An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(12)
Several steam yachts were anchored off East 26th Street early in the morning and the scene on and around the dock of the Department of Correction was a gay one. Carriages were continually driving up with jolly parties, who were taken out to the yachts in naphtha launches or cutters.
In the midst of this gay scene the steamboat Thomas E. Brennan arrived from Blackwell’s Island with about fifty unfortunate men and women who had served a term on the island for some misdemeanor and were brought ashore to be released. They filed down one side of the dock and presented a picture in sad contrast to the other. On one side were men strong, rich and happy, and women handsome, well dressed and about to go on some of the finest yachts of the world.
That same summer, a populist Democratic candidate had a serious chance of getting into the White House. William Jennings Bryan promised social reform and to tackle the widespread corruption and greed that had plunged the country into ruin. But at the last moment, entrepreneurs and the financial establishment, supported by the Presbyterian Church, launched an aggressive countercampaign in which they told the public that phenomena such as socialism and trade unions were precisely what formed the greatest threat to what was left of the nation’s prosperity.
On November 3, 1896, the Republican candidate, William McKinley, won the race. And so the rich continued to throw parties and the poor suffered—although with increasing complaints and protests. When a New York society couple, in the middle of the coldest winter of the crisis, announced in 1897 the biggest, most expensive ball ever organized in the city—for eight hundred guests, two entire stories of the Waldorf Astoria would be transformed into the court of Versailles to the tune of $400,000—they were subjected to the full force of the people’s anger. But none of the critical articles, angry reactions, or even death threats could sway the couple, the Bradley-Martins, from their plans, and the offending ball was held on February 10. As if to demonstrate how untouchable they felt and how little they cared about the anger of the plebs or the misery in which their less fortunate fellow citizens lived, the host opened the ball by playing the well-known ditty “When You Ain’t Got No Money, You Need Not Come Around.”
By now the so-called yellow press, the gutter press, had developed a taste for pillorying the multimillionaires. William Waldorf Astor, heir to the hotel fortune, felt so threatened by the increasingly aggressive press hounds that he fled to Europe, hoping to find more respect and restraint toward the leisure class to which he belonged as a consequence of his birth. Unfortunately, inventions like the telegraph and the telephone meant that news now traveled faster across the ocean than he could. What’s more, the English gutter press was just as vicious as New York’s. As a consequence, Astor saw his comings and goings subjected to close scrutiny on both sides of the ocean, and he had even less room to maneuver than he’d had before.
At this time, Tod Hostetter was still just a small fish to the newspapers, a foolish young millionaire from Pittsburgh with poor taste in friends. The 1896 presidential election so important to the country was interesting to him because it was something he could bet on. Here, too, his legendary luck didn’t let him down: he was the only person to guess all of the results correctly, down to the last decimal point, and won $30,000 in one blow. He lost the sum almost immediately on roulette, the only game of chance he lost time after time. In the words of a friend:
Roulette was his ruin . . . He was the wildest plunger I ever knew, and he was smart as a steel trap, except when he played roulette. If he had left the wheel alone, he could not have lost anything, but he could not leave it alone. He was sure he would win in the end.
Allene did what she could to keep her husband away from the company of Davy Johnson and the temptations of horse racing and roulette. (“If one has the will and persistence, one CAN do things.”) She turned Hostetter House on Raccoon Creek into the setting for “many a gay nineties party,” it was later written. For years, local inhabitants would remember festively decorated boats filled with happy guests sailing to and from Pittsburgh. Allene also successfully threw her feminine charms into the battle, and in the early spring of 1897, she discovered she was pregnant again.
On October 2, 1897, Allene gave birth to a son, baptized Theodore Rickey Jr. after his father. Little Teddy, as the child was called to differentiate him from his father, Tod, originally seemed to have been born under a lucky star. A few months after his birth, America, its own fight for independence fresh in its memory, chose to side with the rebels in the Spanish colony of Cuba and went to war against Spain. This meant that little Teddy’s father would have his first—and, as it would transpire, his only—chance to actually do something for his country. Tod put his Duquesne at the disposal of the American marines. It was therefore partly thanks to him that the Americans were able to drill the Spanish fleet in the Philippines into the ground on May 1, 1898.
The old superpower Spain turned out to be no match for the modern, patriotism-inspired America, and within a few months, America had won the Spanish-American War.
For the first time in its existence, the United States had manifested itself as an independent, imperial entity. During peace negotiations, the country even managed to gain Puerto Rico and the Philippines as colonies. Cuba became an American protectorate, and Hawaii was simply annexed: the leap to political world power had been more than successful.
The quickly won war gave a substantial boost to national self-confidence and was a blessing to the economy, which, as a consequence of the war efforts, quickly picked up speed again. But while his mother country climbed back out of her depression, Tod seemed to have gone too far downhill to be able to find his way back up again. The Duquesne returned to New York, and Tod resumed his career as a professional gambler with renewed élan. As the Pittsburgh Press would euphemistically summarize: “Theodore Hostetter was best-known for his devotion to sports.”