Alva Vanderbilt Quotes

Alva embodied a curious contradiction in that she felt she cared deeply for women as a class while nursing venomous contempt for the women she actually knew.

Woman’s emancipation means education of men as well as women,” Alva insisted. “The mating of the future which will be a success will be founded on the truth of being. We are not only making a new woman—we are making a new man. We are not only bringing forth the truth in women but making men desire the truth.

Love was a frivolous emotion, certainly no basis for a marriage—every young lady knew this. You must always put sense over feeling, Madame Denis, Alva’s favorite teacher, had said. Sense will feed you, clothe you, provide your homes and your horses and your bibelots. Feelings are like squalls at sea—mere nuisances if one is lucky, but many girls have lost their way in such storms, some of them never to return. Alva did not need to love William Vanderbilt; she needed only to marry him.

Alva smiled. “And Harold, when he’s old enough—that God made us equal and it’s man who creates the imbalances, the unfairness, the arbitrary rules meant to keep power in the hands of—” “Don’t trouble them with politics,” William said.

William Henry altered his will nine times in six years, as he fretted over how best to bequeath such a legacy.

he felt strongly that the burden of such a fortune was too great for one man alone. ‘The care of $200 million is too great a load for any brain or back to bear. It is enough to kill a man.

he felt strongly that the burden of such a fortune was too great for one man alone. ‘The care of $200 million is too great a load for any brain or back to bear. It is enough to kill a man. I have no son whom I am willing to afflict with the terrible burden,’ he is quoted as saying.

Cornelius Jeremiah

In 1882 he shot himself in the Glenham Hotel in New York, leaving debts of over $15,000. An undignified auction of his belongings compounded the disgrace of a family suicide.

the word ‘millionaire’ was only coined by journalists in 1843 to describe the estate left by the first of them, the tobacconist Peter Lorillard. In 1845, the millionaire phenomenon was still so rare that the word was printed in italics and pronounced with rolling ‘rs’ in a flamboyant French accent.

I had too much power before I knew how to use it and it defeated me in the end. It drove all sweetness out of my life except the affection of my children.

built from white stone with grey slate towers standing in a park which Alva furnished with small spotted deer who were fed chocolate at dusk.

snow-covered garden

Pine Hollow

Dorothy Schiff,

the ‘Dynasty’ culture of the Reagan era, that bore so many similarities to the cruelties of the Gilded Age.

Edna Woolman Chase,

Alva did suffer when the next wave came, and again and again and again, but a short while later she brought into the Vanderbilt family a girl with tufts of dark hair and wide eyes and the sweetest little bow of a mouth. This infant was perfect. Pain? What pain? Look at this child!

program itself, you’ll only ever get the same already-converted bunch coming to hear you—if that. I didn’t learn a single thing that wasn’t said fifty years ago.” “Our mission is to educate—” “Stimulate,” Alva said. “That’s what you need to do. Give ladies your age a reason to miss their bridge games and piano recitals. Get yourself a firebrand speaker—the equivalent of Christabel Pankhurst, that English suffragette who keeps getting herself arrested. Use a meeting to organize a march on the Metropolitan Club in Washington; the congressmen are more likely to be there than in chambers. Make posters. Write letters. Do things.” Kitty smiled as politely as Alva had done a minute before. “I’m sure we appreciate the advice.” “You know, for an intelligent woman, you are not very sensible.