Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

For, as William Dean Howells once noted, “Inequality is as dear to the American heart as liberty itself,” and it is only a step from this to arrive at something which passes muster for a Society definition of America: that all men may be born equal but most of us spend the better part of our born days in trying to be as unequal as we can. —Cleveland Amory, Who Killed Society?

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.

who died while a student at Yale,

Typhoid fever

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.

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

Billy would go on to more than double the Commodore’s fortune in just eight years—the only one of the Vanderbilt descendants to add to the wealth they’d been handed. By 1885, when he died, Billy had amassed a staggering fortune of some $200 million, the equivalent of about $5.4 billion today.

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

Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain a death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

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.

“In the long run, the rich run together, no matter what,” he told Playboy in 1980. “They will cling, until they feel it’s safe to be disloyal, then no one can be more so.”

“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.”

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