Daniel Guggenheim was the first witness of the morning. It was a Thursday in January of 1915, and the Federal Commission on Industrial Relations had taken over the Board of Estimates room at New York City Hall. That winter, it was questioning rich men about their fortunes, their charities, and their workers. The chairman, Frank Walsh, began with the usual questions.

Asked where he lived, the man who ran American Smelting and Refining gave the name of a hotel, the St. Regis. His office was downtown at 165 Broadway. He was fifty-eight, and he told Walsh he was generally posted as to the conditions of labor at the company’s plants.

What came next is on the government’s own transcript. “I think the difference between the rich man and the poor man is very much too great,” he said. A few men, he said, learned how to save. “It is a difficult matter for a poor man to learn to save.

” He said employers had moved away from the old policy of grinding laborers down and paying them the lowest wages possible. He hoped the capitalist had become more humane. Then he went further. If it were not for what had been done and was being done, he said, “we would have revolution in this country.

” Too many people who had made money, he went on, did not like to part with any of it, even what they did not need. Giving was a habit you had to acquire in early life, and it was a good habit to get into. Then he told the commissioners, “I do not believe in the survival of the fittest. That is something I do not approve of.

There are others that do. ”

It is an odd thing to hear from the head of a smelting trust. When Forbes printed its first list of the richest Americans in 1918, it put Daniel Guggenheim at more than seventy million dollars and quoted a financier who called his the second richest family in the country. Within one long lifetime after that, both of the family’s houses at Sands Point had been given away.

So where does a fortune that size go? The houses are still standing a short walk apart on the north shore of Long Island. One is a Tudor mansion of forty rooms in granite and Indiana limestone, with an entrance hall sixty feet high and a tower of eighty. Daniel did not build it.

He bought it, with the furniture still inside, from a son of Jay Gould whose marriage had fallen apart before the house was finished. The other is a Norman manor of old brick and heavy tile, with a round tower and a cobbled courtyard. Daniel’s son Harry built it on ninety acres of his father’s waterfront and called it Falaise, the French word for cliff. Harry would be a naval aviator in two wars, an ambassador, a newspaper owner, and a racehorse breeder.

Falaise was the house he came home to. A young flyer who had just crossed the Atlantic alone spent a little under three weeks in its northeast bedroom in the summer of 1927. His publisher wanted a book, and he had thrown out the one somebody else had written for him. He wrote his own by hand, in blue ink.

Two years after Daniel told the commissioners he lived in a hotel, he and his wife Florence bought a country estate at Sands Point looking out over Long Island Sound. They had been married since 1884, and their three children were grown. Robert was the eldest; Harry came next; Gladys was the youngest. The house had been built for somebody else’s marriage, and the marriage had not lasted as long as the construction.

Howard Gould, a son of the railroad speculator Jay Gould, had married the actress Catherine Clemens in 1898. Buffalo Bill Cody had paid for her stage career for a while, and in a letter to a friend he called her “too swift and dishonest for me. ” Gould started buying land on the point around 1900. The first building on it was a limestone castle with towers and battlements designed by Augustus Allen.

It served as the stable, the carriage house, and the quarters for the staff. Today it is called Castle Gould. The main house took about another decade and several architects. A Philadelphia architect, Abner Haydel, kept submitting plans until he gave up and sued for his fees.

The American Architect reported in 1912 that the house had been originally designed as a replica of Kilkenny Castle in Ireland. Catherine sued for separation in 1907. Howard’s answer accused her of drinking and of improper conduct with Buffalo Bill. The case came to trial in June of 1909.

His lawyers called a coachman, a carpenter, a footman, a maid, a florist, and a clerk, and each described her drunk or swearing. She won anyway. The decree separated them for good and ordered Howard to pay her three thousand dollars every month for the rest of her life. The brothers Richard and Joseph Hunt, sons of Richard Morris Hunt, finished the main house around 1912—in the end more Tudor than Irish.

