[Here is the fifth and final installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

The Breakers.

I was pleasantly surprised by the quality, depth, and breadth of the self-guided audio tour at The Breakers—that tour, to be clear, provided starting points for all five of this week’s blog topics—but was particularly taken aback, in a good way, by a provocative question raised right at the tour’s outset. The narrator asks directly whether preserving mansions like The Breakers is a worthwhile pursuit for an organization such as the Preservation Society of Newport County—whether such mansions are architecturally or artistically worth preserving, whether they are historically or culturally worth remembering, whether, in short, these kinds of homes merit the obvious expense and effort that are required to keep them open and accessible to visitors. The tour presents arguments on both sides of the question, and leaves it up to the listener to decide as he or she continues with his or her visit.

Of course my first instinct, as an AmericanStudier, as a public scholar, as a person deeply interested in the past, was to respond that of course we should preserve such historic sites. But if we take a step back and consider what the question would mean in a contemporary context, things get a bit more complicated. Can we imagine a future organization spending millions of dollars to preserve Donald Trump’s many homes? Oprah Winfrey’s Lake Como getaway? Bill Gates’s estate? Certainly I can imagine tourists a hundred years hence being interested in visiting those places—well, hopefully not the Donald’s homes; but yeah, probably them too—but is that a sufficient argument for them to be preserved? Or does there indeed have to be something architecturally or artistically significant, or something historically or culturally resonant (beyond their owners’ obvious prominence), to merit the preservation of a private home? And do these “white elephants” (as Henry James famously called them) make the cut?

The question thus isn’t quite as simple as I had first imagined. But my own answer would, I believe, be to point precisely to the topics covered in this week’s blog posts. A site like The Breakers is the repository of so many compelling and vital American histories and stories, so many moments and identities that can help us understand and analyze who we’ve been and who we are. Of course there would be ways to remember and tell those stories without preserving the house, but I do believe that historic sites provide a particularly effective grounding for them, a starting point from which visitors (like this AmericanStudier) can continue their investigations into those themes. I know that my own ideas about America were expanded and amplified by my visit to Newport and The Breakers, as they have been by all my AmericanStudies trips. So while I know it’s not entirely practical, I vote for preserving anything and everything that can help with such ongoing and inspiring AmericanStudying.

Ben
P.S. What do you think?

[Here is the fourth installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

Alva Vanderbilt, 1883.

At the same time that Cornelius and Alice Vanderbilt were building The Breakers, Cornelius’s brother William and his wife Alva were completing their own Newport mansion, Marble House. Located just down the street from each other, these two Vanderbilt homes jointly exemplified and dominated late 19th-century Newport society, and it’s easy to see the two women as similarly parallel. Yet the two marriages ended in very different ways—Cornelius died suddenly in 1899, at the age of 56, and the widowed Alice lived 34 more years but never remarried; Alva controversially divorced William in 1895 and married the younger Oliver H.P. Belmont, moving down the street into his home Belcourt Castle—and those events foreshadowed the two women’s increasingly divergent trajectories.

Both Alice and Alva would continue to play significant roles in Newport and New York society for their more than three remaining decades of life, but in dramatically different ways. Alice, known as the dowager Mrs. Vanderbilt, made her New York and Newport homes the social centers for which purpose they had been built, donated philanthropically to numerous causes (including endowing a building at Yale and one at Newport Hospital), and generally maintained her traditional, influential, powerful high society status. Alva, on the other hand, forged more pioneering and modern paths: her passion for architecture led her to become one of the first female members of the American Institute of Architects; her dissatisfaction with the highly traditional New York Academy of Music led her to co-found the Metropolitan Opera; and, most tellingly, she became one of the most active and ardent supporters of women’s suffrage, forming the Political Equality League, establishing the National Women’s Party, and working with Anna Shaw, Alice Paul, and other luminaries to help ensure the passage of the 19th Amendment.

From an early 21st-century perspective, Alva’s path seems the far more influential, impressive, and inspiring one; whatever we think of her architectural and musical endeavors (and they were certainly important), few 20th-century American achievements were more significant and lasting than women’s suffrage, and Alva’s efforts played a meaningful role in helping effect that change. But I think it would be a mistake to discount all that Alice did and accomplished in those thirty-plus years after her husband’s unexpected death, and the legacy that her efforts likewise left behind. Indeed, Alice’s independent and influential life offers an implicit but compelling argument for women’s social and political equality and for how much every American has to offer his or her society and era. Without the presences and contributions of both of these women, far more than just Newport society would have been impoverished.

Final Breakers story tomorrow,

Ben
P.S. What do you think?

[Here is the third installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916, by Robert Henri.

Just in case Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875-1942), eldest surviving daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, didn’t seem to have enough of an elite American legacy on which to live, she went ahead and married Harry Payne Whitney (1872-1930), son of a famous attorney, grandson of a Standard Oil executive, and heir to a sizeable fortune in his own right. Together the two expanded upon those impressive starting points, inhabiting a New York mansion of their own, becoming prominent racehorse breeders, world travelers, and art patrons, and, in a Gospel of Wealth moment for Depression-era America, endowing the New York Whitney Museum of American Art just before Harry’s death in 1930.

If we see that latter act as simply the kind of thing super-rich people do with their money toward the ends of their lives, however, we miss a far more intimate and lifelong factor. Gertrude apparently had a strong affinity and passion for the arts from a young age, but the Vanderbilts’ society in New York and Newport did not seem to present her with opportunities to act upon those perspectives. After her 1901 marriage, both because of the greater degree of independence it afforded her and because (it seems) Harry supported her efforts, she finally found such opportunities: organizing and promoting women artists, individually and in exhibitions; and studying art and sculpture in her own right. She went on to achieve a career as a public sculptor, creating for example a fountain in the famous patio of the Pan American building in Washington, DC. One of her works is even housed in the Whitney Museum—not because of her last name, but because it merits inclusion in such a space.

Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella Life in the Iron-Mills (1861) focuses on the tragic life and death of Hugh Wolfe, a factory worker whose talent for sculpture goes unappreciated and unrewarded in his grimly realistic environment. While Hugh is a fictional character, the point is real and important: that whatever limitations Gertrude Vanderbilt faced on her way to a successful artistic career, her family and status also certainly provided possibilities that the Hugh Wolfes of the world are far less likely to find. But on the other hand, Gertrude also represented a new, modern American woman—one who not only pursued and achieved her own artistic career, but who at the same time supported the careers and art of her peers and her nation. That her money helped her to do so is an unquestionable truth for which all who visit the Whitney should give thanks.

Next Breakers story tomorrow,

Ben
P.S. What do you think?

[Here is the second installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

While I hope that yesterday’s post complicated some of the simplest narratives about a figure like Cornelius Vanderbilt II, it was nonetheless, I admit, still pretty crazy to use the phrase “rags to riches” to describe Commodore Vanderbilt’s grandson. But how about Rudolph “Rudy” Stanish, who began life as the seventh of thirteen children born to an Eastern European (Croatian and Serbian) immigrant couple in Yukon, Pennsylvania, and ended his life as the world famous Omelet King, chef to some of America’s most prominent people and families? A young man who was brought to Newport’s mansions before he was 16 (in 1929) to work as a kitchen boy with his godmother, and who through a combination of talent, hard work, luck, timing, and more found himself making John F. Kennedy’s inaugural breakfast? Yup, I’d say that just about defines rags to riches.

The principal question when it comes to such rags to riches stories has never been whether they’re possible at all, however, but whether they’re representative of something larger than their singular existence—whether, that is, they offer any sort of more general blueprint for success. As part of the audio tour of The Breakers (which is not where Stanish began his career but where he received his first big break, filling in as head chef at the last minute for a dinner party and impressing the hosts sufficiently to stay on) Stanish is quoted as saying precisely that his story was indeed exemplary; that in a world like that of The Breakers, those among the servants (“The Staff,” as the Vanderbilts insisted on calling them) who worked hard and gave it their best and, yes, were gifted at their jobs could make their way to something far beyond the cramped and hot upstairs quarters where they lived at The Breakers. And it’s hard to disagree: without at least the possibility of such mobility, more than just Stanish’s own story would lose a good bit of its appeal—the story of America would as well.

But even if we accept that Stanish’s story is not only individually possible (which of course it was) but communally achievable, there remains at least one other significant criticism that can be levied against such stories: they are not so much narratives of meritocracy, of opportunity, or, even more radically, of challenges to the existing hierarchies of wealth and class as they are reflections of our society’s unquestionable emphasis on and celebration of fame. That is, Stanish became famous for how well he served the nation’s powerful elites. But even if that fame granted him a place among those elites, it neither equated his identity with theirs nor (especially) led to any questions about the world in which they all operated. To be clear, that’s not the role of any individual, and I’m not critiquing Stanish in any way. But if his story is a uniquely American one, it is at least in part because it highlights the often superficial nature of success in our society.

Next Breakers story on Monday,

Ben
P.S. What do you think?

[Here we present the first installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies.]

Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too!

Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843-1899), the man for whom The Breakers was built (as perhaps the most luxurious “summer cottage” in human history), was named after his grandfather, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), who at his death was the wealthiest man in the United States. Which is to say, young Cornelius wasn’t just born into privilege; he was perhaps the closest thing to the royal baby American society has produced. Moreover, over the thirty-four years between his birth and his grandfather’s death, a period that culminated quite tellingly with the start of the Gilded Age, the family’s fortune only increased further. None of that is young Cornelius’s fault, and if he had decided to give the fortune away he’d have been about the first person ever to do so—but it does make it hard to see him as anything other than the scion of an American dynasty.

Yet as illustrated at length by Cornelius’s entry in Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (1900), the young man’s life did in some interesting ways mirror those of a Horatio Alger, rags to riches, self-made protagonist (without, of course, details like being orphaned or living on the streets). Beginning at the age of 16, Cornelius spent the next five years working as a clerk in two small New York banks, learning the ins and outs of the financial world; he then did the same with the railroad industry in which his family had made their fortune, working for two years as treasurer and then ten as treasurer of the New York and Harlem railroad company. Which is to say, when he became vice president of that railroad in 1877, at the age of 34, he did so after nearly thirteen years in the industry, and more than twenty in financial services; while it’d still be fair to say that he had been destined for the position and role from birth, it certainly would not be accurate to argue that it was in any blatant or nepotistic sense handed to him.

So what? you might ask. Do those years of work make the egregious excess, the truly conspicuous consumption of The Breakers less grating or more sympathetic? Do they in any way complicate Cornelius’ status as the poster boy for Gilded Age inequities? I don’t know that they do—but I do know that they remind us of the complexities, nuances, contradictions, the messy dynamic humanity, at the heart of most every American identity and life, story and history, individual and community. It’s entirely fine—and, I would argue, an important part of a public AmericanStudier’s job—to critique what we see as the worst actions or attributes of historical figures like the Vanderbilts. But it’s not at all okay to do so by oversimplifying or mythologizing (in positive or negative ways) lives and identities, by turning the past into the black and white caricatures that such myths demand. Cornelius Vanderbilt II was a scion of privilege who built one of the most garish mansions in American history; he also worked, and apparently worked hard and well, for forty of his fifty-six years of life. That’s all part of the story of The Breakers for sure.

Next Breakers story tomorrow,

Ben
PS. What do you think?