An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew

by Annejet van der Zijl

It was their youngest son, James Prendergast, who, a few years later, when looking for a group of runaway horses, discovered a flat piece of land near the rapids of the Chadakoin River, approximately three miles south of the lake.

The Panic of 1893, as this serious economic depression was called, made it painfully clear how dependent the young country actually was on foreign capital.

(“If one has the will and persistence, one CAN do things.”)

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.

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.

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.

Tod was in no way inferior to Gates in terms of creativity in gambling. If a fly landed on the table, he’d bet on which direction it would take off. If he saw a waiter coming over, he’d lay money on whether or not he’d drop his tray. And if he saw a beggar on the street, he’d bet on whether, if he gave him a hundred-dollar bill, he’d thank him profusely or make a swift getaway.

pied-à-terre

The once-so-dark Broadway became a “Great White Way” where the general public feasted its eyes day and night on the giant floodlit shop windows of exclusive department stores and boutiques—this thanks to the invention of a “small ball of sunlight, a true Aladdin’s lamp”: Thomas Edison’s light bulb.

There was no city more hospitable and none more capricious than New York, with her “pull-down-and-build-all-over-again spirit,” as poet Walt Whitman succinctly put it.

In the spring of 1906, California was hit by a severe earthquake and fire that took more than three thousand lives. The next year, Wall Street shook in its foundations; the stock market took an alarming nosedive, and a new financial crisis seemed inevitable.

Less than a week later, any thought of high society and parties or the reporting thereof was wiped away with one blow by shocking reports that the brand-new deemed-unsinkable flagship of the White Star Line, the RMS Titanic, had hit an iceberg on its way to New York and sunk. Fewer than 700 of the more than 2,220 people on board survived. Among the victims were many prominent New Yorkers, such as steel magnate Benjamin Guggenheim, Macy’s owner Isidor Straus, and John Jacob Astor. The papers had castigated Astor, a divorced man of forty-seven, for marrying an eighteen-year-old classmate of Greta’s, but now “Colonel Astor” was exalted by the same papers as a heroic figure.

Many saw the wreck of the Titanic as an apocalyptic harbinger of greater disasters, punishment for modern man’s arrogance and presumption.

GE was the brainchild of Charles Albert Coffin, a former shoe manufacturer who in 1892 had the idea of uniting the many private electricity companies in America at that time into one large national network. With support from the inventor Thomas Edison and banking tycoon J. P. Morgan, who financed the plans, he was able to create an internationally operational electricity group within a relatively short time.

Around the corner, in the Rue de Varenne, lived the now elderly but still very successful writer Edith Wharton.

Aside from this—no mean feat for a girl who had taken her first steps in a livery stable in Jamestown—after the wedding she became one of the first Americans ever to be able to call herself a princess.

Wasn’t marriage to a woman of wealth the age-old remedy for poverty-stricken aristocrats?

Just as the amputees from the First World War had learned to live with artificial limbs and even become used to them, Allene made do with an artificial family. There was no space in her philosophy of life for wasting time contemplating lost loves or becoming a captive of her own past.

Those who can best cope with setbacks have the greatest chance of fortune.