Gould had forty rooms and no wife living in them. By 1917, he had sold the place to the Guggenheims. That November he lost to Catherine one more time, at the Supreme Court of the United States. The question was whether her alimony counted as income under the new federal tax, and the court said it did not.

“In case of doubt,” Justice James McReynolds wrote, “tax laws are construed most strongly against the government and in favor of the citizen. ” The house had a palm court that held about 150 kinds of rare orchids, plants, and potted trees beside an aviary of exotic birds. Daniel renamed the place Hempstead House. The money behind both houses came out of the ground in Colorado, in Mexico, and in Chile.

The new smelting trust’s workers walked out in 1900, and Daniel Guggenheim kept his own furnaces burning. The trust was American Smelting and Refining. Henry Rogers, William Rockefeller, and the Lewis brothers had put it together the year before out of twenty-three smelting companies. They had invited the Guggenheims in.

The Guggenheims stayed out. The strikes ran for two months. Daniel sold lead and silver cheap while they lasted. The trust’s shares fell, and he bought them.

The trust gave in the following April. It took in the Guggenheim plants and working capital and paid with about forty-five million dollars of its own stock. That was enough for control. Daniel became chairman and president, and his brothers took seats on the board.

The outsiders now ran the combine they had refused to join. Their strength went back to a pair of flooded mines. Their father, Meyer Guggenheim, was a Swiss Jew from the village of Langnau in Aargau. He had come to Philadelphia in the late 1840s.

He went from a peddler’s pack in the Pennsylvania coal towns to stove polish and lye, and then to importing Swiss lace. When he died in 1905, the New York Times still put the stove polish in the headline. Around 1880, he took a share in two silver mines at Leadville, Colorado. The accounts disagree on how big the share was, and on whether he bought it or took it for a bad debt.

They agree that the mines were flooded. He spent about twenty thousand dollars on pumps, and under the water the mines were rich in silver and lead. The family moved from digging ore to smelting it, where a fee came off every ton whoever had dug it. They built a smelter at Pueblo, Colorado, in 1888, and more across the border at Monterrey and Aguascalientes to get around the American tariff on Mexican ore.

Meyer had seven sons who lived to manhood. Daniel, who had spent his teens in Switzerland learning the embroidery trade, was the one who ran the business. A Canadian magazine in 1907 credited Meyer with a rule for his boys: “Get money, but don’t try to get it by walking over the graves of your fellow men. ” It also printed the family’s favorite story about itself, in which Meyer hands his sons a bundle of sticks they cannot break together—Aesop’s fable of the old man and his sons.

The same writer guessed the family’s fortune at anywhere from one hundred million to five hundred million dollars. A guess that wide is really an admission that nobody outside the family knew. Copper came next, from Chile. A Boston lawyer named Albert Burrage had begun buying up mining claims at Chuquicamata, more than nine thousand feet up in the Atacama Desert, in 1911.

The Guggenheims formed the Chile Exploration Company the next January and bought him out. The ore was low grade, a whole mountain of it. Before it could pay, it needed a port and a power plant at Tocopilla on the coast and an aqueduct bringing water down from the Andes. Production began in May of 1915, four months after Daniel told the commission in New York that he lived in a hotel.

In its first year, the mountain gave about four thousand tons of copper; five years later, more than fifty thousand. Daniel handed the smelting trust to his brother Simon in 1919. Ninety acres of bluff came with Harry Guggenheim’s second marriage. It came in a year of breaks.

The brothers sold control of Chile Copper to the Anaconda Company in 1923 for about seventy million dollars—roughly what Forbes had credited Daniel with personally. Anaconda bought the rest of the shares six years later. The decision to sell was made narrowly, and it split the family. Harry resigned from the partnership over it, and so did his cousin Edmund, Murry Guggenheim’s son.

The brothers and their sons never again ran one firm together. Harry was thirty-two. He had left Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School early to work at the family smelters in Mexico, then took his degree at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He had married at twenty, to Helen Rosenberg.

