“Why, don’t you see, if you do nothing to promote education, to prove to the world that you believe in it, there isn’t a boy in all the land who ever heard of you, but may say, “What’s the use of an education? There’s Commodore Vanderbilt; he never had any, and never wanted any, and yet he became the richest man in America.’”
“Will they say that? But it isn’t true. I do care for education and always have. But what shall I do?”
“Show to the world your true sentiments.”
“How?”
“Well, here you are proposing to build a monument to Washington to cost a million of dollars. Such a monument will not add one iota to Washington’s fame. A monument on every street corner in America would not do it. Suppose you take that money and found a university.”
“A university!”
“Yes, why not?”112
One million dollars from the Commodore’s fortune was soon on its way to Nashville, Tennessee, where a friend of Dr. Deems and Frank Vanderbilt was raising funds for the Central University of Nashville, quickly renamed Vanderbilt University, a change that struck the Commodore as “very satisfactory.”113
7.
When he was eighty, the Commodore invited a friend to go driving with him. As an express train of his Harlem Railroad sped toward them down the tracks, the Commodore declared he would beat the train across. He gave the word and his steeds raced across the railroad tracks, with the carriage passing over just before the train sped by, so close that the rush of wind lifted the Commodore’s hat.
“There is not another man in New York that could do that!” the exhilarated Commodore gloated.
“And you will never do it again with me in your wagon!” his friend moaned.114
The curmudgeon seemed invincible, but at last there came that day in May of 1876 when, feeling every one of his eighty-two years, he returned home, climbed the stairs to his bedchamber on the second floor of the townhouse at 10 Washington Place, laid down his cane, took the cigars out of his pocket, lifted off his overcoat, and untied his snow-white choker, never again to leave the house.
Every other time when he had been ill, the Commodore told Dr. Linsly, he’d seen he would get well: when as a lad he had been poling his periauger so hard that the pole slipped and rammed through his chest; when he’d been in the terrible train accident in 1833; when he’d had those strange attacks in 1849 and again in 1854 during which his heart beat so rapidly it was impossible to count its pulsations. This time was different. As spring turned to summer and summer to fall, and still he lay bedridden, he told Dr. Linsly: “I don’t see this now.”115 “I used sometimes to think that the Commodore never expected to die,”116 Dr. Linsly remembered, but now his patient was no longer talking about whipping the devil.
The reporters from the city newspapers resumed the deathwatch they had begun back in May, renting a room in a house across the street. Fluctuations in the Commodore’s condition were reported in daily bulletins in the morning and evening editions as if part of the day’s weather report. The reporters’ vigil was endless; the old man meant to hold on.
Though confined to his bed, the Commodore maintained a keen interest in the news that was brought to him. When he was told that Daniel Drew, who was three years younger, was also ill, he chuckled. “Aha! Breaking down so young! Well, Dan’l Drew never did have any constitution.”117 At least twice every day, Billy stopped in to report to his father about the railroads, hurrying back to his office at the Grand Central Depot with the Commodore’s orders, which were immediately implemented.
Dr. Linsly would read to him the obituary notices that frequently appeared in the newspapers when the reporters, encamped in the house across Washington Place, concluded that he could not possibly live another day. “He was much gratified with them. I did not read anything that I thought would be displeasing to him.”118 When the obituaries estimated the size of his fortune, Dr. Linsly noticed a slight smile cross the old man’s face, but he would say nothing. The estimates were all far too low. Sixty-seven years after his mother had loaned him $100, he had increased that loan by a factor of one million. He had accumulated a fortune of $105 million. He was richer, by far, than anyone else in the United States was or ever had been. He finally seemed satisfied with that.
Some days he felt better, some days worse, but he was not recovering his strength. Day by day his stamina ebbed. When the pain became intense, he summoned magnetic physicians. “I have a frightful racking pain in my head,” he told Mrs. Helen Clark, one of his favorites. “I am almost insane.”119 She stroked his head where he said the pain was centered, and it then moved down his body. She followed it with her hands until it passed away. He told her he felt like a new man.
