Getters and Spenders
The Vanderbilts and Their Fortunes. By Edwin P. Hoyt. (Muller, 36s.) The Poor Rockefellets. By John W. Rockefeller, Junior. (Alvin Redman, 21S.) THE most pertinent question which one can ask about a millionaire is where and how he got hold of his first ten thousand. In the case of 'Commodore' Cornelius Vanderbilt,'who founded the Vanderbilt fortune, the answer is a ferry boat, 'The employment was mean,' as Gibbon wrote of St. George, the bacon contractor: 'he rendered it infamous.' Cut prices and sharp prac- tice, scant regard of legality or safety, ruthless suppression of competitors—the sort of thing for which St. George was very properly torn into pieces by an enraged mob. But not Commodore Vanderbilt: the old pirate survived to become king of kings on the railroads, to manipulate shares to the tune of billions, to humiliate his wife and bully his children until he was well over eighty. An unattractive figure even in his own kind, he compels reluctant admiration for his sheer brute strength: he once casually beat up a famous prize-fighter called Yankee Sullivan; and when he died, the doctors discovered that for months 'he had been living on sheer will- power. His bladder, kidneys, heart, and both lungs were almost destroyed. He had Bright's disease, cystitis, an enlarged prostate, and scrotal hernia.'
One concedes, then, that the Commodore earns the kind of distasteful interest with which one might approach a freak show. Once we are through with him there is little to be said for Edwin P. Hoyt's The Vanderbilts and Their For- tunes. Mr. Hoyt writes in Womanese C. . . told herself as she first set eyes on his handsome laughing face that this man would become her husband'); his attitudes are typified by his con- stant nagging comparisons between youthful, virile America and decaying old Europe; and his tale, the rise and fall of the Vanderbilts, is commonplace. His theory is that wealthy families decline when they lose their sense of 'high pur- pose' and just start spending the loot. This dreary platitude can only prompt one to inquire which is the less offensive spectacle—the Com- modore greedily piling it up or his descendants seedily dribbling it away? Inevitably, and despite their utter lack of distinction, one prefers the spenders. One can have a certain sympathy for George Washington Vanderbilt, whose hobbies were Indian dialects and translating modern literature into ancient Greek, and even for 'Willie K. H' with his grotesque motor-cars. All sympathy has been used up, however, by the time we get round to Grace Vanderbilt the royalty-leech, arch-snobbess of Fifth Avenue, whose folk de grandeur reduced the Vanderbilt millions until they could be counted on the claws of one hand. I can only hope that with this sycophantic and dismally written book we have heard the last of this mannerless family and its goitrous wealth. Far more appealing is John W. Rockefeller Junior's light-hearted memoir, The Poor Rocke- fellers. 'Poor' is a relative term, by which we are to understand that Mr. Rockefeller and his wife, having a sufficiency, saw no point. in grubbing for more. This puts them firmly in Mr. Hoyt's decadent category of 'spenders,' where, unlike the spending Vanderbilts, they comport them- selves with humour and taste. There is a mock- ing, cosmopolitan, un-American air about this book which should infuriate the Rockefellers of
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