Afterthoughts

The good fortune of our branch of the family is largely due to the hard work of individuals who did not bear our name.

CH Woerishoffer came to the US in 1864 as a young 21-year-old with no means.  He worked his way through the world of finance and married Anna Uhl, youngest daughter of the founder of the NY Staatszeitung in 1873 at the age of 29.  I believe his mother-in-law put up $300'000 ($5.75 million today) which allowed him to set up Woerishoffer & Co.

Between 1873 and his untimely death just thirteen years later, C. F. Woerishoffer became one of the wealthiest and most influential figures on Wall Street.

After CFW died, the United States Trust Company became responsible for managing the estate and in 1931 these assets were placed in trust (an Austrian newspaper, Freiheit, estimated it at $200 million (approximately $3 billion today) in favor of her 3 grandchildren.  These figures may well be exaggerated, and more accurate information likely exists in the archives.

By the time Carlo entered the picture (around 1896–97), most of those who had built this great fortune had either passed away or were very old.

Jakob Uhl and Anna Behr had both passed away and Oswald Ottendorfer was 72 at the time and hardly knew Carlo.

Anna Woerishoffer, Carlo's mother-in-law and Ida Seilern, his mother, were respectively 47 and 56 years old.

This was the perfect setup for a 29-year-old dapper Austrian aristocrat with a pencil moustache, to sweep the 23-year-old American heiress off her feet.  There was no control.  Anna W. was there to keep an eye on Carlo but she too may have been under his charm.

After the marriage, Carlo seems to have regarded his wife’s fortune as his own. With no employment, little experience, and no supervision, he speculated recklessly—unaware of the risks he was taking—with disastrous results.

Without the irrevocable trusts most of the Woerishoffer estate would have disappeared long ago.

It took fifty years (1836–1886) to build two immense fortunes—the New Yorker Staatszeitung and the Woerishoffer trusts—and scarcely a century more for both to all but disappear.

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