The Shadow State 54 The Vanderbilt Curse

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0:17 edition of Warhamster and I's series on secret societies. Warhamster, what do you have for us today? Well, today we're going to take a little bit of a curveball. We're talking about secret societies, but this is going to be sort of a different angle on it because not everyone involved in these secret societies is into nefarious globalist activities. And the family we're going to talk about today is the household name called the Vanderbilts. And it is a fascinating story.

0:46 of one family's rise to prominence in one generation, a second generation where only one of the 12 or 13 children were actually competent enough to maintain it, and then a third generation just born in a splendor and a life of luxury who basically gave it all away to the point there's no living Vanderbilt millionaires today, perhaps. That third generation curse seems to be another pattern that we've discovered.

1:17 Well, it's funny you use the word curse because that's one of the things that tabloids came up with back in that third generation of the Vanderbilts, or even the second, is they started calling it the Vanderbilt curse. And it's a result of making too much money too fast. It's basically the old money, new money thing going at it again in the 1800s in America, which mattered, as did social status. And that's what we're going to see. This is a big story of the Vanderbilts, is how they bought their way into social standing. And that's why we still know their name today.

1:46 It's not necessarily that they had any political influence, although when you're the richest family in America for a brief time, you're going to have some. And you don't see a lot of Vanderbilts working in government and not very many in corporations outside their own railroad business. So it is not a typical secret society's family. And I think the contrast between what these guys are and what some of the others are really points out what the others really are. That's a good point.

2:17 So with no further ado, we are going through secret societies, how it matches up with things like Operation Gladio, the Shadow State and International Syndicate. And we are done with Skull and Bones and we are going through Skrull and Key. Most recently, we were going through Skrull and Key, which is a Yale secret society, which I've hypothesized is nowhere near as nefarious as Skull and Bones. It seems to be founded on a lot more academia. But as we've gotten into the 1880s and 90s, we're seeing these.

2:46 Skrull and Key alumni start to get involved with a little bit of crossover with their bonesmen and other people into the government. But the Vanderbilts aren't really one of them. So, in the 1890s, one of the Vanderbilts was a member of Skrull and Key, and that's why we're featuring the Vanderbilt family, which we've been dying to talk about forever. As soon as I start talking about robber barons and the people who really are the puppet masters, most of them come from this little niche group of East Coast bluebloods. Just seems like the Vanderbilts were never interested in playing the game.

3:17 So I find it fascinating. Me too. Shall we dive in? Absolutely. Okay. Time for the screen share. Right. So this is a Vanderbilt family tree that I pulled off the internet. And it's got a whole bunch of people. Not a lot of them are. A lot of these people are just nobodies. We're not going to go through all of them. I took the liberty of doing my own tree. Because I think it's just sticking to the important people. But you can see.

3:51 I guess that first tree you could really see how diluted a family's worth can be over the generations. It just keeps spreading and spreading. So the real founder of the Vanderbilt family fortune is, of course, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, born in 1794 to 1897. And bear with me. So where did the Vanderbilts come from? It's a Dutch family. It got the name of Jan Uertsen.

4:27 moved here from a Dutch county called De Bilt. John Urchin would eventually change his name to Van, meaning from De Bilt, so Vanderbilt. That's where it came from. And he came over and was a servant for a wealthy Dutch family. That's their ancestors. They were not rich by any stretch, but they were here a long time ago. Cornelius's father was described as a farmer and a boatman who worked tirelessly to make ends meet. So here we are, early 1800s.

5:02 The country is in the early stages of transitioning from kind of agrarian to this raw industrial capitalist system which would dominate the 19th century. Cornelius is in Staten Island, New York, seeing it right in front of his eyes. He grew up in poverty, quit school at age 11, but he's a really smart and disciplined kid. He had a work ethic. Couldn't spell, had bad grammar, but he could see business. So he borrows about $100 from his mother to buy a small boat.

5:35 to ferry cargo and people back and forth from Staten Island to Manhattan. And by the age of 16, he's got a really reliable reputation. And no matter the weather, this guy delivers on time. He bet on himself and outworked the competition. War of 1812 breaks out. He's 18 years old. And there's British warships in these harbors, and he's still out there running shipments and military supplies and food supplies. And I think a lot of his competition disappeared. By his early 20s, he's got a shipping empire.

6:10 Now, can I stop right there? Yeah. Is there any chance that they were doing the Zuckerberg thing back then? Meaning? Meaning creating the people that they want to be wealthy. Do you find it strange? When I first read his story, I was like, wait a minute. He goes from one boat to like almost overnight.

6:39 It's a little bit of a victim of circumstance. Like I said, a lot of the competition disappears in 1812. But he's just a cutthroat, ruthless negotiator. He will cut his rates to destroy the competition, buy up their boats on the cheap, and then raise the rates back up. That's why there's this big argument that the robber barons, especially guys like Vanderbilt, do they help us expand economically because of giving themselves these railroads and steamships and everything? Or do they slow down our growth by having it monopolized?

7:08 and killing innovation. Good point. We're going to be talking a lot about that theme going forward. Good question, though. Here we are. He embraces the steamboat technology. He's going fast. He's working for a ferry entrepreneur by the name of Thomas Gibbons. Gibbons asked Cornelius to be the steamboat captain from New Jersey to New York. He's already starting to be called the Commodore.

7:42 which is kind of a, well, at this time, it's the highest rank in the Navy, but there was kind of a, you'd use it in commercial enterprises and use it at yacht clubs. The head of the yacht club was the Commodore, but he got that nickname and stuck with him for life. So he becomes Gibbons' business manager. Gibbons has a rival by the name of Aaron Ogden, and New York had granted a steamboat monopoly to Robert Livingston and Robert Fulton. They're the ones, Fulton's the guy who designed the steamboat.

8:13 So they granted a license to Ogden to run it. Well, under Cornelius Vanderbilt's guidance, they undercut the prices. Gibbons and Ogden, which is a famous Supreme Court case, goes to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court holds that the state had no power to interfere with interstate commerce. It's a landmark case. But individual states cannot interfere with interstate commerce, meaning they could not give out an individual license to one party over others.

8:46 Vanderbilt won. Cleared the way for the federal government to basically be superior in all interstate commerce issues. It's a big deal. States' rights got smashed right there. So Cornelius continues on, acquires the business from his boss, and starts managing routes that brought big profits. He's making a ton of money. By the 1840s, he's got a fleet of over 100 steamships. And like I said, it's the rate wars that set him apart. He slashed his own prices. The rivals had a higher overhead.

9:21 He drives them into bankruptcy, buys out their ships on the cheap, and then he raises his rates right back up. So what kind of man was he? Ruthless, iron will, swore excessively, chewed tobacco. He sought out spiritualists and psychics, and that'll come back into play a little bit later. He was frugal, didn't live in fancy mansions, which is funny coming from the patriarch or the family that built the biggest mansions in American history. Yes.

9:55 He never had debt. He marries his first cousin, Sophia Johnson Vanderbilt. Marrying your first cousin is another thing that people might blame on the curse. I want to share something funny here. Give me one second. You want to comment while I find what I'm looking for? Well, what I have noticed in a lot of these older families is that was not an uncommon thing to have happen.

10:35 especially over in Europe, the intertwining of the people and the closeness of them. It almost becomes a matter of control as far as controlling not only the fortune, but the end result. And of course, a lot of people say that doing that.

11:01 has long-lasting effects in your family tree, not necessarily in the best way. Got it. And we'll see some of that. And it would look down upon a little bit. And if I don't find this quickly, I'm going to be very upset. Take your time. So I'm cheating with ChatGPD. And I wish I could find this. It's hilarious to read. I go, all right. Give me the family tree of the Vanderbilt.

