Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt

by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart

  Alva’s sons worked alongside Doris Stevens and Florence Bayard Hilles of the National Woman’s Party to give Alva the funeral she wanted. After a short service in Paris, Consuelo and Jacques (and the Marquess and Marchioness of Blandford) escorted her body back to America on board the SS Berengaria. Eight sailors carried the coffin down the gangplank where it was met on the New York dockside by Willie K. Jr and Harold and an escort of honour from the NWP, headed by Alice Paul and Doris Stevens. Consuelo was taken aback by the change of pace between the old world and the new. ‘Leaving the old world, with its marked respect for the departed, where men have time to doff their hats and women to cross themselves in greeting, I found it strange to be met in New York by policemen on motor-bicycles who preceded the hearse while we raced to St Thomas Church.’32 Here, a further group of forty women from the National Woman’s Party stood sentinel to the coffin until the funeral service.

  Around fifteen hundred people came to St Thomas Church on Sunday 12 February at 2 p.m. Observers were as struck by the incongruity of Alva’s last great event as they had been by the Marble House rallies and the motley crew who ate in her PEA lunchrooms. The New York Times reporter was fascinated by the contrast between the 200 NWP delegates in gold, white and purple and the ancient limousines drawing up at the curb of the church. ‘Passers-by on Fifth Avenue stopped and turned to gaze with curiosity at elderly men and women whose dress and bearing would have been more familiar a generation ago,’33 he wrote. A press release from the NWP drew special attention to the presence of representatives of the shirt-waist strikers, and listed representatives of nineteen women’s organisations including two arch rivals, the National League of Women Voters and the Suffragette Fellowship of English Militants.34

  Alva had specified that she wished her funeral service to be conducted by a woman. This did not happen. Her children thought the funeral should be held at St Thomas Church because it was large enough for the spectacular public farewell that Alva so desired. This caused no friction with Alice Paul, probably because the suffragist spirit of Alva’s instructions was faithfully observed. The coffin was preceded up the aisle of St Thomas Church by twenty feminist honorary pall-bearers including Doris Stevens and Alice Paul herself. It was followed by Consuelo and Jacques, Mr and Mrs William K. Vanderbilt Jr, Harold Vanderbilt, Mrs Cornelius Vanderbilt Snr, the Marquess and Marchioness of Blandford and Mr and Mrs Perry Belmont. The family was followed in turn by an escort of representatives from women’s organisations while women in robes bearing white, purple and gold banners processed down the side aisles and stood to attention throughout the short service.

  Having corralled New York society into a large public funeral in association with America’s leading feminists, Alva now subjected unreconstructed mourners to one last broadside on the theme of militancy. Before the service began, her coffin was draped with an old picket banner embroidered with the slogan ‘Failure is Impossible’, the last public words of suffrage campaigner Susan B. Anthony. The banner was then carried up the aisle at the head of the procession of women. The hymns Alva selected included ‘Still, Still With Thee’ by Harriet Beecher Stowe and ‘The March of the Women’, the battle song composed for the Pankhurst’s WSPU in 1911 by Dame Ethel Smythe, a militant suffragette herself.

  Comrades – ye who have dared

  First in the battle to strive and sorrow!

  Scorned, spurned – nought have ye cared,

  Raising your eyes to a wider morrow

  Ways that are weary, days that are dreary,

  Toil and pain by faith ye have borne;

  Hail, hail – victors ye stand,

  Wearing the wreath that the brave have won!35

  Even this, however, was rather eclipsed by the startling words of the hymn that Alva wrote in honour of herself. Here, the middle verse in particular suggested that she was as confident of success in the Afterlife as she was about almost everything else:

  No waiting at the gates of Paradise.

  No tribunal of men to judge.

  The watchers of the tower proclaim

  A daughter of the King.

  For a soul has risen today.

  Halleluiah! Halleluiah!

