Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

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.

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.

In 1866 he bought Saint John’s Park, a lush and exclusive enclave bordered by Varick, Beach, Hudson, and Laight Streets in Lower Manhattan, planned in the same elegant manner as Gramercy Park. It had been surrounded by grand

The apology was begrudgingly given, and it’s worth noting that the recalcitrant daughter in this instance was fifty-one years old and the stepmother all of thirty-seven.

The English took over New Netherland in 1664, to the consternation of the Dutch people living along

the Hudson, up to Albany, and into Long Island—like Jan Aertsen.

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.

he also initiated its fall, by inaugurating the Vanderbilt siege on

the gilded gates of New York society that ushered in the truly astonishing excess for which the Vanderbilts would become famous.

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.

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.

To that end, in 1872 McAllister founded an organization that he named the Society of Patriarchs.

Unlike his namesake, however, Cornelius II softened his ambition with an interest in religion. He had met his wife, Alice Claypoole Gwynne, when they were both teaching Sunday school at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue, and by all accounts, he remained a religious man over the course of his life.

“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.”

Third, and perhaps most jarring, is her choice of the word slave. Alva’s objection to marriage, ultimately, was that she felt owned by her husband—like a slave, robbed of authority, robbed of personhood. Slavery was the most debased condition Alva—once a slaveholder, born into a slaveholding family,

In 1909 she founded the Women’s Political

Equality League, and she opened Marble House, whose furniture was still shrouded in dust covers, to suffragist planning meetings. 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.

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.

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.

Baby Gloria was now the piggy bank for her entire household, and she couldn’t even talk.

she had made a fatal error. By surrendering her child, she had surrendered her own financial freedom.

Seeing this accusation splashed across the newspapers, Little Gloria would discover another fear that would stalk her into adulthood. What if she was like her mother . . . in that way? What would that mean?

Everyone in this story wants something. Money. Attention. Safety. Security. But most of all, love.

Sneak upstairs to the grand ballroom at the Plaza Hotel

Trip down the steps of the Plaza Hotel, past the Pulitzer Fountain in Grand Army Plaza, across from where FAO Schwarz used to be, and you will be treading on the site of what was once Alice Vanderbilt’s private, circular driveway, opposite Central Park.

Stroll a few blocks down to 666 Fifth Avenue, between Fifty-First and Fifty-Second Streets—at

Tool over to Madison Avenue and Fifty-First Street to call upon Alva in the second stage of her life, for this is where she built the Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont House in 1909, another of her collaborations with Hunt.

Vanderbilt Hotel,

Waldorf,

Astoria.

Grand Central,