Waldorf Astor, 2nd Viscount Astor
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William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor (31 March 1848 – 18 October 1919) was an American-English attorney, politician, businessman (hotels and newspapers), and philanthropist. Astor was a scion of the very wealthy Astor family of New York City.
Politician, businessman. William Waldorf Astor III, 4th Viscount Astor (born 27 December 1951) is an English businessman and politician who sits as a Conservative hereditary Lord Temporal in the House of Lords. He is a member of the Astor family, which is known for its prominence in business, society, and politics in both the United States and ...
- The Astor fortune was partly founded on drug smuggling. The wealth of the Astor family originated in fur trading, guided by the intelligent but ruthless business tactics of their American founder, John Jacob Astor I. Having tried his hand at being a butcher like his father and an instrument maker like his brother, John I emigrated to America in 1783.
- John Jacob Astor I’s wife was so good at the business, she reportedly charged her husband $500 an hour. John married Sarah Cox Todd in 1785. She was the daughter of his landlady—and had a $300 dowry, plus connections to sea captains, merchants, shop owners, and ship owners.
- Caroline Schermerhorn Astor ran America’s social hierarchy, known as the “four hundred.” In the New York of the 1880s and 1890s, if you wanted to be accepted into society, it was not enough just to be wealthy.
- The family was torn apart by a feud about who would be called Mrs Astor. John Jacob Astor I’s second son, William Backhouse Astor Sr., inherited his fortune; he in turn passed it to his two sons, John III and William Backhouse Jr.
His son, William Waldorf Astor (1848–1919), was politically ambitious, but, after a stint in the New York state legislature and three years as U.S. minister to Italy, he moved permanently to England in 1890. He became a British subject in 1899, and in 1917 he became 1st Viscount Astor of Hever Castle.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Britishness. History. Royals. British Travel. City Guides. Inheriting the vast fortunes of the Astor family was just the beginning for William Waldorf Astor. Educated and raised in Europe, he found the - Anglotopia Magazine, Edwardian Era, Great Britons, Interwar Period, Modern Britain.
William Waldorf Astor was born in New York City in 1848 as the only child of John Jacob Astor III. Only two generations earlier, his great grandfather, John Jacob Astor I, had left the village of Walldorf, near Heidelberg in South West Germany, to find a future for himself across the Atlantic.
William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor (31 March 1848 – 18 October 1919) was an American-English attorney, politician, businessman (hotels and newspapers), and philanthropist. Astor was a scion of the very wealthy Astor family of New York City.