Later when she was treating him, he jumped and said sharply, “Why don’t you remove that pain as readily as you did before?”
“Remember, Commodore Vanderbilt, you are not to command me! I’m the boss of this job, or nothing at all.”120
He controlled his temper, for he enjoyed discussing with Mrs. Clark an admonition in the Bible that was disturbing him: that it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven.
“How far away do you think heaven is?” he would ask her. “Do you think that the Lord would forgive me and that I shall be washed in the blood of the Lamb?”
“No, I don’t,” she answered. “What have you done to merit heaven?”
What was necessary? he asked her.
“By their works ye shall know them. Are your works material or are they heavenly?”121
The Commodore told her he had prayed. That was not enough, she informed him. When she wanted a loaf of bread, prayer would not get it for her; she must go to work and earn it. And, by the way, she told him, if she had to preach as well as treat every time he called for her, she should charge him double. He persisted. What were the occupations of heaven? She told him that she thought they probably varied as much as in this life. Did she believe in the Judge sitting on the great white throne? No, she answered, the God that she believed in was too great and incomprehensible to be described in that way. Was there hope that he could engage in singing and praying in heaven? “I think you could build a railroad better than you could play on a golden harp.”122
The Commodore might have been thinking of heaven, but he still had enough spunk to make a hell for those who lived with him at 10 Washington Place. Frankie, Frankie’s mother, the servants, Dr. Linsly who had taken up residence in the house—everyone knew well enough to stay out of his way. As had always been the case, no one dared tell the Commodore what to do, to eat his food or take his medicine or move from his bed so that it could be changed. He took his own time and did just as he pleased.
Dr. Linsly suggested that it might help if he was given champagne to sip. The Commodore thought about this for a moment. “Champagne? Champagne! I can’t afford champagne! A bottle every morning! Oh, I guess sody water’ll do!”123
His doctor observed that he was lying on a rubber sheet and told him it was the worst thing in the world for him, that woolen blankets would be much better. The Commodore’s wife informed the doctor that they could not stand the expense of woolen blankets, which had to be changed so often. “Damn the expense!” the Commodore commanded. “Buy a bale!”
Frankie brought him a bowl of soup. He sat up in bed and tasted it, and then flung the bowl against the wall. “Who in hell salted this soup! Don’t give me anything except it is home made!”124
The members of the household kept their distance, avoiding his room as much as possible. Once when Frankie’s mother walked in, he seized her by the hand and squeezed it until she cried out. “Can’t I keep some of you damn sluts here?” he complained.125
“That old man must die,” Frankie muttered. “I can’t stand this hell any more.”126
The Commodore was not planning to make things any easier after he was gone.
“Dan’l,” he said to a friend who had come to v
isit, “when I die, there’ll be hell to pay.”
“Oh, no, Commodore, I guess not.”
“Oh, yes, there will—yes there will. When I am gone there will be trouble, but they can’t break the will. There is not a flaw in it. I believe in the way the Astors did. But I shall leave my property more compact. I don’t know that I am doing right, but I will not have it scattered. I will leave it as a monument to my name.”127
One evening it was obvious that the Commodore wanted to talk with his son about something important. Billy stood at the foot of his father’s bed. Dr. Linsly got up to leave them alone, but the Commodore ordered him to sit down, pointing to the chair he was to occupy.
“Billy,” he said, shaking his finger at his son, “after I’m dead a great responsibility will fall upon you. You will find a piece of paper left to direct you what to do. There are several pieces of paper attached to my will. I charge you to carry out faithfully what I have directed in my will.”
Billy nodded.
“Had I died in 1833 or 1836, or even 1854,” the Commodore continued, nodding at Dr. Linsly, “the world wouldn’t know that I ever lived; but I think I have been spared to accomplish a great work which will remain, and I think I have fixed it so that it cannot be destroyed by the stock market. If I had given my daughters $3,000,000 or $3,000,000 apiece the first thing they would do would be to put William out….The next thing they would be quarrelling among themselves, and their stock would be thrown on the market until it would not be worth 40.”128
As the days and weeks passed, his tall frame became bent, his face grew thin and pale, his eyes sank deep behind his brows, but one of his grandsons noticed when he visited that his hands, the hands which long ago had poled a heavy old periauger across the Narrows to Manhattan, still were calloused and hardened.129
Early in the morning of January 4, 1877, the Commodore looked at Dr. Linsly. “I think I am nearly gone, Doctor.”130
A light snow was falling and already the pavement was white when his children and grandchildren began to crowd into his bedchamber.
