It's a sad truth that lies live on, and on, and on. And the life of Commodore Vanderbilt has attracted lies in thick, nasty swarms.
One of the most persistent of the false claims about Vanderbilt is also the most recent: That he contracted syphilis, went insane, and died from the disease. This assertion first appeared in a 2007 book that I critique at length in the bibliographical essay in my own
The First Tycoon, and that I discuss on my
"First Tycoon" page on this website. There is absolutely no evidence to support the idea that Vanderbilt had syphilis, and mountains of evidence that he did
not have it. Certainly he never went insane.
Despite my heavily documented debunking of this idea, it has surfaced again. Wendy Burden's new memoir,
Dead End Gene Pool, recounting her life as a Vanderbilt descendant, starts off in the
prologue by repeating this nonsense—beginning with the very first line, no less. She repeats other false statements from that 2007 book, such as that the glass train-shed roof of Grand Central Depot collapsed on the day Commodore Vanderbilt died, and that he "disinherited" all but one of his children. Not true.
I wish to be fair to Burden. These claims amount to a few brief scene-setting statements in her prologue, and have nothing to do with the personal story she tells in her memoir. But, I'm sorry to say, she unwittingly perpetuates falsehoods that should be expunged for good.
