Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

by Anderson Cooper

“In the hidden reaches where memory probes,” Consuelo would write, much later in her life, “lie sorrows too deep to fathom.”

“We had terrific word battles. Turning to me[,] he said[,] Damn it, Mrs. Vanderbilt, who is building this house? And I answered[,] Damn it, Mr. Hunt, who is going to live in this house? Our friendship was most beautiful . . . When they buried him, I felt he had been the most resourceful and cherished friend of some of the saddest years of my life.”

Emma Goldman, who wrote in 1911, “The wife who married for money, compared with the prostitute, is the true scab. She is paid less, gives much more in return in labor and care, and is absolutely bound to her master. The prostitute never signs away the right over her own person, she retains her freedom and personal rights, nor is she always compelled to submit to man’s embrace.”

“the race would never progress if women were to eternally sacrifice themselves to a person or to a power.”

“I suspect that being fatherless,” Gordon writes, “leaves a woman with a taste for the fanatical, having grown unsheltered, having never seen in the familiar flesh the embodiment of the ancient image of authority, a fatherless girl can be satisfied only with the heroic, the desperate, the extreme. A fatherless girl thinks all things possible and nothing safe.”