Dr. Deems knelt by his bedside and said a prayer. The Commodore muttered the benediction with the pastor: “Now may the peace of God which passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds on Christ Jesus; and the blessing of God Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
He turned to Frankie. “That was a good prayer,” he mumbled.
“Yes,” Frank replied, “because it expressed just your feelings now.”131
Frankie asked if he would like her to play some hymns on the small organ that had been moved into the room. Yes, he indicated, he would. He tried to join in the singing of his favorite, “Come Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy,” whining along as the others sang: “I am poor, I am needy, weak and wounded, sick and sore.”132
The Commodore looked toward his son Billy, who stood at the head of his bed. “Keep the money together, hey. Keep the Central our road,”133 he whispered. “That’s my son Bill.”134
At 10:30 that morning, Dr. Linsly announced that there was no sight in his eyes. The old man was dead.
The Commodore lifted a hand and with it closed his eyelids. Within a few minutes, finally, reluctantly, he let go of his life and his fortune.
An autopsy revealed that he should have died long before, that he had been living for months on willpower and guts. There was not a sound organ in his body. All were atrophied. The liver and spleen were emaciated, he had Bright’s disease of the kidneys, his intestines were inflamed and ulcerated, and, perhaps not surprising to some, it was found that “the heart was small—smaller than is usual with men of similar size.”135
“It was a giant they buried,” wrote the New York Herald.136 An old sea captain who had known him well said that it was fortunate that the Commodore had not received any education, for if he had “he would have been a god.”137 And at least one congressman thanked God that men could not live more than one hundred years, for if they could, he feared, “such men as Cornelius Vanderbilt would own the whole world.”138
His two sons, eight daughters, sixteen grandsons, and seventeen granddaughters could hardly wait to find out just how much of the world he did own. After his burial on Staten Island, they returned to the home of one of the Commodore’s sons-in-law. There, in the parlor, former judge Charles Rapallo, the Commodore’s attorney for many years, read the will.
The Commodore’s young wife, Frankie, whose patience had been so tried in the final weeks of his illness, was rewarded with $500,000 and the house at 10 Washington Place. Each of his eight daughters received a few hundred thousand dollars of his railroad bonds, and the income from trust funds of several hundred thousand dollars. His wayward son Corneel was left only a trust fund of $200,000, the interest from which was to be used for his support. The Commodore’s sister and brother, nieces and nephews, assorted faithful employees, and friends received smaller bequests. The grandson who had been named for him, Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Billy’s oldest son, received $5.5 million of railroad stocks, and Billy’s other three sons each received $2 million.
The eighth clause of the will provided that “all the rest, residue, and remainder of the property and estate, real and personal, of every description, and wheresoever situated, of which I may be seized or possessed, and to which I may be entitled at the time of my decease, I give, devise, and bequeath unto my son, William H. Vanderbilt.”139
The rest, residue, and remainder left to Billy totaled $95 million. It was a day when the finest French chef could be hired for $100 a month, a proper English butler for $60 a month, a footman, carriage man, or gardener for less than $1 a day. It was a day when a very successful businessman might earn as much as $10,000 a year.
Ninety-five million dollars. This was more money than was held in the United States Treasury.
Fifty-six-year-old Billy threw himself on the piano in the parlor, weeping profusely.