They had two daughters, Joan and Nancy. When America entered World War I, he went into naval aviation as a lieutenant and served in France, England, and Italy. His first marriage ended in divorce, and on February 3, 1923, he married Caroline Morton Potter, known as Carol. Her father was Paul Morton, Theodore Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Navy.

Carol was eight years older than Harry, and she had divorced a banker the year before. Daniel gave the couple ninety acres of his own waterfront as a wedding present—the bluff beside Hempstead House. They built at the very edge, high over Long Island Sound. The architect was Frederick Sterner, working with the firm of Polhemus and Coffin, and the house was finished in 1924.

It was meant to look like a Norman manor of the thirteenth century. It has thick walls of mortared brick, steep roofs of heavy tile, and a round tower over an enclosed courtyard of cobblestones. Inside there were twenty-six rooms with stone archways, oak beams, and carved stone mantels. The couple furnished it with what they brought back from Europe: old furniture, wood carvings, doors, gates, fragments of medieval and Renaissance buildings.

Renaissance paintings went up on the walls; in later years, a few important pieces of modern art joined them. So the father bought his castle ready-made, and the son put his together out of old pieces. That probably says something about each of them, though it may not say the same thing twice. Carol gave Harry his third daughter, Diane, in 1924.

Across Manhasset Bay, Scott Fitzgerald was renting a house on Gateway Drive in Great Neck with his wife Zelda and their small daughter Scotty. He lived there while the bricks went up at Falaise. The novel he was working toward came out in 1925 as The Great Gatsby. It puts two eggs on this water separated by a courtesy bay.

Fitzgerald’s narrator lives on West Egg, the Great Neck side. Across the courtesy bay, he says, the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water. Readers have placed East Egg on the Sands Point shore ever since. Fitzgerald never said so, and nothing ties Falaise to the book.

Gatsby’s own house, the one with the tower, is a “factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy,” and Fitzgerald put it in West Egg, on the far side of the bay. When people hunt for a real model on the Sands Point side, they usually name Beacon Towers, Alva Belmont’s white castle on the point, torn down in 1945. Some of the copper money went straight back to Chile, and Harry had helped point it there. Before he quit, he had been the family’s leading voice for a new venture in Chilean nitrate, which was dug out of the desert for fertilizer and explosives.

The engineer behind it was E. A. Cappelen Smith, who had run the technical side at Chuquicamata. By 1922 he had worked out a new way of refining the ore, soon called the Guggenheim process.

He promised it would cut the cost of production by about two-fifths, and the brothers who stayed in the firm put about seventeen million dollars behind him. Daniel was done with running companies. He and Florence chartered a foundation in their own names in January of 1924. Charles Lindbergh came to stay at Falaise in the first week of July 1927, about six weeks after he had landed in Paris.

At twenty-five, he owed the publisher George Putnam a book. Putnam had already had a New York Times reporter, Carlisle Macdonald, ghostwrite one for him. Lindbergh read the draft and refused it because he thought the tone was false and the facts were wrong, and he decided to write the book himself. The Guggenheims gave him the northeast bedroom, with a small balcony and a view across the sound to Connecticut.

He wrote by hand, with a fountain pen in blue ink on plain white bond paper. Some days he worked at an inlaid desk in the room, some days at a wooden table on the grounds east of the house. He finished in less than three weeks, a little under the forty thousand words his contract called for. Putnam had it in the stores within two weeks after that.

It was called We, and it sold more than 190,000 copies in its first six weeks. Daniel’s money had been in the air for nearly two years by then. At a groundbreaking at New York University in October of 1925, with Harry there, Daniel called himself an old man “whose active days are past. ” He said he would give the rest of his life, with his son’s help, to the science of flight.

He paid half a million dollars for a school of aeronautics at the university, then wrote to Washington. His letter to the Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, set up the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics in January of 1926. Daniel put in half a million to start, then two million more, then another half million—about three million dollars, or roughly a twentieth of what Forbes had said he was worth. Harry ran it as president.

