Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s Wheatley Hills estate is now the clubhouse of the Old Westbury Golf Club.
Florence Vanderbilt Twombly’s Newport mansion, Vinland, is the library of Salve Regina College.
Florham Farms was demolished and became the site of the Exxon Research and Engineering Company. And in 1957, the rest of Florham was sold for $1.5 million to Fairleigh Dickinson University for its third New Jersey campus. The grass around the mansion, which had grown four feet high, was hacked down, the organ in the great hall was sold for a few thousand dollars, and desk-chairs and blackboards were arranged in Mrs. Twombly’s master bedrooms for the first students arriving in the fall of 1958. The empty orangery became the reading room of the library. The carriage house where the fifteen maroon Rolls-Royces were polished to sparkling perfection is now the science building, while the playhouse where Miss Ruth swam and played tennis is part of the gymnasium.
Without a Vanderbilt fortune and 126 workers to keep it just so, Florham today is showing its age. The marble floor of the great hall is scuffed and yellowing, paint peels from around the windows and under the porch roof. Outside, Olmsted’s plantings are overgrown, his vistas obscured, the outlines of the Italian garden just discernible. A bird nests inside one of the massive lighting fixtures with a broken glass panel.
From a dormitory hidden beyond the gardens, a stereo blares. Shouts and cheers echo from an autumn lacrosse game on the field where guests once arrived at the railroad siding. And in the distance, a whistle sounds as a commuter train rushes by.
Consuelo, the former duchess of Marlborough, died on December 6, 1965, at the age of eighty-eight, with about $1 million left from all the millions her father, Willie Vanderbilt, had given her. She had less trouble holding on to a photograph of Winthrop Rutherfurd, which she had kept with her through all the years.
Sometimes, Consuelo once had said, “I thought of the Commodore, what he would have made of me, and of the generations that followed him.”37 What indeed! Blatherskites all! They had certainly made a name for themselves, but at what a price!
Why had he left his fortune to one son, to Billy? To keep the wealth concentrated from generation to generation. “What you have got isn’t worth anything, unless you have got the power, and if you give away the surplus, you give away the control.”38 Now look what they had done. They had divided the fortune up among themselves, time and again, until it was dissipated, one hundred years after his death, among his 787 descendants.
And the New York Central. Where did they think the money was coming from? “Keep the Central our road,” he had told Billy. And what had they done? They had sold their stock and let others manage the railroad, and now the Central, their source of wealth, was gone.
And the spending! The wild, extravagant, endless spending. The Commodore had never let his expenditures rise with his income. “Something may happen,” he was convinced, and therefore he kept saving.39 “I suppose the property will go faster than ever I made it after I am gone,” the Commodore once told a friend. How right he was. Those amazing châteaus on Fifth Avenue. The squads of liveried footmen. The yachts. The summer palaces. The private railroad cars. The rivers of pearls and diamonds. The tapestries, the old masters. The fleets of maroon Rolls-Royces. Now the fortune was gone.
Maybe it had all been predictable. On December 6, 1877, in the midst of the courtroom trial over the Commodore’s will, the New York Daily Tribune published a remarkably percipient editorial, “Founding a Family.”
The Vanderbilt case is an impressive lesson in the folly of attempting to “found a family” upon no better basis than the possession of money. The ruling idea of the Old Commodore’s latter years was to amass a huge fortune which should stand for generations as a monument to the name of Vanderbilt, and make the head of the house a permanent power in American society. He chose one son out of his many children, and trained him to possess alone the inheritance of this vast wealth, as a king’s first born is educated for a crown; and this favored son in turn he doubtless expected to transmit the deposit, unimpaired and perhaps increased, to the head of the next generation. American law and American customs discountenance such preferences, and have never favored the permanent confining of wealth to a single narrow channel. There is no country in the world where fortunes are made so quickly, none where so large a proportion of the men in business have succeeded in amassing a comfortable independence; yet there is none in which ancestral wealth is so rare, and none in which inherited money has done so little for its possessors. Every few years a new Croesus dazzles us with his sudden abundance; he has plundered the stock exchange, he has negotiated a railroad subsidy, he has speculated in land, he has found a silver mine, he has floated a construction company, he has gambled in rotten steamships, he has held an army contract, or he has perchance built up prosperity by shrewd adventures in legitimate commerce. What becomes of all these stupendous fortunes? Most of them vanish as quickly as they came.
