Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

Whether a servant or the host or some other member of the family sees a guest to the door, the door is never closed until the guest is actually underway, by foot or by car.

Most of the early settlers in New Amsterdam were men. (The Castello Plan lists a trumpeter, for example, but no housemaids.) The colony that would become New York City was a well-ordered machine for the creation of profit, and profit was maximized by the maintenance of the monopoly of the Dutch West India Company. The ideology of New York City was, is, and probably always will be profit.

The unfairness of it all didn’t matter one whit.

who has the aspirations of a duke and the fortunes of a footman, do not cut him,” McAllister wrote. “It is better to cross the street and avoid meeting him.”

(Even today, the carpeting of the Metropolitan Opera, which relocated to Lincoln Center in 1966, is lush red velvet.)

There was nothing for Consuelo to do but swallow her loneliness and fear and anxiety into a sour little ball in the pit of her stomach.

Was this what marriage was? She was seized with a miserable longing to be safe with her family again. She burned with resentment that that family was gone,

“In the hidden reaches where memory probes,” Consuelo would write, much later in her life, “lie sorrows too deep to fathom.”

women in their eighties and nineties who had been marching for decades. The youngest were tiny girls pushed in perambulators, sticky-cheeked and squalling. In between these two extremes could be found every imaginable stripe of woman from New York City: factory girls, skinny and exhausted; respectable matrons; seamstresses, milliners, laundresses, and clerks. A coalition of Black women had chosen black frocks with yellow sashes and carried yellow-and-black pennants with American flags. A band of women from Chinatown rode in their own automobile decorated with a saffron-yellow dragon, to spare their feet, broken by binding. There were women on horseback, women in academic robes with hoods lined in the satin colors of Vassar and Columbia, women whose seamed faces betrayed a lifetime of hard use. One woman was costumed as Joan of Arc, but much less finely than the Joan of Arc who appeared at an 1880s costume ball.

Alva’s objection to marriage, ultimately, was that she felt owned by her husband—like a slave, robbed of authority, robbed of personhood. Slavery was the most debased condition Alva—once a slaveholder, born into a slaveholding family, who had played “North and South” the way other children played cops and robbers—could possibly conceive of.

“Gilded sin is so much more interesting than ragged sin,” she reflected. “Scandal dressed in ermine and purple is much more salacious than scandal in overalls or a kitchen apron.”

Alva died in France in January 1933, shortly after her eightieth birthday. Her life was celebrated at a lavish funeral in New York City marked with female pallbearers

The woman whose single-minded drive to work for women’s equality and who was motivated by her deep-seated, unapologetic contempt for Black people was enshrined in American history by the country’s first Black president, Barack Obama.

She and Alfred had two children together, Alfred Junior and George Washington III,

waited to welcome and dip our flag to the Lusitania on her maiden voyage,” Slidell marveled. “We saw the first and last of her.”

Coming so soon on the heels of the Titanic, the loss of the Lusitania staggered the American and British public not only for the number of lives lost, but for the fame of some of those lives, Alfred’s chief among them.

When the latter arranged to be examined by Alice’s private physician, who then attested in writing to her intact virginity, Alice’s veneer of icy disapproval dissolved completely. In the TV version of this story, Alice is played by Bette Davis, who conveys this moment with magnificent, almost incredulous laughter. The revelation was shared with the press, too, for good measure.

Also, in 1931, her most important public sculpture, a memorial to the women who died in the Titanic sinking (from which director James Cameron got Rose’s posture of an angel, arms outstretched on the prow of the ship, for his 1997 movie), was unveiled in Washington, DC.

“Those born to the storm, find the calm very boring,”

“when we die we will be as if asleep, in the same place we were before birth, so why fear death? Scattered on the wind, unaware as we were before we came into this world, with no memory of any of it.”

“They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing,”