The Aftermath of a Dynasty
Ambrose Bierce succeeded in shaping and sullying Charles Crocker’s reputation. He turned the self-made empire builder into a symbol of corporate excess and concentrated wealth. But history renders its own verdicts. The railroad was built, Stanford raised his university, and the controversies faded into footnote. Crocker’s descendants scattered into the wider world. Across more than a century and a half, the family produced an astonishing gallery of personalities who keep turning up in unexpected corners of cultural history: patrons of science, explorers, diplomats, artists, social visionaries, adventurers, mystics, political leaders. The family tree has become a map of American intellectual life.
This is the real afterlife of a self-made fortune. The railroad was a nineteenth-century achievement, but its money and influence flowed on into astronomy, television, particle physics, and medicine—wherever the twentieth century was being made—in laboratories, embassies, publishing houses, museums, art studios, and the halls of government. No corner of modern American life seems to lack a Crocker somewhere in it.
Harry Crocker was a fixture in Hollywood as cousin Aimée was on Broadway. He wrote a daily column “Behind the Makeup” for a dozen years in Hearst Newspapers during Hollywood’s Golden Age. He was honored with this caricature which hung in the Brown Derby among all the stars.
Every branch and generation has produced cultural stars, some with international followings. Clark’s grandson Harry stared his lustrous career as a budding actor, appearing opposite Charlie Chaplin in The Circus. He rose rapidly to become Chaplin’s assistant director and personal secretary. In the 1930s William Randolph Hearst, Ambrose Bierce’s one time employer, poached Crocker and gave him a daily column, “Behind the Makeup,” which ran for fifteen years and chronicled Hollywood’s Golden Age in gossip, drolleries, and patter. His vast web of tinsely friendships led to a short-lived cinema museum on Sunset Boulevard, ownership of the legendary restaurant/celebrity den Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills, and his own caricature on the wall of the Brown Derby. Before the war, traveling as Hearst’s personal secretary, Harry and the publishing powerhouse met both Hitler and Mussolini.
Offspring of the Judge includes phenom Kaffe Fassett, today’s international star of the Crocker lineage. He is considered among the top ten textile designers of world history in nearly every critic’s estimation. Fassett has transformed color and textile into an international artistic language. His books have been translated into multiple languages, his exhibitions have toured internationally, and he has a devoted following among quilters, knitters, textile artists, and designers across Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.
This illustration accompanied a Philadelphia Inquirer article from July 25, 1937, “The Most Fantastic Woman of Her Age,” with the caption “Finally there was Djoet-ta, the Dyak head-hunter who went native one night and carried her, unprotesting, into the jungle.”
Aimée Crocker, youngest daughter of Judge Edwin Crocker, entered the historical record as an active participant in some of the most unconventional intellectual and spiritual currents of her time. She keeps being rediscovered, because she intersects with subjects that remain culturally alive today—female autonomy, global travel, alternative spirituality, body art, celebrity culture, gender expectations, exoticism, and cultural exchange. Few descendants of Gilded Age fortunes have remained so stubbornly relevant.
The rambunctious heiress from the Wild West was given two official titles in her life: Princess Palaikalani—Bliss of Heaven, by King David Kalakaua when he gave her one of his Hawaiian islands, and Princess Galitzine, the day that she married her fifth and final husband, when she was 60 and he was 26. The press would give her a third royal designation—Queen of Bohemia. Aimée made headline news throughout her adult life. Teenaged Aimée eloped with a law clerk who “won” her in a game of poker dice. On route to her sunny Southern California honeymoon, the young couple survived a deadly runaway train wreck. National headlines followed again a few years later when her daughter Gladys was kidnapped by her estranged husband.
Aimée was said to have learned the mysteries of most of the faiths, rituals, and magics “between Port Said and Shanghai” during her trips around the globe. Also during her travels, she converted to Buddhism, spent three weeks in a harem near Bombay and lived in a paper house in Japan.
