Newport Stories: On the Vanderbilt Heiress Whose Seemingly Stereotypical Life Belies a Far More Individual Identity
[Here is the third installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney , 1916, by Robert Henri. Just in case Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875-1942), eldest surviving daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and his wife Alice Gwynne Vanderbilt, didn’t seem to have enough of an elite American legacy on which to live, she went ahead and married Harry Payne Whitney (1872-1930), son of a famous attorney, grandson of a Standard Oil executive, and heir to a sizeable fortune in his own right. Together the two expanded upon those impressive starting points, inhabiting a New York mansion of their own , becoming prominent raceho...