The Vanderbilt money is certainly bringing no happiness and no greatness to its present claimants, and we have little doubt that in the course of a few years, it will go the way of most American fortunes; a multitude of heirs will have the spending of it, and it will be absorbed in the vast circulating system of the country. The plans of the dead railway king will come to naught; and if he ever revisits the earth to look after what he had so much at heart in his last years, he will be satisfied that the art of founding a family was one of the things that he did not know.
“It takes three generations to make an American gentleman,” Ward McAllister had opined.40 Later, Andrew Carnegie spoke of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” in three generations. Perhaps both were right.
NOTES
For further information on works cited, see the Bibliography.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Croffut, The Vanderbilts and the Story of Their Fortune, pp. 142-143.
2. New York World, December 5, 1877.
3. Ibid.
4. New York Daily Tribune, December 8, 1877; March 14, 1878.
5. New York Sun, March 7, 1878.
6. New York Times, March 23, 1878.
7. Ibid.
8. New York Herald, April 10, 1878.
9. Andrews, The Vanderbilt Legend, p. 160.
10. New York Daily Tribune, March 20, 1878.
11. New York Herald, November 15, 1877.
12. New York Mail, December 11, 1877; New York Sun, November 13, 1877.
13. The World, December 19, 1877.
14. New York World, December 5, 1877; December 19, 1877; November 16, 1877.
15. New York World, March 9, 1878.
16. New York Herald, January 5, 1877.
17. His office, he said, was “the head of an upturned flour-barrel on the wharf.” He kept his accounts there, “and took my cold dinner daily on that same barrel.” (Croffut, pp. 106-107.)
18. Elliott, Uncle Sam Ward and His Circle, p. 627.
19. Parton, Famous Americans of Recent Times, p. 384.
20. Andrews, p. 18.
21. Vanderbilt, Queen of the Golden Age, p. 129.
22. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, p. 11.
23. New York Tribune, November 13, 1877.
24. Croffut, p. 41.
25. New York Times, April 13, 1878.
26. Lane, Commodore Vanderbilt: An Epic of the Steam Age, p. 201.
27. Ibid.
28. New York World, November 16, 1877.
29. New York Herald, December 13, 1877.
30. New York Herald, December 9, 1885.
31. New York Sun, December 9, 1885.
32. Lane, p. 200.
33. New York Daily Tribune, November 14, 1877.
34. Once when the Commodore was visiting Corneel at his farm, Corneel collapsed in an epileptic fit, with his jaw clenched, his teeth biting his lips and tongue, saliva frothing out of his mouth. The Commodore pointed to a picture of his steamer Vanderbilt hanging on the wall. “I would have given that ship to cure Cornelius i
f it had been possible,” he said. {New York Herald, March 30, 1878.)
35. New York Herald, December 14, 1877.
36. Andrews, p. 27.
37. New York Times, December 22, 1877.
38. Andrews, p. 27.
39. New York Herald, December 22, 1877.
40. New York Times, December 22, 1877.
41. New York Sun, December 18, 1877.
42. New York Times, April 3, 1882.
43. New York World, April 11, 1878.
44. Andrews, p. 28.
45. Clews, Fifty Years in Wall Street, p. 384.
46. Croffut, pp. 118-119.
47. There was no use opposing his father. At one time he threatened to break up his family and move to Europe if his wishes were not carried out.
