Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

As would be expected, while everyone attended to his or her own business, the Commodore attended to everyone else’s business. One evening after dinner, he walked up to his thirty-three-year-old son Billy, who was enjoying a cigar on the deck. “Billy, I wish you would quit that smoking habit of yours. I’ll give you ten thousand dollars if you do.” “

Burning forty-two tons of coal each day, averaging thirteen knots, the North Star plowed across the Atlantic. Within several days, a routine had established itself. “There was discipline on board that ship, sir,” the Reverend Choules noted. “Each man attended to his own business. The Commodore did the swearing, and I did the praying. So we never di

Two of William’s sisters, Ethelinda Allen (the beneficiary of a $400,000 trust fund) and Marie Alicia La Bau (the recipient of $250,000 of railroad bonds), along with William’s brother, Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt (who had been given only the income from a $200,000 trust fund to be controlled by William), ganged up and decided to contest their fa

Grace was spending $250,000 each year to entertain her friends and maintain her position as Mrs. Vanderbilt, $125,000 more each year than her and Neily’s annual income. The expenses of running 640 Fifth Avenue and of paying taxes for the privilege of having a home on a piece of the world’s most expensive urban real estate amounted to over $1,000 do

“My life was never destined to be quite happy,” he told them. “It was laid out along lines which I could not foresee, almost from earliest childhood. It has left me with nothing to hope for, with nothing definite to seek or strive for. Inherited wealth is a real handicap to happiness. It is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to morality.”

“Society,” he had said, “is an occupation in itself. Only a man who has a good deal of leisure and a taste for it can keep up with its demands.’2 He found himself “assailed on all sides” by people wanting to enter society, and became, as he said, “a diplomat [who] committed myself to nothing, promised much and performed as little as possible.”

How would the ladies make their investment decisions? That was easy, the Commodore responded. Mrs. Woodhull would go into a trance and predict the course of railroad stocks. “Do as I do,” he told one young man asking for stock advice, “consult the spirits.”100 The stock of the New York Central would be rising, he told another. How did he know? “Mrs

When the Cornelius Vanderbilts had acquired the land in the 1880s, it had cost $375,000 and the house $3 million more. Their new mansion had been hailed by the press as “a private house which must for a century or two elevate the standard of such houses, and tend, at least, to the improvement of domestic architecture.”8 Now in 1925 the land, a prim

With the Commodore’s money, the two lively young ladies published the first edition of their newspaper, Woodhull Ö Claflin’s Weekly, on May 14, 1870. And what a paper it was! PROGRESS! FREE THOUGHT! UNTRAMMELED LIVES! BREAKING THE WAY FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS? heralded the masthead. The paper, whose articles were written by a number of gentlemen admi