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.

Grand Banquet at Delmonico's, New York City, 1880

Henry Voigt

In the preface of his 1894 cookbook The Epicurean, Delmonico’s chef Charles Ranhofer cited seventeen grand banquets as being particularly memorable.1 One of these dinners had been held fourteen years earlier for Count Ferdinand de Lessep, the French entrepreneur who built the Suez Canal. Eager to replicate his engineering feat, De Lesseps came to New York in March 1880 to raise money for a sea-level canal that would cut across the Isthmus of Panama. As was customary, a banquet was held in his honor. However, as far as the French-born chef and his brigade were concerned, their famed countryman was more than just another special guest. To them, he was a hero of the age. Observing a palpable excitement in the air during dinner, the reporter from the New York Times wryly noted that “the nationality of the distinguished guest of the evening had had something to do with the zeal of the cooks, confectioners, and waiters.”2

On New Years Day of that year, De Lessep symbolically began work on the canal by digging the first shovel of sand and dumping it into a Champagne box. Transoceanic waterways were regarded as essential to expanding free trade, and this was reflected by De Lesseps’ family motto Aperire Terram Gentibus, meaning “To Open the World to all People.” This motto, which was adopted by the Compagnie de Suez, appeared on the menu, as well as the admission ticket shown above. Although the United States liked the idea of free trade in theory (and in practice when it favored the country), the prospect of a French canal in the Western Hemisphere caused consternation in Washington. Remembering that it had only been a decade since Napoleon III tried to make Austrian Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian the emperor of Mexico, President Rutherford B. Hayes was suspicious of this project, bluntly declaring that “a canal across any part of the Isthmus is either a canal under American control, or no canal.”

Give Me a Break: Kit Kats and the Gilded Age

Steven Cromack

I just completed teaching a unit on the Gilded Age. Information wise, the Gilded Age can be soporific—railroads, oil, Stalwarts, Mugwumps, and Half-breeds. Who cares, especially if you are 16 and have just gotten your learner’s permit? Instead of teaching content, therefore, I decided to teach concepts. I took a risk, and, as a result, a classroom experiment that could have gone horribly awry not only intrigued students, but also forced them to reflect on their roles as citizens and to face their own sense of morality.

At the heart of the Gilded Age was the question of wealth. What, if anything, do the rich owe society? I began one class by having students choose a card from a prearranged deck stacked with twos, threes, and fours and four kings. I then gave each student the number of Hershey kisses on their card. The kings, however, got “King Size” Kit Kats. There was outrage. I immediately had the students write and reflect. How did it feel to have the wealth of the classroom concentrated in the hands of a few? Their answers included discussions of fairness, chance, and justice. These were the themes discussed and debated during the Gilded Age by the Populists, millions of immigrants, the wealthy, and Theodore Roosevelt.