Vanderbilt Family Quotes

Remember whenever money is involved, it brings out horrific things in people. It has the power not only to split families apart, but to destroy the foundations of one's life. Never lose site of this. Take time and be certain you place your trust in those whose interests and goals mirror your own.

Barnaby Fanning was the lone offspring of a marriage between two of New Orleans’ finest families. Growing up in a Garden District mansion so iconic it was a stop on all the tours, the future heir to sugar and cotton fortunes both, his adolescence spent at debutante balls during the season and trips abroad during the summer: it was the stuff of true Southern gentlemen. But Bucky always refused the first table at a restaurant. He carried a pocket calculator so he could tip a strict twelve percent. When his father nudged him out of the nest after graduating Vanderbilt (straight Cs), Bucky fluttered only as far as the carriage house because no other address would suit. He sported head-to-toe Prada bought on quarterly pilgrimages to Neiman Marcus in Dallas, paid for by Granny Charbonneau. At the slightest perceived insult, Bucky would fly into rages, becoming so red-faced and spitty in the process that even those on the receiving end of his invective grew concerned for his health. During the holidays, Bucky would stand over the trash and drop in Christmas cards unopened while keeping mental score of who’d sent them. He never accepted a dinner invitation without first asking who else would be there. Bucky Fanning had never been known to write a thank-you note.

A famous British writer is revealed to be the author of an obscure mystery novel. An immigrant is granted asylum when authorities verify he wrote anonymous articles critical of his home country. And a man is convicted of murder when he’s connected to messages painted at the crime scene. The common element in these seemingly disparate cases is “forensic linguistics”—an investigative technique that helps experts determine authorship by identifying quirks in a writer’s style. Advances in computer technology can now parse text with ever-finer accuracy. Consider the recent outing of Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling as the writer of The Cuckoo’s Calling , a crime novel she published under the pen name Robert Galbraith. England’s Sunday Times , responding to an anonymous tip that Rowling was the book’s real author, hired Duquesne University’s Patrick Juola to analyze the text of Cuckoo , using software that he had spent over a decade refining. One of Juola’s tests examined sequences of adjacent words, while another zoomed in on sequences of characters; a third test tallied the most common words, while a fourth examined the author’s preference for long or short words. Juola wound up with a linguistic fingerprint—hard data on the author’s stylistic quirks. He then ran the same tests on four other books: The Casual Vacancy , Rowling’s first post-Harry Potter novel, plus three stylistically similar crime novels by other female writers. Juola concluded that Rowling was the most likely author of The Cuckoo’s Calling , since she was the only one whose writing style showed up as the closest or second-closest match in each of the tests. After consulting an Oxford linguist and receiving a concurring opinion, the newspaper confronted Rowling, who confessed. Juola completed his analysis in about half an hour. By contrast, in the early 1960s, it had taken a team of two statisticians—using what was then a state-of-the-art, high-speed computer at MIT—three years to complete a project to reveal who wrote 12 unsigned Federalist Papers. Robert Leonard, who heads the forensic linguistics program at Hofstra University, has also made a career out of determining authorship. Certified to serve as an expert witness in 13 states, he has presented evidence in cases such as that of Christopher Coleman, who was arrested in 2009 for murdering his family in Waterloo, Illinois. Leonard testified that Coleman’s writing style matched threats spray-painted at his family’s home (photo, left). Coleman was convicted and is serving a life sentence. Since forensic linguists deal in probabilities, not certainties, it is all the more essential to further refine this field of study, experts say. “There have been cases where it was my impression that the evidence on which people were freed or convicted was iffy in one way or another,” says Edward Finegan, president of the International Association of Forensic Linguists. Vanderbilt law professor Edward Cheng, an expert on the reliability of forensic evidence, says that linguistic analysis is best used when only a handful of people could have written a given text. As forensic linguistics continues to make headlines, criminals may realize the importance of choosing their words carefully. And some worry that software also can be used to obscure distinctive written styles. “Anything that you can identify to analyze,” says Juola, “I can identify and try to hide.

The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A paucity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had.

If ever Scott Fitzgerald needed evidence to substantiate his aphorism that “the very rich…are different from you and me,” it was here in spades in this portrait gallery of extravagant crazies that is the unique saga of the Vanderbilt family.

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!

President and Chairman of the independent oil and gas exploration firm Vanderbilt Energy Corporation. Considering he belonged to such a wealthy and prominent family, it seems rather odd that John Hinckley, Jr. was always portrayed by the media as some kind of vagabond who did nothing but stalk Jodie Foster and read Catcher all day.

Rockefeller was embraced no less warmly by the New York Central, which was controlled by the Vanderbilt family.

The family’s parsimony, even as Vanderbilt’s share of Gibbons’s profits grew, created the basis for his ascendance. When Gibbons died in 1826, his son inherited the fleet of boats. Rather than have Vanderbilt on salary, William Gibbons leased the Bellona to him for a flat fee. Gibbons then gave Vanderbilt one of his routes. With all of the money he had accumulated, thirty-three-year-old Vanderbilt commissioned the construction of a steamboat of his own, the Citizen. With the now-ubiquitous side paddle wheel, the Citizen was smaller than Fulton’s original, but it was Vanderbilt’s own a full eleven years after meeting Thomas Gibbons for the first time. Back then, he had willingly given up his entrepreneurial independence to enter a field he could not otherwise afford to. Now he was his own man—he had side businesses, to be sure, but they were ancillary to his daily commercial activities. A year later the younger Gibbons sold his assets to someone else. With this, Vanderbilt shed all past ties.

Commodore Vanderbilt’s death was a pivotal moment in the shift of business from family to public ownership—a transition rich in possibilities for Pierpont Morgan.

Institute of Musical Art acquire the Vanderbilt family guesthouse on East 52nd Street to create the Juilliard Graduate School that same year.

According to most researchers who have been working intensively on the most powerful families on earth, the names are among others: Warburg, Rothschild, Rockefeller, DuPont, Russell, Onassis, Collins, Morgan, Kennedy, Hapsburg, Li, Bundy and Astor. The following families are closely interwoven with the leading families: Vanderbilt, Bauer, Whitney, Duke, Oppenheim, Grey, Sinclair, Schiff, Solvay, Oppenheimer, Sassoon, Wheeler, Todd, Clinton, Taft, Goldschmidt, Wallenberg, Guggenheim, Bush, Van Duyn and many others. For a long time both the power and money in the world has belonged to these families. Of course not everyone going by one of these names is related to such a powerful family. Many are unaware of what’s really going on in the world. Within the framework of this book, it is important to have a closer look at some of these ruling families.

Curator David Finley called his friend Edith Vanderbilt, who agreed to hide the nation’s most precious artworks—sixty-two paintings and seventeen sculptures—at the Biltmore, her family estate in western North Carolina. There, after a secret 450-mile train trip to Asheville, the artworks were stored in the first-floor music room of the palatial château. Security was crucial to the mission: Workers installed steel doors and bars on the music room’s windows,

Staten Island, where the Vanderbilt family—or van