Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

In this nation of immigrants, the idea that people seen as nouveau riche, or “new money,” first arrived on North American shores in the 1600s might seem counterintuitive. The Vanderbilt money was made in the nineteenth century, but the family itself had been around since New York City was New Amsterdam.

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.”

when Jan Aertsen’s time as an indentured servant expired, he obtained a small holding of land in the area we now know as Flatbush, in Brooklyn.

Jan Aertsen married a woman named Annetje Hendricks, and they had at least one son, Aris Janse van der Bilt, around 1653.

he was certainly there by 1661, and died in 1705.

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 region of Brooklyn where Jan Aertsen van der Bilt settled then became known as Flatlands (and would remain so up until the nineteenth century). Jan’s son Aris married a woman named Hillitje Hillegonde Vanderbeeck in 1677. They had several children, including Jacobus (Jacob) Aertse van der Bilt, who was born in 1692—the year of the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, though not as dramatic a year in the rolling farmlands, on the wagon-rutted king’s highways, or on the busy waterfronts of Long Island. Jacob married and had a son, also named Jacob, and by 1731, he’d ventured with his family across the choppy Narrows of New York Harbor to settle and farm Staten Island. It was from this Staten Island branch of van der Bilts, a mere two generations later, that the Commodore would spring.

The changing of New Amsterdam for New York, the Anglicization of the Dutch colonies, inscribed itself in the Vanderbilt family, too; the second Jacob Vanderbilt married an Englishwoman, Mary Sprague, on Staten Island in 1746. This meant that the Commodore’s father, the first Cornelius Vanderbilt on Staten Island, was half-English, and his mother, Phebe Hand, was fully so. Despite his name, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt was only one quarter Dutch.

In 1817, when Cornelius Vanderbilt was a strapping twenty-three-year-old ferry captain with a young wife and two baby daughters, a businessman named Thomas Gibbons hired him to run a Hudson River steamboat between New Jersey and New York. Cornelius kept his own ferry boats running on the side, but he assumed control of Gibbons’s ferry concerns as well. But while Vanderbilt’s ferries all ran within New York State, Gibbons’s ferries were interstate, and technically illegal. He was breaking a long-standing monopoly on that essential service (echoed by the battle between medallioned yellow taxis and ride-hailing apps in New York City today). None of this rule breaking bothered the Commodore.

Vanderbilt, meanwhile, went to Washington, DC, and hired attorney Daniel Webster to argue for the overturn of the monopoly. On March 2, 1824, the Supreme Court ruled in Gibbons’s favor in Gibbons v. Ogden, a case still cited frequently today, which marked the turn in America from monopolies to markets. The case doesn’t bear Vanderbilt’s name, and he didn’t appear in the news around it, but it is covered in his fingerprints in its declaring that individual states had no standing to interfere with interstate commerce. The last of the protected Dutch-era monopolies were washed away

That was Cornie’s father’s judgment, anyway: that his son was weak, an embarrassment, a drain on the old man’s resources, a drain on his name. It was hard being the son of the Commodore, harder still to be named after him and judged only on the differences between them. Always being found wanting.

The Commodore had been dead a little more than five years, but even from beyond the grave he hounded Cornie. The lawyer Cornie had hired to try to break the Commodore’s will was suing him for payment. The selfsame will that had left nearly everything, $100 million, to Cornie’s brother Billy—William H. Vanderbilt.

The Blatherskite. That’s what their father had always called Billy. The blockhead. Well, he may have been a blatherskite and a blockhead, but Cornie and his sisters were convinced Billy had swayed their father in his interest, consolidating his control over the Vanderbilt fortune through undue influence in the waning days of the Commodore’s final illness.

the same asylum where the Commodore had committed his wife, Cornie’s mother, Sophia, in 1846, against the wishes of all the children except Billy, who seemed willing to do almost anything to stay in his father’s good graces. The Commodore had sent her there ostensibly for her instability during what he referred to as her “change of life,” but in truth, he wanted her out of the way so he could spend time with his children’s governess unfettered by the constraints of marriage.

Cornie hadn’t had the wherewithal to try to break the Commodore’s will by himself. In that enterprise, he had joined with his sisters Ethelinda and Mary. They would have been mad not to. One hundred million dollars, all to Billy, with only a few hundred thousand dollars for everyone else? They filed a formal objection to the probating of the will in Surrogate Court in March 1877, two months after the Commodore’s death,

Billy was controlled in his appetites, be they for tobacco, food, liquor, or women. He had married Maria Louisa Kissam, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister in New York City, in 1841, and eight of their children had survived to adulthood, including Cornelius II, whom Cornie had been accused of impersonating when he needed lines of clean credit.

beginning of Billy’s special influence over the Commodore to the moment when he was the only one of the children to take their father’s side when he sent their mother, Sophia, to the asylum in 1846.

1850s. While Cornie was wending his way in and out of institutions, Billy demonstrated enough nascent business acumen that the Commodore brought him in from exile on a farm in Staten Island to run the affairs of the New York Central Railroad.

Commodore named Billy president of the New York and Harlem Railroad in 1864, and within a few years he became vice president of the entire Vanderbilt railroad empire, expanding along the Great Lakes and establishing a monopoly on all rail travel from the East Coast to as far as Chicago.

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.

Billy offered to give Cornie a million dollars if he made the suits go away.

Around two in the afternoon, alone in his room at the Glenham Hotel, Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt placed his Smith and Wesson revolver to his temple and pulled the trigger.

