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From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 47, 22 November 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
If you have good eyes and you read even the one-inch items buried among the ads on page 19, you may have seen an obscure bit in the New York papers last week about John J. Astor being served with a court summons by his ex-cook for a matter of $172 back wages due and unpaid.
Now the John Jacob Astor in question lives at 998 Fifth Avenue in something more than a flophouse. He is direct in line to inherit most of the famous Astor fortune. This fortune was started by that old miser John Jacob Astor, who traded off rot-gut liquor to the Indians for fine furs. It has since been pyramided to hundreds of millions by miles of New York real estate bought cheap and rented dear. So the latest namesake of the rum-for-fur trader isn’t so short of the ready that he can’t pay a cook’s wages.
The cook, Delia Curran, went to court and got the summons against the Astor heir on the complaint, that she tried repeatedly to get her pay after leaving the job on Oct. 23. It seems that any mere cook who just works for a living and has the effrontery to quit on the Astor millions without being fired, can just wait for her money.
The case never went to trial because the day after the summons was issued, Nov. 9, Deila Curran got a check in the mail. So the case was dropped. That’s when the press recognized it at all.
Now, if you are addicted to regular reading of the Big Business press, you might after a while get to think of the rich as not such bad folks after all. You read all about their “philanthropies” and the new stained-glass windows they contribute to churches and similar good deeds.
But the little story about Astor’s cook gives a better insight ito the true character of the plutocratic leisure class. They’re pretty mean and cheap.
They’ll hand out five dollar tips ostentatiously in a night club – that’s for the society column gossip. But where there’s no publicity attached, they’ll chisel a nickel every time.
The monied class of this country, through its press, has put out an awful lot of bunk about itself – patrons of the arts, preservers of culture, big-hearted philanthropists. The truth is they’re vicious, mean in small things as in great. Ask Mr. Astor’s ex-cook.
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