  Hosanna to our Lord.36

  After the service three motor-buses took delegates from the NWP and other women’s organisations to Woodlawn Cemetery, while members of the family made their way by motor car. A crowd of curious onlookers gathered to see Alva finally laid to rest alongside Oliver in St Hubert’s Chapel which she had designed in a last obeisance to French Gothic architecture. The robed delegates preceded the hearse up the steps of the chapel, and formed a guard of honour, banners aloft. A mixed quartet, accompanied by four women buglers, sang ‘Softly E’er the Light of Day’ and ‘Abide with Me’ as Dr Brooks, who had conducted the service, led the family, Alice Paul and Doris Stevens into the chapel. The final moment came with the sounding of taps – the haunting melody played by a lone bugler that is often heard at American military funerals and played over the graves of soldiers. ‘The relatives returned to their automobiles and drove away, leaving small groups of mourners silent on the hillside in the lengthening shadows, while the entrance to the tomb was covered with banked flowers and with multi-hued banners standing upright in the snow,’37 wrote The New York Times. ‘Failure is Impossible’ was buried with Alva in St Hubert’s Chapel.

  All of this would have pleased Alva, but it was probably not quite enough. She had a secret fantasy which she confided to Doris Stevens at their final tea together in 1931, the ‘first and only time I ever saw Mrs Belmont weep’. ‘She said that … she would like me to present to her son WK at an appropriate time, the erecting to her of a monument. She described exactly what she wanted; a heroic figure of herself in the open air in Washington, the space to be set aside by the government, the base of the monument to contain a bas relief depicting various scenes which occurred in Washington – riots by the police and by the mob, women being loaded into petrol wagons, women arrested for petitioning President Wilson – in short, she wanted cut in stone the sacrifices which so many women had made in going to prison for this idea.’38

  It is not clear whether Doris Stevens ever put this proposal to Willie K. Jr but the longed-for monument never materialised. Instead, Alva had to be content with encomiums that appeared at the time of her death such as: ‘There is not a woman living today who is not nearer the benefits and beauties of freedom because of Mrs Belmont.’39 This was, in many ways, a fair assessment. She was not a suffrage leader of the importance of Alice Paul, Anna Howard Shaw or Carrie Chapman Catt, but she played a key role in bringing votes for women nearer, and her contribution has been underestimated.

  Alva was critical to reviving the fortunes of the National American when she joined in 1909, paying for the removal of headquarters from Ohio to New York and making generous subventions to keep it going. She was highly effective in translating society experience into a political campaign for which there was no precedent in America, impressing on the suffrage movement the importance of positive action, public impact, strategically placed buildings and expert manipulation of the press. She was well ahead of her time in perceiving the importance of alliances with other groups of women, regardless of whether they were shirt-waist workers, black women, society women or agricultural workers and regardless too of contradictions such as her simultaneous support for black women and the racist suffrage campaign of the southern states. In becoming the main financial backer of the National Woman’s Party, she helped to introduce a new, confrontational element to the suffrage campaign, based in Washington, adapted from the English militant campaign, and led by Alice Paul. This was highly effective in holding male politicians from the President downwards accountable for their failure to deliver the vote, and in pioneering the idea of a suffrage amendment to the constitution alongside the state-by-state campaign, an approach which eventually won the day and also became the basis of Carrie Chapman Catt’s ‘Winning Plan’. Histories of the American suffrage
movement are frequently partisan; but a balanced view suggests that though the conservative National American represented the views of the majority of American women, female suffrage in America would have taken much longer without the National Woman’s Party’s success in putting President Wilson on the defensive by picketing the White House and forcing him to declare in its favour.

  Alva’s heroine-worship of Joan of Arc is important too, for it reflected a judgement about men and women that is much closer to modern feminism than that of ‘majority’ suffragism led by Carrie Chapman Catt and supported by Consuelo. Alva’s view – which chimed with that of her colleagues in the NWP – was that men and women were equal in every respect other than biology, that once the chains of male domination had been cast aside women were capable of anything including leading armies to war.

