Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

“Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself,”

Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt founded a dynasty that would rule the Gilded Age, and his rise was dizzying. He possessed a genius and a mania for making money, but his obsession with material wealth would border on the pathological, and the pathology born of that wealth would go on to infect each successive generation in different ways.

This is the story of the extraordinary rise and epic fall of the Vanderbilt dynasty. This is the story of the greatest American fortune ever squandered.

In its 77 years of existence, The Breakers saw the equivalent of nearly $218 million evaporate into thin air.

The Breakers was the center of attention, the center of fame, and the center of envy without being a center of power. The house stands as a temple to excess.

The United States, a country founded on antiroyalist principles, would, only twenty years after its revolutionary burst into existence, produce the progenitor of a family that would come to hold itself up as American royalty, with the titles and palaces to prove it. But their empire would last for less than a hundred years before collapsing under its own weight, destroying itself with its own pathology.

New York society could ignore him, but in the end, they couldn’t ignore his money. No one could.

“I don’t forget what I remember.”

The ideology of New York City was, is, and probably always will be profit.

The combination of Caroline Schermerhorn’s Dutch lineage and the Astor fur fortune was a powerful nexus, but one crucial ingredient was still needed to vault Mrs. Astor into the stratosphere of American social influence: a war that would call into question what American culture really was.

Mrs. Astor’s signal insight turned on the necessity of laying claim to a heritage, even if it was an invented one. In her schema, social ambition could be seen as a nationalist project, an investment in Americanism at a moment during which the concept of “American” was far from fixed. 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.

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.

“My life was never destined to be quite happy. . . . Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

Spiritual Poverty produces as great evils even among the rich. The idle useless lonely woman of the leisure class is a thing spiritually dead.”

The time had come to stop asking men to give them favors. The time had come to remake entirely how men saw women. “Woman’s emancipation means education of men as well as women,” Alva insisted.

“I predict that just as now[,] the men look back to the women of the Victorian Era[,] who fainted away and wept on all occasions[,] and think what wretched companions they would now make, so the men of tomorrow will look upon the stupid doll of today who may not faint but cannot think.”

There it is: the source of the contempt. Alva could not stand to feel owned herself. But even more than that, she could not stand people who, she believed, allowed themselves to be owned. It is impossible to think about Alva’s feminism without looking squarely at her virulent racism.

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.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

In reminiscing about her stilted relationship with her mother during her teens, she mused, “Maybe she was as scared of me as I was of her?”

Everyone in this story wants something. Money. Attention. Safety. Security. But most of all, love. The one thing of which, no matter how privileged the surroundings, how polished the chauffeur-driven cars or delicate the crystal sherry glasses, there still never seems to be enough.

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

“At the very least,” she’d written to me once, “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.”

But dying in theory is one thing; the reality is far different.

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

“So many, and then there’s no one left but oneself. Then one knows it’s only the long walk of the blood—one’s children—that endure.”

There’s something poetic to be said about robbing the tomb of the richest family in America for metal decorations to be sold as junk, but men wielding stolen sledgehammers on Christmas Eve probably don’t have a lot of spare time for poetry. So, maybe that’s all they were after: scraps.