Vanderbilt

The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

Anderson Cooper, Katherine Howe

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062964649
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

"Splendid.... haunting and beautifully written." — Washington Post

The #1 New York Times bestselling chronicle of the rise and fall of a legendary American dynasty, from CNN anchor and journalist Anderson Cooper and historian and novelist Katherine Howe.

One of the Washington Post 's Notable Works of Nonfiction

When eleven-year-old Cornelius Vanderbilt began to work on his father's small boat ferrying supplies in New York Harbor at the beginning of the nineteenth century, no one could have imagined that one day he would, through ruthlessness, cunning, and a pathological desire for money, build two empires—one in shipping and another in railroads—that would make him the richest man in America. His staggering fortune was fought over by his heirs after his death in 1877, sowing familial discord that would never fully heal. Though his son Billy doubled the money left by "the Commodore, " subsequent generations competed to find new and ever more extraordinary ways of spending it. By 2018, when the last Vanderbilt was forced out of The Breakers—the seventy-room summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island, that Cornelius's grandson and namesake had built—the family would have been unrecognizable to the tycoon who started it all.

Now, the Commodore's great-great-great-grandson Anderson Cooper, joins with historian Katherine Howe to explore the story of his legendary family and their outsized influence. Cooper and Howe breathe life into the ancestors who built the family's empire, basked in the Commodore's wealth, hosted lavish galas, and became synonymous with unfettered American capitalism and high society. Moving from the hardscrabble wharves of old Manhattan to the lavish drawing rooms of Gilded Age Fifth Avenue, from the ornate summer palaces of Newport to the courts of Europe, and all the way to modern-day New York, Cooper and Howe wryly recount the triumphs and tragedies of an American dynasty unlike any other.

Written with a unique insider's viewpoint, this is a rollicking, quintessentially American history as remarkable as the family it so vividly captures.

Part I

Rise

1

The Tycoon

January 4, 1877

The people who first come to virgin country usually arrive as workers, for every hand is needed, living facilities are at a premium, and there is little if any of the leisure or money necessary for the immediate development of an aristocracy. That is why all old American families such as mine have strong and simple roots here.

—Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette, Introduction

Heavy clouds lay low over the sleeping city. A wicked cold snap had gripped the entire country that week, and reporters camped outside the town house at 10 Washington Place, huddled over ash can fires, stamping their boots to keep the blood moving in their feet. They had been out there for months.

Inside, a great man—or, certainly, a formidable one—was dying.

He was an upstart from Staten Island. He had overseen construction of the town house in 1846, when he was fifty-two years old, rich with an extraordinary fortune made in shipping, but he was only getting started.

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. The Knickerbockers and other old-money families of Washington Square shunned him, but he didn’t care. Money was his sole concern: making it, spending it, and making more. New York society could ignore him, but in the end, they couldn’t ignore his money. No one could.

The house itself was stolid and elegant, built of red brick with brownstone trim. In the back, a courtyard led to stables along Fourth Street. The parlors on the first floor were well appointed, but the only valuable work of art was the Hiram Powers marble bust of the great man, made at the peak of his powers, when he was long-cheeked, tall, with sharp, calculating eyes and a shock of wiry hair rising over his high forehead. This was the man all the reporters were eager to hear from, to quote, maybe even to catch a glimpse of: “The Commodore,” Cornelius Vanderbilt.

Months earlier, reporters asking after his health at the door of 10 Washington Place heard the old man bellow down the stairs, “I am not dying!” But he was. For eight wretched, painful months, he’d been ill and installed in his bedchamber, which connected to an office and to the boudoir of his second wife, Frank Armstrong Crawford, so named for her father’s best friend, when her parents thought she might be a son. These rooms faced south and, on a less bitter winter day, would have let in bright beams of sunlight through the fringed Victorian curtains that likely hung there. But on this morning in January, the curtains were almost certainly closed.

The Commodore was eighty-two, and while his death was expected, when the end actually came, the reality of it surprised both his family and the city he had helped build. The previous night, according to the New York Times, he felt well enough to move from his bedchamber to a wheeled chair in his sitting room, his favorite room in the house, which was dominated by an imposing oil painting of his mother, Phebe. There he stayed up until ten o’clock at night, chatting with his family and a couple of friends. His son William H. Vanderbilt, called Billy when he was in favor, passed some of the evening with him and was confident enough in his father’s health that he returned to his own home without undue worry.

But night comes for everyone, and it crept in on Commodore Vanderbilt before dawn as he lay in bed. At around four in the morning, a pallor touched his cheek, and his attending physicians summoned the members of the household to his bedside soon after. The Times reported that the Commodore was weak, but gratified at having his loved ones gathered around, and that he asked them to sing some favorite hymns to keep his spirits up. The death watchers, led by one Reverend Doctor Charles Deems of the Church of the Strangers—a congregation of Southern transplants in which Frank was very active—then joined together in prayer, and the Commodore tried in vain to sing with them. Presently, the spark faded from his eyes, and he sighed away in peace, his last words “That was a good prayer.”

