Last week the news was spread: Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, aged 28, was in financial difficulties. His tabloid newspapers, the Los Angeles Illustrated Daily News (maximum circulation 214,000), San Francisco Illustrated Daily Herald (maximum circulation 135,000), the Miami Tab (only 18 months old) needed more money. He had sunk $100,000 of his own money. He had 5,000 fellow stockholders. He had borrowed $1,080,000 from his father. But he still needed $300,000 to put his papers on a paying basis—and his father would lend him no more. He tried to pledge his patrimony—a $1,500,000 trust fund—and failed.
The San Francisco paper suspended publication. The others dropped their Sunday editions. The Chicago Tribune, which succeeded in establishing the financially most successful tabloid in America, sneered: "It is evident that the secret of a newspaper cannot be found as in a recipe for a cake. . ."
Finally he made his predicament public. He retained Lawyers Dudley Field Malone and Clarence Darrow to help him find the necessary capital. Offers began to flow in from people who were willing to lend to a Vanderbilt. It was a peculiar situation—"first aid to a Vanderbilt."
It is nearly half a century since "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt I departed this life, full of years and power, having amassed a fortune in ships and railroads and begat William Henry (1821-1885), who begat Cornelius II (1843-1899), who begat Cornelius III (1873—), who begat Cornelius IV (1898—), who took a wife in 1920 and is yet without issue.
The wealth of Cornelius I clung to the family through the generations, but Vanderbilt skill and dominance seems to have thinned. Here begins the story of Cornelius IV, fifth in the line of primogeniture. A chubby-featured boy with crisp curly hair, some thought they could discern in him an underlying physical frailty. He went to St. Paul's school with other sons of wealth. He got his higher education at Harstrom's Tutoring School. He went to France during the War in the Ambulance Service and was gassed, decorated.
Afterwards he did a strange thing for a Vanderbilt. Ever since a bullet-headed, thick-jowled Vanderbilt stood with arms folded in front of his hearth and said, "The public? Bah! The public be damned . . . ", Vanderbilts have been press-shy. Relentless editors have made the phrase more than a sneer—made is a symbol, like the legend under a carriage crest, of Vanderbilt arrogance from the day of its Staten Island patroonship to the day when a Vanderbilt turnout swerved onto a crowded sidewalk that the fetlocks of its four strawberry roans might not be sullied in a puddle.
But Cornelius IV was not press-shy. He got himself a job on the New York Herald Tribune as reporter. From there he went to the New York Times, and from there to Washington to free lance, until Publisher Hearst, whose gum-chewing public dotes on names like Vanderbilt, gobbled him up to write signed articles. There is evidence that the youth received lasting inspiration at the Hearstian knee, for his journalistic activities ever since have been in the gum-chewing field.