How Vanderbilt Rose From Poverty to Become the Richest Man in History
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 16 September 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
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Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, few figures embody the rise of America’s economy in the nineteenth century more than Cornelius Vanderbilt. He began with nothing, working the waters of New York Harbor, and built a fortune that placed him among the wealthiest people in history. Known to some as a railroad baron and to others as the very model of a captain of industry, Vanderbilt created vast networks of steamships and railroads that fueled the Gold Rush, connected a growing nation, and forever changed the shape of New York City. Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer T.J. Stiles, author of The First Tycoon, shares how one man’s relentless drive to win laid the foundations for the modern corporation and the American economy itself.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:04.0 | What I told people, I was making a podcast about Benghazi. |
| 0:08.5 | Nine times out of ten, they called me a masochist, rolled their eyes, or just asked, why? |
| 0:15.1 | Benghazi, the truth became a web of lies. |
| 0:18.5 | From prologue projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco, Benghazi. |
| 0:23.9 | What difference at this point does it make? |
| 0:27.4 | Listen to Fiasco, Benghazi, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. |
| 0:33.4 | Music And we continue with our American stories. |
| 0:46.8 | And up next, a bit of economic history and a bit of business history. |
| 0:51.1 | In his pool of surprise-winning biography, The First Tycoon, the epic life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, |
| 0:57.4 | author T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius Commodore Vanderbilt's humble birth |
| 1:03.4 | during the presidency of George Washington to his death as one of the richest men in American |
| 1:09.1 | history. The Commodore helped to launch the transportation revolution, propel the gold rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation. |
| 1:18.5 | This combative American icon, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other single individual to create the modern American economy. |
| 1:29.1 | Here's T.J. Stiles with the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt. |
| 1:35.9 | Vanderbilt has often been depicted as this purely amoral creature who was willing to do anything, |
| 1:43.0 | basically. And he's often been conflated and confused with |
| 1:46.8 | a lot of his rivals. For example, in the famous Erie War of 1868, the most famous of the Gilded Age |
| 1:55.2 | Wall Street battles in which he fought with Daniel Drew and Jay Gould and Jim Fisk over the control of the Erie Railway. |
| 2:03.0 | There was a lot of corruption of government officials. |
| 2:06.2 | And I, when I started writing the book, I assumed that Vanderbilt was bribing away with the best of them. |
| 2:11.3 | And it turns out I could not find any evidence or even any accusations at the time that Vanderbilt was bribing people. |
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