That’s the Times’ version, and it is certainly a complimentary one, aligning with Victorian fantasies of what a good and appropriate home and spiritual life should look like for a man of the Commodore’s stature. But is it true? The breathlessly watching newspapers had been constantly warring for scoops on this larger-than-life man and his final days. The New York World reported that the Commodore had bemoaned that the devil was after him. The New York Sun agreed, claiming Vanderbilt told his doctor that he and the Lord were fighting the devil together. As for the cause of his death? The Times attributed it to “exhaustion,” the New-York Daily Tribune to something else entirely: “venereal excesses.” Adding insult to injury, the Tribune had been run by Horace Greeley until his death five years before, and the Commodore had always considered Greeley a friend.

Frank had been watching over her husband steadily since he first took to his bed and, on occasion, writing her own version of events in a journal. She’d thought he was going to die the previous May, as he shuddered through waves of pain that no amount of medicine seemed able to relieve. “Thy will O God be done,” she records the Commodore gasping in late May as she and retinues looked on, “but if the Lord has anything more for me to do, be pleased to postpone the pain and enable me to do it.”

The next day, she said, the Commodore laid his hand on Frank’s hair and told her that she was the last link binding him to life on earth—not his children, notably; nor his grandchildren; not even his work (building the railroad into the American wilderness, or building a shipping network to cross Nicaragua); nor his fortune (greater than any ever amassed in the history of American business). Though, as the darkness gathered around him that spring, Frank wrote that he said he was grateful to have helped found the university in Tennessee that bore his name. The Commodore had stopped going to school when he was eleven, so having a university named after him likely gave him deep satisfaction. Proof, yet again, that with money, anything was possible.

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. 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 houses, with a dignified church at the center of intersecting pathways meant for promenading during the afternoon. Vanderbilt knocked down the sweeping trees and removed the grass and pathways to erect the Hudson River Railroad Depot, an interchange for freight trains coming into Manhattan from New Jersey and other points west. In October 1869 (the same year the Commodore and Frank were married), upon the completion of the depot building, he installed, high up on the western wall, a statue of himself, flanked on either side by a bas-relief sculpture full of references to his shipping empire and his railroads, celebrating his victories over those who had tried to compete with him in business. When the sculpture was unveiled, The Nation magazine described it as a monument to “audacity, push, unscrupulousness, and brazen disregard of others’ rights or others’ good opinion.” By the 1890s, the area around the depot had become a slum. The fine houses that had once surrounded the park, with tile floors and parlors wide enough for dancing a quadrille, had been converted into crowded tenements with clotheslines, washtubs, and stovepipes snaking into fireplaces. Today, the site is a traffic exchange that funnels cars to the Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. The statue he had built of himself was eventually moved some two miles north to Grand Central Terminal, where it still stands today.

On June 1, 1876, his illness seemingly worsening, the Commodore reportedly announced that he had forgiven all his enemies. “I bear no ill feeling to anyone,” Frank records him saying, no doubt aware that there were plenty of people who still bore her husband ill will. The following day, he begged to be given the strength not to complain. On the eleventh, a Sunday, Frank quotes him saying, “You have been a true and faithful wife and done me good. Twas Providence that had thrown us together and I hope we will be united above.”

Frank had married the Commodore eight years earlier, on August 21, 1869, when he was seventy-five years old and she was thirty. Born in Mobile, Alabama, she had traveled north in penury with her mother following the defeat of the Confederacy, eventually landing in New York City. They looked up Cornelius Vanderbilt, their distant cousin, and managed to ingratiate themselves so thoroughly that Frank and the Commodore eloped to Canada, a year after his first wife, Sophia, died. The wedding was attended by only a few friends of Frank’s and none of Vanderbilt’s children.

Frank was an unashamed Confederate sympathizer, a self-described Rebel, and 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 theory, he made the gift as a gesture of peace to the South, after having given a million-dollar ship, the U.S.S. Vanderbilt, to help the Union Navy. With his endowment of the university, the Commodore successfully split the difference on public accolades.

Despite the accounts of his concerns about the devil, Cornelius Vanderbilt had never been a churchgoing man. It was only because of Frank’s involvement with the Church of the Strangers that Reverend Doctor Deems was a frequent visitor to the Commodore’s sickbed, leading the ailing man in prayer and joining Frank in song to keep his spirits lifted. Deems’s devotion to the Commodore might also have been helped by the older man’s donation of fifty thousand dollars to buy the Strangers their church building.

The Commodore spent much of June fretting over his younger wife. He told anyone who’d listen how good she had been to him and wished loudly that his family could understand this. He wanted her to be buried with him, in the family tomb he had erected, at no small expense, in Staten Island—if that was her wish. On June 5, he expressed a desire to add further to the university endowment and then told Frank that she should place her trust in his eldest son, Billy.

