Intro/Outro (00:06)
From the Bill of Rights Institute, Fabric of History weaves together US history, founding principles, and what all of this means to us today. Join us as we pull back the curtains of the past to see what’s inside.

Haley (00:20)
We hear the phrase the American dream all the time. But what does it actually mean? In this week’s episode of Fabric of History, Mary, Gary, and Eryn explore this question by tracing the origins of one of the most successful families in American history, the Vanderbilts. What did the legacies of some of its most prominent members teach us about integrity and human nature?

Mary (00:45)
Okay, so one idea that really permeates American history and the present day, I think it’s fair to say, is this concept of the American dream, this rags to riches, this inspirational story. If you work hard if you persevere if you’re resourceful. And I think there’s a fair amount of luck being in the right place at the right time, you can have great success. And this idea of entrepreneurship and the American dream is a huge concept in American history. But it’s also a really big thing to wrap your head around. And I think that there are a lot of examples, certainly in the past and even in the present, of people who embody this concept. But because the Fabric of History were really interested in the stories of history, we thought we would explore the story of the Vanderbilt family from Staten Island as our example of this American dream, this idea of the entrepreneur, the person, the family, and what legacy do they leave behind?

Eryn (01:48)
Yeah, we still all go visit all of the cottages and homes that they have along the East Coast. It’s fascinating.

Mary (01:57)
Yes, I’m actually coming to you live from the Breakers Cottage in Newport, Rhode Island. I’m not I wish I were. Okay. So I think it’s worth talking a little about. So who are the Vanderbilts? Where did they come from and how do they become this example of the American dream? I think it’s worth exploring. So it turns out that the Vanderbilts, as I said, they’re from Staten Island. They’re actually Dutch. And Cornelius Vanderbilt is the heavy hitter. So he is the one who accumulates the family wealth, but he starts he is a very humble beginning. So he starts a fairy service by the time he’s 16 with money from his parents, and he left school to do so. And he just keeps taking advantage. He’s very resourceful and takes advantage of the opportunities that are presented to him. So he’s running this ferry service. His ferry service expands in the War of 1812. Then he moves on to steamships, and then he moves onto railroads, and he just becomes fabulously wealthy. So you’re fabulously wealthy. What next?

Gary (03:00)
Where do you go from there? Is a really good question because we started off by saying this concept of the American dream is really hard to wrap your head around. And I think we at the Bill of Rights Institute often like to use narratives to ground these big concepts in the stories of real human beings. And the Vanderbilts actually appear in a number of our resources. They’re mentioned in docks of freedom, in the Gilded Age, in some other activities that we have. And so you mention Cornelius, and I think that’s such a great starting point to think about the Vanderbilt family. So Cornelius isn’t the first Vanderbilt in New York. The first Vanderbilt in New York goes back to 1651. Jan Vanderbilt. There’s a record of his family in New York, but it is Cornelius who was born in 1794. He’s around to 1877. So he’s really representing the 19th century. That I think is sort of the start of this narrative of the American dream. You mentioned the rags to riches and that money. What was it, $100 that he got to start, what eventually becomes this empire that he has. But he as the quote, the Commodore, I think the story is interesting in juxtaposing his experience versus, as you said, what comes next, those who are descendants from him and how the choices they make are slightly different because they’re already born as a Vanderbilt and that means something. And yet there are choices and there are experiences that they each individually have. So I think exploring the whole family and as you said, the legacy they left, not only the changes they made but even the physical legacy you can look around is a really interesting question of not only what’s next but who are some other Vanderbilts of note?

Mary (04:51)
I think it’s kind of interesting. So the Commodore, he is the Vanderbilt that acquires the vast amount of wealth. As Gary said, he’s not the first one, but he dies an extremely wealthy man. He’s worth 185,000,000,000 in 2010 dollars. So that’s a lot of money. That’s a fair chunk of change. But he doesn’t build flashy houses and there’s no real ostentatious display of wealth from him. He did like racehorses, so he bought resources and that was his big splurge. It’s his descendants that are the big spenders. That’s a lot of money. I’m still hung up on the $185,000,000,000, like pre income tax too. I mean, these guys are just fabulously wealthy.

Gary (05:33)
It’s how he did it. I think it’s an interesting question. And when right. So going back to that, it was shipping and railroads. That’s such an emblem of that time and that technology and managing. That is an amazing sort of action to take. I think back to among the things at BRI we talk about is also virtues. And one that strikes me is initiative. We describe initiative as exercising the power, energy, or ability to lead, organize, or accomplish something. So seeing the opportunity, doing something about it, and looking back on the impact of, say, railroads again in the 1880s, looking back on it, it’s like, well, it’s obvious. It’s so important. But we’re living in a world now where we can look around and say, where are those opportunities? What can we do about it? How can we work with other people? And seeing that is really a staggering ability for him to have had.

