- 1 week ago
The story of the Vanderbilts is one of the most compelling dynastic narratives in American history, marked by astonishing wealth, extraordinary ambition, and a profound long-term decline.
Few family names have become so closely associated with both immense prosperity and eventual fragmentation, making the Vanderbilt legacy a powerful case study in the rise and fall of great fortunes.
From the steamboat empire of Cornelius Vanderbilt to the lavish Gilded Age mansions that still attract visitors today, the family once embodied the height of American industrial success.
Few family names have become so closely associated with both immense prosperity and eventual fragmentation, making the Vanderbilt legacy a powerful case study in the rise and fall of great fortunes.
From the steamboat empire of Cornelius Vanderbilt to the lavish Gilded Age mansions that still attract visitors today, the family once embodied the height of American industrial success.
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00:00A woman stands on a balcony, 14 floors above the street. She is holding her son's hand,
00:05then he lets go. Her name is Gloria Vanderbilt. Her family was once the richest in America,
00:09richer than the US government. They built palaces, they threw parties that cost a fortune,
00:14and within a single lifetime most of it was gone. So were the people.
00:17How does the greatest fortune in America end? With a mother on a ledge,
00:21reaching for a son who won't hold on. Picture a boy of 11, quitting school to haul cargo across
00:26New York Harbor. That boy was Cornelius Vanderbilt. By the time he died in 1877,
00:31he had built a shipping and railroad empire worth more than $100 million,
00:34more than the entire US treasury was holding. One man held one in every $20 in the country.
00:40He knew what he loved. I have been insane on the subject of money making all my life,
00:44he once said. His family built the biggest houses this country had ever seen,
00:48one of them the Biltmore, is still the largest private home in America. At their parties,
00:52one hostess, Alva Vanderbilt, wore the pearls of a Russian empress. But the fall came faster than
00:58the climb. His son William Henry didn't just keep the fortune. He doubled it and bragged that
01:02he earned $19 a minute. Then the grandchildren took over. They stopped building and started
01:06spending. Marble mansions, European art, a row of palaces on 5th Avenue most torn down within a
01:11generation. In Newport, they built marble summer cottages with dozens of rooms just to spend three
01:16weeks a year in them. Less than 50 years after the Commodore died, not a single Vanderbilt was among
01:21the richest people in the world. Let that sink in. But money was the first thing this family lost,
01:27not the last. One of those grandsons was Reginald Vanderbilt. He gambled. He drank. He burned through
01:32his share and died of cirrhosis in 1925, leaving a baby daughter behind. Her name was Gloria.
01:37Imagine being 10 years old and the whole country is fighting over you. Little Gloria had a trust fund
01:42and no father. In 1934, her aunt sued her own mother for custody and control of that money. The press
01:47called it the trial of the century. Behind closed doors, the judge cleared the courtroom to let
01:51the child speak. People outside heard weeping through the walls. The court handed her to the
01:55aunt. The papers gave her a name that stuck for life, the poor little rich girl. She grew up. She
01:59married four times. She built a jeans empire with her name on the back pocket. She survived all of
02:04it. Her children would not be so lucky. Picture a 10-year-old boy losing his father on an operating
02:09table. In 1963, Gloria married the writer Wyatt Cooper. They had two sons, Carter and Anderson. For 15
02:15years, they were happy. Then on January 5, 1978, Wyatt Cooper died during open-heart surgery. He was 50.
02:21Anderson was 10. Gloria never married again. The boy learned young that safety can vanish in an
02:26afternoon. But the worst was still, 10 years away. Carter Cooper was 23, a Princeton graduate. Gentle,
02:32his family said. Friends said he had been shaken by a breakup and doctors had treated him for depression.
02:37On July 22, 1988, he walked onto the terrace of his mother's 14th floor apartment. Gloria followed.
