TEN MILLIONS FOR A DUKEDOM.
The announcement was made in 1895 that "a marriage had been arranged" between Consuelo, a young daughter of William K. Vanderbilt, and the Duke of Marlborough. The wedding ceremony was one of showy splendor; millions of dollars in gifts were lavished upon the couple. Other millions in cash, wrenched also from the labor of the American working population, went to rehabilitate and maintain Blenheim House, with its prodigal cost of reconstruction, its retinue of two hundred servants, and its annual expense roll of $100,000. Millions more flowed out from the Vanderbilt exchequer in defraying the cost of yachts and of innumerable appurtenances and luxuries. Not less than $2,500,000 was spent in building Sutherland House in London. Great as was this expense, it was not so serious as to perturb the duchess' father; his $50,000,000 feat of financial legerdemain, in 1898, alone far more than made up for these extravagant outlays. The Marlborough title was an expensive one; it turned out to be a better thing to retain than the man who bore it; after a thirteen years' compact, the couple decided to separate for "good and sufficient reasons," into which it is not our business to inquire. All told, the Marlborough dukedom had cost William K. Vanderbilt, it was said, fully $10,000,000.
Undeterred by Cousin Consuelo's experience, Gladys Vanderbilt, a daughter of Cornelius, likewise allied herself with a title by marrying, in 1908, Count Laslo Szechenyi, a sprig of the Hungarian feudal nobility. "The wedding," naively reported a scribe, "was characterized by elegant simplicity, and was witnessed by only three hundred relatives and intimate friends of the bride and bridegroom." The "elegant simplicity" consisted of gifts, the value of which was estimated at fully a million dollars, and a costly ceremony. If the bride had beauty, and the bridegroom wit, no mention of them was made; the one fact conspicuously emphasized was the all-important one of the bride having a fortune "in her own right" of about $12,000,000.
[Illustration: THE DUCHESS OF MARLBOROUGH, Daughter of William K.
Vanderbilt.]
The precise sum which made the Count eager to share his title, no one knew except the parties to the transaction. Her father had died, in 1899, leaving a fortune nominally reaching about $100,000,000. Its actual proportions were much greater. It had long been customary on the part of the very rich, as the New York State Board of Tax Commissioners pointed out, in 1903, to evade the inheritance tax in advance by various fraudulent devices. One of these was to inclose stocks or money in envelopes and apportion them among the heirs, either at the death bed, or by subsequent secret delivery. [Footnote: See Annual Report of the New York State Board of Tax Commissioners, New York Senate Document, No. 5, 1903: 10.]
Like his father, Cornelius Vanderbilt had died of apoplexy. In his will he had cut off his eldest son, Cornelius, with but a puny million dollars. And the reason for this parental sternness? He had disapproved of Cornelius' choice in marriage. To his son, Alfred, the unrelenting multimillionaire left the most of his fortune, with a showering of many millions upon his widow, upon Reginald, another son, and upon his two daughters. Cornelius objected to the injustice and hardship of being left a beggar with but a scanty million, and threatened a legal contest, whereupon Alfred, pitying the dire straits to which Brother Cornelius had been reduced, presented him with six or seven millions with which to ease the biting pangs of want.
Marriages with titled foreigners have proved a drain upon the Vanderbilt fortune, although, thanks to their large share in the control of laws and industrial institutions, the Vanderbilts possess at all times the power of recouping themselves at volition. The American marriages, on the other hand, contracted by this family, have interlinked other great fortunes with theirs.
One of the Vanderbilt buds married Harry Payne Whitney, whose father, William C. Whitney, left a large fortune, partly drawn from the Standard Oil Company, and in part from an industrious career of corruption and theft. The elder Whitney, according to facts revealed in many official investigations and lawsuits, debauched legislatures and common councils into giving him and his associates public franchises for street railways and for other public utilities, and he stole outright tens of millions of dollars in the manipulation of the street railways in various cities. His crimes, and those of his associates, were of such boldness and magnitude that even the cynical business classes were moved to astonishment. [Footnote: For a detailed account see that part of this work, "Great Fortunes from Public Franchises.">[ Cornelius Vanderbilt, jr., married a daughter of R. T. Wilson, a multimillionaire, whose fortune came to a great extent from the public franchises of Detroit. The initial and continued history of the securing and exploitation of the street railway and other franchises of that city has constituted a solid chapter of the most flagrant fraud. William K. Vanderbilt, jr., married a daughter of the multimillionaire Senator Fair, of California, whose fortune, dug from mines, bought him a seat in the United States Senate. Thus, various multi-millionaire fortunes have been interconnected by these American marriages.
[Illustration: CORNELIUS VANDERBILT, Great-Grandson of Commodore
Vanderbilt.]