Vanderbilt

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For the scope and vigor of those activities there has seemingly been another, even more potent inspiration. Perhaps it was the fading tradition of successful Cornelius I, which high-minded, highstrung Cornelius IV sought to regarnish, revitalize. Or perhaps his wife had something to do with it. Rachel Littleton came of no effete patroon line, though she did not mind marrying into one. Her father, Martin Wilie Littleton, is a lawyer of the very first rank and a self-made man every inch of the way. How much insistence and assistance from her lay behind young Vanderbilt's break from Hearst, his formation of the C-V Feature Service and later his beginnings of a grander venture, a chain of tabloid newspapers, doubtless young Vanderbilt himself could not say. Perhaps it was very largely her vigorous nature's impatience with any thing or man not standing on its or his own feet that steeled her husband, Macbeth-wise, to great ambitions; to make a place for himself so that he could say, as he did say last winter, "Of all the boys with whom I have associated, I suppose I am the only one who has found fun in work."

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