11:39 And it starts with Cornelius. And it says she's married to someone who isn't, who I just described. Well, wait a minute. I know for a fact that I'm correct. So I go back to ChatGPT. He married his first cousin, Sophia Johnson Vanderbilt. This other woman played into the family tree, like a distant cousin. But ChatGPT comes back to me and goes, no, I'm right, you're wrong. So I go back with Ancestry.com. I go back to them with Findagrave.com. And by the third source,

12:11 Comes back and says, oh, yes, you're right. The reason I got this wrong was because I'm ready to throw my fist through the door. It's arguing with me about who he married. It's a historical fact. That's a good point for all of the researchers out there. You can't rely on AI to do the research for you. If I hadn't done all the reading before and I was just going to do a book report, I would have had the wrong wife in there. Correct.

12:43 So anyway, Sophia's got it done in a very good picture. Let's put her back up on screen. Okay. And of course they have, bear with me. Okay. They have 13 children together, 12 of which live to adulthood. I believe it's 10 girls and three boys. We'll get to the kids in a bit. As a father, Cornelius was strict in distance. He's not a loving father. You know, his children had to earn his love. He believes unearned wealth was a sin.

13:29 So these kids aren't living like they grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth. Not these ones. So he's doing great in his steamship business. Marrying, kicking out kids all over the place. Although they live in a humble abode. He's buying up land around New York. California Gold Rush of 1849 hits. And the existing route to get people by steamship to California.

14:01 was to go to Panama and get on a string of mules to go across Panama. Doesn't Panama show up when we talk about Gladio quite a bit? Yes, it does. Well, everybody shows up in Panama. So the story we're going to tell right now is probably when this stuff really started. Okay, so the existing routes across Panama. Vanderbilt, who knows how to read a map, decides to establish a shorter route through Nicaragua.

14:34 And he proposes a Nicaraguan canal and never got approval or funding for it, which is interesting because he's already like close to the richest man in America. And what time frame is this? This is California Gold Rush is 1849. So this is by 1852. OK, so he was the original Nicaragua canal guy because that comes up again, obviously, during the.

15:00 controversy over the Panama Canal because Congress eventually does approve the funding for the Nicaraguan Canal. Yes. Well, tell me if this sounds familiar. No, but it's exactly proven our point. Exactly. Yeah, they do it because they need to make it not just easier on the Navy, but to help these multinational corporations and shipping companies. So instead of a canal, he sets up a coach and ferry service. So you had a little bit of a land crossing.

15:28 You go through Lake Nicaragua, and then you jump out on the San Juan River, and you can get to the Pacific and go straight to California. Cornelius Vanderbilt would help hack out that route himself through the jungle, and he establishes something called the Accessory Transit Company. It's basically riverboats and stagecoaches that cut the journey to California by two days and hundreds of dollars, and Vanderbilt makes millions on this new line. In 1852, one of his partners, a guy by the name of Joseph White, has a dispute with Vanderbilt.

16:01 And at the time, Vanderbilt, most of 1853, Vanderbilt and his whole family touring Europe on his yacht, the North Star. So his partner, White, would conspire with Charles Morgan, one of J.P. Morgan's, I think, brothers or cousins, to betray Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt, of course, gets back from Europe and builds a rival steamship line to his own company that he'd lost and cut prices. They drove Morgan and White.

16:33 Out of business. They had to basically pay him off, and they ended up buying his ships from him at an inflated price. So this guy just wins everywhere he goes, right? All right, a little bit more on Cornelius. He would then shift to transatlantic steamship lines. The competition was a federally funded line called the Collins Line, and subsidies gave him a huge advantage. So what did Vanderbilt do?

17:08 He drove them into extinction by cutting prices. Sensing a pattern here? Yes. Goes back, repurchases the accessory transit that line over Nicaragua again, cheaper than he sold it for. Here's where it gets fun. Right before he bought it back, or right at the same time period, there's an American military adventurer named William Walker who leads an expedition to Nicaragua and takes control of the government for a short period of time.

17:43 How many people know that an American actually was the ruler of Nicaragua in the 1850s? I did, but only because I went through this. So this guy by the name of Edmund Randolph, he's a close friend of Walker's. He convinces Walker to annul the charter of Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit Company. The U.S. and English governments, when they finally, well, they refused to restore Vanderbilt's rights and property. So he goes and negotiates with Costa Rica.

18:15 who, like the rest of Central America, declared war in Nicaragua when Walker took over. He sends his men, mercenaries, to lead a raid that captured steamboats on the San Juan River and cut Walker off from his reinforcements, and he had to give up. So you have an American corporate-led counter-coup of an American-led coup. But we weren't an empire yet, were we? Nothing new under the sun. And it just reiterates the point that

18:49 What we see post-World War II was nothing new. It's just the installation of these same activities inside the government because they went on for at least 100 years before that. Yeah. Well, piracy is nothing new. Correct. It really isn't. In fact, it's one of the oldest professions. Let's see, the new Nicaraguan government doesn't give him back his contracts, so he then just starts a brand new line of shipping in Panama.

19:20 moved south and developed a monopoly on the California steamship business because that's what this guy does. We get to the Civil War, and he donates his biggest steamship, known as the Vanderbilt, to the Union Navy. That's the one they outfitted with a ram that basically took out the Merrimack, or not known as the Virginia. We got the Erie War of 1868, and that stemmed from his famous feud with Jay Gould and James Fisk. Vanderbilt had tried to corner the stock on Erie Railroad stock.

19:54 And what they did is they defeated him by issuing what's called watered stock, which is basically printing fake certificates. And Gould had bribed the New York legislature to allow the issuance of the stock. And they actually beat Vanderbilt in the Erie War. And Vanderbilt had a lifelong feud with Gould. And he called him a lot of really nice names. So here he is, richest man in the world, age 70. And he sees railroads replacing shipping.

20:27 So he sells off his shipping interests and invests in railroads and consolidates railroads throughout the North. And it's even richer. He's the guy that built Grand Central Station in New York City. A lot of it was consolidating rail lines from New York City to Chicago. You don't see him mentioned in Skull and Bones, people never like that. But he's every bit as one of the biggest railroad magnets we had. He's in the same bankers and getting the same government handed stimulus to build it. And I say that.

20:55 People said, well, the government wasn't spending all that money on this deal. No, what they were doing was giving land grants. They were giving free land to the railroads. The railroads could then turn around and sell them to the settlers, and that's how they paid for the building of the railroads. It was a government's gift subsidy. That's what they talked about when they say internally funded internal improvements. That's how these guys, that's how the robber barons made it. They controlled the government, the one-party Republican government that was basically in place for that whole period. They controlled the politicians. The politicians,

21:25 you know, controlled who got the land grants. It's crony capitalism, people. And, of course, we saw that play out in the education with the land grant colleges. This model has been repeated over and over again. Yeah, and the federal government has no authority under the Constitution to be owning land or giving it away. Can you hear the fighter jets going overhead? Yes. That's like four of them in a row. I don't know what's going on. It's the most I've ever seen here. We got an Air Force base.

21:56 A little bit up the road. All right. Railroads, he did great. 1873, he founds Vanderbilt University. He's now starting to get into the charities. Beginning. His will, remember he's got 12 living kids, gives 95% of the estate to William Henry Vanderbilt. Cornelius Jeremiah didn't get as much. The rest of them don't even merit a picture of that generation.

22:35 That's what kind of father he was. Okay, so William Henry Vanderbilt, that's Billy, gets all the money. It rages the siblings. Court battles follow. Tabloids in the newspapers were all over the story. They wanted to talk about Vanderbilts. That's when that story of the haunted Vanderbilt came out. Mary Vanderbilt's the one that fought the hardest, and Billy actually settled with some of the heirs to preserve the family name.

23:07 During those trials, they talked about his father, Cornelius, the Commodore, William Henry's father, said that he was insane at the end and William Henry manipulated him and that he used spiritualists and seers. Remember I mentioned that earlier? Yes. That all came up in trial. But Billy kept the money. And again, they talk about the Vanderbilt curse. So the Vanderbilt curse is also used to explain away really bad planning choices. So obviously Cornelius.

23:40 didn't really dissipate his estate very well, according to most of the kids. And the ones kids that did have a little bit of a step in going through them, they spent money like it was going out of style. And the next generation, of course, we know about building all the mansions, but we'll get there. They're just burning money without earning money. So let's talk about William Henry. He's the oldest son, 1821 to 1885. His father berated him, called him a blockhead, and it's called a blatherskite.

