The Life and Syphilis of Cornelius Vanderbilt
Absent from the list of robber barons recently reconsidered has been Cornelius Vanderbilt, known to everyone as the Commodore. Indeed, the last major biography of him was Wheaton J. Lane’s Commodore Vanderbilt: an Epic of the Steam Age, published in 1942. This is a pity, as the Commodore was one of the first and one of the most remarkable of the men who made great fortunes in nineteenth-century America.
Born a Staten Island farm boy in 1794, he died the richest self-made man in the world in 1877, leaving his heirs $105 million. Measured against the gross national product of the day, it is a fortune that ranks third in American history, behind only to John D. Rockefeller’s and Andrew Carnegie’s in size. Starting with a single sailboat, working the waters between Staten Island and Manhattan when he was 16, he moved into steamboats in the late 1810s and became the largest owner of such vessels in the country by the 1850s. In the 1860s, the decade in which he turned 70, he turned to railroads, showing himself the master of Wall Street in the process. By the time of his death he controlled the largest railroad empire in the world, one that was run with consummate efficiency and that produced ever-increasing dividends for its stockholders. The “Vanderbilt stocks” were the Microsoft or Google of their time in terms of capital appreciation.
Part of the reason, perhaps, that present-day historians have slighted Vanderbilt is the fact that he was at least a generation and a half older than Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gould, and the others. He was in his forties before cheap daily newspapers began to extensively chronicle the lives of the very rich (to be sure, with no undue regard for the truth). He owned his business interests personally for most of his life, so there are few corporate archives to illuminate his wheeling and dealing. And he had only a few years of formal education—not an unusually small amount for men of his generation–and had no interest in intellectual abstractions or books. He personally wrote few letters, and those he did write used spelling as he pleased, not as Noah Webster prescribed in his American Dictionary of the English Language, which was not even published until Vanderbilt was in his thirties.
Thus there is not a lot of primary source material for a biographer to sink his teeth into, especially dealing with Vanderbilt’s early career in sailing ships and steamboats.
I wish I could say that the new biography, Commodore: The Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, by Edward J. Renehan, Jr. (Basic Books, 364 pages, $27.50), broadened and deepened Lane’s portrait with new material. But it doesn’t. There is new material here, to be sure, especially the diary of Vanderbilt’s longtime physician and friend Jared Linsly. But Renehan is remarkably parsimonious with quotes from the diary, preferring to tell the reader what is in it rather than letting us see for ourselves. (In the notes, the author writes that the diary is in his possession. I hope it will quickly be made available for other scholars to use.)
The principal revelation is that the doctor diagnosed Vanderbilt (an inveterate tomcat) with syphilis in 1839, and Mrs. Vanderbilt with the same disease the following year. But most doctors in the 1830s didn’t distinguish between gonorrhea and the potentially far more serious syphilis, so the author takes the evidence much further than is warranted. He ascribes nearly all Vanderbilt’s later health troubles (but, curiously, none of Mrs. Vanderbilt’s) and even moods to the disease. Yet it was impossible then to distinguish the myriad symptoms of tertiary syphilis from those of many other possible causes, and he gives the reader no evidence to show that it was syphilis and not just old age that caused the problems.
Indeed, the author seems more than a little obsessed with what was not an uncommon malady in the nineteenth century (Franz Schubert the composer, Guy de Maupassant the writer, and Paul Gauguin the painter all died of it). This book’s subtitle might well have been “The Life and Syphilis of Cornelius Vanderbilt.”
Commodore is more a caricature than a biography, reminiscent of the old hatchet-job biographies of a hundred years ago. The author’s dislike of his subject is all too obvious (one senses that it was an attitude that preceded his research and writing, and guided both).
The author, for instance, never tires of telling the reader how uneducated Vanderbilt was, but he doesn’t square that with the fact that Vanderbilt was always deeply involved in the design of his steamboats, which were notably fast, fuel-efficient, and safe. In an age when steamboats did “a wholesale business in human slaughter” (to quote a New Yorker of the day), Vanderbilt never lost one to fire, explosion, or shipwreck. He didn’t read for pleasure, but he was a master of the complicated fields of naval architecture and engineering.
Moreover, Renehan endlessly tells the reader how looked-down-on by New York society Vanderbilt was, how bad his manners were. But he quotes no contemporary sources to that effect. He makes no attempt to square that description with the fact that Vanderbilt was welcomed into the most exclusive New York men’s clubs and “met and breakfasted with Lincoln at Moses Grinnell’s New York home shortly before Lincoln assumed office.” Moses Grinnell, like Vanderbilt a major ship owner, and part of the very inner circle of New York society, was hardly likely to have invited a hopeless boor as Renehan depicts, however rich, to breakfast with the President-elect.
Referring to “Alexander Stewart, Peter Cooper, Moses Taylor, William Aspinwall, Daniel Drew, and a slew of Astors,” Renehan writes that, at a dinner for General Grant, “Vanderbilt, as rarely happened, briefly rubbed shoulders with the above-named millionaires, all of whom thought themselves his social superiors.” In fact, all of those millionaires, with the exception of Peter Cooper, were fellow members of the Union Club, where Vanderbilt often went to relax and play cards. He thus rubbed shoulders with them on a daily basis.
He also tells the reader over and over how uncharitable Vanderbilt was, even as he admits that he gave Central University in Nashville, Tennessee, quickly renamed in his honor, $1 million, the largest single act of philanthropy up to that time. (He even criticizes his requiring that the university’s endowment be invested in New York Central first mortgage bonds, the most gilt-edged securities in the world at the time.)
The author ludicrously ascribes the success of Vanderbilt’s career in railroads entirely to his son William H. Vanderbilt, writing that it was the latter who was responsible for increasing the family fortune from about $20 million in 1860 to $105 million in 1877. But then the author notes that it was Vanderbilt, not his son, who made many millions in three legendary corners on Wall Street in the 1860s. While William, a superb executive, took over much of the daily burden of running the ever-growing Vanderbilt empire as his father aged, the Commodore remained in charge of overall strategy.
Vanderbilt was no saint. He treated his wife very badly, to put it mildly, was a pathological philanderer, and largely ignored his 13 surviving children when he wasn’t browbeating them. But even the author admits that while Vanderbilt’s “reputation for driving hard bargains was undeniable, so too was his reputation for standing by his word, honoring his agreements, and doing everything he had promised.” That counts for a lot—and not nearly enough in this book.
Commodore is rather sloppily written and badly edited. The author gets an annoying number of small details wrong (trotting races don’t involve carriages, President James Madison wasn’t a Federalist, many ships he describes as “packets” were no such thing, the sum of twelve and a half cents was called a “shilling,” not a “schilling,” which is an Austrian monetary unit, etc.). One chapter has the footnotes misnumbered.
Worse, Renehan does not have a good grasp of mid-nineteenth-century Wall Street (not understanding, for instance, what “watered stock” really was) and, perhaps in consequence, gives Vanderbilt’s remarkable career there very short shrift. Indeed, he devotes more space to covering the last few months of the Commodore’s life, as he lay dying and being a difficult patient in the process.
All in all, stick with Wheaton Lane’s 65-year-old portrait. A good modern biography of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt has yet to be written.