Honest Vanderbilt

“The public? Bah! The public be damned . . .” snorted bullet-headed Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt many years ago.

His great-great-grandson, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, a gangling 26-year-old youth in 1924, set out to pander to the public by founding three tabloid newspapers, against the wishes of his family. He used on his masthead the phrase: “The public be served.” Within two years, his tabloids (in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami) went bankrupt (TIME, May 10, 1926, et seq.]. Vanderbilt IV then functioned as special writer for the Hearst New York Mirror, appealed to the masses with sneering remarks about his family’s plutocratic mansion on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan.

Critics have called Vanderbilt IV inefficient, disloyal, peevish, erratic, eccentric. Perhaps they were harsh, misinformed. For, last week, Vanderbilt IV, honest, put his signature to a document pledging more than $1,000,000 of his inheritance to repay stockholders of his dead tabloids. Said he: “I am giving up my heritage purely as a moral obligation. Legally, I no longer have any debts, but I wish to wipe the slate clean.”