24:15 He would go to Columbia University and never graduate, but he does get a job in dad's railroad business and works his way up. And by the time dad passes away, Billy is a pretty experienced railroad guy who's seen every bit of the business. So when he inherits the money in 1877, he became the richest man in America. But he would build it really well, and he actually doubled the fortune.

24:48 Right about this time period, income, well, a little bit later, income taxes and estate taxes are going to wipe out a lot of the rest of the family fortune. But Billy never really enjoyed the work at the railroad because he inherited it and never earned it. In 1885, he dies of a stroke and left most of his wealth to his two older sons. And these sons were not builders. They were inheritors. They were all into the yacht clubs and the horse races and being in high society.

25:20 It's really all about displaying wealth rather than earning it. So that's pretty much how to get to the third generation. One other fun side note about Billy. He got into a business venture with Ulysses S. Grant that was a Ponzi scheme, and Grant ended up owing him about $150,000. Ulysses Grant had to give him to settle the debt, all of his Civil War memorabilia, which Billy would then give back to Grant's widow after his death. So nice gesture.

25:55 He said the other son, Cornelius, not too exciting. Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt. William Henry had some kids. And they are worth talking about. And the first one is going to be one William Kissam Vanderbilt. Born in 1849 to 1920. So this is the grandson of Cornelius. Okay. He's actually the third child of Billy and Maria Louisa Kissam. I didn't picture.

26:37 William Kissam Vanderbilt is known as a sportsman. He loved yachts. He was the co-owner of the 1895 America's Cup winner, the Defender. He was known for his horse breeding, loved European architecture, and he had inherited, in 1885, about $55 million. And he would spend it lavishly, of course.

27:07 One of his big things he left behind is he had bought P.T. Barnum's great Roman Hippodrome and turned it into Madison Square Garden, which is still there to this day. And he is known for building the Vanderbilt's mansion on Fifth Avenue at 660 Fifth Avenue. So they were builders. And again, it's all about displaying money at this point. He marries a woman named Ava Belmont.

27:37 Well, actually, she died, Ava Belmont, on her last husband after he passed away. Her name was Ava Vanderbilt. That's what she was known as. And she is important. She is born not into old money, but some Southern money. Her name was Alva Eskern Smith. She really cared about pedigree more than you would, I mean, just like you wouldn't believe. And so she basically, you know, marries into a ton of fortune, buys her way into society.

28:16 At this point, Vanderbilts are still considered old money. They're not part of the exclusive social status of New York and Boston and Rhode Island yet. They may be the richest, but that doesn't mean they get invited to all the parties. She spends about three years and $3 million, which is a ton back then, to build the mansion on Fifth Avenue. I think it was the first job they've hired famous architect William Morris Hunt to do. We talked about him recently, and we'll show the houses at the end here.

28:49 The famous event that changed the Vanderbilts socially was Mrs. Astor of the Astor family, who made their money in the fur business, was considered pretty much the queen of New York high society. And with the tabloid writers, I forget the guy's name, Ward McAllister, I think, they had a list called the 400. These are the 400 people that had status. Guess how many people fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom? 400.

29:21 So Alva is a dynamo. She starts making these plans. Three years and three million to build this mansion with a ballroom that can fit 1,200 people. Three times bigger. Lavish display of wealth, yes? Yes. They're going to throw this huge coming out ball. And they're sending all the invitations out by coachmen by hand. And it's got so much hype around all the decorations and everything they're doing here. The newspapers can't stop talking about it. And she has not.

29:52 invited Mrs. Astor to the party yet. And she's asked about it. She goes, well, how could I? Mrs. Astor has never called on me socially. Within two to three hours, Mrs. Astor was there in a coach in front of her mansion, in front of Alva's mansion. And the rest is history. The Vanderbilts were totally part of the in-club just because of this one ball. And that's the life that these next generation grows, you know, basically grows up in.

30:20 And I've read several stories about her and the social events. And basically, I wouldn't use the word manipulating, but insinuating yourself into that lifestyle because it became a destination. Yeah. And at the same time, remember, this is Gilded Age. And we've got the robber barons like the Carnegies and the Rockefellers.

30:48 And all these other families we've been talking about, mostly with all the skull and bones ties. And they're using their social position for business purposes and political purposes. Not the Vanderbilts. The Vanderbilts are, at this point in time, all about the social status. Seems to me you need a little bit of balance there. What else do we care about her? She commissions the Marble House in 1892. 500,000 cubic feet of marble.

31:21 11 million dollars to build which would be about 300 million dollars today called it the summer cottage and of course she is so fashionable she builds the chinese tea house that both the colonel and i have pictures of because we both visited tea house yes so she's got all the wealth in the world she's got all the status in the world what doesn't she have well she doesn't have a title so she breeds her daughter consuelo oops where's consuelo there she is she breeds consuelo

32:00 And at 18, they marry her off to the Duke of Marlborough, who just happens to be a Churchill. So can I tell that story about her marrying off her daughter? Because her daughter didn't want to marry him. Oh, yeah. And it was not a happy marriage. Go for it. She held her daughter prisoner in her room until she agreed to marry him. Literally would not let her out of her room.

32:30 She had her daughter wearing braces. She would get horse whipped to teach proper posture and discipline. She was bred to be married off to nobility. Correct. That's what Ava did to her. Pretty cruel. The Duke obviously wanted the Vanderbilt money to keep up his English estates. And that's part of the story. When you build these lavish estates, whether it be in England because you're a lord or in America because you're a robber baron, it's one thing to build it, but how much money does it take to keep these things up?

33:06 And that's why they never pass. Very few of these dynasties last because it's just the upkeep on these manors and the estates are just gigantic. And that's why we got the dollar princesses marriages of the rich American industrialist would marry their daughters over to people with English and European titles. And it was, you know, money for titles. And because it, this generation, because they're not the builders, they're the displayers of wealth. You find that,

33:36 these families like the daughter they chased the 70 degree weather which is where Jekyll Island came in there's a place in Florida called Mountain View that had all of these palatial it's by Falk Towers in central Florida all of these palatial manors were built and so they don't just have one they didn't just have the marble house

34:02 They had multiple ones all over the world so that they could literally just chase 70 degree weather and live luxuriously wherever they went. And like Warhamster points out, there's a year round staff at each of these locations. It isn't just one manor.

34:24 It's all of the locations. It's the Jekyll Island Cottage that they had. It was the estate at places like Mountain View. It was a place out in Colorado or Montana. They went all over to do this. They had places in Italy and all of them very, very grand and all of them requiring a huge

34:51 24-7 staff to maintain. Very much so. Okay, before we go on to the next generation, we should probably talk about George Washington Vanderbilt II. Let's get him in here. Here's George Washington Vanderbilt II. See him here married to an Edith Stuvesant, Vanderbilt Gary, who she remarried. That Stuvesant name is very old in New York, descended from the last Dutch governor.

35:41 of manhattan so and there's also a whole section of new york called stuvescent i think new yorkers pronounce that differently but i haven't been in new york so long i don't remember how they do it i said what do you know about george born in 1862 youngest son of william henry billy vanderbilt and he was not interested in high society he was bookish and into beauty he starts buying up land you want to go ahead and pull up a um

36:14 I don't know if I have one handy. Or maybe I do. I'll show it in a second here. We'll do it later. The Biltmore. He starts buying up the land in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. Hires Richard Morris Hunt, family architect, and a guy by the name of Frederick Law Olmsted, who's the guy who designed Central Park. So you've got the best architect building the mansion and the best landscaper doing the lawn.

36:42 That lawn is immaculate. It's amazing. And they have a greenhouse. I have pictures of that that we'll show at the end if I can figure out how to do that on my laptop. Because I took personal pictures of all of the place in North Carolina. I have not been to that one. Although I have a very good friend who lives pretty close by. And I need to visit him. No, wait, he just moved to Florida. There is that. So the build more was.

