Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

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.

I don’t think I would have been as driven as I have been if I had grown up believing there was a pot of gold somewhere waiting for me.

A few central myths appear again and again in Americans’ popular imagination: that success is available to anyone who is willing to work hard, for example, and that success is worthier of celebration if it is achieved without help.

We somehow, simultaneously, believe that we are all the same, all created equal, and yet we secretly suspect that the rich are somehow more special, that they have something figured out that the rest of us don’t know.

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.

The Breakers is the grandest and most opulent of Newport’s Gilded Age mansions, and it remains the most popular tourist attraction in the state of Rhode Island.

As is often the case with many things designed to impress, The Breakers proved to be an enormous financial burden.

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.

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

In a very real way, the Commodore was part of the first generation that truly made the United States into America as we know it now, with its disorderly market culture and its thirst for competition.

It was hard being the son of the Commodore, harder still to be named after him and judged only on the differences between them.

Cornie’s wayward attitudes could be traced to his coming of age after the Commodore’s fortune was made, rather than during its making, as Billy had.

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.

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

The practice of paying calls was one of the more arcane, time-consuming instances of social theater practiced by upper- and upper-middle-class women in the Gilded Age.

The snub of Caroline Astor’s daughter was a masterful maneuver.

Mrs. Astor and Mrs. Vanderbilt did not meet face-to-face; no words were exchanged between them personally. But delivery of the calling card, according to the complex set of rules they lived by, meant that Alva Vanderbilt had won.

And New York society would never be the same again.

Six-point-four million dollars for a party.

These two events—Alva’s ball and the recovery of the bodies from the Diamond coal mine tragedy—shared equal space on the front page of the New York Times

Consuelo realized with a sickening drop in her stomach that her mother had ordered the dress when they were still in Paris, before the Duke had officially proposed. That’s how immutable Alva’s plans for her were.

Consuelo wasn’t the first of the “million-dollar duchesses,” but she was the most spectacular.

the Washington Post had published a roundup of the most eligible millionaire girls on the scene in Newport and Bar Harbor, shamelessly pointing out that it was Consuelo’s mother’s ambition driving her daughter’s rumored engagement to the Duke, and not the young lady’s own heart.

Alva had determined to marry Consuelo into royalty. No American man would be good enough. Consuelo was a chip, a token that Alva would play in her never-ending quest for social influence and rank.

The Gilded Age was over, and Alva—the most gilded of them all, the wearer of Catherine the Great’s pearls, the hostess of the most fantastic and expensive costume ball ever given, plotter of the most spectacular royal marriage for her daughter—was ready to burn it all to the ground.

Within her understanding of her marriage to Willie and its end can be found the seeds of Alva’s later activism, as well as one woman’s experience of nineteenth-century perspectives on gender and conditions of freedom—or lack thereof.

“Scandal dressed in ermine and purple is much more salacious than scandal in overalls or a kitchen apron.”

“Woman’s emancipation means education of men as well as women,” Alva insisted.

There it is: the source of the contempt. Alva could not stand to feel owned herself.

Fog can do funny things with sound and space and light. Ships can loom into being out of nowhere, almost as if they have risen up suddenly from the depths—even ships as massive and elegantly appointed as the R.M.S. Lusitania.

While it was true that newspapers all over the country had posted notices from the German government on their date of departure, warning that ocean liners could not expect to be safe from the flourishing war in Europe, nobody on board had taken the warning as anything other than grandstanding.

Alfred had never expected to be the head of the Vanderbilt family.

(The fact that a journey across the North Atlantic was almost always too cold or inclement for passengers to enjoy dining al fresco didn’t stop the company from advertising its uniqueness.)

The sinking of the Titanic only three years before had shocked every level of American society, but members of the Vanderbilt set had felt the loss with special keenness.

The Lusitania was in fact officially listed as an auxiliary ship of war, and her manifest on this voyage stated that her cargo included more than 4 million rounds of rifle cartridges, 1,250 empty shell casings, and 18 cases of fuses.

The Lusitania sank in only eighteen minutes,

taking more than 1,100 people with it. Of the 139 U.S. citizens traveling on board, 129 were lost, including Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt.

Though two years would pass before the United States did officially join the war against Germany, its entry was partly in response to the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare in the waters around Great Britain.

The professional crew, the jockeying at the start—all of it, for this, the greatest yacht racing series in the world, to have no wind.

Harold Vanderbilt was convinced he was the superior sailor, though, with his lifelong thirst for speed and relentless drive to compete. If only there were a breath of wind.

The United States had never lost the America’s Cup, ever, and Harold would be damned if it lost now.

Endeavour had beaten him. Sopwith, the Brit, had beaten him. Harold might be the first American skipper ever to lose the America’s Cup.

All right, so he had been beaten. But now he had seen how Sopwith handled Endeavour in heavy weather. Harold knew what Rainbow could do. At least, he thought he did.

It wasn’t enough.

Not only did the challenger now lead in the standings by two races to zero—something almost unheard of in the America’s Cup—but Sopwith had finished the course in only three hours, nine minutes, and one second: a new record.

After they rounded the mark, Harold stepped away from the helm, out of either frustration, pragmatism, or shame.