The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made

by Flora Miller Biddle

  In late-nineteenth-century New York, life for a young girl from a wealthy family was rigidly structured. Especially for Gertrude Vanderbilt. She could never be alone with a boy. She must wear specific kinds of clothes for each different occasion — lacy white morning dresses, low-cut silk and satin evening dresses, carefully tailored riding dresses, bathing dresses. In an 1894 journal, she lists thirty-two outfits under the heading “New Dresses This Year.” It begins “Light blue crepon, white spots, trimmed with yellow (yellow hat)” and describes eight costumes in each of her favorite colors, pink and blue. Mourning a close family member meant no outside social life, and black clothes for at least two years, including jewelry; I still have a black enamel pansy pin that Gertrude wore in mourning. A young girl in society must make formal calls with her mother, and must be “at home” to receive visitors on particular days and times. There were so many “dos” and “don’ts” that it’s a wonder anyone could remember them all. To her diary she wrote, at nineteen, “It is evening, 9:50, and I am waiting for the time to come to dress to go to a reception. My hair has been carefully arranged by the hairdresser so I cannot lie down. I come to you for solace. How I long for excitement, for emotions, provided they are of the right sort … a man chooses the path that gives him the most thrill. That is what I want. I want someone to make me feel, feel this is indeed life. Understand, I don’t want to fall in love, that would be both bothersome and useless. But I want for a little while to live completely. … If I could but thrill tonight for a few moments, for one blissful second, how happy I should be. … I can count the thrills in my life, they are so few and far between.”

  As time went on, she became reconciled to her role. Faith was an important aspect of this acceptance, and she attended the Episcopal church — even if sporadically — all her life. “When I was eighteen I felt as if I could hold my head up under it, and that I would act my part well for God had put me there, just where I was, and if He had not meant me to have strength to go through He would never have put me where I was.”

  When her grandfather, William Henry Vanderbilt, died, Gertrude was ten years old and had often visited her grandparents. Even though she had taken their home and its furnishings for granted at the time, it’s clear in her journals that the art she saw influenced her later appreciation. In 1890, for example, while visiting museums in Paris with her New York neighbor and future sister-in-law, Pauline Whitney, Gertrude was impressed by Pauline’s opinion. “We talked about the fine pictures and other articles which belonged to Grandpa and now to Grandma. I had no idea Grandpa had such fine things. I knew of course they were very expensive etc., but I hardly thought of them as she said.” Perhaps this was because, surrounded as she herself was by fine architecture and works of art, such things were givens.

  In 1892, her promising and beloved brother William died from typhoid fever while a junior at Yale. In “My History” Gertrude mentioned but did not elaborate on the mournful event: “a very sad time after I lost my eldest brother which I would rather not dwell upon.” Grief-stricken, Cornelius and Alice retired from most travel and social activities for the prescribed mourning period. Later that year, their house in Newport burned to the ground. The Vanderbilts, during this quiet time, became absorbed in working with Richard Morris Hunt on a replacement home, the new Breakers, a magnificent seventy-room mansion filled with French and Italian furniture and decorations and paintings and sculptures from both Europe and America.

  Gertrude’s young uncle, George Washington Vanderbilt, was probably the most cultivated member of the family. He spoke eight languages and read several others, he had studied architecture, forestry, and landscape gardening. In the early 1890s, he began planning an immense chateau designed by Richard Morris Hunt on 130,000 acres near Asheville, North Carolina. Using advanced and socially responsible theories of agriculture, forestry, and ecology, George worked with Frederick Law Olmsted to develop the property. Today, we can still enjoy Biltmore, since George’s descendants have maintained and increased their grandfather’s original commitment to sound ecological practices, and have turned the estate into a lucrative business by opening it to the public.