According to Frank, the Commodore prayed for God’s forgiveness for his sins and transgressions and asked that He “change the hearts of his offspring and bring them all around.” To what exactly, it isn’t made clear. Likely, his late-in-life marriage, of which his daughters disapproved, or his plans for the dispensation of his fortune. The great man’s children had begun to trickle in to see him at his sickbed, as rumors spread that he might be facing the end. He didn’t always admit them upstairs if he didn’t feel like it. On June 11, his son Cornelius stopped by Washington Place expecting to see his father, but was sent away. Despite being the Commodore’s namesake, the younger Cornelius had always been a source of shame. Not even impending death would change that.

Frank tried to bring “Com,” as she called her husband, to God—on that point at least, there is little disagreement. Few men, arguably, were more in need of God’s forgiveness on the morning of January 4, 1877, than Commodore Vanderbilt. A master manipulator, disseminator, and inventor of his own legend, Cornelius Vanderbilt reveled in attention, in being feared by men in business with him and, certainly, by men in business against him. He was feared also by his children, whose lives he dominated with judgment and control. More than anything else, however, the Commodore thrived on money. He had blasted it out of the wilderness building railroads and had sieved it from the water with poles and sails and, later, steamships. When his final breath escaped his body, this man would leave behind a veritable monument of money.

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.

This financial feat, together with his talent for legend making and publicity—a talent shared by several of his descendants, even if many of them excelled more at spending than making money—made him the center of untold hordes of attention. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper would publish an engraving of Washington Place just after the Commodore’s death, showing the street thronged with gawkers, lining fences three deep, craning necks from atop hansom cabs, bundled tight against the winter wind. 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.

Before the sumptuous palaces of Fifth Avenue then being erected by his children, before the Upper East Side and Billionaires’ Row, where Commodore Vanderbilt’s figurative descendants now roost and preen, Washington Square was the beating heart of New York City society. The Commodore died just off the square, in his fine house nestled cheek by jowl with the social elites who never accepted him. The sedate, leafy block of Washington Place is a far cry from where Commodore Vanderbilt’s story began.

New York has always offered up the possibility of forging a new self, a new identity, making new wealth out of nothing. New York has done this since before it was New York. Cornelius Vanderbilt may not have been the first person to remake himself in New York City, but his rise from hardscrabble rural obscurity to a level of wealth never before seen in America, and rarely paralleled since, places him squarely within the persistent American mythology that holds that success is tantalizingly available to anyone with the cunning and discipline to seize it.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on May 27, 1794, on Staten Island, in a small, undistinguished Federal-style farmhouse of modest clapboards, polite shutters, and a deep porch, in the fledgling years of the new republic. 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. He was by all accounts a restless boy. The family farmstead—which he still owned at his death, together with a small cottage on Union Street that his mother, Phebe, had occupied and that, out of sentiment, he refused to sell—ran right up to the water. As a child, Cornelius watched from the shore as salt-crusted boatmen navigated small ferries through the difficult currents around Staten Island, their vessels laden with farm goods and, once in a while, a passenger, earning a few pennies here and there. Cornelius’s father, with whom he shared a name, was one of them.

His father was an unambitious man. He farmed, he fished, he supported his wife and nine children, and the seasons drifted into each other on Staten Island, one year after another. Young Cornelius, who was called Cornele by his family, took after his mother, at least as far as cunning went. Phebe was English, pragmatic, sharp with money, and had already saved their farm from foreclosure once, by producing the required sum in cash that she had secreted away in a grandfather clock.

Cornele never cared much for school, preferring to work on his father’s two-masted boat, known as a periauger. Though only a child, Cornele transported vegetables and passengers between Staten Island and Manhattan, a distance of about five miles, maybe an hour’s sail if the wind and tide cooperated. The periauger was wide and shallow, good for carrying cargo. With Bermuda rig sails on its masts, and no keel, it was easy to maneuver in shallow water, quick before the steady winds of the harbor, polable when the winds died. Still, sailing a periauger through the currents of the Narrows was no mean feat for a boy of eleven, which is how old the child who would become the Commodore was when he left school and started earning money on the water.

Fragmentary anecdotes about Cornele’s childhood have persisted over the years, though the man didn’t write them down himself, and so they are next to impossible to substantiate. In fact, the Commodore was just this side of illiterate, and surviving examples of his handwriting border on the illegible. The stories could be myths or lies that Vanderbilt told to bolster his own legend or that writers—like the sober reporters of the New York Times who gave the hard-cussing Commodore such an angelic death—invented to color a childhood for which there is little trustworthy evidence.

The day after his death, the newspape...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endpapers
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Vanderbilt Family Tree
• Introduction
• Prologue: The Breakers: March 30, 2018
• Part I: Rise
• Part II: Fall
• Epilogue: Christmas Eve, 1930
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Authors
• Also by Anderson Cooper and Katherine Howe
• Copyright
• About the Publisher