THE CHANCELLERIES: The New Manor Lords

About the time Communist Karl Marx finished writing Das Kapital, Capitalist Charles Pratt began selling “Pratt’s Astral Oil.” A high-grade lamp fuel, refined in Brooklyn from Pennsylvania petroleum, it became world-famed. Until Edison made his improvement, no one could read the Communist Manifesto, or anything else, under a mellower light. Onetime grocery clerk Pratt eventually joined up in Standard Oil with onetime bookkeeper Rockefeller. When he died in 1891, Pratt was Brooklyn’s richest citizen, a solid, sharp-faced, goateed, philanthropic Baptist. To his six sons and two daughters he left an 800-acre estate at Glen Cove, on Long Island’s North Shore, where they built themselves manor houses.

One of the manor houses was Killenworth, a million dollars in stone and granite, Tudor style, with 39 paneled rooms, 13 baths, twelve fireplaces, five cellars, a swimming pool, and flower beds tended by 50 gardeners. It was built by Capitalist Pratt’s third son, George Dupont Pratt, well-known conservationist, Boy Scout sponsor, big-game hunter and collector of relics of early civilization. When the master died in 1935, Killenworth fell on hard times, eventually went on sale for taxes. In 1944 the Miller Manufacturing Co., local trunk makers, took it over as an administrative headquarters. Last week Miller & Co. sold Killenworth to Stalin & Co.

The Exclusives. The Russian purchase (for a rumored $120,000) was on behalf of 200 employes of Amtorg, Soviet commercial agency in the U.S. At Killenworth, the new manor lords would find rest, recreation and, above all, isolation.

Wherever Moscow sends its officials abroad, it keeps them secluded from non-Soviet contact. In Washington, for example, Soviet employes send their children by chartered buses to a Soviet Embassy school in order to reduce contact with capitalism.

At Glen Cove the Russians will have even less contact with the natives. Last fall they leased the late J. P. Morgan’s $2,500,000 East Island estate, which adjoins Killenworth. Local folk said they saw as little of the exclusive comrades as of the haughty Morgans and Pratts.