My brother bought me this book for Christmas, and I have been chipping away at it between other books and travel and everything else, and just finished it last week (which this reminds me that I have three other books to report! eeek!!) Anyway, I normally read non-fictions about presidents, kings, queens, and prime ministers all of whom bear the weight of some massive social responsibility. Cornelius Vanderbilt is really the first non-fiction that I have read that was none of that. Cornelius Vanderbilt was an animal.
In
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, T.J. Stiles opens with the court case about Vanderbilt's will. The case was between William Vanderbilt and most of the rest of Vanderbilt's children. Here is why: when Vanderbilt died, in an effort to keep his wealth together, he left everything to William, his most dependable son. The other children received around $500,000 in company stocks, except for his namesake and alcoholic, gambling son who inherited around $200,000. It was not enough to cover Corneilius, Jr.'s debts, though in my opinion it was too much for such a squanderer to be trusted.
As you can imagine, his children banded together and sued the eldest son. They lost.
The stunning part of Cornelius Vanderbilt is that though at a time one out of every 20 dollars in America belonged to him, he came from nothing and started his career on Long Island as a boatman, saving desperately and working 20 hour days to afford his own vessel. He felt his mother taught him intense shrewdness and accountability. In a time in America when significant wealth was inherited and made by men whose families could afford to educate them in America's elite universities, Vanderbilt was able to shatter that glass ceiling. He was an affront to the wealthy, but it quickly became evident to them that they had no choice but to deal with him, accept his family or be trampled.
Vanderbilt was able to overthrow America's social order really as an afterthought, in his fight to the top. He did not always behave as a gentlemen, and early on, he sometimes chose the wrong friends in an effort to get in with the right crowds, but he always behaved true to himself and he was never at any time above manual labor and getting the best deal.
I think that my favorite story in the book was about when Vanderbilt built his huge steamer,
The Vanderbilt. He planned to take his entire family to Europe, but at the last minute, assuming they could get higher pay, the crew and fireman who manned the steam went on strike for higher wages. Vanderbilt never blinked. At the age of 60, he fired them all and hired men who barely knew how to crew a boat, paid them less, and when they ran into problems, they came to him and he rolled up his sleeves and marched down below and manned the steam and steered the boat.
He did the same countless times when he was bushwhacking a steamship through Nicaragua to take miners to San Francisco for the gold rush. He loaned his family's steamer,
The Vanderbilt, to Lincoln to stand down the
Merrimack for which he was given a medal of honor. He did not even get into railroading until he was 69, when he bought a tiny money losing railroad called the Harlem and used it to start a monopoly.
He is really just a stunning person. Now, I will say that another consequence of reading presidents, kings, queens and the like is that presidents, kings and queens write a lot of letters. They or someone else writes down everything they say. They are public figures and even their private lives are often public record. This is not the same of Cornelius Vanderbilt who generally thought that the less written down the better. He rarely spoke to reporters, he did not write letters, he avoided signing contracts, and his children were told to keep quiet. Not one word is written down that came out of the mouth of his first wife, though they were married until her death after 50 years of marriage. When debt collectors came to him to try to collect his son's debts, he was heard to silence them once and for all by saying that if someone was using his name as collateral for debts, then he was surely and impostor and that it had no bearing on he, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and was certainly the fault of the debt collectors for accepting such collateral.
I thought this book was great. I was proud of Cornelius Vanderbilt the whole way through, and though I can see that there are aspects of him that would be off putting, to say the least, I thought he was generally fair and kind to his children (the will thing was admittedly weird in the end). He seemed to be a good husband to his wife. He expected everyone to work as hard as he did and handle things as concisely and rightly as he did, which must have been daunting.
Now, as a general rule, his kids kind of fell to pieces when he died. Cornelius Vanderbilt was the opposite of extravagant and his son, William, who inherited most of his wealth, started spending like a madman. The lifestyle became lavish; William for instance built two mansions side by side and filled each with excessive art from around the world, as well as other homes, his son Corneilius committed suicide, deeply in debt, 8 years after his father died.
When Cornelius Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt's, oldest grandson, died, the Vanderbilt dynasty pretty much ended. The bulk of the wealth had been spent and no one in the family had worked for years. They died in their early 50's, where Cornelius the elder had lived to 90. He drank very little, he ate very little, he worked always.
I recommend this book!! It is a testament to human will!!
