Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

But the money was like a parasite, or contagion, preying upon Cornie’s body and on his mind.

He had no children, and when his wife died[,] there was left not a single influence in all the world to influence him for good.”

Once the effort to break in socially is made, the newcomer finds most big cities culturally stimulating and financially rewarding, as small towns can rarely be.

creating the impression of a doubling of her power to anyone privileged enough to approach her.

the United States of the immediate postbellum period was suffering an identity crisis.

American society would make up for its youthful inexperience by taking the class signifiers of Europe for their own.

Her task was clear: get married—and make sure he was rich.

and passed set times in the afternoon creaking along in landaus from brownstone to brownstone, as often as not sending a footman to the door to leave cards on behalf of themselves, their husbands, and their children without bothering to try to step inside for an actual visit.

Wittingly or not, the Vanderbilts were giving an entertainment that paid homage to the past while single-mindedly lighting the path of the future of society—her torch and tiara preceded the Statue of Liberty by three years.

Around her throat, Miss Strong wore a black velvet ribbon with a bell and the word puss spelled out on the choker in large diamond letters.

Was a ball like this just frivolous entertainment, an excuse to burn through money at a rate never before attempted or imagined? Or was it evidence of superior taste, of a new elite establishing a truly American class and culture that would stand atop the world?

Of all life’s ceremonies that of marriage is the most touching and beautiful.

Leave it to a ten-year-old to say out loud what everyone else was whispering.

Consuelo was grateful that the veils covered her face. Even so, newspapers would later report that it was obvious she had been crying.

either addicted to or completely uninterested in the bicycle habit—indeed, to the public, Consuelo seemed to have no opinions of her own whatsoever.

Consuelo didn’t have any money of her own. What she had was her mother, Alva, and Alva’s ambition.

Alva informed her that she had no taste, and so, her opinions weren’t worth considering. “I thought I was doing right,” Consuelo said. “I don’t ask you to think. I do the thinking, you do as you are told,” Alva countered.

Alva, watching her dark, swanlike daughter about to accept her marital fate before the admiring eyes of all the best of New York society (her former in-laws notably excepted), glowed with cool triumph, which wasn’t exactly the same as pride, or love.

“Younger and more attractive women would patronize her,” Alva said to Sara, still speaking of herself in the third person, as was her wont when discussing painful topics. “And often before her very eyes, without even the thinnest veil of decency being drawn over the act, she would see others being given her place.”

“If marriage is a protection for the woman against many wrongs,” she said, “divorce is also an escape from many degrading evils.”

“the race would never progress if women were to eternally sacrifice themselves to a person or to a power.”

Purple-and-gold banners unfurled in the grand summer house bearing a quote from Susan B. Anthony (whom Alva would later disparage as insufficiently radical):

“Failure Is Impossible.” A stint in Europe left her believing that American suffragists were being too meek in their demands. The time had come to stop asking men to give them favors. The time had come to remake entirely how men saw women.

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.