Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife, Alice, built the seventy-room mansion in 1895, and a Vanderbilt had lived there ever since. Gladys would be the last.

Despite being the Commodore’s namesake, the younger Cornelius had always been a source of shame.

Cornelius had no qualms about striking a deal with the British, who had shut down New York’s harbor. He moved supplies for the British military and, when possible, brought produce from up the Hudson River to hungry New Yorkers. The money Cornelius made playing both sides of the blockade allowed him to invest in two other periaugers.

The first family arrival that we know of was Jan Aertsen, a broke, undistinguished farmer from a village named Bilt, in the Utrecht region of Holland, an inland hamlet about thirty miles southeast of modern-day Amsterdam. He was born there around 1627, and his name was recorded as Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, or “from the Bilt.”

“Redemptioners” were indentured servants who agreed to work off the cost of their passage within a stated period of time after arrival; if they failed to do so, the ship’s captain who had arranged their passage could then sell their labor to the highest bidder.

Wall Street is so named because it used to have a wall running along it, south of which lived most of the colony; the wall was designed to protect against unknown forces in the wilderness,

But successive fires that tore through New York City in 1776 and 1835 consumed any remnants of Dutch-period architecture that would have been left standing. Unlike Boston, which nearly sanctified its seventeenth-century buildings and wears its eighteenth-century identity on its sleeve, New York City keeps its Dutch past largely hidden.

And while Billy undoubtedly facilitated the rise of the Vanderbilt fortune, as the only one of the descendants actually to build upon the great monument of wealth left by the Commodore, he also initiated its fall, by inaugurating the Vanderbilt siege on the gilded gates of New York society that ushered in the truly astonishing excess for which the Vanderbilts would become famous.

New York society was personified by two inscrutable consuls, leaders elected by their own guile and consenting to reign together, ruling over the patricians who cowered at their feet: Caroline Astor and Ward McAllister.

Caroline Astor was born Caroline Schermerhorn in 1830 to an old Dutch family of famously staid respectability and decent money. In 1853, she married William Backhouse Astor Jr., descendant of a family that had originally made its fortune in fur trading.

She also recognized early on the importance of money in a country without landed aristocracy. In New York, society and money would never be divorced again.

Caroline Astor was a “nob,” someone with a long pedigree and old money. The Vanderbilts, in contrast, were “swells,” nouveau riche arrivistes who were ready to lavish their fortunes on social climbing.

Mrs. Astor determined that for acceptance into society, one must be at least three generations removed from whoever’s hands had been dirtied in the making of money.

Ostensibly referring to the number of people who could fit in Mrs. Astor’s ballroom (a rumor that has since been put to rest), McAllister determined that New York society was led by “the Four Hundred,” no more and no less.

(Several more years would pass before the list was published in the form of a “blue book,” which persists today as the Social Register.) The artificiality of this distinction, the sheer invention of it, marked New York society then as much as it does now.

Alice and Cornelius II had the money, to be sure, and were enough generations removed from the Commodore to claim the respectability necessary for social success according to Caroline Astor and Ward McAllister. What they lacked, however, was “ease of manner,”

In Society as I Have Found It, without naming her explicitly, McAllister calls Caroline Astor a “true and loyal friend in sunshine and shower.” Mrs. Astor did not attend his funeral.

Alva had very little patience for tradition—Alva was known as Alva Vanderbilt. The wife of William Kissam Vanderbilt, one of the two surviving sons of Billy the Blatherskite and a grandson of the Commodore,

Alva Erskine Smith was an expatriate Confederate, born in Mobile, Alabama (like Frank Crawford Vanderbilt before her), in 1853, to a family rich in Kentucky cotton money. She was raised with a taste for brutality, and she freely admitted that as a girl she enjoyed abusing the children who were enslaved by her family.

The snub of Caroline Astor’s daughter was a masterful maneuver. According to the rules by which their society functioned, Alva Vanderbilt was being scrupulously correct. That Mrs. Astor had never deigned to call on her suggested that she believed Alva Vanderbilt did not socially exist.

“And I noticed,” Alva continued, “that the women grew stupid and morbid, that, like unpicked sweet peas, they went to seed while it was still blooming time and their great cry, midst all their luxury and material satisfaction, was ‘I am so lonely.’”

It is impossible to think about Alva’s feminism without looking squarely at her virulent racism. Her contempt for women who allowed themselves to be subservient to men aligned directly with her contempt for enslaved Black people for, in her absurdly simplistic view, allowing themselves to be enslaved.

Not all was lost—Alice Vanderbilt’s Augustus Saint-Gaudens mantelpiece now stands in the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the gate to her driveway guards the Conservatory Garden in Central Park.

Eagle-eyed viewers can spot Vanderbilt castoffs in film after film in the 1940s and later, as the stuff of an American dynastic fantasy was marshaled to embroider the fantasy lives of Americans all over the country.

Some Herter furniture possibly chucked out of Billy Vanderbilt’s mansion even appears, fleetingly, in Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

William Waldorf Astor tore down the family house next door and erected a new and fashionable hotel, the Waldorf, bringing crowds and noise and public life to Mrs. Astor’s exclusive doorstep, she considered exacting her revenge by tearing down her own house and building a stable so that the beautiful people would be harassed by the odor of manure. Instead, she erected a hotel of her own—the Astoria. Eventually, the two hotels would merge, creating the first Waldorf-Astoria Hotel,

The original Waldorf-Astoria was razed in 1929 and replaced with the building that stands at that address today—the Empire State Building.