37:11 130 acres at the time. They sold off a bunch of the estate later on to the forestry department. Had 250 rooms, 175,000 square feet. It's big. Indoor pool, library with 10,000 books, a bowling alley, and of course it costs a fortune. Funny thing about Edith and George. In 1912, they booked a trip on the Titanic.

37:42 Changed their plans at the very last minute and sailed on the Olympic which left before the Titanic the sister ship Which is pretty fascinating. Yeah Yeah, by the time they got to New York they heard about the rest Yeah, we're not gonna do Cornelia. I don't think they had a daughter Cornelia Where we have her

38:12 And they lived with the Biltmore for a time. He dies at the age of 51 during a routine appendectomy. Edith had to manage the estate, and they started selling it off to the public by 1930. So one other point about Biltmore, and I think I mentioned it, but I want to kind of drive that home since we're going to look at a few pictures. They had to build the railroad to that location. There was no way to get to the land that he...

38:42 And so there was a very big logistical project that had to occur even to create the Biltmore. And they went to the extent of ordering people to build the scaffolding of the level to which it was going to be built so that he could see the view from each level.

39:10 of the biltmore because it has a veranda on the back of it and he wanted to be able to approve the view from each level of the veranda yeah well the guy didn't know how to spend money that's for sure all right who we're going to do next let's go down to the next generation cornelius vanderbilt ii give me one second there he is also there's a third or second i need he was um

39:57 Born in 1830, dies in 1882. He was epileptic and had a generous heart, but no business sense. His father would commit him to an insane asylum on more than one occasion. And apparently he had forged some drafts and the Vanderbilts were trying to go for an insanity defense so the family name did not get dragged through the mud.

40:31 He spent some time and money donating to universities, hospitals, and churches, and then ends up committing suicide at age 51. He marries Alice Claypool Vanderbilt, and they have a bunch of kids, which we'll get to. Here's Consuelo Vanderbilt, which we mentioned, and she's the one who married the Duke of Marlborough. All right, so let's go down into Cornelius' kids, because it's where it keeps getting fun. All right.

41:11 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. We have spoken about before when we did Skull and Bones. She marries a Henry Payne Whitney from the Whitney family. Bear with me. I'm jumping around a bit. And, of course, we did basically a whole show on the Whitney's. Yeah, we did. Because of their extensive ties to Skull and Bones. Yeah. And let's see. We had Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt would end up marrying.

41:54 a woman named Ellen Tuck French, who's close friends with Gertrude. Let me just give you the details, a quick rehash on Whitney's. All right, Henry Payne Whitney, you're seeing there, was born in 1894. His sister would marry the first baron of Queenborough, another dollar princess, and he's a big avid sportsman. That's about all he's known for, but they would have kids too that mattered. The Whitney's, of course, had...

42:39 Well, that's one of the oldest families in America. And it goes all the way back to Williams, Collins, Whitney, etc. We talked about them quite a bit. There have been about four or five Whitney's in Skull and Bones. And that's who Gertrude marries. And Gertrude, there's going to be more about Gertrude. Cornelius Vanderbilt III. Okay, this one is known as Neely. Born in 1873, dies in 1942. He was Reggie's half-brother. Went to St. Paul's School in Concord, one of the grooming schools.

43:33 This is the guy who went to Yale and was scrolling key. He would marry a woman named Mary, I'm sorry, Grace Graham Wilson. Their father did not approve of the marriage, so he gets disinherited and they elope. He gets only a $500,000 stip inheritance. But he's an interesting guy. He was a tinkerer with all kinds of inventions, over 30 patents, a lot of them for trains. Spent his time before World War I in Europe.

44:05 socializing with, oh, I don't know, King Henry VII, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas II. He would serve in the National Guard. World War I breaks out, and he gets called to action. He gets promoted quickly into Brigadier General. Never saw real action. And, of course, he is known for building the famous Beaulieu estate on Newport, Rhode Island. Nothing too exciting about Grace, nor are their kids famous. Now we get here to Reginald. Reginald's a fun one.

44:49 Born 1880 in Manhattan, died at age 45, 1925. And what do we have to say about Reginald? He's a fun one. Known as Reggie. Also known, and we'll talk about that in a second, he is a playboy and a gambler. He never worked. He never invested. He just spent money. He would die in 1925 from cirrhosis of the liver. And liked to drink.

45:25 Oh, yes, he did. His wife, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, was not a Vanderbilt, so she had no claim on the Vanderbilt money, so it was all left, what was left of it, to their daughter, Gloria Vanderbilt, who we'll get to. Then, of course, we've got Alfred. Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt is a guy who inherited about $70 million, and he managed some of the family railroad holdings. His first marriage would fall apart, and he would just live large and throw large parties.

46:16 He would, interestingly, he was on a Lusitania in 2015 off the coast of Ireland when the German U-boat hit it. And apparently, even though he could not swim, stories are that he died a hero. He gave up his life jacket to save a woman he didn't know and died, drowned. So, that's Alfred. And of course, there's Gladys Vanderbilt. And she's mostly known because she would marry a count who should become a countess and count of Hungary.

46:57 This guy would end up being a minister to the United Kingdom. We know how important that is. Yep. Okay. Moving along. Let's talk about Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney. Oops, bear with me. Have you seen any patterns so far? Oh, my gosh. Oh, we're going to have my notes on Cornelius. He's not that exciting. Bear with me. We're not going to do anything on Cornelius because I don't have anything exciting on him.

48:02 Okay. Well, let's go back to Gertrude. So one of the big things that happened when Gloria Vanderbilt inherited her money is basically she's being raised by her mom, who was only like 20 years old at the time. And her mom just decided to become a socialite in Europe, left her with her nanny most of the time. And we have this thing called the trial of the century. You're in the wrong place. Yeah, I know. I'm doing terrible on my multi-screens today.

48:51 That's why I don't do that. All right, so Gloria Vanderbilt is 18 months old when her father dies. Inherits a $5 million trust fund. Her mom is only 20 and just traveled to Europe social circles, and Gloria is raised by a nanny. So Aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney sues for custody, and the tabloids have a field day. I mean, it's called the trial of the century. It's 1934.

49:28 Gloria would actually testify that she was afraid of her mom and Gertrude wins custody. And Gloria grows up into that life. But Gloria isn't just going to settle for that. She's a pretty spectacular woman. So we've got a lot of men, but women have done a lot. Gertrude was a social force. Ava was a social force. And Gloria might have been the best of the best. She grew up very lonely. Gets into modeling at age 15. Becomes a painter and an actor.

50:04 and is, of course, became a designer in the 1970s and launched the famous Gloria jeans. Did you ever have a pair? No. I was more of a Levi kid. You must have had a bell-bottom period, at least a little bit. Yeah, but never named brands. We were very poor. Well, I don't think you missed much with the Gloria. But anyway, she's a success. She gets a lot of credit. Her fourth husband, and that's the other thing that Vanderbilt's been doing.

50:37 They kind of broke the mold on whether divorce was a cool thing. They get a lot of credit for that. You know, the high society didn't divorce. Well, a lot of Vanderbilts divorced. So you can give them a bit of credit for that one. Anyway, her fourth marriage was to a Wyatt Emery Cooper, who was an actor, screenwriter, author. And Wyatt Cooper would die in 1978 during heart surgery. They had two children, Carter Cooper.

51:15 who 10 years after the father died decided to jump from a 14-story balcony standing right next to his mom and kill himself and then of course their other child who we all know Anderson Cooper and I've got to play something because you know it's funny I read a little blurb on him and they talked about how he basically denied the family riches well he didn't really inherit many

51:48 He gets into journalism, and the write-up I got on him is what a brave journalist he is, traveling into post-war and war zones and hurricane winds. He's a truth-teller. We all know a little bit better than that. But I've got to play this. This is Anderson Cooper fighting hurricane winds. I try not to argue with other TV anchors, and I usually let conspiracy theorists go unanswered.

