Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic's First-Class Passengers and Their World by Hugh Brewster

frequently to be found in the Astors’ stateroom; they wanted to keep her near since she had recently gotten lost during their trip up the Nile, as Madeleine’s sister Katherine Force later related:
She [Kitty] wandered away from Colonel Astor’s side one day at a landing and [he] was greatly distressed by the loss of the dog. He spent a great deal of time looking for her, and when he had to give up and start up the Nile again he employed scores of natives to look for her, promising a handsome reward for her return. Nothing was heard of Kitty until on the return trip [downriver] when, on passing another dahabea [boat], Colonel Astor spotted Kitty making herself at home on board. The Astor boat was stopped and Kitty found her master with joyous barks. After that, a closer watch was kept of Kitty on board the Titanic . She slept in Colonel Astor’s room [and he] took frequent walks and romped with Kitty a great deal.
     
    Frank Millet and Archie Butt, too, often opted for a walk on the boat deck at day’s end. On running into Astor on deck, both men would have greeted him, since they were social acquaintances, although the colonel was not a man for easy conversation. Astor’s military rank was a result of his outfitting a 102-man artillery regiment called the Astor Battery at the outbreal of the Spanish-American War. He had accompanied the regiment to Cuba in June of 1898 and had observed from a safe distance as his distant cousin, Teddy Roosevelt, and his Rough Riders made their famous charge up San Juan Hill. He spent only a month in Cuba but it was enough to earn him the honorific that became his chosen mode of address. The colonel did not accompany the Astor Battery when they were sent to the Philippines in 1899, but Frank Millet did, traveling across the Pacific with the regiment and treporting on the war for Harper’s Weekly . He later published his dispatches in book form as The Expedition to the Philippines .
    In early February of 1910 Archie Butt had been seated near Colonel Astor at a dinner-dance in the New York mansion of Cornelius Vanderbilt III. It was a thrill for Archie to be invited to this function, since, as he noted to Clara, it marked “the first time a member of the Butt family has actually penetrated into the heart of the Four Hundred.” Archie was told that Astor had been placed at the head table under the watchful eye of the hostess for fear he might be “cut” by some of the guests due to his recent divorce from Ava. A society woman whispered to Archie that, while she did not object to John Jacob Astor’s morals, “she thought [he] looked like an ape,” and Archie wrote,“I had to agree with her.”
    Much of the resentment toward the Astors in New York was driven by the fact that they were, in effect, the city’s biggest slumlords. The first John Jacob Astor, a butcher’s son from Baden who landed in New York in 1784, had left behind on his death in 1848 the largest fortune in the United States. Astor began as a fur trader but cashed in his fur company in the 1830s to buy up large parcels of New York real estate. “If I could live all over again,” he once said, “I would buy every square inch of Manhattan.” He very nearly succeeded—his son William would be known as “the landlord of New York” for his vast holdings in the city. The Astors preferred to lease out their land to others who would then return the improved real estate once the lease was up. This also spared the family the unpleasant business of collecting rents from the tenements that occupied many of their properties.

     
    This 1898 magazine cartoon is captioned “A New Factor in Modern Warfare: The Jack-Ass(tor) Battery.” (photo credit 1.68)
    Astor-owned hotels like the Waldorf-Astoria and the St. Regis put an elegant gloss on the hard fact that three-quarters of the family’s income came from rents derived from New York’s poorest neighborhoods. In this, the Astors and the White Star Line had something in