  Alva learnt her feminist radicalism in part from the Pankhursts, but at her boldest she drew on the imagery of slavery that she had experienced as a child, which resonated with the Marxist language of exploitation used by radical twentieth-century feminists. In an unpublished article she wrote: ‘There is no more subtle and pernicious form of slavery in the world than the subjection of women to men. It is buttressed by tradition and custom; by science and religion; by the present economic and political system; by the mercantile view of love; by the romance of literature … It has been the more degrading because women have not realised the extent of their slavery.’40 Expressed in its starkest form, this was quite at odds with the view of conservative suffragism that men and women inhabited ‘separate spheres’ and that what was needed was a balance. This difference of view lay at the heart of the controversy about the equal rights amendment which would rage for decades after her death. As one of its earliest supporters, she would have been delighted to hear that the amendment was eventually passed in Congress and incensed that it was never ratified. It would also have infuriated her to learn that when a new generation of feminists emerged in the late sixties and early seventies, and realised that their ‘new’ movement had a remarkable history of its own in the National Woman’s Party, the more radical were turned away in alarm by an organisation already more concerned with past glory than future action.

  Alva’s strengths were wit, charm, intelligence and energy. The adjectives most often applied to her by her admirers are ‘fervent’, ‘vehement’, ‘determined’; the nouns ‘clarity’ and ‘fearlessness’. She was, said Alice Paul, ‘a born, born fighter’,41 which was very useful to the suffrage campaign. But the frightening belligerence and aggression that drew her to militancy also damaged her legacy. ‘I wanted to be a sort of female knight rescuing other women,’ she told Sara Bard Field.42 But this was sharply at odds with how others saw her: ‘She has all the crushing force of people who have had power all their lives and have never been constrained by hard necessity to be gentle to others,’43 said one. These characteristics may have made her a natural politician and a great exponent of militant feminism, but a world view conceived in the language of slavery and dominance drove her to control and rearrange the lives of everyone around her, in spite of herself, and she could treat those she regarded as inferior with attitudes ranging from contempt to violent cruelty. It made her an impossible mother for a teenage daughter, though Alva also gave Consuelo just enough confidence to stand her ground when she first came to England and the basis of unexpected strength of character once she escaped Alva’s control.

  Belligerence and aggression also came to work against Alva’s standing as a public figure. Carrie Chapman Catt disliked her so intensely that Alva was virtually written out of histories of the National American, while comparable histories of the NWP were never written. Bishop Manning’s feud with Alva unleashed a view of her as a socially ambitious and tyrannical mother – a view that would stand and obliterate the rest of her achievements. Perhaps even Edith Wharton’s dislike of her worked against her, for they should have understood each other. Edith Wharton’s best novels anatomise precisely the tyranny of men over powerless women in the closed, claustrophobic world of nineteenth-century New York. Perhaps, in the end, only Edith Wharton could have done justice to the price paid by Alva for challenging its rules.

  The verdict of a very different commentator, Elsa Maxwell, remains one of the most astute and interesting. ‘Probably the most misunderstood woman in America,’ she wrote. ‘She was twenty years ahead of her generation.’44 Elsa Maxwell would have been intrigued by the final pages of Alva’s clippings books, for in the five years before her death she started to include articles about the achievements of younger women and less about herself. A ‘bobbed head girl’, Miss G. A. Nairn, wins the chancellor’s gold medal for classics at Cambridge; Amelia Earhart makes a solo flight across the Atlantic; a woman becomes senator of the Czechoslovak Legislative Assembly; Fru Betsy Kjelsberg becomes Norway’s first woman factory inspector; Marie Curie receives an honorary degree.45 ‘The important thing is knowing how to live,’ Alva told Elsa Maxwell just before she died. ‘Learn a lesson from my mistakes. I had too much power before I knew how to use it and it defeated me in the end. It drove all sweetness out of my life except the affection of my children. My trouble was that I was born too late for the last generation and too early for the next one. If you want to be happy, live in your own time.’46

  It was perhaps inevitable, given that so much of Alva’s life was dominated by feuds, fights and confrontation, that part of her legacy was another quarrel. Most of her will was straightforward. Consuelo was the residual legatee – the American estate alone was valued at over $1.4 million. Marble House was left to Harold (although it had been sold by the time she died) and 9 Rue Monsieur and the chapel at Woodlawn Cemetery to Willie K. Jr. There were legacies for her great-grandchildren; for the children of August Belmont who had attended Oliver’s funeral; $100,000 for Jacques; jewellery for Mrs William K. Vanderbilt; and legacies for the long-suffering Azar and another servant, Ernest Mangold. The NWP received $100,000 and the statue of Joan of Arc which Oliver had given her as a birthday present in 1902 and stands in Sewall-Belmont House to this day.

