The Shame of the Vanderbilts

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I had occasion to enjoy a lunch and a few subsequent interviews with Frederick Vanderbilt Field. Fred, who was raised in a mansion on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, spent his life fighting for peace and justice and against racism and economic oppression, so of course he was considered the black sheep of the Vanderbilt family.

Fred was also forced to flee the US during the McCarthy period. It figures doesn't it, that he was a pariah in this country, while his robber-baron great-grandfather was some kind of national hero?

That's one reason why I was so intrigued by Steve Fraser's review in this week's magazine of "The First Tycoon," T.J. Styles's new biography of Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt. Through Fred, one of the country's most notorious tycoons and I were are only three-degrees of separation apart (And my friendship with Alger Hiss, leaves me only two degrees of separation from Richard Nixon. Enough of that game).

There's another reason why I was curious about the review. About the time I met Fred, I got to know Matthew Josephson, the great progressive biographer whose monumental group portrait of capitalism run amok ,"The Robber Barons," focused heavily on the Vanderbilt family.

Matty, as he preferred to be called, was very deaf. His hearing aids were attached to a large headset. It was a finicky contraption. He couldn't hear a word you'd say until you yelled at him at top of your lungs. Then, he'd look at you quizzically and ask, "Why are you screaming? I can hear your perfectly."

Matty, who wrote quite a few pieces for The Nation, asked me to help him out with a book he was writing on the Hiss case. We worked on it through the winter of 1977. But then, fed up with the freezing temperatures, Matty headed out to Santa Cruz to wait out the cold weather. A few months later, he caught a cold and died. Talk about irony.

Because Matty didn't have much use for capitalism, his reputation has taken a few hits the last few years, but I'm glad that Fraser refers to his work with great respect. I still occasionally pick up Matty's wonderful memoir of the 1930s, "Infidel in the Temple" and recommend it highly to anyone interested in the period. Another recommendation is Fred Field's memoir, "From Left to Right." Unlike his grandfather, Fred was a real hero and a man of conscience, and unlike the Commodore, he had no use for phony titles. "Fred" was just fine with him. The Nation didn't have much use for the Commodore either. Here's a report that appeared in the magazine in 1869 about the memorial to his own greatness that he paid for himself.

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William Greider's article about the lessons unlearned from Vietnam, "The Fifty-Year War," led me to this 1971 piece about what a disaster the Vietnam War had become. The author has a great line about one general who suggests that we lost the war "when we got involved." Our Commander in Chief should take note.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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