52:26 The son of the president, Donnie Jr., tweeted out this picture of me in waist-high water, my camera crew a few feet away on higher ground in only a little bit of water. Donnie Jr. was claiming it showed me in Florence faking the depths of floodwaters in order to somehow harm his father. I've covered hurricanes for about 14 years, and it really does make me sad to think that anyone would believe that I would try to fake something or overly dramatize a disaster. This was taken 10 years ago during Hurricane I.

52:53 on september 13 2008 i did a two-hour broadcast from bridge city texas by highway 62. fire personnel uh fish and wildlife folks in boats and pickup trucks monster trucks taking people out of here injured people as well we've seen just in the last couple minutes a couple cars go by with people we don't want to put a camera in their face just out of respect for them as for those who think i was kneeling or faking the water level or making it look worse than it was or standing in some sort of a hole

53:21 This is an area where people had been trapped on the roofs of their homes by water. The idea that I am kneeling in water to make it look deep is frankly idiotic. Here in Wilmington, New Hanover County, this has become a deadly hurricane now with two fatalities, a mom and her infant. Boy, I tell you, look at the wind just whipping the palm trees. The person you see there, his name was Doug Thomas, the audio tech. He worked for CNN for 26 years. He covered a lot of storms and a lot of stories.

53:52 He died a year ago this month. So did you notice the other guy in the second clip there that was just walking normal while he was trying to look like he was bracing for the wind? Yeah, that's been an internet meme for quite some time. That's why we call it fake news. Yeah. It's not like the real news isn't bad enough already. And of course, there's also that photo of Gloria Vanderbilt when both Cooper and his brother were much younger.

54:23 on the bed with the satanic looking um emblems all around them as well which kind of goes to the whole theme that you've laid out here that that's kind of their source of what you and i as christians believe in god there's a reoccurring theme of mysticism and other things that are prevalent

54:54 among some of these families. Well, you want to look at some of these houses real quick? Sure. I'll show a few first. And we've seen this before when we did this, when we started scrolling key, but when we started talking about Hunt, the architect. But just to put it into context, and you can show the interior pictures. This is the Breakers, owned by the Vanderbilts and built by the Vanderbilts. Now a public museum. I was just there last month. The famous marble house.

55:33 absolutely gorgeous this one is i don't think this one is also vanderbilt ochre court velcourt castle so this is not a vanderbilt one and here is the build more and imagine how much that costs to keep up on a yearly basis and today's money that would be three three or four hundred million to build i gotta imagine the maintenance on it's got to be it's got to be two three million a year yeah um i think when i was there a few years ago

56:14 the estimate was two million dollars that's just the upkeep that's just the upkeep and now the historical preservation society owns it and they've got to cut that bill correct i'm sure the city of newport's about as wealthy as they come i'm sure there's money there there's not that's not a problem there's a lot of money there well this one's this one's in north carolina that's why i forgot that um

56:39 I want to show you interior pics before we sum up what's going on with the Vanderbilt. Oh, just to tie it all down, you do a search engine or in any chat, in any AI and say, hey, give me a list of all the prominent Vanderbilts that are still going. And the only two names yet that are even close to knowable are Anderson Cooper and Gloria Vanderbilt. The rest of them may still, I mean, there's still dozens of Vanderbilts running around out there, but none of them are important on the world stage in business, politics.

57:08 You know, you see them in philanthropy and their names are on libraries and it was like that. And that's how their name's going to go down in history. But their wealth did not. Nor did their influence. Let me see if I can get down to it. I was trying to share my screen. Oh, share screen. Okay. Entire screen. Because I have my slide deck.

57:44 All right. So can you see these photos? Yes, we can. Okay. This is the inside of the marble palace. The walls, the ceilings, the staircases, every bit of this is marble. There's something on every surface. The frescoes on the ceilings, the lighting, all gilded in gold. And this is real gold. This isn't fake, like gold paint, like I do.

58:21 And you can see back here in the background, all of this is marble. The entire walls are sheets of marble. That's one of the sitting rooms. You see the frescoes up here? Yeah, and they're all very well preserved. Look at this. Look at that. That was carved out of actual marble. I have that picture. Yeah, and the woodwork, all of this. And these were built. I mean, they're not molds. People did this.

58:58 look at this ceiling um they're bringing over the finest uh artists and architects from europe this wall this wall has silk those are silk linings the stained glass in here is amazing and all of this interior the inserts into the ceiling all painted hand painted yeah they spared no expense but you understand why they didn't pay more

59:33 yeah the draperies alone and look at this fresco on the top on the ceiling here yep it was in that room this is me and my daughter again all gilded in gold and you can see like up here the the carvings there's faces in every one of these um uh fixtures here around the the ceiling now the other thing you need about this thing is they um

1:00:12 really you know they'd like to show off their wealth so these are the some of the very first buildings in america that had electricity and plumbing indoor plumbing and they showed off their bathtubs and well i i have a couple pictures of the bathtubs um these again all carved that's a fireplace all hand painted look at the intricacy there marble walls marble columns

1:00:49 This is one of the bedrooms. And what's weird about this is in the ones you're allowed to walk in, these beds are humongous, but they look normal because the rooms are so big. Did you think that you thought they were big? Because I thought they were. I thought some of them looked really tiny compared to I mean, it's spatially disorienting. There is one of the rooms that you're allowed to actually go in and walk along the bed.

1:01:18 The bed is actually big, but they look small because these rooms are so big. And you know what's interesting is the man and the wife would have separate rooms. Yes. Yeah, this is the wife's room here. This is that. Yeah, this was her room. It's the purple room. Look at the bed. That's all hand carved. This was her room. And that was, if I'm not mistaken, that's his room.

1:01:54 Look at that fireplace. That fireplace is all marble, gilded in gold. And, of course, you have to have the frescoes painted on the ceiling with all of the intricate woodworking. Look at the detail on that bed. Now, you've got to remember, when these guys are out starting this gilded age stuff, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, which is billions today, I think their net worth at one point in time got to about $4 or $5 billion equivalent. But at the same time, the average person in America is earning $4 a day.

1:02:40 This is marble. This is their bathroom, all marble. And my husband and I were talking about this staircase. While most people would not appreciate what it takes to make wood round like that, it's absolutely amazing. Royal purple. And if I'm not mistaken, this is the bedroom that she was held hostage in. This is the girl's bedroom. Look at that bed. Now, the other really stunning contrast.

1:03:38 of these gilded age mansions is i live here in the northeast now and i've gotten to see a lot of the historical we were called mansions back then and those places were built for midgets i'm six three and i hit my head all the time in these older houses yeah the gilded age the vanderbilt certainly didn't have to want to worry about hitting their heads so this right here is one of the servant hallways you'd notice it's not all decorated still nicer than most houses it is

1:04:09 These are the guest rooms. What I love is how the ballrooms have these elegant staircases going down. So when you have a ball, the owners of the house get to walk down in all pomp and circumstance. Then they're going to make their grand entry when you have like a debutante, like Cornelia, coming down there in her courses.

1:04:37 So here's the kitchen. And I was fascinated by the use of copper. And when I went home, I changed out all my pots and pans to copper just because I did the research and found out why they use copper and how much more health benefits there are to cooking in copper. Here we get the tea house. This is gorgeous. I don't know if I had the tea house, to be honest with you. I'll find it right now while you're doing that. Here's the back.

1:05:09 um of the marble house and this is some of the the landscape this is the view from the back end this is just another one of the houses that were along the the trip um that we were looking at and this is the other one what's the breakers my daughter looks so happy so this is the breakers this is the inside of the breakers

1:05:57 oh and the grand scare case that um war hamster was just talking about this is it so you see how it comes down from the and it's like a double staircase it is very very grand i've got um i've got the tea house if you want me to pull it real quick okay hold on let's get through these and then we'll go back to the tea house look at the ceiling in this room oh yeah you can get married in there you could have 200 people in there and not even touch each other and and again

1:06:29 Look at the, that's marble. The columns are marble. Inlaid wood on the floor. You can literally walk into that fireplace. That's how big that thing is. Yeah, and Leslie Bayer in the chat says, you're right, Brady, it seems sharing the wealth could have been in the mix a bit more. Yeah, but these people grew up at yacht clubs. They grew up, their whole goal was to be in high society. They never wanted to use it for political,

1:07:08 using it for political or business purposes they just lost that edge so let me also point out this floor this is mosaic tile they don't they did not have sheets of tile back then that was um webbed together like we have today they hired someone to place every single one of these tiles on this floor that's all hand done that's all hand done i think they treated their servants and workers with any respect

1:07:49 No. A billiards room. And look at this. Let me see if I can make this bigger. That's all tile. And that view is looking out on the Atlantic Ocean, right? Yes. How would you even plan the tile to do that? And it's curved. Anybody that's done tile, and I've done a lot of tile in my life, I walked out there and I went, oh my gosh.