  The problem, inevitably, was caused by the change Alva made to her will in 1931 revoking the legacy of $50,000 to Doris Stevens. Doris, to whom this came as a complete shock, decided to contest it and prepared a long and embittered chronological account of her relationship with Alva as part of her case – an angry self-pitying description of what it was really like to be Alva’s surrogate militant suffragist daughter; the way she used her money as an instrument of power even with her colleagues in the National Woman’s Party; her relentless and overbearing demands; and her tyrannical behaviour. Doris Stevens’s own diary entry in 1927, however, would seem to point to the root of the problem. ‘We have made agreement. She has promised to put me in her will because of all I have done for her. I am greatly relieved – said I could do law later – after she was gone – very sad.’47 In other words, Doris thought that the money was largely her reward for work done in the past, but Alva made it conditional on Doris postponing her law degree and helping her in future. In 1931, when Alva changed her will, Doris Stevens was unavailable to come to Europe at her behest because she was busy taking law exams. When she did appear, Alva thought she had behaved badly.

  Doris Stevens failed to win her case. She never forgave Alice Paul whom she held responsible for alienating Alva’s affections, and was still plotting against her in 1946. Elsa Maxwell, who was a witness to the change in the will, later wrote that when Alva offered to leave her a legacy she had refused it, sensing, perhaps, that it could all too easily turn into the snare it subsequently became for Doris Stevens.48 Alice Paul was certain, however, that Consuelo and her brothers came to a private arrangement with Doris afterwards, and gave her at least part of the disputed sum.49 She thought they made the gesture to prevent further damage to Alva’s reputation; but perhaps Alva’s children also understood how difficult it was to cope with Mrs Belmont from a position of dependence. Consuelo especially may have felt a twinge of guilt a
t the extent to which Doris Stevens drew Alva’s fire in her old age and understood, better than most people, that hysteria was an understandable reaction.

  One effect of Alva’s death on Consuelo was that she suddenly realised how much she had missed the company of her brothers during her decades in Europe. Alva’s child-rearing techniques may have been idiosyncratic but she had produced interesting children – ‘the most successful of William Henry’s grandchildren’,50 in the view of Louis Auchincloss, noting that they had inherited Alva’s intelligence but not her vile temper. Willie K. Jr had by now married Rosamund Warburton, having successfully dodged several of his mother’s matrimonial schemes throughout the 1920s. Alva once told Elsa Maxwell rather snappishly that he was her favourite child because: ‘He’s the only Vanderbilt in captivity who ever got over his accident of birth.’51 Consuelo thought he had inherited a large part of their father’s charm and loved him for his ‘joyousness and overwhelming spirits’,52 and he certainly appears to have been the more life-enhancing of her brothers. He combined Alva’s love of travel with Vanderbiltian enthusiasm for velocity.

  There may not be universal gratitude that it was Willie K. Jr who helped introduce the motor car to America by importing some of the earliest and most elegant racing cars from Europe and encouraging American manufacturers by starting the Vanderbilt Cup Race on Long Island in 1904. But these were the days when motoring was still an adventure, when one took one’s chances with the new touring hotels, punctures were routine, signposts unreliable and there was much dependence on maps issued by the Royal Automobile Club. Willie K. Jr’s most passionate interest, however, was collecting marine specimens for what would become the Vanderbilt Museum at Centerport, Long Island. Holding a navigation licence that entitled him to command any ship, he sailed all over the world in the 1920s in his yacht, Ara, returning on one occasion with over fifty specimens of fish, a collection of parrots, and fourteen tiny canaries, two of which were snowy white. As Louis Auchincloss points out, marine biologists should be indebted to him for specimens such as ‘the golden flutemouth, the calico razor wrasse, the Moorish idol, the fringed pipefish, and the blueline butterfly’,53 if only for their names.