Its first stated aim was to promote aeronautical education “both in institutions of learning and among the general public. ” It paid for schools of aeronautics at ten universities, among them the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Michigan, and the California Institute of Technology. It offered one hundred thousand dollars to anyone who could build an airplane that flew slowly and landed safely in a small field. It also sent Lindbergh around the country.

Within days of finishing his book, he took off in the Spirit of St. Louis on a tour paid for by the fund. Between July 20 and October 23, he flew to eighty-two cities in every one of the forty-eight states and covered about twenty-two thousand miles. A Commerce Department plane flew alongside, and a young aide named Donald Keyhoe handled the schedule; Keyhoe later became much better known for his books claiming that flying saucers were real.

The fund wanted the millions who had only read about Lindbergh to see him and his plane fly. The stop in every state was Lindbergh’s own idea, and a good one. He gave 147 speeches on that tour, about airports, air mail, and what flying could do for a town. Minnesota shows how it went.

He landed at Minneapolis on the afternoon of August 23, three minutes off the time printed on the schedule. About twenty thousand people broke onto the field around the plane. The Minneapolis and St. Paul papers counted the crowds along the parade route at anywhere from a quarter of a million to half a million; nobody was counting carefully.

Lindbergh worried more about the cars than the crowds. Reception committees made up for lost time by driving him through town at speeds he considered dangerous. Two days later he came down on a farm outside Little Falls, the town where he grew up. About fifty thousand people turned out.

The parade had floats carrying his family’s old Saxon automobile and a farm tractor; others carried copies of his plane, the Eiffel Tower, and the Statue of Liberty. Five hundred school children marched behind. At the fairgrounds he told them, “The day is coming when airlines will be more extensive than our present-day railroad lines. ” He pointed out that the hop from Little Falls to Minneapolis took him one hour, against three by land.

Over towns too small to land in, he flew low and dropped printed messages about the future of commercial flying, signed by Lindbergh, by Harry Guggenheim, and by the assistant secretary of commerce for aeronautics, William MacCracken. He disliked the name the papers gave him, Lucky Lindy, and he resented newspaper stories about what he had eaten. He hardly saw his own family that week; his sister said afterward that she barely had a chance to talk to him. Vandals had broken into the empty family house outside town and carried off books from his late father’s library.

He took off from Little Falls on the morning of the 26th, heading west for Fargo. Historians of aviation credit the flight and the tour together with the boom that followed. Over the next two years, airports, pilot licenses, airplane companies, and air routes all multiplied across the country. The next year, Lindbergh suggested that towns paint their names on rooftops so pilots could tell where they were; in October of 1928, the fund wrote to eight thousand postmasters to ask.

Harry and Carol became close friends of his, and Falaise became a place he came back to. One day that same October, he drove a young woman out to Sands Point for lunch in his black Franklin sedan. She was Anne Morrow, daughter of the American ambassador to Mexico—and, by then, his future wife. Harry and Carol told her stories about the practical jokes of the man they all called Slim.

He had arranged to use one of the Guggenheim horse pastures as a landing field. After lunch he took her up in a rented de Havilland Moth with an open cockpit. One day in August of 1929, Carol Guggenheim was reading aloud in the living room at Falaise. As Lindbergh’s biographer tells it, the article came from Popular Science Monthly, and it was about a rocket that had gone off with a terrible noise near Worcester, Massachusetts.

Lindbergh was listening. Anne, by then his wife, was upstairs writing letters. The rocket had flown that July, carrying a thermometer, a barometer, and a small camera. It came down with a crash and a fire.

The police and ambulances turned out, and Massachusetts told its builder to stop launching rockets in the state. He was Robert Goddard, a physics professor at Clark University in Worcester. Three years earlier, he had launched the first rocket in the world to burn liquid fuel, from a cabbage patch on his aunt’s farm in Auburn. It flew for two and a half seconds, climbed forty-one feet, and came down 184 feet away.