In his will, he left the newly built Hartford house to George Terry. The Baltimore Sun theorized that Cornie’s wayward attitudes could be traced to his coming of age after the Commodore’s fortune was made,

the Gilded Age—the name given by Mark Twain to the glittering years from the 1870s until around 1900—New

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. They were the keepers of the gates, the makers of the taste, and the arbiters of who could be said to belong and who would be excluded.

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. (The Astor Place subway station mosaics today feature silhouettes of beavers in homage to the family’s roots.) William was a younger son who—not unlike Cornie Vanderbilt—resented his elder brother John Jacob Astor III for having been the favorite of their father and for having a snobbish demeanor.

nicknamed Lina by her friends,

With each new wave of arrivals of immigrants from Europe, new money from the Midwest, and expatriate former Confederates (like Frank Vanderbilt), Mrs. Astor felt more keenly the imperative to define and codify who should qualify as polite society, preferably in terms that would also consolidate her own power and influence.

Samuel Ward McAllister was born in 1827 in Savannah, Georgia. He studied for a time at Yale and then went west with the Gold Rush in 1852,

Upon his return to New York, he married a fellow Southerner, Sarah Gibbons, but then refused to read law as his family expected and instead traveled to Europe to give himself the requisite amount of polish. On his Grand Tour, McAllister made a careful study of all aspects of social life:

“the most complete dandy in America,” and established himself in New York as essentially a professional snob.

Under McAllister’s guidance, Mrs. Astor began to Old Worldify herself completely: she instituted livery for her servants, began collecting French art, hired a French chef, served dinner on French and German china.

They sought to rate people according to a hierarchy as much as they wished to rank food or clothing or interior décor. To that end, Ward McAllister divided the social world along two axes: “nobs” on the one hand and “swells” on the other.

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.

“A fortune of a million,” McAllister remarked to the New York Tribune, “is only respectable poverty.”

European taste, plus aristocratic pretension, plus vast postbellum wealth—this was the recipe Mrs. Astor and Ward McAllister drew up for social acceptance in New York City.

in 1872 McAllister founded an organization that he named the Society of Patriarchs. This group instituted a series of Patriarch Balls, designed for introducing young people to society and to one another. Each Patriarch was issued a finite number of invitations that he could disseminate to young men and women of his choosing for each ball. The name was rather transparently designed to create the impression of a long-standing tradition, completely belying the fact that the society was a new invention of his own. Under McAllister’s system, there were only twenty-five Patriarchs, defined as “representative men of worth, respectability, and responsibility.”

Ward McAllister’s biggest triumph of branding, however, was not the institution of the Patriarchs, but the naming of a number: four hundred. 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.

then New York’s most fashionable neighborhood, Washington Square,

Billy, consolidated his position as the head of the family, that the Vanderbilt siege on New York society began in earnest. Under Billy’s stewardship, the Vanderbilt fortune ballooned, and while Billy himself was only one generation away from his father’s rough beginnings on the Staten Island waterfront, his own children—including Cornelius II (who would finish building The Breakers in 1895) and William Kissam—qualified for inclusion in society by Mrs. Astor’s rules.

Cornelius II managed to score some Patriarchs invitations, only because Ward McAllister thought that the sheer size of the Vanderbilt fortune meant their social triumph was inevitable, but most polite society hostesses kept the Vanderbilts at arm’s length through the 1870s.

The newly rich Academy rejects, led by Billy Vanderbilt, instead banded together and enlisted architect Josiah Cady to erect a new Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway between Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth Streets.

The new opera house opened to great fanfare on the fine and mild night of October 22, 1883, featuring soprano Christine Nilsson singing Faust. The symbolism of this particular soprano singing this particular opera would be enshrined in literature when Edith Wharton began her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the Gilded Age, The Age of Innocence, with the line “On a January evening of the early seventies, Christine Nilsson was singing in Faust at the Academy of Music in New York.” No more symbolic reference to the sweeping away of the old guard could Wharton imagine.

(Wharton alluded to this embarrassing error when she described the Academy as being cherished “for its excellent acoustics, always so problematic a quality in halls built for the hearing of music.”)

“William H. Vanderbilt developed an unusual degree of sociability during the evening,” the New York Times reported the following day. “He is the owner of three boxes, two of which he occupied at different times. He also paid two or three visits to the boxes of his friends, and while passing through the lobby stopped frequently and talked with various acquaintances. He was apparently in excellent spirits,” though the paper then went on to add that “as he walked about it was plain to see that he is growing round-shouldered.” Billy had succeeded in buying an opera box not only for himself, but one for each of his sons. His triumph was total. But heavy is the head that wears the crown. “All the nouveaux riches were there,” sniffed an anonymous critic with a more pointed perspective than the newspapers. “The Goulds and Vanderbilts and people of that ilk perfumed the air with the odor of crisp greenbacks. The tiers of boxes looked like cages in a menagerie of monopolists.

Almost immediately, the old New York families caved and consented to rent boxes at the new opera house. By 1885, only two years after the Met’s opening, the Academy of Music had closed its doors.

That same year, Billy “the Blatherskite” Vanderbilt died at the age of sixty-four. Each of his daughters inherited around $10 million, but the bulk of his fortune was split between his two eldest sons, each of whom got $65 million, about $1.7 billion today.

Cornelius II assumed control of the family’s business interests. He was the obvious choice. He had the ambition of his grandfather, which probably explains why the Commodore ...

He had met his wife, Alice Claypoole Gwynne,