In 1901, as she traded husband number two for husband number three, Japanese master Hori Toyo, on two separate occasions, tattooed the controversial heiress, a scandalous thing for a society woman of her day.
Aimée’s long list of lovers included the occultist Aleister Crowley.
In her 1936 classic, And I’d Do It Again, one of the most gloriously unreliable memoirs in American history, she answered the conservative “Mrs. Grundys” who had dogged her all her life, with shark attacks, opium dens, love affairs with headhunters, and cheerful, unrepentant candor.
Charles Crocker’s three sons, Fred, George, and Will, spent their inheritance on some of the most important scientific expeditions of their day. Col. Fred financed solar eclipse expeditions—from Cayenne, French Guiana to Hokkaido Island, Japan to Jeur, India—for the Lick Observatory and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. Photographs from Fred’s astrographic camera became benchmarks in the history of astrophotography. George backed Robert Peary’s 1905-06 Arctic expedition aboard the Roosevelt. The explorer thanked him by naming a landmass he claimed to have sighted “Crocker Land” (it turned out to be a mirage). George, once among the country’s most notorious society drunks, got sober, tripled his fortune, and won his place in Mrs. Astor’s 400 ultrafashionables in society. He left the bulk of his money to cancer research. Will, the family’s banker, chased eclipses on a grander scale, bankrolling twelve expeditions whose results helped confirm Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. He also supported Nobel laureate Ernest Lawrence and television pioneer Philo Farnsworth.
Fred’s son Templeton carried the family torch not only financing expeditions but leading them, sailing his yacht Zaca on six voyages for the California Academy of Sciences, the Bishop Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the New York Zoological Society. Templeton and his guest scientists, including the legendary William Beebe, returned to their institutions with thousands of specimens and photographs that reshaped scientific knowledge and museum collections nationwide. The eclectic and diverse Templeton also revived the moribund California Historical Society, donating his unrivaled Californiana; wrote an opera, Fay-Yen-Fah, that earned a dazzling write-up in Time Magazine and the French Legion of Honor; and built a spectacular French Art-Deco penthouse that was, by Vogue’s account, “perhaps one of the most beautiful apartments in the world.”
If Aimée is the great adventurer of the Crocker saga, Barbara Harrison Wescott is its great mystery, a hidden chamber in the family house, less visible than the grand rooms but filled with unexpected treasures. She was both the granddaughter of Fred Crocker and Mr. Burton Harrison, Jefferson Davis’s private secretary during the Civil War. She was also a noted patron of the Arts as well as a patron of the groundbreaking psychoanalyst Karen Horney, a survivor of personal tragedy, and a grand participant in one of the twentieth century’s most influential artistic circles.
Barbara founded the elegant Harrison of Paris publishing house creating thirteen small press masterpieces, and was the salonnière of a unique, rural, artist colony on her farm in New Jersey. Chief among the colonists were bosom buddies and groundbreaking artists: Glenway Wescott, the novelist and later her brother-in-law; Monroe Wheeler, the impeccable aesthete who would one day shape the exhibitions and publications of the Museum of Modern Art; and George Platt Lynes, the controversial photographer whose camera made Roman gods of his friends and is now the subject of an award winning documentary. They lived together for decades like prized pieces in a living sculpture garden—brilliant, celebrated, and utterly dependent on the conditions she quietly maintained. Wescott’s universally praised masterpiece The Pilgrim Hawk, preserves a memorable evening in Barbara’s Parisian salon with some eccentric Crocker family guests. She carried within her life story an astonishing range of American experience. Barbara is not a chapter in the Crocker story. She is a volume unto herself.
Harriet Crocker, sister of Fred, George and Will, presided over what might be called the “State Department branch” of the Crocker family, a line whose pedigree in diplomacy is hard to match. Her daughters married into it. Mary wed Edwin Sheldon Whitehouse, Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Guatemala and Colombia, and Harriet Jr. married Winthrop Aldrich, who would represent the United States at the Court of St. James’s as Ambassador to Great Britain. The next generation kept the flag flying. Sylvia, a bridesmaid at JFK’s wedding, married Robert O. Blake, Ambassador to Mali, while her brother Charles joined the CIA and worked in the Congo, Turkey, Belgium and Cambodia. In the 1970s, he served as Ambassador to Laos and Thailand.