He had been at this since he was a boy; in a high school speech in 1904, he said that “the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow. ”

The press had not been kind to him. The Smithsonian Institution published his paper on reaching extreme altitudes in 1919, and it mentioned, almost in passing, sending a rocket to the moon. A New York Times editorial insisted a rocket could not work in the vacuum of space; Goddard, it said, “only seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools.

” The paper took that back in July of 1969, the week Apollo 11 flew to the moon. The fund, meanwhile, was finishing its own work on Long Island. On September 24, at Mitchell Field, Lieutenant James Doolittle took off in a Consolidated biplane with a hood pulled over his cockpit. He saw nothing outside.

Lieutenant Benjamin Kelsey rode in front as safety pilot, with his hands in plain view to show he was not flying it. Doolittle steered by an artificial horizon and a directional gyro from the Sperry Company, and by a radio beacon. His altimeter was made by a young German immigrant named Paul Kollsman, sensitive enough to land by. He flew a short course for about fifteen minutes, came back, and put the plane down.

It was the first flight ever made, from takeoff to landing, on instruments alone. Harry announced that month that the fund had done what it was set up to do. In October, Hoover—now president—named him ambassador to Cuba; in November, Harry was in Havana presenting his credentials. So Harry was gone when Lindbergh went after the rocket man.

Lindbergh checked Goddard’s standing with engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then telephoned him in late November and drove up to Worcester the next day. What Goddard needed was steady money for a few years and open country where nobody would call the fire department. Lindbergh took the problem to Daniel. A government film about Goddard made long afterward put it plainly: money was needed, and Lindbergh had the name to pry open the pocketbooks.

Lindbergh later remembered the old man asking him one question in effect: did he believe rockets had a future? Lindbergh said he thought they probably did. It is a sensible thing to ask at seventy-three, before you start paying for rockets. Daniel pledged twenty-five thousand dollars a year for four years; the first two years were firm, the rest depended on how the work went and on an advisory committee with Lindbergh on it.

The safe airplane prize was settled in January. Twenty-seven airplanes had entered; only two reached the final round, and the Curtiss Tanager beat the British Handley Page by a single point. Out in California, the fund had already run a model airline between San Francisco and Los Angeles for a year, with a weather reporting service that any pilot with a radio could use; in that year, there was not a single accident caused by weather. The fund closed on February 1, 1930, after one of its last grants—three hundred thousand dollars—went to Georgia Tech for a school of aeronautics.

Most foundations are built to last. This one was built to finish. Goddard took leave from Clark that summer and moved to a ranch outside Roswell, New Mexico, with his wife Esther and a small crew of machinists. His tower, his tools, and his rockets went west in a railroad car.

The desert had the room he had been asking for. Daniel died at Hempstead House on Sunday morning, September 28, 1930, at seventy-four. His funeral was held two days later at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan. Goddard had been in Roswell for about three months.

The man paying for him was gone. Time magazine reported in July of 1930 that the family’s new process for making nitrate cut labor costs by three-quarters and fuel costs by nearly as much. Within two years, the Chilean combine built around it had lost more than thirteen million dollars, and one of the family’s nitrate companies had stopped paying its bondholders. The process ran at full capacity from 1928 at a desert works called María Elena, and the family bought the Lautaro Company the next year.

Then the price of fertilizer fell with everything else. Synthetic nitrate made in Germany had been eating into the Chilean trade since World War I, and the depression did the rest. The Guggenheim companies went into a giant combine with the Chilean state early in 1931. It took in almost all of Chile’s nitrate producers, and the state owned half of it.

In its first year the combine cut its workforce from nearly 19,000 to about 10,000 to 12,000. Lautaro’s newest plant, Pedro de Valdivia—then the largest nitrate works in the world—shut down in November of 1932. Solomon Guggenheim, Daniel’s brother, prepared to sail for Chile that December with the banker Medley Whelpley to try to save it. The new government of Arturo Alessandri abolished it anyway in 1933.