02:42She tried to talk him back. She reached for him. He went over the edge while she watched. In her
02:46own
02:46words, he let go. She thought about following him over. She later called it the loss that stripped
02:51her bare. 10 years after the operating table, one family, a father, a brother, gone. The fortune that
02:57built the palaces couldn't save a single one of them. The Commodore's own son had taken his own life
03:02in 1882. A century later, the pattern reached Carter. When Gloria Vanderbilt died in 2019, the family
03:09fortune, once the largest in America, had shrunk to an estate worth less than $1.5 million. Her son Anderson
03:15inherited most of it. He says he never wanted it. He calls inherited money an initiative sucker. He calls
03:21it a curse. His brother's death is the reason he became a journalist. He went looking for other people's
03:26grief to sit with his own. He is the last one left. Think about what that really means. A family
03:31that once
03:31filled ballrooms with a thousand guests now comes down to one man, sitting alone in a television
03:36studio. Some of the houses are still standing. The family is not inside them. Today, strangers walk
03:41through those rooms. They stand in halls that were built for people who are all gone now. To understand
03:45how it ended on that terrace, you have to go back. Not to the men who made the money. To
03:49the children who
03:50paid for it. Because Gloria and Carter were not the first Vanderbilts the fortune could not save.
03:55Long before the 14th floor, there was another young person and another locked door. Picture a girl of 18.
04:00She is crying behind a white veil. She is marrying a man she does not love. While thousands of
04:05strangers fight in the street just to get a look at her. Her name was Consulo Vanderbilt. Her mother
04:09was Alva. The same Alva who wore the pearls of an empress. Alva once threw a costume ball that cost
04:15around 3 million dollars. She had money for anything. She wanted the one thing money could not print.
04:19She wanted a title in the family. A whole wave of rich American girls was crossing the ocean in those
04:24years to marry broke noblemen. The newspapers had a name for these girls. They called them dollar
04:28princesses. The girls brought cash. The lords brought a name. Consulo was about to become the
04:33most famous trade of them all. So Alva chose a duke. His name was Charles Spencer Churchill. The 9th
04:38Duke of Marlborough. He owned a famous English palace called Blenheim. And the palace was falling
04:42apart. He needed the marriage money to keep Blenheim standing. The Vanderbilts had the money. It looked
04:46like a fair trade to everyone except the bride. Because Consulo was already in love. She was secretly
04:52engaged to an American named Winthrop Rutherford. She wanted to run away with him. Her mother found out.
04:57What Alva did next reads like a nightmare. She locked her daughter in her room and threatened
05:01to have Rutherford killed. The girl still said no. So Alva claimed the stress was destroying her
05:05health and took to what looked like her deathbed. Consulo finally gave in. Her mother made a full
05:09recovery the moment she got her way. The wedding was held in New York on November 6, 1895. Consulo was
05:15only 18 years old. Police had to hold back the crowds outside the church. And under the white veil,
05:21where the cameras could not reach, she was weeping. Then it got colder. After the ceremony,
05:25the Duke told her he was in love with another woman. She had traded her whole life for a crown,
05:29and the man who handed it to her did not want her either. They had two sons. They shared almost
05:33nothing else. They came apart within about 11 years. Her story became so well known that the
05:38writer Edith Wharton used it as the seed for one of her novels. And years later, Alva finally told the
05:43truth about what she had done. When the marriage was ended, she testified that she had forced it.
05:47I forced my daughter to marry the Duke, she admitted. Consulo did find real love in the end,
05:52much later, with a Frenchman named Jack Balson. But the best years were already spent. The money
05:57bought a crown. It bought a palace. It could not buy her a single happy year inside it. And a
06:01loveless marriage was one of the gentler things this fortune paid for. Some Vanderbilt stories did
06:06not end in a cold room. They ended in cold water. Picture a man standing on the deck of a
06:11sinking
06:11ship. All around him, people are screaming and climbing over each other for a spot in the lifeboats.
06:16He is calm. He takes off his life vest and hands it to a stranger. Then he ties it on
06:20for her
06:20because her arms are full. He cannot swim. He knows there are no more life vests. He does it
06:25anyway. His name was Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. He was a great-grandson of the Commodore himself,
06:30an heir to a share of the family fortune. He was rich beyond most people's dreams. None of it
06:35mattered on this day. The day was the 7th of May, 1915. Alfred was crossing the Atlantic on a famous
06:40ship called the Lusitania. Off the coast of Ireland, a German submarine fired a torpedo into her side.