  With a large group of aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, Gertrude traveled by private railroad car to Biltmore for its Christmas opening in 1895. Although its scale and grandeur must have been extraordinary — 250 rooms! — she hardly mentions it in her letters to her friend Esther Hunt, Richard’s daughter, which is mostly about the people she talked with and the walks she took. This isn’t as surprising as it might seem. I myself can remember visiting the Breakers, where my great-aunt Gladys was living, when I was about ten, but I can’t remember thinking there was anything unusual about it. It was where my great-grandparents had lived, that was all. Not that my own family lived in such an ostentatious house! But I was conscious of the way former generations had lived. Gertrude, whose family lived their everyday lives in what now seems a fantasy splendor, would have expected and found normal the magnificence she found at Biltmore. One must, I think, keep this in mind when considering her life. Although she bemoaned her position as heiress, she took it for granted, too. The same year she visited Biltmore, she wrote in her journal:

  “You don’t know what the position of an heiress is! You can’t imagine. There is no one in all the world who loves her for herself. No one. She cannot do this, that, and the other simply because she is known by sight and will be talked about. Everything she does or says is discussed, everyone she speaks to she is suspected of going to marry, everyone she loves loves her for what she has got, and earth is hell unless she is a fool and then it’s heaven. … Of course, worldly goods surround her. She wishes a dress, a jewel, a horse — she has it, but not all the money in the world can buy her a loving heart or a true friend.”

  Gertrude learned French and German, languages then de rigueur for a well-educated young woman. On their travels, besides meeting the aristocracy of Europe, the family heard concerts and operas and visited museums, always with well-trained guides, establishing the groundwork for her later absorbing interest in cultural affairs. Balls, tea dances, house parties, and dinners bridged the Atlantic, and by the time she was twenty she had beaux in several countries and several marriage proposals. Few were of real interest, however, until Harry Whitney became a serious contender in 1896.

  February 2: “Harry has been to see me quite often, twice last week. He has a little dog whom I keep very often when he is at law [Columbia Law School].”

  February 6: “Harry and I are having a desperate flirtation. It’s splendid. We understand each other perfectly.”

  Since Gertrude kept all her papers, it is easy to trace their growing love. Sometime in February, Harry wrote to her:

  “Of course it is possible for someone to love you simply and entirely for yourself. We have been made to go through an existence here, God knows for what — it is hard enough & unsatisfactory enough — but there is one, just one, redeeming feature & that is the possibility of love. …” The rest of this letter makes it clear that Harry was already in love. Soon she and Harry, with her parents and a group of young men and women, set off for Palm Beach in her father’s private railroad car, Number 493, and attendant cars: first a smoking car, then the men’s car separated from the women’s by the dining car, and at the end, for the view, the so-called day car. Gertrude documented their romance in her journal: by the second day, in St. Augustine, they sat together at dinner and had “the sort of conversation it is impossible to repeat.” In Palm Beach, finally alone with Harry on the piazza of the Hotel Royal Poinciana, Gertrude talked this time not to make conversation (as she often did with others, making lists ahead of time of subjects she might bring up), but to reveal herself. She told Harry of her long-time wish that she could have a better relationship with her mother. “It is not really anything that we say or do, it is simply that she does not understand. When it is like that, there is no use trying to have an understanding.” With that, Harry turned suddenly toward Gertrude,
and said, “Gertrude, shall we have an understanding?” Unable to speak, she gave him her hand, saying, “Oh, Harry.” “Taking my poor, ugly hand he kissed it over and over again and yet over and over, saying ‘No, no, Gertrude — it can’t be. Oh no, Gertrude.’”

  On the train trip home, in a rare moment together, “I suddenly looked at him and could not take my eyes away. He looked down — I could not. He looked at me again — and for the first time we looked right into each other’s eyes and saw each other’s souls. Then he leaned forward suddenly and pulled my hands to him. He said, ‘Kiss me.’ And before I knew it he had leaned over the table and kissed my mouth. A few moments later he said, ‘I feel better now.’”

  ***

  Why, when she was so doubtful of the motives of others, was it so easy for Gertrude to accept the sincerity of Harry’s love?

  Whitney roots can be traced much further back than those of the Vanderbilts, way back to Thurstan “the Fleming,” who followed William the Conqueror into England and is even mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as an extensive landholder in Hertfordshire and the Marches of Wales. Subsequent Whitneys included a knight as well as merchants, manufacturers, and entrepreneurs.

