Dutchess County Historical Society Yearbook Vol 056 1971

BOOK REVIEW THE AMAZING CHANLERS AND HOW THEY GREW All who take pleasure in rummaging in our regional history and who enjoy a good story that is written with spirit and style and a high regard for factual accuracy, will be grateful for the publication of A PRIDE OF LIONS: The Astor Orphans by Lately Thomas (Wm. Morrow & Co., N. Y. 1971). For this is the volume which inaugurates the chronicle of the Chanlers of Rokeby, at Barrytown. It is at one and the same time a multiple biography of eight extraordinarily vital brothers and sisters during their first 35 years, and a study of life on one of Dutchess County's notable Hudson River estates as the surviving influences of 18th Century manorial society, the oppressive pieties of the Victorian era, and the realities of the dawning 20th Century catch these eight orphans in cross-currents that set them spinning.

Mr. Thomas is a leading biographer and social historian. He has written superbly on New York's Mayor W. J. Gaynor and on that city's greatest restaurant, Delmonico's, and has recounted the lives of figures as far removed from each other as Andrew Johnson and Aimee Semple McPherson; but perhaps more significantly, in 1965, he was acclaimed for Sam Ward: King of the Lobby. That endearing, scintillating man of parts was the grandfather of the eight Chanlers, and thus introtuced to the family, Mr. Thomas found the grandchildren an irresistible subject for biography. Admirably qualified for the task, he has written a wholly admirable book which covers the years 1862 to 1901.

The Chanlers became the orphaned young proprietors of Rokeby in 1875 after the deaths of the former owner, their great-grandfather, William B. Astor, and of their mother, Margaret Astor Ward Chanler. Astor, known as the "Landlord of New York" and the nation's richest citizen, was the son-in-law of Rokeby's builders, General John Armstrong and his wife Alicia, who in turn was a sister of Chancellor Livingston and a granddaughter of Col. Henry Beekman. The orphans' father, Congressman John Winthrop Chanler, died soon after his wife, and the children (three of the original eleven died in childhood) were reared at Rokeby under the tutelage of a spinster cousin. Strong roots deep in the ancestral home soil, a rambunctious childhood spent mainly in the company of servants and each other, erratic education at home and abroad, formed the environment which produced young adults possessed of undoubted ability, means, good looks, charm, pugnacity and a certain maverick strain that occasionally flowered as eccentricity. The author remarks on this family's penchant for "monumental disputes and fantastic reconciliations," which prove to enliven the narrative as much as the family's international derring-do and the extraordinary range of their acquaintanceship with the famous (or notorious) of their time. Although they disparaged it, they were members of the "400," whose leader, Mrs. Astor, was their great-aunt.

John Armstrong Chanler married a beautiful but scandalous novelist who was probably a dope-addict. Subsequently, his friend Stanford White 91