2
THE BLATHERSKITE
1877–1883
“Any fool can make a fortune,” the Commodore had told his son William, whom he still called Billy, shortly before he died. “It takes a man of brains to hold on to it after it is made.”1
In his own mind, William had earned every penny of the fortune that was now his, for fifty-six years having put up with a cantankerous, overbearing father who considered him a bumbling fool and treated him like one, exiling him to a small farm on Staten Island and never letting him participate in his business ventures until he was forty-three. Was William Vanderbilt equal to the challenge of now holding on to the fortune? The head of a great railroad like the New York Central needed the administrative ability to oversee an operation consisting of thousands of employees spread all across the United States. He must be a daring financier as well as a shrewd strategist, ready to seize the best routes for his lines and to take over smaller lines after weakening them by cutthroat competition. And he must be a consummate diplomat and politician in order to secure every conceivable concession from the town councils, legislatures, and governors of the areas his trains would cut through. William Vanderbilt? No. He didn’t fit the bill.
William harbored no illusions about his entrepreneurial abilities. The executive titles his father had bestowed on him were meaningless. The Commodore had made all the decisions until the day he died. When faced with a business decision, William’s only resource would be to try as best he could to remember how his father would have acted.
The Commodore’s business associates shook their heads and predicted it would not be long before the old man’s fortune was gone. Bumbling Billy could never hold on to the empire his father had built. Whether he could or not would become clear soon enough, for that empire was now under siege.
Several months after the Commodore’s death, a depression that had lasted for most of the decade—the era was known as the “black seventies”—finally affected the railroads. In May of that year, 1877, the Pennsylvania Railroad announced a 10 percent wage cut for all employees, its second cut si
nce the panic that had begun in 1873. This action was immediately followed by similar decrees from the Erie and the Baltimore and Ohio. On July 14, 1877, three days after the Baltimore and Ohio slashed its wages, its firemen walked out. Two days later, its conductors, trainmen, trackmen—every employee—deserted the trains and began rioting. In Pittsburgh, angry mobs of railroad men, joined by other unemployed who had lost their jobs in the business downturn, torched hundreds of boxcars and passenger coaches, destroying scores of locomotives, tearing up tracks, and burning depots. Panicked railroad executives called in the state militia. When the mob overcame the militia, President Rutherford Hayes sent in troops from the Grand Army of the Republic to quell the nation’s first labor uprising.
Did he think the strike would spread to the New York Central? a reporter from the New York Times asked William Vanderbilt, who was vacationing at Saratoga.
“Not at all,” he responded without hesitation. “I put great confidence in our men. There is a perfect understanding between the heads of departments and employees, and they appreciate, I think, so thoroughly the identity of interest between themselves and us that I cannot for a moment believe that they will have any part in this business. I am proud of the men of the Central road, and my great trust in them is founded on their intelligent appreciation of the business situation at the present time. If they stand firm in the present crisis, it will be a triumph of good sense over blind fury and fanaticism. Our business relations with all our men on the Central are shaped, as they fully understand, by the emergencies of the business situation. Their hope, like ours, is for better times.”2
William Vanderbilt was right about one thing: The men of the New York Central were intensely loyal to the Vanderbilt family. Hadn’t they worked valiantly through the rough winter that year when a series of blizzards and weeks of freezing weather had threatened to stop all rail traffic between Albany and Buffalo? Yet it was difficult for the railroad workers to reconcile all the facts the newspapers were publishing. On the one hand, the New York Central that year had reported earnings of $28,910,555, operating expenses of $16,136,977, and a net profit of $12,774,578, a remarkably healthy profit margin; the Central’s 8 percent dividend had never been cut; the Commodore had passed away, leaving an estate of $105 million. On the other hand, the mechanics who worked for the railroad were paid $1.20 a day; the switchmen and trackmen earned 80 cents a day; the average annual salary of most of the Central’s employees was several hundred dollars. And now, when the Central faced a slump and its stock was falling, William Vanderbilt was joining the presidents of other railroads by ordering a 10 percent wage reduction for all New York Central employees. “The workman now earns the equivalent of a barrel of flour each day,” he had told the shareholders of the Central when justifying this decision, which he implemented just a few days after his Saratoga interview.3 It certainly seemed, as one editorial writer noted, that the railroad kings, “having found nothing more to get out of stockholders and bondholders, [have] commenced raiding not only the general public but their own employees.”4
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