1:08:32 shows you what happens when you have the greatest wealth division in human history. All these fortunes are made during the industrial period by the Robert Barons, like I said, on the backs of government-funded paternal improvements, but they also have immigrants coming in with cheaper free labor all over Europe. Welcome your huddled masses, and we'll put you to work in our factories earning slave wages. So we may have ended slavery in the 1860s, but we basically created a modern...

1:09:02 i don't know second classes and a new serfdom and that's how america was built and it was not honest this just shows you a huge wealth disparity at the time it really is and the only reason this family has a name is they have one ancestor cornelius commodore vanderbilt who was just incredibly good at business and he's a hard worker a terrible man and a terrible father and it's you got to blame him for the lack of his you know

1:09:34 next generation success because he never even talked to him. This ceiling here just fascinated me. That's all hand painted. Looks like stained glass almost. It does. This is like what they referred to as the library with its monster big fireplace. There was... There's the tub. Look at the marble. I'm going to have another shot of the tub because I showed the piping. I caught it behind the tub. There's another one of their marble fireplaces.

1:10:18 I think that one's hideous, but whatever. Mr. Vanderbilt's bedroom. Which Mr.? The one that built this house. The Breakers. This is what their closet looked like. Their suits hung on these things here. Tub right there is made out of marble. That's a solid chunk of marble carved to look like that. Did you get any of the kitchen? I'm not sure I got the Breakers kitchen. I think I did.

1:11:06 And I just want to look at this bathroom. And like he said, this is the state of the art plumbing back then. Nobody had indoor plumbing back then. Another picture of the closet. This is in her bedroom. That's the dressing room. Another bathroom. It's just crazy to imagine people living in. And this is the outdoor of the breakers. Yep. That's one of my favorite views.

1:12:17 Besides the one from the tea house, which I've got ready to go. All right. Let me get back to stop sharing. However, I do that. There you go. And in the meantime, I'm going to scroll down to do the. Let's see. Where are you at? Can you send me your link? I've got that. This is just a screenshot.

1:12:55 It should be in the screen share below. All I see is mine. Well, crap. Try it again. I'll do the screen share. Here it is. I know, but it's not showing it to me. Hold on a second. Let me stop screen. Okay, there you are. There you go. All right, this is Alva's famous Chinese tea house, and it is Japanese, I think. Absolutely gorgeous.

1:13:29 That's my wife standing in front, and I have now had to promise to build her a smaller version of this with an ocean view at some point in the near future. I'm just hoping she picks different colors. Okay, so let me go back. I'll remove yours. And I do want to show, let's see, entire screen. All right.

1:14:02 This is the kitchen in the breakers. Yeah, I got that. That's just amazing. That's like the world's biggest stove. These are very modern appliances, but they've got to cook for like a thousand people. And the pot fillers along the wall back here, they had pot fillers. Most people in America today doesn't have pot fillers. They're bread ovens. Go ahead. They had to have like 30 cooks, 100 servers.

1:14:37 you know today today these parties did cost a million dollars and what so this is the part that cracked me up this is the butler pantry so they have um in every one of these um china cabinets they have different um sets of china for different people it's a two-story butler's pantry guys two stories most again most people don't have a butler's pantry

1:15:06 let alone a two-story butler's pantry with like a zillion sets of china for different guests it's crazies and um also what we hadn't mentioned yet throughout this entire house is this intercom system did that what year did that come in i know it wasn't right at the beginning but they had to do a bunch of work to get that to work i don't know i don't remember them saying what year

1:15:35 um but of course you know my husband being an electrical contractor he's put in a lot of modern day communication systems we were just fascinated by it um okay so let me go back over here um and stop doing that because then i want to go down um because at the end of this trip um we went to um i have to get back to um

1:16:05 the end of the trip where we went to the Biltmore. So hold on just a second. And I will get to that. While you're doing that, I just want to make commentary. You know, we talk about philanthropy being a fake tool for international diplomacy at times. It's also, you know, these charities and charitable balls are waiting for social climbing and status engineering and all that.

1:16:35 It seems to me that the Vanderbilts cared only about the status, nothing about charity. I mean, they may have donated to some libraries, but every single thing they spent their money on was about building gaudy monuments to their great-grandfather and great-grandfather, not to themselves, but they don't know any better. It's like they actually thought they deserved and they needed to show off the opulent wealth that they had. And because of it, they don't have any because they had their priorities all wrong. Definitely had the wrong priorities.

1:17:06 um and that's kind of one of the common themes in all of this if if you have that much money and every single one of these people put the onus of charity on the government they were fundamentally responsible from transitioning um the traditional charity being out of your own personal pocket onto the taxpayers

1:17:35 And if they really cared, I mean, if you live like this, you obviously have money to take care of the poor in a more meaningful way than a couple of dollars here and a couple of dollars there. But every single one of these people are responsible for the current state of where it's assumed like organizations like USAID and things like that are all coming out of our pocket.

1:18:03 Not their pocket. All right. I'm almost there. These pictures, because there's a couple I want to show you. I'll go through them faster. Before you jump in, I just want to comment on what you just said. This whole disparity of wealth and the way they live, there's a reason the populist movement of the 1890s, we saw the end of single-party Republican rule. The Democrats became the populist party, and we became a two-party system again.

1:18:33 the resentment was very real with the reform that had to come out of that we had some labor reform very grudgingly and everything like that but the the people would never put up with this long term these people are making themselves into kings and queens and the government is eventually forced to give us well get some of the social reforms that we're still paying for today like social security and medicare so this is the biltmore this is the looking at it um from the sidewalk walking up to it

1:19:04 There's over in where that bus is sitting, that building that you can see behind it is a huge big greenhouse. This is in front of the Biltmore looking back towards the south and the lawn coming up to, this is what it looks like. And these things, these goblins and whatever these things are, are hideous looking. Did it have goggle oils?

1:19:37 It does. Look at these weird things. This is carved stone here. That's the water fountain. It has the most grueling looking weird things. Yeah, see them? That's gothic, right? I don't know. Look at the faces on them. This entire thing is very haunting looking. See that thing up there at the top that's squatted down? It looks like a half monkey.

1:20:13 It's literally, yeah, this is like the atrium inside. What do you do when you have too much time on your hands? No profession and no need for one. This is the hunt room here. All kinds of stuffed animals and pictures of the hunts that they went on. They were renovating that room. That's the big hall. That's a big fireplace down at the end. There's one at the other end as well. This is like their big ballroom.

1:21:01 This is the other end of that ballroom. And the entire ceiling is wood. Again, I can't even imagine growing up in a house with all of the weird stuff that's in this house. You're talking about the demonic stuff? Yeah. How about a house that size in the first place? Yeah. So this is the pipe organ that's in this room. Is it still working? Yep. It's amazing. Sheer opulence.

1:21:39 We are the Vanderbilts. We have more money than God. Watch us show it off. Look at the face on that thing. You know, you couldn't do cherubs or anything like that. What kind of feel did you get when going in there? It's creepy. I'm telling you it's creepy. Everything about it. It's not like the breakers and the marble where it's light and bright and soft colors.

