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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part III: Give, and We Shall Receive
Brett Anderson
02/02/2004
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The gifts of the Commodore’s descendants, like his, tended to be rather spontaneous one-offs, often posthumous. William H. gave $200,000 to the university his father founded and nominal bequests to hospitals and museums. His own son, Cornelius II—a man of rigid rectitude, as blithe a spirit as a Puritan magistrate—devoted a considerable portion of his time, as well as his purse, to charitable activities. He served in dozens of posts of varying degrees of responsibility, including that of vestryman, member of the finance committee of the Episcopal Board of Foreign Missions, member of the executive committee of the YMCA, and director of the American Museum of Natural History. Yet even Cornelius’ philanthropic efforts received little formal structure outside his daily regimen, and his will made relatively modest provisions for these favored organizations. Beside the monumental bequests of later prominent clans—the Phipps, the Morgans, Frickes and Mellons—the Vanderbilts’ philanthropic legacies were remarkably scarce: Other than Vanderbilt University and the Whitney Museum (the brainchild of Cornelius’ daughter, Gertrude), the only monument to the Commodore’s name that remains is Grand Central Station—appropriately, a commercial rather than a civic endeavor. Even the fortune, which the Commodore’s last testament had guarded so jealously, is for all intents and purposes gone.
 This slow finale began with William H.’s decision to depart from his father’s wishes in dividing the Vanderbilt estate among his four sons and four daughters: Each of the six youngest received $10 million, while William K. and Cornelius II each inherited equal allotments of $65 million. The family business, which had to that point served as the unifying element within the family, would persevere in that role for one more generation, as the elder brothers cooperated in its management—Cornelius as the captain of industry, William as the greaser of social wheels. But the brothers were the last to play any active part in the railroad; after them, the family’s only common bond was their pursuit of social status and their willingness to spend unlimited sums in attaining it.
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