48 pages • 1 hour read
Anderson Cooper, Katherine HoweVanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Use and Misuse of Money
In the case of the Vanderbilts, this theme consists mostly of examples of the misuse of money, ways in which the vast family fortune was used to ill effect. The authors repeat several times that, by the 19th century, the Vanderbilts were the richest Americans in the nation’s history. This was true when the patriarch, Cornelius Vanderbilt, died in 1877 and bequeathed $100 million to his heirs, and eight years later when his son Billy Vanderbilt died, leaving a fortune of over $200 million. Although the focus of the book is on some of the individuals who made up the family, the telling inevitably involves how they spent their money.
The Commodore himself had simpler tastes. He built himself a house in Manhattan’s Washington Square, then the center of New York society. However, in more than 30 years of living there, while his wealth continued to grow, he had never thought to build something more opulent. He also used some of his fortune for good causes. During the Civil War, he purchased a ship for the Union Navy that cost $1 million. Later, he gave the same amount to the Methodist Church so it could found a university in Tennessee (later renamed for him). When he died, he gave the bulk of his money to his elder son, Billy, as the Commodore trusted his business acumen more than that of his other surviving son.
The Vanderbilts started losing money not long after Billy died. Large families and, later, multiple marriages played a role, but the major drain on the fortune was lavish spending. The authors describe how various family members worked to outdo each other and other members of high society, like Caroline Astor. To keep the monetary amounts in perspective, Cooper and Howe put many of the dollar figures in today’s equivalent amounts. The Commodore’s fortune at his death, for example, would be worth $2 billion today and Billy’s about $5.4 billion.
On the expense side of the ledger, take Alva Vanderbilt’s famous party in 1883, which established her as the equal of Mrs. Astor. Estimates are that she spent over $6 million in today’s money, all told—$280,000 (today’s cost) on flowers alone. Cornelius Vanderbilt II, a grandson of the Commodore, and his wife Alice built a magnificent mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, at a cost of $220 million in today’s money. That was just their summer home. Alfred Vanderbilt spent the equivalent of $310,000 on a car for his mistress in 1907. Reggie Vanderbilt, Cooper’s grandfather, burned through the equivalent of about $105 million, much of it on alcohol and gambling. The list is lengthy.
The Epilogue sums up this short-lived excessiveness succinctly as the authors take the reader on a tour of bygone Manhattan locations connected to the Vanderbilts, noting whose mansion once stood where, and so on. In each case, the result is the same: “By 1927, it was dust” (287); “the mansion was, inevitably, demolished in 1945” (287); and “it was razed in favor of a parking lot” (288). The conclusion is that, other than Vanderbilt University, the Vanderbilt money went to few philanthropic causes. The vast fortune was spent and squandered over little more than a century, with nothing like the Carnegie libraries or the Rockefeller Foundation left to show for it.
The Effects of Fame
Another main theme of the book is how fame affects people. One could consider the media as a character in the Vanderbilt story. The family’s great wealth attracted the attention of the press virtually from the beginning. As a result, the lives of many of the family members played out in public, and part of the book’s objective is to show the effects of this. An early example is the court case after the Commodore’s death, in which his son Cornelius (Cornie) sued another son, Billy, attempting to get a larger inheritance. Many private details of the two, as well as of the Commodore, came to light during the trial—for instance, the level of Cornie’s involvement with gambling. As the authors write, “For the first time, the true depths of Cornelius Jeremiah’s financial straits were laid bare for the public to see and feast upon” (60). Finally, the case was settled when Billy offered to give Cornie more money “if he made the suits go away” (67). Three years later, Cornie died by suicide, as the strain of being a Vanderbilt caught up with him.
In 1895, Alva Vanderbilt oversaw the marriage of her daughter Consuelo to the Duke of Marlborough. Consuelo was miserable about it and wanted to marry someone else, but her mother was firmly in control and had the final say. Being the daughter of such a famous and dominant personality as Alva was a heavy burden. The press reported Consuelo’s every move once she made her debut. “Sometimes it seemed to her that random members of the public knew more about the specifics of her mother’s plans for her than she did,” the authors write (120).
The Washington Post had reported the news that Alva was the driving force behind the marriage to the Duke rather than Consuelo herself, and a London newspaper ran a cartoon with the caption, “The Duke’s Return from the Land of Dollars”—noting the fact that he was looking for a rich American to help shore up his estate. It was all a great deal of psychological pressure for Consuelo, who spent an unhappy, loveless decade with the duke before they separated; another 15 years later, they finally divorced.
Perhaps the greatest example of the effects of fame, however, involved Cooper’s mother, Gloria, who had to endure a very public custody trial when she was only 10 years old. It was dubbed “the trial of the century” and came after the girl was virtually kidnapped by her aunt, Gertrude Vanderbilt. All manner of juicy details came to light of the bohemian life led by Gloria’s mother, not least of which was the charge of her having lesbian affairs, scandalous at the time of the trial in 1934. It was a trial whose unprecedented attention stemmed from the Vanderbilt fame and “would consume the newspapers in the early years of the Depression and leave one small child indelibly marked for the rest of her otherwise very long and notable life” (206).
The Myth of the Self-Made American
A third theme at the foundation of the larger story is the myth of the self-made American. Cooper notes this in the Introduction, writing that one of the nation’s enduring notions is “that success is available to anyone who is willing to work hard, for example, and that success is worthier of celebration if it is achieved without help” (xv). Immediately following, he points out that the Commodore himself would not have been able to start his first business without a loan from his mother. This myth serves to not only keep people thinking that Vanderbilt-style wealth is within their own grasp but also to validate the display of such wealth through conspicuous consumption. For all the Vanderbilts who followed the Commodore, whatever success they might have had cannot be separated from the advantages that came with the Vanderbilt name—be it education, leisure time, societal contacts, or the pure power of money. Cooper illustrates how they were born, as the saying goes, already on third base.
This is underscored by the occasional mention of events taking place concomitantly with the stories about Vanderbilt family members. In Chapter 5, for instance, the authors end with an incident that was reported on the front page of the New York Times alongside the article on Alva’s famous ball. It was about a mining disaster in Illinois. For a month, a flood had trapped miners in a coal mine, and it was not until the night of Alva’s party that rescuers gained access to the inner cavity. Seventy-two bodies were recovered. Such dangerous and difficult work, done for a pittance, was essential to the economic engine of the country. The source of much of the Vanderbilt’s wealth—railroads—depended upon coal. Yet the Vanderbilts themselves were far removed from the hazards that mining entailed.
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