Mary (06:35)
And we should take a break and dive a little bit deeper.

Mary (06:42)
Hello, Fabric of History listeners. Join the Bill of Rights Institute and fellow educators this fall as we explore topics such as women’s suffrage, the executive branch, and how to use Socratic discussion with your students, see links and show notes and we hope to see you soon.

Mary (07:03)
Okay. So we gave you the spark Notes version of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He has humble beginnings, but he acquires mass amounts of wealth by the time of his death in 1877. And he leaves most of his money to his heir. So he does establish Vanderbilt University, but he’s leaving an insane amount of money to his family and his eldest son in particular. But all of his heirs now have this name, the Vanderbilt name, and they have a lot of money and they’re born into their own. So it’s now in 1877, we’re in the post-Civil War America, it’s the Gilded Age, and we have this Vanderbilt family that’s dominating the society of New York. So what does that mean? So again, Cornelius is sort of working his way up and acquiring the wealth, and he’s passed on and his family now has their own story to tell. And Interestingly. So an interesting family member, in particular, is his grandson William, whose wife is named Alva. And they have a daughter named Consuelo, who actually, in addition to having a fabulous name, has a really interesting story.

Eryn (08:13)
Yeah, I think it’s really interesting because at the time, of course, just the name Vanderbilt implied the wealth and this notoriety and just them setting up specific example of what a Vanderbilt was. And so even from a young age, Alva trained her daughter Consuelo in the art of being a well-bred young woman. There was this instrument they put her in and helped her set up straight. And it was a steel Rod strapped to her shoulders and went down her back and around her head just so you learn that perfect posture. And as she got older, Alva wanted Consuelo to have a Duchess title and even had Consuelo painted in the style of an English Duchess. And so it was almost like they were mirroring what that old British wealth looked like in America. And so Alva ended up taking Consuelo to England to try and find her husband and ended up settling on the Duke of Marlborough, who, according to sources, was not a great catch because he was not incredibly friendly. He was five, six. But he did have one of the best palaces in England. So I guess that made up for everything, which was called Blenheim Palace. But at this point in time, blending palace was a wreck and so his palace was suffering. And so the Duke of Marlborough receives two and a half million dollars in Vanderbilt railway stock as a wedding dowry to Consuelo, which is $64 million today. And so everyone in America is super excited that they’re going to have this wedding. And the news even said, oh, this is our own American Princess, big media frenzy about a fairy tale, which sounds very familiar. But many years later, in her autobiography, Consuelo, who was 18 years old when she married the Duke, said, I spent the morning of my wedding in tears. And that was partly because she had been engaged to someone else. And Alva said, no, you will marry the Duke. You’re too young and foolish to choose your own husband. Locked her in her room for the last six weeks, away from all her friends and any social contact until it was her wedding. And there’s a very fascinating political cartoon. We’ll make sure to link it on our website. But it’s a political cartoon of Alva and the Duke’s wedding. And it’s basically Alva is in her wedding dress in chains. And the public very soon realized this was a transactional wedding and marriage. And for the most part, it was. Consuelo was not happy. She wrote that she had silent dinners with her husband and her husband. The Duke actually even said, you’re just a link in the chain because the Duke saw this as a sense of duty for him and very like your father gave me money to restore Blenheim Palace. In exchange, I got you this wedding dowry. But her two sons do give her a lot of joy. And when we were talking about the impact and the legacy that the Vanderbilts have, for better or for worse, based on these human choices that they make, Alva made these choices for her daughter, as did Consuelo. But it led to Consuelo really finding what gave her joy. And that was a lot of charity work and helping the less privileged she became a local counselor in England. She advocated for women’s right to vote. That’s actually how she became close to her mother. Again, Alva and Consuelo worked together on women’s suffrage, and she also opened a home for single mothers. And of course, finally, the money from her dowry allows Blenheim Palace to be upkeep and modernized. We wouldn’t have the Blenheim Palace that people tour every day if it weren’t for her because it was in disrepair before that. And side note, fun fact, it was also featured on an episode of Downton Abbey. So it’s very fascinating. We’re talking about the Vanderbilts not just as a name that we know and associate with wealth, but they were humans. They were a family. And the choices they made and really impacted them on this personal level. Like Consuelo mentioning that she was in tears on her wedding morning. But it led to a lot of the things that we see today like Blenheim Palace and her impact on a lot of this charity work.