  Like the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys settled in America in the mid-seventeenth century. In June 1635, John Whitney, a well-educated member of a freeman’s guild, the Merchant Taylors Company, arrived in Boston with his wife, five sons, and 113 other passengers aboard the Elizabeth and Ann. Despite restrictive Stuart economic policies John had done well in England, unlike many Puritans, and as an Anglican he hadn’t suffered religious persecution. But he was ambitious. He wanted greater opportunity and freedom to achieve his goals.

  The community of Watertown, near Boston, where he came to live, was a place in which he could make good use of his superior education and legal expertise, and soon the Whitneys became prominent landholders and political, military, and constabulary leaders. By 1788, the family was well established, and General Josiah Whitney — the head of the family — had distinguished himself in the Revolutionary War, had represented Harvard in the General Court, and was a delegate to the Boston convention for ratification of the federal constitution.

  The Vanderbilts, at this time, were farmers in Staten Island still struggling to survive.

  Josiah’s great-grandson, James Scollay Whitney, also a general (in the militia), and his wife Laurinda Collins, a descendant of William Bradford of Plymouth Colony, settled in Conway, Massachusetts, and from their small general store built a large cotton mill business. James became postmaster, a member of the Massachusetts House, and sheriff of Franklin County, then organized the Conway Bank and the Conway Mutual Fire Insurance Company, of which he was the first president. The family was, by local standards, rich and powerful.

  William Collins Whitney, Harry’s father, was the third child and second son of James and Laurinda’s six children. It was William who advanced his family’s fortunes as the Commodore did for his family, and who came to live in New York in a palatial home right across the street from Cornelius Vanderbilt II. However, unlike the Vanderbilts, he was building on a solid family base of some eight hundred years of continuous achievement. He and his family were immediately welcomed by New York’s business and society circles, and distinguished partners were ready to work with him along his road to success, unlike Cornelius Vanderbilt’s father, William, who had to fight for acceptance. Although that acceptance came much easier to Cornelius II (Gertrude’s father), I believe that the family’s lack of a solid heritage of education, public service, and social position led to Gertrude’s strict, conventional upbringing, and resulted in her striving for accomplishment, self-esteem, and appreciation.

  William C. Whitney was a complex individual, a serious, attractive young man who had worldly ambition but loved to read and write as well. Tall, with large gray eyes, straight brown hair, and strong features, he studied the classics at Yale, leading a rigorous life in dormitories that lacked plumbing, heating, and adequate lighting. There he made lifelong friends, including his roommate Henry Farnam Dimock, who became his law partner and his sister’s husband, and Oliver Hazard Payne of Cleveland, whose sister Flora he later married. Another friend, William Graham Sumner, wrote years later:

  “Whitney’s position amongst us … was, from the first, that of a leader … easily the man of widest influence in our Class and perhaps the College.” When he was tapped for Skull and Bones, his more studious roommates complained about the constant procession through their room of Whitney’s friends.

  After graduating from Harvard Law School, clerking in a prestigious law firm, and passing the bar exam in New York, in 1867 he and Dimock set up their practice at 17 Wall Street. Oliver Payne arranged for him to meet his sister Flora, who had enrolled in an experimental seminary for women at Harvard conducted by Louis Agassiz and had subsequently traveled widely in Europe, North Africa, and the Levant, writing and illustrating remarkable journals and letters about all she learned and saw. Her father, Senator Henry B. Payne, one of the wealthiest and most powerful Democrats in Ohio, had published many of her letters in the Cleveland Daily Record. A student of archaeology, science, and languages, Flora was an exceptional woman, especially for her time. Her brother Oliver loved her dearly, and was convinced that she and William belonged together.

  “So you are the Will Whitney that I have had held up to me for so many years?” the high-spirited Flora began their conversation. Dinner, the opera, and visits between Cleveland and New York followed, and they were married in October 1869.