Goddard’s money stopped with the rest. His first winter in New Mexico had gone well, and one of his rockets had climbed about two thousand feet over the desert. Even so, he was back teaching at Clark by the spring of 1932. Not until the fall of 1934 did the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation send him back to Roswell.

Florence Guggenheim did not stay in the big house. She was sixty-seven when Daniel died. In World War I she had set the record for individual sales of Liberty Bonds, and she had been treasurer of the Women’s National Republican Club for seventeen years. She and Daniel had paid for free outdoor concerts in Central Park and on two university campuses in the city, and she kept them going after his death as a memorial.

She had Polhemus and Coffin, the firm that had worked on Falaise, build her a smaller French manor on the estate. It was finished in 1932, and she called it Mill Fleur—a thousand flowers. Hempstead House was closed. She sold its furnishings in 1940.

That summer, the empty house took in children sent away from the war in Europe, and Life magazine photographed small boys at play in what had been the formal garden. She gave the whole estate away in June of 1942—162 acres, two-thirds of a mile of shoreline, and Howard Gould’s forty rooms—to the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences. It was to become a research center called Daniel Guggenheim Park. Florence died in May of 1944, at eighty.

Two years later, the Navy bought the estate from the institute. What moved in was the organization of Luis de Florez, a Navy flyer and engineer who believed pilots could be trained on the ground by machines. During the war, his office had built motion picture trainers for aerial gunners and trainers for bombardiers. He moved it from downtown Washington to the old Guggenheim estate, and it was commissioned there as the Special Devices Center in August of 1946.

The Navy’s engineers and instructors worked out of Hempstead House and Castle Gould. For twenty years the work there was flight simulators, submarine trainers, radar trainers, and later trainers for space flight. De Florez’s office had also been the first sponsor of a project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Whirlwind. It began as a flight simulator and grew into an early digital computer.

The center moved south to Orlando, Florida, in stages through the middle 1960s, and the last of it left Sands Point in July of 1967. While his mother was closing the big house, Harry was still in Havana. On January 5, 1933, he cabled Washington about a dead prisoner. The Cuban president, Gerardo Machado, had been elected in 1924 and had since arranged to stay on.

He was holding power by force, and students were being killed. The embassy was not even sure of the dead man’s name. Hernandez or Alvarez died shortly after midnight in a hospital to which he had been brought with a bullet in his head. Harry wrote, “These killings of prisoners have deeply stirred public opinion and have strengthened belief that no person under arrest is safe from official vengeance.

” The next day he saw Machado. He reported that the president did not try to deny the government’s responsibility for the murders of students; Machado called them a stupid mistake. Harry left his post that April. A new administration in Washington sent Sumner Welles to Havana that May to manage what came next, and Machado had fled by August.

At home, Harry kept the family’s promise to Goddard as far as the money allowed. In September of 1935, he and Lindbergh flew out to Roswell to watch a launch. They stayed two days, and both attempts failed. Lindbergh took a photograph straight down the inside of the launch tower.

Before they left, the two of them pressed Goddard to publish his results and to give one of his rockets to the Smithsonian. He did, and it became the first liquid fuel rocket in the Smithsonian’s collection. His best flight in New Mexico reached about nine thousand feet. A tornado knocked down his launch tower in 1938.

A historian writing for the Smithsonian has since called him one of the best funded scientists in America in the 1930s, and most of that funding was Guggenheim money. Harry’s marriage to Carol ended in 1939. The same month the divorce became final, he married Alicia Patterson in Jacksonville, Florida. He was nearly forty-nine, and she was not yet thirty-three.

Her father ran the New York Daily News, where she had worked as a reporter. The next spring, Harry paid about fifty thousand dollars for the plant of a failed daily in Hempstead, Long Island. The first edition of Newsday came off its press on September 3, 1940, full of typographical errors. After her father died in 1946, Alicia asked to own part of it.