48. New York World, November 16, 1877.
49. New York Daily Tribune, November 14, 1877.
50. Croffut, p. 45; Lane, p. 92.
51. New York Times, August 14, 1861.
52. New York World, March 16, 1878.
53. New York Herald, April 29, 1853.
54. His mother died the next year, on June 22, 1854, leaving an estate of $50,000, the product of her industry and thrift.
55. New York Post, January 5, 1877.
56. Churchill, The Splendor Seekers, p. 36.
57. Amory, Who Killed Society?, p. 82.
58. Andrews, pp. 48-49.
59. New York Times, January 5, 1877.
60. Lane, p. 112.
61. During the Civil War, the Commodore’s actions exhibited both patriotism and more ignoble characteristics.
On March 15, 1862, he received a telegram from Washington: ‘The Secretary of War directs me to ask you for what sum you will contract to destroy the Merrimac or prevent her from coming out from Norfolk—you to sink or destroy her if she gets out? Answer by telegraph, as there is no time to be lost.” (Lane, p. 176.)
Vanderbilt immediately went to see Abraham Lincoln and the secretary of war.
“Can you stop the Merrimac from coming out?” the president asked him.
“Yes, I believe I can. We can sink her if she attempts to come out.”
“For how much money will you undertake to do it?”
“The Government cannot hire me for anything. I will not be put on a par with the thieves who are robbing the Government in the shape of high pay.”
Lincoln could not understand this response. “Well, then,” said the president, “we cannot do anything with you.”
“I think you can,” Vanderbilt replied. “I will give the Government the steamer Vanderbilt, and fit her out, and put her at the station off Point Comfort, keep charge of her myself, and sink the Merrimac if she attempts to come out, provided your Navy Department shall have nothing to do with the ship. I do not want to be bothered by any navy men to accomplish this thing.”
“How long before the Vanderbilt could be at the point named?”
“I will have her here in forty hours.”
The Vanderbilt was there in forty hours, and Commodore Vanderbilt was skippering her, itching to blow up the Merrimac. The Confederates were smart enough not to venture out. (New York Genealogical Society and Biographical Library, Laurus Crawfurdiana, p. 93.)
Congress adopted a resolution thanking the Commodore for his gift of the Vanderbilt to the nation, a gift that he had never intended to make. He had intended rather to loan his prize steamship to the government for one specific mission. “Congress be damned!” he swore when he received a copy of the resolution. “I never gave that ship to Congress. When the Government was in great straits for a suitable vessel of war, I offered to give the ship if they did not care to buy it; however, Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Welles think it was a gift, and I suppose I shall have to let her go.” (Lane, p. 179.) The steamship, which had cost the Commodore $800,000, was turned into a warship, and he was given a gold medal, inscribed “A Grateful Country to Her Generous Son.” (Friedman, p. 12.) Years later, he would complain, “I was served meanly on that, meaner than ever any government served a man before or since. Why, they never gave me my vessel back.” (Andrews, p. 93.)
In less noble moments during the war, he chartered or sold to the Union a number of his ships that proved unseaworthy. A congressional investigating committee concluded that some of his ships were not fit even for a trip around New York Harbor. “In perfectly smooth weather the planks were ripped out of her and exhibited to the gaze of the indignant soldiers on board, showing that the timbers were rotten. The committee have in their committee room a large sample of one of the beams of this vessel to show that it had not the slightest capacity to hold a nail.’ (O’Connor, The Golden Summers, pp. 31-32.)
