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January 10 - January 12, 2024
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 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.
In its 77 years of existence, The Breakers saw the equivalent of nearly $218 million evaporate into thin air.
The visitor center would be built on the grounds of The Breakers. It would even sell sandwiches.
The horror! sandwiches!
Stiles points out that in 1790, one out of every three families in northern Staten Island relied upon enslaved people. The
Sandy Hook, the spit of sandbar jutting from New Jersey into New York Harbor, southeast of Staten Island,
With money came power. With money came freedom.
They say money doesn't buy hapiness but it sure is a gateway to many other things.
But only three of the children actually mattered to the Commodore: his sons, who would carry the Vanderbilt name. His nine daughters? They would get married and change their names, and, as far as the Commodore was concerned, their children would not be Vanderbilts.
He suffered from epilepsy, which his father took to be a mental illness and a mark of weakness.
We may remember that Wall Street is so named because it used to have a wall running along it, south of which lived most of the colony; the wall was designed to protect against unknown forces in the wilderness, be they Native or English or French.
Street plans list copious breweries, suggesting that New Yorkers, then as now, liked a good tipple.
The New-York Historical Society estimates that as many as 20 percent of residents in colonial New York were enslaved, and 41 percent of pre-Revolutionary New York City households used enslaved labor as servants and for domestic businesses—numbers more in line with what was seen in Charleston, South Carolina, than in Boston.
Cornie had spent much of his adult life in Hartford, Connecticut, away from the stresses and excitement of the big city where he was born.
was, notably, 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.
“After I was married I worked a small farm my father gave my wife in West Hartford,”
Our hood!
fortune in just eight years—the only one of the Vanderbilt descendants to add to the wealth they’d been handed.
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.
Twenty-six of the new lifeboats added to the Lusitania after the Titanic disaster were never deployed at all; they were collapsible, made of hollow wooden bottoms and canvas sides that required assembly before use, assembly there was no time for.
Of the 139 U.S. citizens traveling on board, 129 were lost, including Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt.
When the water closed over his lips and the last bubble escaped his nose, Alfred Vanderbilt could not have known that his death would play a part in a remaking of the world.
Gloria Morgan was still, legally speaking—and likely emotionally, too—a child herself. She was only twenty when Reggie died, which meant that she could not serve as her own daughter’s legal guardian, and in fact needed a guardian herself.
At twenty in the 1920s you were still considered a minor?
the strange arrangement of a minor mother left with nothing of her own, in whose care lay a baby child in sudden possession of $2.5 million.
an allowance be allotted from her daughter’s trust to cover the “monthly expenses necessarily incurred for the maintenance and support of said infant” and the home where they were living. These expenses amounted to $4,165—about $60,000 today—every month, and included $925 for servants, plus another $250 for the servants’ food. Baby Gloria was now the piggy bank for her entire household, and she couldn’t even talk.
In the spring of 1924, when their baby was only a few months old, Gloria Morgan and Reggie hotfooted it to Europe for three months, leaving her at Sandy Point Farm with “Naney,” as Laura Morgan was known, and the nurse.
Parents of the year. Such were the times
(Thelma is also credited with, or blamed for, introducing the prince to Mrs. Wallis Simpson and asking her to “take care of him” while she was away.)
Fun fact!
They fell for each other hard and fast, but it would never work, as Hohenlohe was penniless. He owned a palace larger than Buckingham, yet made a salary less than what Gloria Morgan paid Dodo. It was a problem.
Buried in the dense thicket of Dodo and Naney’s concerns, Gloria grew weak and sickly, like an orchid overwatered, too well pruned, and kept too far from the sun.
“The Lindbergh kidnapping was symbolically perfect for the Depression,” argues Goldsmith, “for it demonstrated that an individual—no matter who he was—could not control his own destiny.”
The judge released his opinion on November 21, 1934, granting Gloria’s sole custody to her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Her mother would have visitation on weekends, for a month in the summer, and on Christmas Day.