1:22:14 It really is weird. That's one of the dining rooms. I'm going to go through these kind of faster than we did before because I want to get to the basement. The basement is crazy. There's the Commodore. Again, look how dark these rooms are. That's one of the views out the back. It's funny that George Washington Vanderbilt, who built it,

1:22:56 the biltmore was talking was totally they talked about him being bookish and into beauty that's the interior of the biltmore you're showing us right yes yeah well that doesn't look beautiful to me it doesn't look beautiful at all not you know when you look at from the big picture from the outside with all the manicured gardens acres of manicured gardens it does look like a phenomenal i haven't been here so this is the first time i've seen the inside it's it's very interesting um

1:23:30 Again, very, very dark. And look at these heads. Completely different than the... And that's why I wanted... We actually scheduled this kind of at the last minute because I wanted to compare it to what we saw in Rhode Island. This is their library. It's a two-story library.

1:24:04 that spiral staircase goes up to the second. That'd be fun to spend a year in that library. Probably some amazing original books. Yes. And these guys were collectors of all fine things, whether it be books, paintings, sculptures, you name it. Yeah, there's one of their family portraits there. So my understanding is they go back, the family meets back at the Biltmore every year for like a reunion.

1:24:40 And it's pretty much just a bunch of middle class and some upper class society people, but not a whole ton of money, like not a millionaire in the bunch. So you can see there's and they did this throughout the building. So there's the family portrait. And then what they do is they do this like outline of who everybody is that's in the picture. So you can actually look at who they are. All right. Let me get through these like that one there. So there's the picture.

1:25:19 And then that's who they are. It's pretty cool. Yeah. Again, so dark. You just have such an ominous feeling. And this is a whole hallway of nothing but old prints of the family and their family history. We'll get to the basement in a second. That's like the last thing on the tour. No, it's worth it. I haven't seen this stuff before. I think part of the audience hasn't either. I like the comments in the chat. Dracula looks like he's going to come out of one of these rooms.

1:26:05 So again, this is another hallway with all of these photos in it. So what do you think? Is there a Vanderbilt curse? Or is it just poor planning? There's another bathroom picture. I was fascinated by the bathrooms, given the period of the time that this was built. The furniture, this is all inlaid wood. I can't even imagine the courtesan that...

1:26:43 did the furniture in here. Alright, so we're getting to the basement. This is the wall. Look at that wall. They call it the Halloween room. There is a... They were known for their costume balls in Newport and Manhattan. So they had... This is the room. Toy soldiers. They give you a phone when you go in to hear the history of it.

1:27:33 That's why everybody's got those phones to their ears. These pictures, so the one that married the royalty over in England, in the UK. Yeah, Gloria. So they are the ones that paint, no, the original one. Cornelia. Cornelia. They're the ones that painted this.

1:28:08 And they would invite all of their English friends. This was their party room. My apologies. It's Consuelo is the one you're talking about that married the Churchills. Yeah. This was painted by them. It's gaudy. And there's a whole story to this theme down here with bats flying around. Yeah. And there's the bowling alley. I think we had a picture of.

1:29:03 More bathrooms. Yeah, there's a swimming pool with the ropes hanging on the side. That's in the basement. It's crazy. That's your tour of the Biltmore. That's amazing. It started with one man who doesn't have a whole lot of scandal in his past. Just an unsavory character. I mean, obviously, he had to bribe officials and ports and stuff like that. And anybody in the shipping in the 1800s was probably doing some smuggling. But there's actually no...

1:29:52 evidence of scandal with cornelius who's the king of the shippers for you know better part of 40 or 50 years you know we know it probably happened but they just either they've been so they were so wealthy they could cover anything up and the scandal never broke in the newspapers or it never happened and then the rest of the generations it would have been nice to have a few more scandals besides the fact that they partied too hard or spent too lavishly but it really is a pretty darn boring family outside of what they built what they spent it on but i think it's a to me it's a perfect

1:30:21 black and white image of them versus some of the other robber barons we've looked at who did spend all their wealth monopolizing or joining cartels business and then you know extorting extorting exerting their influence on politicians and placing their people you know in the army in the intels the vanderbilt didn't do it you know don't know why yeah and and you really don't like you said you don't know what they did behind the scenes um and it it does

1:30:51 It's hard to believe, given the patterns that we've established, that there wasn't something. But did they have enough money to ensure it never got into print? It's entirely possible. That's the outstanding question. But some people call it one of the most successful family stories in history. And I'd say it's one of the worst examples of what a family should be. Yeah, because throughout the history of that family, you are struck.

1:31:22 by the coldness and the estrangement, if you will, in the whole point of Gloria Vanderbilt's story of being basically abandoned as a child. That goes right back to the beginning where he basically had nothing to do with his children that he had 12 of. That he had with his first cousin. That he had with his first cousin.

1:31:50 It is a very estranged family. Yep. Well, we don't have to worry about them too much going forward. We'll see their names on certain universities and libraries. But I think it's been a fascinating look into another angle of the Gilded Age and how the real direction of our country was changed in that time period. I agree. And we're going to hammer that home really hard the next couple of weeks. Next week, we're doing the Roosevelt's and the Delano's. They're joining at the hip.

1:32:19 Oh, and the one after that, I'm just going to keep it a surprise for now. Okay. I can't wait for the Delanos, however you say it, and the Roosevelts. Well, they're going to be full of the scandal that was missing today. Yeah, because they have lots of very interesting history as it relates to Operation Gladio. Yeah, and we'll just leave it at that, and we'll hit that next week.

1:32:49 All right. Thanks everybody for joining in. Appreciate it. Hope y'all enjoyed everyone. Cheers. See you next week.

Entities here

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr29 Vanderbilt family25 Biltmore Estate13 William Vanderbilt11 Alva Vanderbilt10 Gloria Vanderbilt9 New York City9 The Breakers8 Skull and Bones8 Nicaragua8 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney6 Californian5 George Washington5 United States5 United Kingdom4 Delano-Roosevelt family4 Panama4 Marble House4 Consuelo Vanderbilt4 Accessory Transit Company3 Joseph White3 Operation Gladio3 Whitney family3 William Walker3 Sophia Johnson Vanderbilt3 Edith Stuyvesant Vanderbilt3 Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt3 Thomas Gibbons3 Jay Gould2 Rhode Island2 Jekyll Island2 San Juan2 Aaron Ogden2 Erie War2 American Civil War2 Charles Moret2 Harry Payne Whitney2 Anderson Cooper2 California Gold Rush2 Gilded Age2

Claims made here

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr member_of Vanderbilt family documented ▶ 3:51

“I guess that first tree you could really see how diluted a family's worth can be over the generations. It just keeps spreading and spreading. So the real founder of the Vanderbilt family fortune is, o…”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr financed_via Thomas Gibbons documented ▶ 7:08

“and killing innovation. Good point. We're going to be talking a lot about that theme going forward. Good question, though. Here we are. He embraces the steamboat technology. He's going fast. He's work…”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr married Sophia Johnson Vanderbilt documented ▶ 9:55

“He never had debt. He marries his first cousin, Sophia Johnson Vanderbilt. Marrying your first cousin is another thing that people might blame on the curse. I want to share something funny here. Give …”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr founded Accessory Transit Company documented ▶ 15:28

“You go through Lake Nicaragua, and then you jump out on the San Juan River, and you can get to the Pacific and go straight to California. Cornelius Vanderbilt would help hack out that route himself th…”

Joseph White conspired_with Charles Moret documented ▶ 16:01

“And at the time, Vanderbilt, most of 1853, Vanderbilt and his whole family touring Europe on his yacht, the North Star. So his partner, White, would conspire with Charles Morgan, one of J.P. Morgan's,…”

William Walker overthrew Nicaragua documented ▶ 17:08

“He drove them into extinction by cutting prices. Sensing a pattern here? Yes. Goes back, repurchases the accessory transit that line over Nicaragua again, cheaper than he sold it for. Here's where it …”

Edmund Randolph member_of William Walker documented ▶ 17:43

“How many people know that an American actually was the ruler of Nicaragua in the 1850s? I did, but only because I went through this. So this guy by the name of Edmund Randolph, he's a close friend of …”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr carried_out_attack William Walker documented ▶ 18:15

“who, like the rest of Central America, declared war in Nicaragua when Walker took over. He sends his men, mercenaries, to lead a raid that captured steamboats on the San Juan River and cut Walker off …”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr supplied_arms_to Union Navy documented ▶ 19:20