The tradition has not yet run out. Sylvia’s son, Robert Blake Jr., served as Ambassador to Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Indonesia. Charles’s son, Sheldon Whitehouse, has spent the last twenty years as United States Senator from the state of Rhode Island. He has been the lead sponsor of twenty bills that passed both chambers and became law. Among them: bipartisan overhauls of education policy and criminal justice, new legislation on ocean conservation and addiction recovery, and a string of government-ethics reforms. He has also given hundreds of floor speeches on climate change, campaign finance reform, and the partisan capture of the judiciary. For a family that has spent generations in the service of the state, a Crocker descendant in the Senate is a fitting capstone.
Martin Scorsese hosted a high-profile $1,000-a-head campaign fundraiser for Sheldon Whitehouse’s first Senate bid at his town house in Manhattan’s East Sixties. Caricature from The New Yorker, March 20, 2006.
Senator Whitehouse, however, presents an odd postscript to this Crocker story.
He has become one of the Senate’s fiercest critics of concentrated wealth and dark money, the “vast armada” of wealthy influencers—deployed quietly, covertly, surreptitiously—who, in his words, are “camouflaged behind webs of phony front groups” to control the government.
For years Whitehouse has pushed the DISCLOSE Act to bring into daylight the nonprofits, shell corporations, and layered legal fictions through which billions of dollars flow into American politics. He has also pressed legislation aimed at curtailing executive overcompensation. The DISCLOSE Act has repeatedly encountered the Senate’s sixty-vote barrier, while earlier versions of the CEO Act stalled in committee. Whitehouse keeps drilling at the senatorial granite, in true Crockerian fashion, certain that with enough persistence he will one day tunnel through.
The world he is confronting bears an unmistakable resemblance to the one his ancestor helped create.
Stanford historian Richard White does not describe today’s hyper-capitalism as a reenactment of the nineteenth-century Gilded Age, exactly, but as the resurgence of many of its defining traits: concentrated wealth and corporate power, political capture, speculative finance, technological upheaval, weakened labor, and a growing conviction that the system is rigged.
More unsettling is White’s larger claim: that the Gilded Age is not a two-part series with historical costume changes, but something closer to the default condition of American capitalism. The relative oligarchic quieting of the mid-twentieth century—the “un-Gilded Age,” in White’s formulation—was an interruption, produced by Progressive-era and New Deal reforms, progressive taxation, regulation, and powerful unions. Those measures constrained forces that had never entirely disappeared. The tendency toward gaping inequality and the fusion of private fortune with public power, White argues, was not an aberration but part of the deal from the beginning.
Whitehouse is an interesting figure. He is descended from a truly dynamic energy, who was also a founding father of the Gilded Age 1.0. But Charles Crocker, his grandmother’s grandfather, was born over 200 years ago and is now more of a myth than an ancestor: the self-made man archetype, or the cartoon robber baron, or some uneasy combination of both.
The better kinsman to Senator Whitehouse may be Ambrose Bierce, equally ferocious, unsparing, and magnetic, who spent a career skewering the fusion of money and government, the laundering of self-interest into patriotism—and who, in sinking a railroad refunding bill, sank the railroad titans’ reputation with it.
It is not hard to imagine, in the present Gilded Age, the pyrotechnic line of questioning Whitehouse, senior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, might deliver to the overcompensated Stanford, Huntington, and his gregarious grandfather if they were called to testify before him.
It is tempting to read Bierce as the senator’s spirit guide—haunting the Crocker line until one of their own became its loudest critic. Whitehouse confronts a newer, more bloated version of the world Bierce spent his career attacking, with less Biercian venom, less glee perhaps, but considerably more Newport panache. 