Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

The book’s Introduction recounts how Brooke Astor loved to tell the tale of John Jacob Astor as a “uniquely American” saga of a fortune made through hard work, daring, and sheer grit: He “came here with nothing, carved an empire out of the wilderness, and then helped build a great American city” (6). In the Epilogue, the authors reject this “American self-made myth that we have all imbibed for so long. The immigrant who arrived with nothing (he did not; remember the flutes), who saw a world in the process of its remaking (it was already made), who leached value from the labor of all the successive waves of our arrivals and our dreams” (277). They reject the common idea of America as a land of opportunity where any person can come, work hard, and make it rich without any support or exceptional luck, and they reject the idea that one particular immigrant, John Jacob Astor, helped build the country in a positive way. This is a “myth” that they imply people have heard too long.

They attack the myth in three ways: by showing the advantages that John Jacob had, by highlighting the number of immigrants who worked hard without achieving riches, and by portraying high