Harry sold her 49 percent for about eighty-one thousand dollars and kept control. She backed Democrats and he backed Republicans, and in some election years the paper printed his endorsement and hers side by side. Harry had kept his commission in the Naval Reserve since the First War, and he went back into uniform after Pearl Harbor, at fifty-one. He became the first commanding officer of Mercer Field, a new naval air station at Trenton, New Jersey, in the summer of 1943.

Then he went to sea. In May of 1945 he joined the escort carrier Nantahala Bay, bound for the fighting at Okinawa. He flew as the turret gunner in its Grumman torpedo bombers—the same type of plane a young George Herbert Walker Bush flew in the Pacific. He was fifty-four.

On June 7, the carrier came under kamikaze attack and was not hit. That day, Harry flew in a strike against Japanese positions south of Okinawa. The Navy gave him two commendations that year. Goddard was working for the Navy too, at Annapolis, on rocket units to help heavy planes take off.

He died in Baltimore that August of throat cancer, before the war in the Pacific was over. The racing stable was the part of Harry’s life the public saw most. He had kept horses since 1929, and in the war years he named the stable Cain Hoy after his plantation of about ten thousand acres in South Carolina. He named one of the cattle farms there Iron Bottom, after the waters off Guadalcanal where so many Navy ships went down.

He bought a colt called Dark Star as a yearling for $6,500. The Kentucky Derby of 1953 belonged on paper to Native Dancer, a gray who had never lost a race. Dark Star went off at twenty-five to one. Trained by Eddie Hayward and ridden by Hank Moreno, he took the lead early and held on by a head in two minutes and two seconds.

It was the only race Native Dancer ever lost. Dark Star bowed a tendon in the Preakness three weeks later and never raced again. Harry stayed in racing for the rest of his life, and in 2024 the racing museum at Saratoga named him a Pillar of the Turf. Newsday won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1954 and kept growing under Alicia when she backed Adlai Stevenson against Eisenhower in 1956.

The quarrel over who controlled the editorial page went to the lawyers. She typed out a statement of resignation, and then she stayed. She died in July of 1963, after an operation for an ulcer. She had run Newsday for twenty-three years.

The spiral on Fifth Avenue opened on October 21, 1959, about six months after the man who designed it had died. Solomon Guggenheim had started out collecting old masters and American landscapes. Then, in 1927, he met a German painter named Hilla Rebay, who steered him toward Kandinsky, Mondrian, and the art she called non-objective. His first museum opened in May of 1939 in a former automobile showroom on East 54th Street.

He hired Frank Lloyd Wright in 1943 and paid him twenty-one thousand dollars to start designing, before there was even a site. Wright unveiled his design to the family at a luncheon at the Plaza Hotel in August of 1945. After the war, rising building costs made Solomon hesitate. Solomon died late in 1949—the last of the seven brothers—without seeing a spade in the ground.

He left two million dollars toward the building, and his nephew Harry took charge of the foundation. Harry did not get on with Rebay, and she resigned in 1952. Her replacement, James Johnson Sweeney, did not much like Wright’s design either. When the plans went to the city that year, they drew objections under thirty-two separate building regulations.

A permit did not come until 1956, and construction began that October. Wright wrote back and forth with Harry about the ramp the whole way through. Sixteen years had passed since Wright was first hired. Harry asked Herbert Hoover—whom he called the Chief—to sit on the platform at the opening ceremony.

Hoover had made his own fortune in mining and had sent Harry to Havana. He had another engagement that day and wrote that he hoped to visit later. Not everyone wanted it: while it was going up, twenty-one artists, Willem de Kooning among them, signed an open letter complaining that the building had no sympathy for showing paintings and sculpture. The critic Lewis Mumford did not care for it either, though others, Peter Blake among them, praised it.

