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| Building Your Family's 100 Year Plan: The Series |
100 Year Plan Part III: Give, and We Shall Receive
Brett Anderson
02/02/2004
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The following article is an excerpt from The 100 Year Plan series from the December, January, February and March editions of Robb Report Worth. To subscribe or to order back issues, please call (800) 777-1851 or order online now.
Why We Give: Philanthropy and the Family Mission
The Vanderbilts, at the peak of their hegemony over social and financial life in the United States, contrasted sharply with their peers in two respects. First, they had more money: On his death in 1885, William H. Vanderbilt, president of the New York Central Railroad and son of "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt, the family’s founder, left his heirs $200 million, a  sum that placed him, at the time, in the sometimes unenviable position of being the wealthiest man
on Earth. Secondly—and chiefly—they exhibited an abiding reluctance to part with much of it for the purposes of charity, a financial and moral inertia that even their rivals for preeminence, the Astors, managed to overcome in the person of Vincent Astor (see "The Good We Do").
Of course, the members of America’s wealthiest family (the fortunes of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie were, at the time, mere embryos of ambition) did not entirely lack social conscience—William H.’s celebrated outburst ("The public be damned!") to a Chicago Tribune reporter in 1882 notwithstanding. The Commodore, renowned as much for his contempt for those of lesser commercial skills as he was fond of the capital they earned him, possessed the capacity for kindly gestures. The man who, on his deathbed, informed a friend that there would be "hell to pay" at the reading of his will, because he would not see his fortune ("a monument to my name") carved up among his two sons and eight daughters, did give $1 million for the founding of Vanderbilt University. And on one occasion, he allowed his wife to persuade him to donate $50,000 for the building of a church—with a stipulation that the gift be regarded as a friendly secular gesture, rather than as a religious one, for to do otherwise would be to profess a "religious sentiment I don’t feel."
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