The Amazing Chanlers and How They Grew — A Book Review

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

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arranged his incarceration in a madhouse — allegedly without cause — and after three long years he escaped. Winthrop Chanler, an intimate of Theodore Roosevelt, was wounded while on a commando mission for the Cuban insurrectionists early in the Spanish-American War. Elizabeth Chanler was painted by Sargent, traveled in imperial India, and married the essayist and reformer, John Jay Chapman. William Astor Chanler had, by the age of 25, led the first two large American exploring and scientific expeditions into East Africa, discovered Chanler Falls and circled Mt. Kenya. He later ran guns to the Cubans, attempted to raise a, regiment of infantry when war was declared, and eventually won a seat in Congress. Lewis Stuyvesant Chanler became a celebrated criminal lawyer, perhaps the first "people's attorney" who limited his clientele to indigent defendants whom he represented without fee. He also campaigned in Ireland on behalf of Redmond and Home Rule and, during the first decade of this country, became a successful Democratic politician, serving as Lieut. Governor and campaigning from Rokeby in his nearly successful bid to unseat Charles Evans Hughes as Governor in 1908. Thereafter, he helped start the political career of his cousin, F.D.R.

Margaret Livingston Chanler, under the tutelage of her great-aunt Julia Ward Howe, campaigned for women's suffrage and civic reform and founded the Women's Municipal League, a precursor of the League of Women Voters. She was known in the press as "the Angel of Puerto Rico" for her hospital field work during the Spanish-American War. After inspecting Army nursing arrangements in the Philippines during the insurrection, and being in Japan and Peking at the time of the Boxer Rebellion, she was instrumental in the successful lobbying for the establishment of the Women's Army Nursing Corps. In 1958, by then the widow of Richard Aldrich, eminent N. Y. Times music critic, and lifelong chatelaine of Rokeby, her memoirs were distributed under the title Family Vista as an occasional publication of this Society. Alida Beekman Chanler, who once tripped Czar Nicholas while dancing in London, married Christopher Temple Emmet at a Rokeby wedding stage-managed by Stanford White. Robert Winthrop Chanler was to become a celebrated painter, muralist and exponent of the Bohemian life, but first, as "Sheriff Bob," he would serve as an immensely popular and colorful Democratic sheriff of Dutchess County, spending huge sums in order to insure that everyone enjoyed his campaigns as much as he did himself.

Of course this period of "Chanlerism," as the Poughkeepsie papers styled the political fortunes of Bob and Lewis, in not covered in this present volume; nor is mentioned here Willie's fantastic later career as a professional soldier of fortune, political agent and counter-revolutionary; nor John Armstrong Chanler's renowned 1910 telegram to Bob, who had just married — and then been bilked and repudiated by — a famous opera singer: "Who's loony now?" All this and much else is contained in the sequel volume, which the publisher is expected to bring out if Volume 1 sells in satisfactory quantities. All who relish preservation and dissemination of our full-flavored regional history, as well as good story-

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telling (in recent reviews the Chanler chronicle has been justly compared with The Forsyte Saga — the principal distinction between them being that the latter is mere fiction), will be anxious to see publication of the succeeding volume or volumes, which bring the chronicle down to the death of the last of the "eight" in 1969.

Meanwhile, we can take delight in the volume in hand, and marvel at the author's stunning technical achievement in weaving together so smoothly and compellingly the entertaining record of eight very divergent lives. As Mr. Thomas does not intrude to belabor the social significance at every turn, but rather allows it to demonstrate itself as the narrative unfolds, this is social history at its most palatable. Starting with the marvelously detailed description of a Victorian childhood and household on a great Hudson River estate, and ending with a family Christmas dinner there as described in John Jay Chapman's unforgettable verse, Dutchess County throughout provides the unifying home focus. A PRIDE OF LIONS is illustrated with 42 photographs and is based almost entirely on hitherto unpublished family papers, handled with the most scrupulous accuracy and impeccable workmanship. Mr. Thomas writes with uncommon cla,riry and a style that is both brisk and literate. The palpable pleasure he takes in his subjects is infectious.

John Winthrop Aldrich Boston, Massachusetts.

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