06:46The ship went down in about 18 minutes. There was no time. In the middle of the panic,
06:50Alfred helped women and children into the lifeboats. A young mother came to him. She
06:54needed a life vest for her baby. He gave her his own and tied it on for her. Witnesses say
06:58he did
06:59this knowing he could not swim. Then the sea took the ship and it took him too. His body was
07:03never
07:03found. Nearly 1,200 people died that day. One newspaper of the time said his final act showed
07:08gallantry which no words of mine can describe. The richest family in the country and the cold water
07:14did not care. His money bought him a first-class cabin. It could not buy back the one seat he
07:18chose to give away. Now look at the houses because the houses tell the same story in stone. The
07:23Vanderbilts built their palaces to stand for a thousand years. Most did not last 50. On 5th Avenue
07:28in New York, the family put up a whole row of mansions. One of them was the Petit Chateau,
07:32a French-style castle. Today, if you go looking for it, you will find a clothing store standing in its
07:37place. It was torn down in the 1920s. It was not alone. At least six other Vanderbilt mansions on 5th
07:43Avenue were demolished. The grandest of them all belonged to Cornelius Vanderbilt II. It was the
07:48largest private home in the city. It was knocked down in 1926 and a department store was built on
07:53the spot. The summer cottages in Newport had a softer fate. They survived but not as family homes.
07:58The Breakers has 70 rooms. Marble House holds 500,000 cubic feet of marble. Today, both are museums that
08:04anyone can pay to walk through. Strangers stand in the ballrooms now. The family that built them is gone.
08:09The stone outlived the people. That was the plan. It just did not work the way they hoped.
08:14And the man who built the Breakers barely got to enjoy it. The man who built the biggest house in
08:18all of America would pour a fortune into it. And that house would help take everything from him.
08:23Picture a shy man who loved books far more than business. He is quiet. He would rather read than
08:28run a railroad. His name was George Washington Vanderbilt, the youngest son of William Henry
08:32and his father's favorite child. George did not chase the family business. He chased beauty.
08:37And he decided to build the most beautiful house America had ever seen. He built it deep in the
08:42mountains of North Carolina. And he called it the Biltmore. It had 250 rooms. And it was the largest
08:47private home in the whole country. It still is. But a house like that has a price. And the price
08:52never really stops. George poured about 4.5 million dollars of his 5 million dollar inheritance
08:57into the Biltmore. Bad investments ate away at the rest. The house he built to show the world his
09:02fortune slowly helped drain that fortune away. Here is one strange twist. In 1912, George and
09:07his wife bought tickets to sail home on a brand new ship. Then they changed their plans at the
09:11last minute. The ship was the Titanic. And they were not on it when it sank. The sea let George
09:16Washington Vanderbilt live. Three years later, that same ocean would take his nephew Alfred on the
09:20Lusitania. But George did not get to grow old. He died in 1914 at the age of 51. From complications
09:27after an operation on his appendix. He built the biggest home in America. And he barely got to live
09:32in it. After he was gone, his widow sold about 86,000 acres of the land to the government. And
09:37it became a national forest. The great estate shrank from more than 100,000 acres to only about 8,000.
09:4351 years old. Hold on to that number. Because another Vanderbilt died at exactly 51. More than 30 years
09:49before George. And his ending was much darker. To find him, you have to go all the way back to
09:54the start.
09:55Back to the Commodore and his own children. The Commodore had a favorite son. That was William
09:59Henry, the one who doubled the money. But he also had a son he could not stand. His name was
10:04Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt. The family called him Corneal. From the age of 18, Corneal suffered
10:09from epilepsy. And his father treated it as a sign of weakness. The Commodore said of his own son,
10:14he's a very smart fellow, but he's got a cog out. He even had Corneal locked away in an asylum
10:19for a
10:19time. Corneal never found his footing. He failed at one job after another. Ran up heavy
10:24gambling debts and borrowed money on the family name that he often never paid back. He was seen
10:29as the family embarrassment. And his father never let him forget it. When the Commodore died in 1877,
10:35he left almost everything to William Henry. Corneal got only a small piece. He fought the
10:40will in court alongside two of his sisters. And he lost. Six years later, it was over. In April of
10:451882,
10:46after a night at a gambling house, Corneal took his own life in a New York hotel room. He was
10:5051 years old,
10:51the very same age George would be. The next day, a newspaper gave him the cruelest title of all.
