MY SIX YEARS at Groton, 1930–1935, coincided closely with those of the Great Depression, but the Great Crash of 1929, which devastated our world, affected my family little, though we had reason to regret the move we had just made to a splendid penthouse on the highest point of Park Avenue. I was completely absorbed by boarding school and essentially unaware of the outside world until I had to go home to have my tonsils out. I needed a tutor to make up for lost school time, and Mother asked me if there was anyone from the old Bovee faculty I would like. The school was terminated; the teachers were all out of work.
"Oh, I'd love Mr. Evans, but you'd never get him."
"Oh, I think I might."
And poor, dear Mr. Evans duly appeared, looking sad and gaunt. Mother, leaving for her day, told me to be sure to ask him to stay for lunch. I forgot, and when she returned and found him gone she was irritated.
"Why was it so important?" I wanted to know.
"Because he's hungry!"
***
During these difficult times, Father remained a member of the Davis Polk firm, and there was always an income to be gleaned from the financing and reorganization of the great corporations it represented. When things were so bad that the older members had to reduce their percentages of the take, they would do as John Davis instructed them. He would take each older partner aside and say, if to Father, "Howland, we old farts have to move over a bit."
Sometimes, as Father put it, when the figures came out, it would be apparent that only one old fart had moved over, but that was all right. Davis's charm and the eminence of his political and legal career lent weight to his decisions for the firm. In a brilliant but competitive partnership it was always helpful to have a strong leader.
In the early years of the Depression, there came a time when Father was seriously concerned, without validity, about a corporate bond issue that he had approved: Would the firm have to buy it in? Would he survive financially? Then his father, John W. Auchincloss, lost the bulk of his fortune on the stock market, and my father's siblings blamed him unfairly for not guiding the doddering old man with a firmer hand. My poor parents had a nervous crackup, and we didn't know where we were at. Despite my sympathies for the disadvantaged, I sometimes think economic insecurity is most taxing when sudden and when its victims are least accustomed to bearing it.
Mother purported to derive comfort from my fourteen-year-old's smart-alecky sagacity. "It's the end of something," I told her pompously, "but not of everything."
Despite these ruminations the bad luck ended as suddenly as it had come. The bond issue was not invalid, after all; my grandfather's affairs were somehow patched up. Father recovered and went back to work.
I have never understood my grandfather's financial career. His older sister Sarah returned to Scotland and made a fortunate marriage to Sir James Coats, the great thread tycoon. Grandfather, as a young man, formed a partnership with his brother Hugh Dudley called Auchincloss Brothers to represent Coates Thread in America. They did so well that Grandfather was able to build a summer house in Newport that is still one of the show places of that opulent colony. Yet when Sir James asked him and his brother to take into their partnership an American son-in-law of Sir James, they refused, saying they would choose their own American representative. So that golden business was lost. Grandfather went into other enterprises, some of which failed, and lost his directorship in Illinois Central by talking back to E. H. Harriman. He lived well all his long life, but he was losing money even in the bull market of 1929, and when he died in 1937 he left an estate of only $300,000. His brother Hugh Dudley had done better; he had married the daughter of one of John D. Rockefeller's partners. That there was something a bit cloudy in Grandfather's upper story may explain his belief that an ancestor called Stuart gave him a claim to the throne of Scotland.
My father's older and my mother's two younger brothers did well enough for themselves in the Depression and caused no concern in the family, but this was less true of Father's three sisters. Aunt Betty, the eldest, had married Percy Jennings, son of the famous and wealthy corporate lawyer Frederick B. Jennings, whose mansion on lower Park Avenue later became the Princeton Club, but whose wealth was largely dissipated by poor family investments. Fortunately, there were some trusts in a bank to ward off total disaster.
Aunt Caroline, wife of a rich doctor of the Fowler meatpacking family, was the hardest hit, as her husband had invested heavily in mortgaged brownstone residences that were foreclosed on him. She used to say that she sometimes took the Madison Avenue trolley in lieu of the Fifth Avenue bus to save a nickel. Finally there was that perennial victim of hard times, the unwed daughter, my aunt Josie, who became a trained nurse, unique in our family, who used to mildly complain that it was hardly fair to raise a daughter with expectations of economic means and leave her to fend for herself.
At school in the Depression I heard a great deal of families "cutting down," but in our world it was largely the luxuries that were being eliminated. The children even of the hardest hit were apt to be kept in private schools, often on scholarships originally planned for the impoverished classes. Innumerable cousins and friends still managed to get out of the hot, hot city in summer.
I think the dividing line for me between the pre-1929 Depression days and all that followed was the line of huge derivative French chateaux and Italian palazzos that lines Fifth Avenue from Forty-second Street to Ninety-sixth. Almost all were destroyed by the 1920s and '30s. They had been erected to show off the new wealth of business leaders in the economic boom that followed the Civil War, and many, particularly those commissioned by the Vanderbilt clan, were designed by Richard Morris Hunt, whose sculpted image appropriately adorns a colonnade of the park side of the avenue near Seventieth Street. Some of the mansions were handsome enough, but the prevailing look was vulgar. It is hard to imagine anyone living in them today.
It might be difficult today to find men or women who take themselves that seriously. For how can you live in a palace without occasionally imagining yourself royal? We still have rich, even super rich, but they know they're not royal. The guests so festively attired as kings and queens from Mrs. W. K. Vanderbilt's famous costume ball in the 1880s may have been not so sure.