A Voice From Old New York: A Memoir of My Youth Read Online Free Page B

widespread admiration: The dynasty's rather too-palatial residences tainted them with vulgarity to a discriminating minority. Edith Wharton spoke of the family as engaged in a constant Battle of Thermopylae against bad taste, which they never won.
    Revered by all in my boyhood for rectitude and the highest financial responsibility were the partners of the House of Morgan. To my young and naive ears they might have been the twelve apostles. I should note here that my father's law firm represented J. P. Morgan & Co. and that my mother's father had been head of a small trust company that was part of the Morgan empire. As a little girl she had been staying in a summer hotel in Bar Harbor, Maine, when the great Morgan yacht, the
Corsair,
had steamed in, and an invitation to dine onboard sent to the Stantons, who promptly accepted, though they had another engagement. A fictitious cold was used as an excuse to their previous host when the date was cancelled. When Mother, overhearing all this on the telephone, protested, she was simply told: "When you're older, dear, you'll understand these things."

    The kind of dissipation of large fortunes in gambling and women that forms such a staple for novelists of nineteenth-century French fiction was never a characteristic of American society, even in the South, though it certainly existed, and made a kind of surreptitious appearance in the New York of the 1880s and '90s. Certainly by the time of my father's generation (he was born in 1886), the sacredness of capital was an established creed, and even the Vanderbilts (George of Biltmore always excepted) probably lived within their incomes. The work ethic applied to all. My father had two brothers-in-law born wealthy men who lost the bulk of their fortunes by insisting on managing their money themselves rather than leaving it to professionals. "Had they been beachcombers," Father used to say, "they'd be rich men today."
    I can't think of a single example among my contemporary friends and relations who dissipated a substantial inheritance. Many vastly increased them. Some parents were ingenious in training their offspring in the care and management of money. The Rockefellers are perhaps the extreme example of a family whose members were successfully taught financial responsibility from an early age.
    The father of my friend Bill Scranton, former governor of Pennsylvania, gave Bill, when we were at Yale, a much larger allowance than other students. But with it went the responsibility for two poor relatives who would presumably be destitute if Bill blew it all. Even bribes in the family, theoretically meretricious, sometimes worked. I know of a case where an idle youth with bad marks was turned into a star by the lure of a glittering motorcycle. He went on to become a Wall Street magnate.

    A common objection to inherited wealth is that it stifles the urge to work. I have not generally observed this to be true, except in cases where the individual involved would probably not have achieved very much had he toiled in the vineyard. My richest friend and contemporary, Marshall Field IV, whom I met in law school, is sometimes cited as a victim of wealth; he succumbed at age fifty to drugs. But his nervous troubles were a matter of tragic inheritance; the story of the Fields is like that of the House of Atreus.
    I pause for a moment with Marshall. The first thirty years of his life were wonderful ones. He seemed blessed of the gods. He had looks, brains, health, charm, a lovely and loving wife, a devoted family, many interesting and lively friends, and pots of gold. At Virginia Law School, where he and I were classmates, he was Notes editor of the Law Review and president of the law school and of the university's honor court. The honor system was sacred at Virginia: the most honorable of the students, and they were fine men indeed, would not hesitate to turn in their best friends for cheating. I remember watching Marshall preside at a session of the