“moved south and developed a monopoly on the California steamship business because that's what this guy does. We get to the Civil War, and he donates his biggest steamship, known as the Vanderbilt, to …”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr attempted_coup_against Erie Railroad documented ▶ 19:20

Jay Gould traded_network_to Erie Railroad documented ▶ 19:54

“And what they did is they defeated him by issuing what's called watered stock, which is basically printing fake certificates. And Gould had bribed the New York legislature to allow the issuance of the…”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr founded Vanderbilt University documented ▶ 21:56

“A little bit up the road. All right. Railroads, he did great. 1873, he founds Vanderbilt University. He's now starting to get into the charities. Beginning. His will, remember he's got 12 living kids,…”

William Vanderbilt succeeded Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr documented ▶ 21:56

William Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family documented ▶ 22:35

“That's what kind of father he was. Okay, so William Henry Vanderbilt, that's Billy, gets all the money. It rages the siblings. Court battles follow. Tabloids in the newspapers were all over the story.…”

Ulysses S. Grant paid William Vanderbilt documented ▶ 25:20

“It's really all about displaying wealth rather than earning it. So that's pretty much how to get to the third generation. One other fun side note about Billy. He got into a business venture with Ulyss…”

William Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family documented ▶ 25:55

“He said the other son, Cornelius, not too exciting. Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt. William Henry had some kids. And they are worth talking about. And the first one is going to be one William Kissam Va…”

William Vanderbilt married Alva Vanderbilt documented ▶ 27:37

“Well, actually, she died, Ava Belmont, on her last husband after he passed away. Her name was Ava Vanderbilt. That's what she was known as. And she is important. She is born not into old money, but so…”

Alva Vanderbilt founded The 400 host_asserted ▶ 28:49

“The famous event that changed the Vanderbilts socially was Mrs. Astor of the Astor family, who made their money in the fur business, was considered pretty much the queen of New York high society. And …”

Alva Vanderbilt recruited Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 29:52

“invited Mrs. Astor to the party yet. And she's asked about it. She goes, well, how could I? Mrs. Astor has never called on me socially. Within two to three hours, Mrs. Astor was there in a coach in fr…”

Alva Vanderbilt funded Marble House host_asserted ▶ 30:48

“And all these other families we've been talking about, mostly with all the skull and bones ties. And they're using their social position for business purposes and political purposes. Not the Vanderbil…”

Consuelo Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 31:21

“11 million dollars to build which would be about 300 million dollars today called it the summer cottage and of course she is so fashionable she builds the chinese tea house that both the colonel and i…”

Alva Vanderbilt ordered_assassination_of Consuelo Vanderbilt host_asserted ▶ 32:00

“And at 18, they marry her off to the Duke of Marlborough, who just happens to be a Churchill. So can I tell that story about her marrying off her daughter? Because her daughter didn't want to marry hi…”

Edith Stuyvesant Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 34:51

“24-7 staff to maintain. Very much so. Okay, before we go on to the next generation, we should probably talk about George Washington Vanderbilt II. Let's get him in here. Here's George Washington Vande…”

George Washington member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 35:41

“of manhattan so and there's also a whole section of new york called stuvescent i think new yorkers pronounce that differently but i haven't been in new york so long i don't remember how they do it i s…”

George Washington recruited Richard Morris Hunt host_asserted ▶ 36:14

“I don't know if I have one handy. Or maybe I do. I'll show it in a second here. We'll do it later. The Biltmore. He starts buying up the land in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. Hires Richa…”

George Washington funded Biltmore Estate host_asserted ▶ 36:14

George Washington recruited Frederick Law Olmsted host_asserted ▶ 36:14

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 39:10

“of the biltmore because it has a veranda on the back of it and he wanted to be able to approve the view from each level of the veranda yeah well the guy didn't know how to spend money that's for sure …”

Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 40:31

“He spent some time and money donating to universities, hospitals, and churches, and then ends up committing suicide at age 51. He marries Alice Claypool Vanderbilt, and they have a bunch of kids, whic…”

Consuelo Vanderbilt member_of Whitney family host_asserted ▶ 40:31

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 41:11

“Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. We have spoken about before when we did Skull and Bones. She marries a Henry Payne Whitney from the Whitney family. Bear with me. I'm jumping around a bit. And, of course,…”

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney member_of Whitney family host_asserted ▶ 41:11

Harry Payne Whitney member_of Whitney family host_asserted ▶ 41:11

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt member_of Whitney family host_asserted ▶ 41:54

“a woman named Ellen Tuck French, who's close friends with Gertrude. Let me just give you the details, a quick rehash on Whitney's. All right, Henry Payne Whitney, you're seeing there, was born in 1894…”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr member_of Skull and Bones host_asserted ▶ 42:39

“Well, that's one of the oldest families in America. And it goes all the way back to Williams, Collins, Whitney, etc. We talked about them quite a bit. There have been about four or five Whitney's in S…”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 42:39

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr funded Beaulieu Estate host_asserted ▶ 44:05

“socializing with, oh, I don't know, King Henry VII, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas II. He would serve in the National Guard. World War I breaks out, and he gets called to action. He gets promoted qu…”

Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 44:49

“Born 1880 in Manhattan, died at age 45, 1925. And what do we have to say about Reginald? He's a fun one. Known as Reggie. Also known, and we'll talk about that in a second, he is a playboy and a gambl…”

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 45:25

“Oh, yes, he did. His wife, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, was not a Vanderbilt, so she had no claim on the Vanderbilt money, so it was all left, what was left of it, to their daughter, Gloria Vanderbilt, w…”

Gloria Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 45:25

Gloria Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 46:16

“He would, interestingly, he was on a Lusitania in 2015 off the coast of Ireland when the German U-boat hit it. And apparently, even though he could not swim, stories are that he died a hero. He gave u…”

Gloria Vanderbilt member_of Whitney family host_asserted ▶ 46:16

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney exposed Gloria Vanderbilt host_asserted ▶ 48:51

“That's why I don't do that. All right, so Gloria Vanderbilt is 18 months old when her father dies. Inherits a $5 million trust fund. Her mom is only 20 and just traveled to Europe social circles, and …”

Carter Cooper member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 50:37

“They kind of broke the mold on whether divorce was a cool thing. They get a lot of credit for that. You know, the high society didn't divorce. Well, a lot of Vanderbilts divorced. So you can give them…”

Wyatt Emery Cooper member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 50:37

Anderson Cooper member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 51:15

“who 10 years after the father died decided to jump from a 14-story balcony standing right next to his mom and kill himself and then of course their other child who we all know Anderson Cooper and I've…”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr founded Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 1:09:02

“i don't know second classes and a new serfdom and that's how america was built and it was not honest this just shows you a huge wealth disparity at the time it really is and the only reason this famil…”

Vanderbilt family funded Biltmore Estate host_asserted ▶ 1:16:35

“It seems to me that the Vanderbilts cared only about the status, nothing about charity. I mean, they may have donated to some libraries, but every single thing they spent their money on was about buil…”

Vanderbilt family funded The Breakers host_asserted ▶ 1:16:35

George Washington founded Biltmore Estate host_asserted ▶ 1:22:14

“It really is weird. That's one of the dining rooms. I'm going to go through these kind of faster than we did before because I want to get to the basement. The basement is crazy. There's the Commodore.…”

Consuelo Vanderbilt member_of Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 1:28:08

“And they would invite all of their English friends. This was their party room. My apologies. It's Consuelo is the one you're talking about that married the Churchills. Yeah. This was painted by them. …”

Cornelius Vanderbilt Starr covered_up Vanderbilt family host_asserted ▶ 1:29:52

“evidence of scandal with cornelius who's the king of the shippers for you know better part of 40 or 50 years you know we know it probably happened but they just either they've been so they were so wea…”

Delano-Roosevelt family member_of Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 1:32:19

“Oh, and the one after that, I'm just going to keep it a surprise for now. Okay. I can't wait for the Delanos, however you say it, and the Roosevelts. Well, they're going to be full of the scandal that…”