  As the young lawyer’s business grew, so did his interest in reform politics, which at that time meant allying himself with Samuel J. Tilden to get rid of the dishonest Boss Tweed. The Young Men’s Democratic Club, which he had been instrumental in founding, contributed greatly to Tweed’s defeat and the victory of clean municipal government. In a letter to her sister Molly in the summer of 1872 Flora described their lives:

  “William is in politics and the first thing that kind of business does is take a man away from the bosom of his family. I submit, as I think it is the duty of young men to work when they are called upon in such a time as this. William is a natural politician, and takes to it as a duck to water, and is one of the leaders among the young men. About a hundred Committee men are to meet here Wednesday night and you can imagine the pow-wow.”

  Like Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt, whose first baby, Alice, had died, William and Flora lost their first-born child. Then, in the spring of 1872, Harry Payne Whitney was born, and Flora wrote a long unpublished essay beginning:

  “Never came a Baby into the world, more wanted, with more love ready to welcome him than our Boy. One little life had been given to us before. We had planned and hoped and been ready for it. … Then came the agony, and the birth, but the little voice would first be heard in Heaven, and not in the Mother’s arms. So when I knew that life once more might be allowed to weave the child fancies in my home, just gladness filled me, gratitude, and joy without a cloud. I shut out every shadow from my life. The nine months should be millennium … He never in all those months was anything but a source of pleasure to me.”

  It was typical of my great-grandmother’s intense feelings and tough mind that she began with the loss of her firstborn. “With her there is no glossing over, no forgetting, and by beginning with the lost Leonore, she makes her happiness and William’s at Harry’s birth all the greater. Not only in this little journal but in dozens of her own letters and William’s it is apparent that they doted on this son” (Friedman). Four more children were to come; Pauline, William Payne, Olive (who died of diphtheria at six), and Dorothy; But Harry was always special. Only Dorothy’s relationship with her father, after her mother’s death, was as close.

  Meantime, William was becoming a recognized figure in New York, with a distinguished clientele. After a stint as corporation counsel, he struggled for and won the valuable Broadway street railway franchise. He contributed money and his considerable organizat
ional skills to the presidential campaign and election of Grover Cleveland, who rewarded him by appointing him Secretary of the Navy, a key position at a time when command of the seas was strategically vital. During his tenure (1885–1889) he modernized the fleet and eliminated widespread corrupt bidding and contracting practices. Living part-time in Washington, the Whitneys were at the epicenter of its social life. Flora gained a reputation as a brilliant hostess, bringing together the intellectual, cultural, and political worlds of the city, creating fantasy environments for costume balls and other fanciful entertainments.

  Both the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys had plenty of worldly ambition — but in contrast to the Vanderbilt men, William C. Whitney was profoundly conscious of the obligations of wealth, and gave not only money but time and work for causes he believed in.

  William also pioneered in new theories about horses, recognizing the importance of mares rather than stallions alone in the speed and endurance of thoroughbreds. He was highly successful in breeding and racing as well as in his legal, business, and political careers.

  As time went on, back in New York Flora felt increasingly isolated. She grew lonely and sad as William spent much time away from home pursuing political or business interests. The tender, loving letters she had written to William at first changed in tone as, often pregnant, she began hearing gossip about other women:

  “I knew I was heavy and awkward, and not this last winter the lithe little lady you loved to caress; but it added to the hurts, and hurts grow into disappointments, and these into commonplace living, and then the angel of romance folds forever her wings, or turns and finds its waiting by the cradles of the sleeping children.”

  Flora was one of many educated, intelligent, and talented women of her time who found little outlet for their abilities. When pouring their emotions and desires into care for their families didn’t entirely satisfy them, they felt guilty and depressed. William himself was prone to the moodiness and headaches prevalent in our family — especially in the men. In their last years together they were both unhappy although when Flora died in 1892, at the age of fifty-one, it was a tragedy for the whole family. At the peak of her life and marriage, she had been a beautiful, lively woman full of joy, with a marvelous sense of humor and play, delighting in intellectual pursuits, in people of many kinds, and in her family. Her journals and other writings have a fresh outlook and individual style, and I treasure the notes and fine drawings with which she filled a red leather volume while studying in Agassiz’s seminar.