After escorting his pregnant second wife to a lifeboat, coolly waving to her as the boat was lowered to the calm sea, jaunty, mustachioed Colonel John Jacob Astor IV went down with the unsinkable ship Titanic while the orchestra played "Hold me up, mighty waters, / Keep my eye on things above." That left a nervous, narrow-chested youth of 6 ft. 4 in., perhaps the greenest freshman at Harvard, to inherit a fortune of approximately $87.2 million, organized around vast and spreading holdings, including some of Manhattan's finest hotels—the Astoria. St. Regis, Knickerbocker. Cambridge and Astor House. It was 1912, apogee of the Progressive Era and the nation's damnation of what Theodore Roosevelt had called "malefactors of great wealth."
Indeed, the gales of social criticism were already blowing before young Vincent Astor fully comprehended that he, at 20, was heir to one of the U.S.'s least popular traditions—fortune founded by great-great-grandfather out of fur trading with the Indians and Manhattan real estate; fortune battened down by grandfather and father upon acres of New York tenements bitterly known as "Astor Flats"; fortune tarnished when half the family moved to England because the U.S. was not "a fit country for gentlemen to live in."
"It is monstrous," read a letter young Astor got from Muckraker Upton Sinclair soon after leaving Harvard to administer his money. "The poor people see in the papers the picture of your magnificent and luxurious home and they realize that it is out of the rents that they pay." But Astor, wiser even then than he appeared to be, replied calmly: "I am not unmindful of the wrongs to be righted . . ."
Left-Leaning Neighbor. Quietly he set about righting some of the wrongs. "Each dollar is a soldier that does your bidding," he once said, and he watched them win or get mowed down. He turned parts of his Hudson Valley estate at Rhinebeck, N.Y. into a model farm, parts into a holiday home for invalid children. He kicked off and often led a house-to-house canvass of tenements built on his land, urged New York police to crack down on lawbreaking landlords. In later years, during Mayor Fiorello La Guardia's social-reform surge, he demolished slum tenements by the dozen, sold others to New York City on easy terms.
For an eventful decade. Astor turned his social awareness toward politics. The focus: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Hudson Valley neighbor he had come to like while Astor was a naval officer in World War 1 and Franklin Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. With open pocketbook, with amateur's enthusiasm, Vincent Astor backed his neighbor for New York Governor, for U.S. President, took F.D.R. cruising on his $2,500,000 yacht Nourmahal after the election (TIME Cover. April 9, 1934). End result: disappointment. When F.D.R. went farther and farther to the left, Astor could not go along, and soon the magazine Today, which Astor had founded along with F.D.R. Braintruster Raymond Moley to boost F.D.R., was calling the Hudson Valley neighbor "an irresponsible radical." Today merged in 1937 with Newsweek, in which Astor held the controlling 60%-plus interest.