Mayor Robert Wagner spoke at the opening, and so did a member of President Eisenhower’s cabinet. On the first Sunday it was open to the public, the museum had 16,039 visitors. In its first nine months, it had three-quarters of a million. The two old mining men stayed friends.

Harry later asked Hoover, by then eighty-eight, to write an introduction to a history of one of the Guggenheim Foundations. Hoover said no, because he had too much writing of his own. For most people, the name Guggenheim means that building, and it was Harry who got it finished. The next year, the government settled with Goddard’s estate.

The Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the new space agency paid one million dollars for the rights to his patents. The money was divided between his widow Esther and the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation. A space flight center in Maryland already carried Goddard’s name. The space agency dedicated it in March of 1961, on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the rocket in the cabbage patch.

After Alicia died, Harry ran Newsday himself for four years. In 1967 he hired Bill Moyers, who had been Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary, as publisher and kept the titles of president and editor-in-chief for himself. They split over the war in Vietnam; Harry complained that the paper’s coverage of the protests leaned left. In 1968 he backed Richard Nixon, and Moyers backed Hubert Humphrey.

Under Moyers, Newsday won another Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1970, for exposing secret land deals in eastern Long Island. Harry had three daughters and no son. That same year, 1968, he chose his successor at the head of the family’s affairs: his cousin Barbara’s son, Peter Lawson-Johnston, who was Solomon’s grandson. Lawson-Johnston went on to lead Solomon’s foundation for a quarter of a century, first as president and then as chairman.

The newspaper went the other way. Harry sold his controlling share of Newsday in 1970 to the Times Mirror Company of Los Angeles. Moyers and his backers had offered about ten million dollars more, and Moyers resigned within days. After he fell ill and his doctors told him he needed exercise, Harry had the rose garden behind Falaise turned into a swimming pool.

He died at the house on January 22, 1971. He was eighty and had cancer. That year he was added to the National Aviation Hall of Fame. His will gave Falaise to Nassau County, with its ninety acres and everything in the house, to be kept as a museum.

His bequest to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, which he had founded in 1929, started its program of grants for research into violence and aggression. The county took over the Navy’s land next door that same year—127 acres, with Hempstead House on it. The father’s estate and the son’s estate became one public park, the Sands Point Preserve, with Castle Gould as its visitor center. In 2006 the whole property went on to the National Register of Historic Places under the name Gould–Guggenheim Estate.

Falaise opened for public tours on May 20, 1973, with Harry’s furniture where he had left it. His trophies and racing memorabilia are still on display there, along with the paintings and the old carved doors. When Daniel Guggenheim died in 1930, his biographers put his estate at about twenty million dollars. Forbes had credited him with more than seventy million twelve years before.

Part of the difference is easy to trace, because he gave it away in public: the half million to New York University, the three million in the aeronautics fund, the foundation he and Florence set up that paid Goddard’s bills in New Mexico through the 1930s. The sources do not say how much of the rest was lost in the crash of 1929 or tied up in Chilean nitrate as its price fell. The fund may have been the best thing the family did with the money, because it knew when to stop. It set out to push flying forward, spent its money in four years, and closed.

The school of aerospace engineering at Georgia Tech still carries Daniel’s name. The two houses left the family in different ways. Florence gave the big one away during the war, and the Navy spent twenty years on the estate, teaching men to fly and sail without leaving the ground. Harry left his own house to the county in his will, furnished.

The Navy’s training center still builds its simulators in Orlando. The Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, the one that kept Goddard going, was dissolved in June of 2011; its papers are in the Library of Congress. Harry’s own foundation is still giving grants for research into violence. Solomon’s foundation still runs the spiral on Fifth Avenue, and in 1997 it opened a second museum in Bilbao, Spain.

The family business went a quieter way. The office the brothers built ran for most of a century, and in 1999 it was folded into a new investment firm called Guggenheim Partners. Fortune magazine reported in 2013 that the Guggenheim family owned only a small percentage of the firm that carries its name.