Chapman was inordinately fond of W. C. Fields and ran photographs of the comedian in the Explorer from time to time for no particular reason other than as tributes to the star.

  Chanler Chapman’s first wife was the former Olivia James, a grandniece of Henry and William, and a son of this union, Robert Chapman, lives in Italy where, for a time, he lived in a cave and made kites, becoming the first troglodyte in the Social Register. Another son, John Jay Chapman II, graduated from Harvard and then went to Puerto Rico, where he became a mailman. In P
uerto Rico he met and married a black woman by whom he had several children. When one of his daughters was ready for boarding school and had applied to St. Paul’s, which had recently gone coeducational, Chanler Chapman ticked off the list of reasons his granddaughter was bound to be accepted: “She’s a she, she’s a Chapman, she’s a Chanler, and she’s black.”

  In 1972, John Jay Chapman II returned from Puerto Rico to his hometown of Barrytown and became a mailman there. Said cousin Winthrop Aldrich—known as Winty—to Chanler Chapman of his son’s chosen occupation, “Isn’t it remarkable—Edmund Wilson called your father the greatest letter writer in America, and now your son may be the greatest letter carrier!” Chanler Chapman was not amused. “Winty knits with his toes,” was his only comment.

  In the meantime, Uncle Archie, gone from the lunatic asylum but not forgotten by the New York State police, who had a statewide warrant for his return, had gone to Philadelphia for a while, where he had himself examined by his relative by marriage William James in an effort to get himself declared sane in New York. The results of the psychological tests were mixed, and Uncle Archie then moved to an estate in Virginia called Merry Mills, changed his name to Chaloner, and continued his fight to be pronounced legally sane. In Virginia, he was just as noticeable as he had been elsewhere. Like many of his relatives, Uncle Archie loved horses, and managed to unearth an obscure Virginia statute that required automobiles to “keep a careful look ahead for horseback riders.… If requested to do so by said rider [said driver] shall lead the horse past his machine.” To enforce this law, Uncle Archie, dressed in an Inverness cape, patrolled the roads outside Merry Mills on horseback. A green umbrella was affixed to the cantle of his saddle, a horn was attached to the pommel, and a revolver was tucked in Uncle Archie’s belt. After dark, he had port and starboard running lights hung from his stirrups, and what amounted to a riding light hung from the girth. To unobliging motorists, the horn was his warning. The revolver was his ultimatum.