“The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt”, by T.J. Stiles

736 pages, Vintage, ISBN-13: 978-1400031740

Well, I give T.J. Stiles all the credit in the world for trying his damndest to humanize “The Commodore” in The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, but he just comes up short. Oh, he tries, alright – lord, how he tries – but the man just comes off as the coldblooded Robber Baron that he was – but, oh, what a Robber Baron! Cornelius Vanderbilt was born on Staten Island to hard-working but thrifty Dutch-descended parents; he got his start in boating at 16-years-old when he borrowed $100 from his mother to purchase a periauger (that’s a shallow draft, flat-bottomed two-masted sailing vessel with oars, Class); soon, he was ferrying people and goods to New York City, plowing his profits into more sailboats and then, eventually, steamboats. As a competitor, he was as cut-throat as cut-throat could be (some of his enemies actually paid him to discontinue his lines so that they, too, could be Robber Barons). At the age when most men at that time had long-since dropped dead, he abandoned ships and started a new career in railroads; the Commodore started small, and then added more and more lines, consolidating them as he went (before Vanderbilt established the trunk line, the New York Central, it took seventeen trains to ride from New York to Chicago). Many enemies tried to swindle or outsmart the Commodore, but his deep pockets protected him in most situations.

For all of his heartlessness and drive to conqueror, there are many things to be impressed about Cornelius Vanderbilt: he was a strapping fellow who knew how to take command; he was a financial genius when it came to the stock market; he knew ships well enough to produce revolutionary designs that made for safer and economical travel; and he was a patriot, as when, during the American Civil War, he donated and leased a number of ships to the Union and, after Appomattox, helped to heal the wounds between North and South by providing the bond to free Jefferson Davis and to create Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. He helped to put New York City on the map as America’s financial capital (for better and for ill), and, although some considered him a scoundrel, he had a personal code of honor; his word was his bond. He battled many men over the years and was betrayed by his friends, but he rarely held a grudge and knew how to separate business from friendship.

Stiles does an admirable job of detailing both the professional and personal life of the Commodore; the business side of things can be fiendishly difficult to comprehend to the uninitiated, while the author also sets the record straight about many myths that have been told about Vanderbilt (although I wish there was as much information about his daughters as his sons-in-law, but there is little about these women on the written record). And for all that, The First Tycoon is strangely bloodless: not badly written or poorly researched, there’s just no verve in the prose (and it’s a Pulitzer Prize winning biography, to boot). But it is informative, make no mistake, as Stiles reveals all about the Gilded Age, the birth pangs of Capitalism and America’s first tycoon.