62. New York Times, January 5, 1877.
63. New York Daily Tribune, March 23, 1878.
64. New York Sun, March 23, 1878.
65. Twain, ‘Open Letter to Com. Vanderbilt,” pp. 89-90.
66. Lane, p. 73.
67. Clews, p. 110.
68. New York World, January 5, 1877.
69. New York Tribune, September 19, 1879.
70. White, The Book of Daniel Drew, p. 180.
71. Clews, p. 113.
72. Ibid., p. 115.
73. Andrews, p. 107.
74. Depew, A Retrospect of 25 Years with the New York Central Railroad and Its Allied Lines, p. 5.
75. Croffut, p. 82.
76. Andrews, p. 113.
77. Croffut, pp. 83-84.
78. Andrews, pp. 116-118.
79. Minnigerode, Certain Rich Men, p. 85.
80. Moody, The Railroad Builders, p. 94.
81. Cochran, Railroad Leaders, p. 166.
82. Lynes, The Taste-Makers, p. 93.
83. Clews, p. 139.
84. Andrews, p. 132.
85. Lane, p. 251.
86. Simon, Fifth Avenue, p. 107; New York Tribune, January 5, 1877.
87. Weed, Life of Thurlow Weed, pp. 381-382.
88. Hendrick, The Age of Big Business, p. 22.
89. New York Times, July 7, 1873.
90. New York Times, April 19, 1873.
91. New York World, March 2, 1878. While showing a friend around his home, he turned and said, “Look at that bust. What do you think Powers [the sculptor] said of that head?”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘It is a finer head than Webster’s!’ “(McAllister, Society as I Have Found It, pp. 251-252.)
92. In 1929, the statue of Vanderbilt was removed and placed by Grand Central Station, overlooking the top of the Park Avenue traffic ramp. The rest of the frieze was destroyed.
93. New York World, April 10, 1878. “I don’t know whether Cornelius is as bad as some folks represent him to be,” the Commodore told a friend, but then, on second thought, added that “Corneel is a damn bad fellow” and would spend all of the Commodore’s money if he could get his hands on it. “Why I wouldn’t let him come into my office if there was anything there he could carry away.” (New York World, March 16, 1878.)
William’s younger brother, Corneel, was envious of his success, and repeatedly pleaded with his father to give him, too, a chance to prove himself. “Here is William,” Corneel wrote to his father, “to-day surrounded by his millions, with every luxury and comfort at his command, and myself persistently denied the opportunity of testing my usefulness and merit, and with a stipend enough indeed to supply the real necessaries of life, and not sufficient to enable me to sustain creditably the dignity of my position as the son of America’s wealthiest and most distinguished citizen.” (New York Sunday News, January 6, 1878.)
Corneel asked his brother to put in a good word for him with their father and see if there was a position he might have with the railroads.
William replied, “I cannot interfere between father and you; if I should he would give me a damning up and down. I dar’sn’t do anything myself without he tells me to.” (New York World, December 20, 1877.)
“I could be of some service to father on the New York Central road and also in
some legislative matter,” Corneel persisted.
“We really don’t require any of your assistance,” William haughtily told him.
Several days later, Corneel went to his father’s office. William was present, and now treated his brother courteously. Corneel remarked on this change of attitude: “You don’t assume such an imperious way as you did the other day.”
“It is all summed up in a word,” William answered. “There is the master,” he said, pointing to his father, “and there is the slave,” pointing to himself.
“Leatherhead!” the Commodore exploded at William, telling him that he had “been trying to learn him something for the last twenty years, but he did not know enough now to hold his gab.” (New York World, December 19, 1877.)
94. Croffut, p. 81.
95. Harlow, The Road of the Century, p. 165.
96. New York Daily Tribune, March 16, 1878. The Commodore always treated his son like an employee. “Don’t let William know anything about this plan until it is completed, else he will think that he originated it.” (New York Herald, November 1877.) But Billy was now helping to make major policy decisions. The Commodore had no interest in extending his lines westward. “If we take hold of roads running all the way to Chicago, we might as well go to San Francisco and to China.” (Croffut, p. 123.) It was Billy who convinced him to expand their lines to Chicago by buying the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern running along the south shore of Lake Erie.
97. “The Vanderbilts,” Spectator, December 4, 1886.
98. Amory, p. 485.
99. Morris, Incredible New York, p. 130.
100. Ibid., p. 129.
101. Ibid.
102. New York World, March 9, 1878.
103. Croffut, p. 120.
104. Ibid., p. 121.
105. Churchill, p. 2.
106. New York Herald, December 14, 1877.
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