Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

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.

The Vanderbilt dynasty disappeared long ago, and my parents had made sure I understood early on that there was no “Vanderbilt money” or trust fund I’d be inheriting when I became an adult. They wanted me to be my own person, and I am grateful to them for that.

The Vanderbilt story somehow manages to be both unique and also, deeply, universally American. It is a saga of wealth and success and individualism, but as it turns out, those aren’t necessarily the universal goods our culture likes to believe they are.

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.

Before they made their final trip down, they went out on the terrace overlooking the ocean and toasted The Breakers with a bottle of champagne, remembering family and friends and a life now ending. 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.

The Breakers, named after the waves that crash ashore at the base of the cliffs behind the property, rose from the ashes of its former self, a temple to Vanderbilt money and ambition.

The sheer size of The Breakers is hard to contemplate: Seventy rooms comprising square footage better measured in acreage than in feet—nearly three times as big as the White House.

A single ticket to tour The Breakers now costs twenty-six dollars, or about one dollar in 1913 money—just about what a scullery maid employed in the Vanderbilts’ kitchen could have expected to be paid for a month of work. The Breakers has never been shy about its relationship with money.

When The Breakers was first built, there was no federal income tax. After the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified in 1913, the great fortunes of the Gilded Age were exposed for the first time to taxation from the government, and Alice Vanderbilt was no exception.

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

As a teenager she was all over The Breakers, Eloise-like, working in the Children’s Cottage gift shop, hanging out with the guides, visiting with the security guards, polishing the brass hinges on the oak doors before they opened every morning. But

She never looked back. The Breakers now belonged to the Preservation Society of Newport County and to the public—perhaps to history as well.

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.

That is why all old American families such as mine have strong and simple roots here.

Since then, he had lived in the double-width town house for more than thirty years, and in that time had made another great fortune, his second, in railroads, but he never considered moving or building a grander home.

Of course, the Commodore had laid many monuments to himself over the years. There were the ships and trains that bore his name and the portraits of himself he had commissioned and given to his favored children.

The statue he had built of himself was eventually moved some two miles north to Grand Central Terminal, where it still stands today.

it was through her influence and introductions that the Commodore put up $1 million for the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, to found the Central University in Tennessee, which would eventually be renamed Vanderbilt University in his honor. In

Cornelius Vanderbilt started his life with next to nothing. He barely had any formal education, and yet, lying there in his bed, on the point of death, with his doctors and his wife and her minister watching over him, he was about to leave behind more money than any American at the time had ever accumulated: $100 million, the equivalent of more than $2 billion today. It beggared the imagination.

No one could believe that the man who controlled one out of every twenty American dollars in circulation at that time could actually, finally die.

Descended from a Dutchman who came to the New World as an indentured servant before staking a claim in Brooklyn, the “van der Bilts” had farmed on Staten Island for almost a century by the time Cornelius was born.

With money came power. With money came freedom. And that is what the young man who would be the Commodore was after.

This sense of freedom infused the culture of the wharves around Staten Island and Manhattan, and Cornelius took to it like a fish to water. He drank and whored and didn’t stand down from a fight. The wharves were the crucible in which Cornelius Vanderbilt’s acquisitive hunger was forged.

The money Cornelius made playing both sides of the blockade allowed him to invest in two other periaugers.

Cornelius and Sophia had thirteen children, of whom twelve survived to adulthood: Phebe Jane (named for his mother), Ethelinda, Eliza Matilda, William Henry (Billy), Emily Almira, Sophia Johnson, Maria Louisa, Frances Lavinia, Cornelius Jeremiah, George Washington (who died at age four, in 1836), Mary Alicia, Catherine Juliette, and the second George Washington.

In August 1869, he and Frank had eloped. She signed a prenuptial agreement first, relinquishing any claim to Vanderbilt’s estate in exchange for half a million dollars in first mortgage bonds in the New York and Harlem Railroad.

period architecture that would have been left standing. Unlike Boston, which nearly sanctified its seventeenth-century buildings and wears its eighteenth-century identity on its sleeve, New York City keeps its Dutch past largely hidden.

The burghers in pot hats and bag breeches that wandered along Perel-Straat (Pearl Street) when it was the water-line of the East River, and the faithful huis-vrouws in balloon skirts that chattered along the cow path (Beekman Street) leading through the Beekman farm up to the (City Hall) park would never be able to orient themselves in the new New York. But remnants of Dutch life sometimes peek through the rocky soil of Manhattan, buried under twelve generations of silt, offering a window into what Jan Aertsen’s world might have felt like.

The 1600s were something of a golden age in Dutch culture, and some of that relatively high life traveled with Dutch settlers when they came to the New World.

This picture of everyday Dutch life stands in contrast to archaeological evidence of English settlements in New England, which suggest a plainer existence. New Englanders, while no strangers to the profit motive in their settlements, were self-abnegating religious extremists, carving out a foothold in wilderness that Puritan minister Cotton Mather memorably termed “once the Devil’s territories.”

Street plans list copious breweries, suggesting that New Yorkers, then as now, liked a good tipple.

a company town run by the Dutch West India Company for company purposes.

Thirty years ago workers constructing a federal office tower at 290 Broadway in Lower Manhattan uncovered intact human skeletal remains dozens of feet below the surface of the city streets. They had happened upon the “Negroes Buriel Ground,” six acres containing the remains of more than fifteen thousand people of African heritage, both enslaved and free, who had lived in colonial New Amsterdam and New York between the 1630s and 1795.

The 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 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.

Through the Native lands was the path to valuable beaver fur—the promise of wealth that had brought the Dutch West India Company to the Hudson River in the first place.

Hard to imagine that the man who made the Gilded Age according to his whims and who died on the cusp of the twentieth century had a great-grandfather born the same year as the Salem witch trials, but such are the long spans of generations.

Despite his name, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt was only one quarter Dutch.

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.

Gibbons hated Ogden with the fire of a thousand suns; he wanted to bankrupt him.

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.

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 in the unfettered competitive churn of steamboats plying between New York and New Jersey.

Ethelinda, and especially Mary, dated the 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.

By the time of the trial over the will, Billy served in his father’s place as president of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, the Canada Southern Railway, and the Michigan Central Railroad, with further holdings in the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad; the Chicago and Canada Southern Railway; the Detroit and Bay City Railroad; the Hudson River Railroad; the Hudson River Bridge; the Joliet and Northern Indiana Railroad; the Michigan Midland and Canada Railroad; the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad; the New York Central Sleeping Car Company; the New York and Harlem Railroad; the Spuyten Duyvil and Port Morris Railroad; and the Staten Island Rail-Road.

Despite all this, 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.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Cornie and his sisters couldn’t break the will. Billy would get everything. The unfairness of it all didn’t matter one whit.

It was almost as though the Vanderbilt fortune itself was Cornie’s affliction—the access to it, the lack of access to it, the assumption of it, the theft of it, his father’s affection for it. Epilepsy is a disease. But the money was like a parasite, or contagion, preying upon Cornie’s body and on his mind.

When the coroner was done with him, late that night, the sexton of the Church of the Strangers arrived at the Glenham Hotel with an icebox. He was the same sexton who had overseen the funeral of the Commodore five years before. A service was scheduled for the next morning, with a discourse preached by the same Reverend Doctor Deems who had called upon the Commodore in his final illness, and it took place in the same church the Commodore had paid to build. Then Cornie’s body was to be carried on a train to Hartford, leaving from Grand Central—out of the station built by the Commodore, traveling on railroad tracks the Commodore had owned. Cornie died as he had lived, an echo, following along on a path laid out for him, paved for him, made only for him, by his father.