The Vanderbilt family tree begins with a Staten Island ferryman. By a disputed family tradition, Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt (1794-1877) borrowed $100 from his thrifty mother, Phebe Hand Vanderbilt, bought a boat, and left behind roughly $100 million in shipping and railroad money — the largest fortune in America. With his first wife and first cousin Sophia Johnson Vanderbilt he had thirteen children; after her death he married Frank Armstrong Crawford Vanderbilt, a Southern cousin 45 years his junior whose Methodist piety encouraged his religious and philanthropic interests and helped lead to the 1873 endowment of Vanderbilt University, while she discouraged the séances he had taken up before their marriage.
The first fracture is the will. The Commodore left about 95 percent of everything to one son, William Henry Vanderbilt (1821-1885) — the son he had called a blatherskite and banished to a farm — and mere trust income or token bequests to the rest. Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt, epileptic and ruinously in debt, whom his father had twice had committed to an asylum, joined the prolonged contest alongside his sister Mary Alicia Vanderbilt La Bau, arguing the old man was insane and manipulated by mediums. The challenges were eventually withdrawn or settled while the will stood intact, and Cornelius Jeremiah died by suicide in 1882. William Henry doubled the fortune to $200 million in eight years and died of a stroke, calling the money a burden.
William Henry's nine children with Maria Louisa Kissam — eight of whom survived childhood — built the Gilded Age itself. Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice Claypoole Gwynne raised The Breakers at Newport; William Kissam Vanderbilt married Alva Erskine Smith, whose 1883 costume ball forced the family into Mrs. Astor's world and whose 1895 divorce scandalized it. Alva then coerced her daughter Consuelo into marrying the 9th Duke of Marlborough — a $2.5 million rescue of Blenheim Palace, ended by civil divorce in 1921 and annulled by Rome in 1926; Consuelo married Jacques Balsan happily in 1921. Frederick William Vanderbilt retreated to Hyde Park with Louise; George Washington Vanderbilt II spent his share on Biltmore, and his widow Edith sold its timberland to create Pisgah National Forest.
The later branches are marked by rupture and reinvention. Cornelius Vanderbilt II disinherited his son Neily in 1896 over his marriage to Grace Wilson, suffered a stroke that year and died three years later, in 1899; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, elevated in his place, went down with the Lusitania in 1915. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded the Whitney Museum in 1930 and won the 1934 custody trial over her fatherless niece Gloria Laura Vanderbilt, taking the child from her living mother; the "poor little rich girl" became a designer and the mother of Anderson Cooper. Documented in wills, court transcripts and the houses that survive as museums, this tree remains the standard American map of how a fortune is made, defended and dispersed.
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