10:57It called him the discarded son of the late Commodore Vanderbilt. This was the first Vanderbilt
11:01to die by his own hand. He would not be the last. The darkness that found Corneal in that hotel
11:06room
11:06in 1882 was not finished with this family. It would wait, quietly, for more than a hundred years.
11:12And then it would climb to a 14th floor terrace. Now at last, back to the man who built the
11:17breakers.
11:17His name was Cornelius Vanderbilt II. He was the Commodore's favorite grandson. The Commodore
11:22left him $5 million, and his father left him close to $70 million more. He ran the family
11:27railroads. He built the grandest cottage in all of Newport. From the outside, he had everything.
11:32Inside that grand family, the cracks were already showing. His little daughter Alice died of a
11:37childhood illness when she was only five. His oldest son, William Henry II, died of typhoid fever at
11:4221 while he was away at Yale. Then his son Naley fell in love with a woman Cornelius did not
11:47approve of. Cornelius cut him off and disinherited him, and the two barely spoke again.
11:51Soon after that fight, a stroke left Cornelius partly paralyzed, and he never really recovered.
11:56He finished the breakers in 1895. By September of 1899, he was dead at the age of 55. He built
12:03a
12:03palace to stand for a thousand years. He got four years inside it. But here is the part that ties
12:08the whole story together. Look at the children this one man left behind. One of his sons was Alfred,
12:14who gave away his life vest on the Lusitania. Another son was his youngest boy, Reginald.
12:19You already met Reginald. He is the one who gambled and drank his share away and died young,
12:23leaving behind a baby daughter named Gloria. And one of his daughters was named Gertrude.
12:27Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney grew up to be a sculptor and to found a famous art museum.
12:32She was also little Gloria's aunt. And in 1934, it was Gertrude who took Gloria's own mother to court
12:38and won custody of the child, in the trial of the century.
12:40Sit with that, one father, one generation. A son lost to the sea. A son lost to the bottle.
12:46A daughter who pulled a 10-year-old girl away from her mother in front of the whole country.
12:50It all runs through the man who built the breakers. So ask the question again,
12:54how does the richest family in America end up here? The answer is not bad luck. The Vanderbilts
12:59had every dollar a person could dream of. What the money could not do was keep them safe. It could
13:04not keep a boy from typhoid, or a man off a sinking ship, or a father out of a hotel
13:08room,
13:08or a son off a ledge. It bought the biggest houses ever seen in this country. It could
13:12not build a wall high enough to keep the grief out. Gloria carried more of that grief than
13:16almost anyone. She lost her father as a baby. She lost the trial as a child. She lost her husband
13:21Wyatt, and then she lost her son Carter. And still, she kept going, all the way into her 90s.
13:27Near the end of her life, something quiet and beautiful happened. After Gloria turned 91,
13:31she and Anderson began writing long letters back and forth. They finally talked about all of it,
13:35even Carter. Those letters became a book they made together called The Rainbow Comes and Goes,
13:40a mother and a son, going back over a lifetime of love and loss before it was too late.
13:44In one of those talks, Gloria repeated a line she loved, that, a fatherless girl thinks all
13:49things possible and nothing safe. All things possible and nothing safe. That was the Vanderbilt
13:53story in a single sentence. A family that could buy anything and hold on to almost nothing.
13:58Gloria Vanderbilt died in June of 2019, at the age of 95. And so the greatest fortune in American
14:04history came down to one man, a man who never wanted the money in the first place.
14:09He does not chase the fortune his family died building. He chased the truth instead,
14:13and he sat with other people's grief because it helped him carry his own. He would trade every
14:17dollar the Vanderbilts ever made for one more afternoon with his father, or one more phone
14:22call with his brother. That is the real fate of the Vanderbilts. They built the tallest palaces
14:26in the land. In the end, the only thing worth keeping was the one thing no fortune could ever buy,
14:31and the last one left knows it better than anyone.
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