Newport Stories: To Preserve or Not to Preserve, or, On the Million-Dollar Question about Newport’s (and All) Historic Homes

[Here is the fifth and final installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

The Breakers.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality, depth, and breadth of the self-guided audio tour at The Breakers—that tour, to be clear, provided starting points for all five of this week’s blog topics—but was particularly taken aback, in a good way, by a provocative question raised right at the tour’s outset. The narrator asks directly whether preserving mansions like The Breakers is a worthwhile pursuit for an organization such as the Preservation Society of Newport County—whether such mansions are architecturally or artistically worth preserving, whether they are historically or culturally worth remembering, whether, in short, these kinds of homes merit the obvious expense and effort that are required to keep them open and accessible to visitors. The tour presents arguments on both sides of the question, and leaves it up to the listener to decide as he or she continues with his or her visit.

Newport Stories: Alice and Alva Vanderbilt

[Here is the fourth installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

Alva Vanderbilt, 1883.

At the same time that Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt were building The Breakers, Cornelius’s brother William and his wife Alva were completing their own Newport mansion, Marble House. Located just down the street from each other, these two Vanderbilt homes jointly exemplified and dominated late 19th-century Newport society, and it’s easy to see the two women as similarly parallel. Yet the two marriages ended in very different ways—Cornelius died suddenly in 1899, at the age of 56, and the widowed Alice lived 34 more years but never remarried; Alva controversially divorced William in 1895 and married the younger Oliver H.P. Belmont, moving down the street into his home Belcourt Castle—and those events foreshadowed the two women’s increasingly divergent trajectories.

Both Alice and Alva would continue to play significant roles in Newport and New York society for their more than three remaining decades of life, but in dramatically different ways. Alice, known as the dowager Mrs. Vanderbilt, made her New York and Newport homes the social centers for which purpose they had been built, donated philanthropically to numerous causes (including endowing a building at Yale and one at Newport Hospital), and generally maintained her traditional, influential, powerful high society status. Alva, on the other hand, forged more pioneering and modern paths: her passion for architecture led her to become one of the first female members of the American Institute of Architects; her dissatisfaction with the highly traditional New York Academy of Music led her to co-found the Metropolitan Opera; and, most tellingly, she became one of the most active and ardent supporters of women’s suffrage, forming the Political Equality League, establishing the National Women’s Party, and working with Anna Shaw, Alice Paul, and other luminaries to help ensure the passage of the 19th Amendment.

Newport Stories: On the Vanderbilt Heiress Whose Seemingly Stereotypical Life Belies a Far More Individual Identity

[Here is the third installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916, by Robert Henri. 

Just in case Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875-1942), eldest surviving daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, didn’t seem to have enough of an elite American legacy on which to live, she went ahead and married Harry Payne Whitney (1872-1930), son of a famous attorney, grandson of a Standard Oil executive, and heir to a sizeable fortune in his own right. Together the two expanded upon those impressive starting points, inhabiting a New York mansion of their own, becoming prominent racehorse breeders, world travelers, and art patrons, and, in a Gospel of Wealth moment for Depression-era America, endowing the New York Whitney Museum of American Art just before Harry’s death in 1930.

Newport Stories: The Omelet King, or, On the Very American Story--in Some of the Best and Worst Senses--of Rudy Stanish

[Here is the second installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

While I hope that yesterday’s post complicated some of the simplest narratives about a figure like Cornelius Vanderbilt II, it was nonetheless, I admit, still pretty crazy to use the phrase “rags to riches” to describe Commodore Vanderbilt’s grandson. But how about Rudolph “Rudy” Stanish, who began life as the seventh of thirteen children born to an Eastern European (Croatian and Serbian) immigrant couple in Yukon, Pennsylvania, and ended his life as the world famous Omelet King, chef to some of America’s most prominent people and families? A young man who was brought to Newport’s mansions before he was 16 (in 1929) to work as a kitchen boy with his godmother, and who through a combination of talent, hard work, luck, timing, and more found himself making John F. Kennedy’s inaugural breakfast? Yup, I’d say that just about defines rags to riches.

Newport Stories: Cornelius Vanderbilt II, or, On Whether a Child of Privilege Can Also Be a Horatio Alger Story

[Here we present the first installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843-1899), the man for whom The Breakers was built (as perhaps the most luxurious “summer cottage” in human history), was named after his grandfather, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), who at his death was the wealthiest man in the United States. Which is to say, young Cornelius wasn’t just born into privilege; he was perhaps the closest thing to the royal baby American society has produced. Moreover, over the thirty-four years between his birth and his grandfather’s death, a period that culminated quite tellingly with the start of the Gilded Age, the family’s fortune only increased further. None of that is young Cornelius’s fault, and if he had decided to give the fortune away he’d have been about the first person ever to do so—but it does make it hard to see him as anything other than the scion of an American dynasty.

Yet as illustrated at length by Cornelius’s entry in Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1900), the young man’s life did in some interesting ways mirror those of a Horatio Alger, rags to riches, self-made protagonist (without, of course, details like being orphaned or living on the streets). Beginning at the age of 16, Cornelius spent the next five years working as a clerk in two small New York banks, learning the ins and outs of the financial world; he then did the same with the railroad industry in which his family had made their fortune, working for two years as treasurer and then ten as treasurer of the New York and Harlem railroad company. Which is to say, when he became vice president of that railroad in 1877, at the age of 34, he did so after nearly thirteen years in the industry, and more than twenty in financial services; while it’d still be fair to say that he had been destined for the position and role from birth, it certainly would not be accurate to argue that it was in any blatant or nepotistic sense handed to him.