Mary (13:40)
I think Consuelo’s story, I think, is really interesting because if you contrast her situation, she’s born into this inherited wealth, and it’s almost like her wealth is a burden because she’s forced into this loveless marriage. But she’s a Duchess, right? That is that’s the thing. But again, the Vanderbilt family, they work their way up and their success is just from hard work, and they’re not born into anything. But it’s almost like by the time you get to Consuelo. So I guess she is a great-granddaughter of the Commodore. They want that status. They want that title, which in a way, is very not American. Like, we purposely don’t want titles of nobility in our country. But her mother just had to have that for her. It was the ultimate prize. So I just think that’s kind of an interesting I don’t know that’s kind of taking the story in a full circle. But like you said, she Consuelo is not happy in her marriage, but she made the most of it. She did a lot of good for the world and left a lot of good things behind her.

Eryn (14:46)
And she did actually end up divorcing the Duke in 1921 and remarried someone else that same year. And she relinquished her title of Duchess.

Mary (14:55)
Wow, that’s a big thing, right? Because this is when there are only so many Dukes. I’m a big Anglophile nerd.

Eryn (15:03)
There were 27.

Mary (15:04)
That’s a set number. So like an English Duke is the prize. It means something. To be an English Duchess and to divorce, I think back then was considered it was not something to be taken lightly. So I think she really had a lot of courage in her own right to do that.

Eryn (15:21)
She tried to do it. She actually fell in love in 1906 with her husband’s cousin and runs off to Paris with him.

Mary (15:32)
That’s our next episode. No, it’s not.

Eryn (15:34)
Yeah. Well, she knew she could lose her title, the access to her own fortune, and her children, because at the time that was basically considered, the men took over all that, took over the money, still could keep the children. But the Duke of Marvel’s cousin, Winston Churchill, steps in and negotiates a separation where they lived apart, but still, both had access to the children because divorce was so frowned upon. So they did that for 15 years.

Gary (16:08)
When you say these stories again, there is at the same time a mix of opportunity and limitation on every member of the family and every member of the United States and all human beings right there’s. The contexts have opportunities and limitations. There’s no way to get out of those things. So I think that’s part of what makes your story really interesting is we think of Dukes and so forth as, again, seeming as an era of her time as being something. But ultimately it’s status. Right. So that idea of status. What does it mean, the pressures to have status if you’re born into a family that already has some sort of status, and by status, it may be financial, it may be, as you said, titles. But thinking about that choice, in addition to the choices people have in being in their context, there’s also the choices of what does one do with dealing with their own status in life.

Eryn (17:07)
And I think the Vanderbilts are the perfect example that they all dealt with it a little bit differently.

Gary (17:13)
I really was intrigued by what you were saying, Eryn, about the concept of status and what it looks like from the outside, what it means, and the idea that status isn’t itself good or evil. Right. It’s just sort of what happens. I just think of an anecdote. So I grew up on Long Island, not far from Centerport, where the Vanderbilt Museum is. And this is the Vanderbilt Museum, named for a descendant, William Vanderbilt II, who was around late 1800. He died in 1944. Anyway, the Museum is on the grounds or is his former estate. Right. So his estate’s name was Eagle’s Nest. It was a 43-acre estate, a beautiful sort of thing, and one would argue a manifestation of his status. But it also became this amazing Museum that we would go to all the time. And it was sort of a footnote if you walked around the Museum that it was this palatial estate. What really was the focus that we are there for was the educational part, the amazing Planetarium I went to very frequently as a kid, the natural history and science parts of the Museum. And so the perception of the vendor built, there was this educational location that is also this symbol, for lack of a better word, of status on this estate. So it just makes me think about how the legacy of the Vanderbilts is something you can still see everywhere across the country that isn’t inherently something to evaluate good or bad, although that is an interesting question, but rather the impact, the footprint that they had.

Eryn (19:01)
Their name is associated with so much. Now the Vanderbilt University, the museums, like you mentioned, even I know we were kind of saying that Gloria Vanderbilt and the jeans and just like the lasting impact that the whole family is.

Mary (19:19)
So we started with this young man, Cornelius, who leaves school and he starts his own ferry business and he’s resourceful and he changes with the times and he amasses this immense fortune. And he is sort of the patriarch of this family that grows so wealthy that they endow Vanderbilt University and they create these museums that little Gary visits on Long Island. And I definitely want to check out. But the family, they’re kind of synonymous with this idea of wealth and status and entrepreneurship, but they are very human and they had choices and difficulties like we did or we do today. So they’re very much a product of their time, but I think that human element of their story is still really interesting. So what do you think? Have you had any interactions with the Vanderbilt family or any interpretations of the American dream that we didn’t think about here? Please email us at comments@fabricofhistory.org and thanks for tuning in. We’ll see you next time.

Eryn (20:22)
Bye, guys.

Gary (20:22)
Bye, everybody.

Intro/Outro (20:27)
The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exists in a free society. Check out our educational resources and programs on our website mybri.org. Any questions or suggestions for future episodes? We’d love to hear from you. Just email us at comments@fabricofhistory.org and don’t forget to visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay connected and informed about future episodes. Thank you for listening.