Astor's Battery

I read newspapers today, mostly from the Spanish-American War. I learned something that I had not known. JJ Astor's Astor Battery had both better food than the usual soldier -- better than JJ himself was eating, actually, -- and that JJ Astor was paying the wages of the Astor Battery during the entire time that it served. Mind you, the agreement was that he would raise the Battery and equip it until it mustered in. He also let the government have free passage on his railroad and volunteered his yacht as a gunboat.

I had had suspicions that he went to war, he was so insistent on going to Cuba, because a few months earlier the papers had reported him stating that Cuba would be a wonderful place to develop if the US would annex. It had gotten me to thinking that he might have wanted to go to scout out the lay of the land, so to speak. But, learning this about his Battery and how well care of he took of them, well, it makes me think differently. He didn't have to feed them so well -- his men had lamb chops and milk and other things the other troops could only wish for (and this in the field) -- that if it had been the work of a man just wanting a first foot in the door, he would have let them eat just what the rest of the Army ate. He also provided pipes and tobacco.

He worked hard, and shared in the daily life of the men he served with. Granted, the rest of the men did not have valets and private secretaries along with him, but he did eat the food, sleep in a tent and all the rest. He even developed a liking for pork n' beans. I think that this would have changed him and made him more sensitive to the working man, and what it was to work hard for a living. I think that this would have stripped off the entitlement veneer that most very rich people grow up with. But it probably took off some of his romantic idealism as well. That would have been a loss, but gaining clarity about his place in the world...well, as the commercial says....priceless.