In the spring of 1895, New York society was shaken by an announcement that seemed almost unthinkable. Alva Vanderbilt, the woman who had single-handedly forced the city’s oldest families to accept the upstart Vanderbilt clan into their exclusive circles, had filed for divorce from her husband, William Kissam Vanderbilt. In an era when unhappy marriages were simply endured, the move was a scandal. But Alva was not a woman who waited for permission.
Less than a year later, she married Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont, and together they would turn her restless energy toward a new cause: the fight for women’s right to vote. Alva Erskine Smith was born on January 17, 1853, in Mobile, Alabama. Her father, Murray Forbes Smith, was a lawyer turned cotton trader, a profession that placed his family at the heart of the Southern economy. Her mother, Phoebe Desha, was the daughter of a Tennessee congressman.
Of the six Smith children, only three survived to adulthood, a common tragedy in an era of poor medical care. In the 1850s, as tensions over slavery pushed the nation toward war, Murray Smith grew skeptical about the future of cotton and moved his family north to New York City, settling at Madison Square in 1859. While the Civil War divided the country, the Smiths prospered, building business ties in Britain, maintaining a holiday home in Rhode Island, and occasionally traveling to Europe. This cosmopolitan upbringing shaped Alva’s strong character and broadened her political horizons.
In her early twenties, Alva was introduced to William Kissam Vanderbilt, grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the patriarch who had built the family fortune through shipping and railroads. By the early 1870s, Cornelius was nearing eighty and reputedly the richest man in the world. William and Alva hit it off immediately and married on April 20, 1875, at Calvary Church on Park Avenue. Their children followed quickly: a daughter named Consuelo in 1877, a son named William Jr.
a year later, and a third child, Harold, in 1884. Joining the Vanderbilt family did not automatically grant Alva entry into New York’s high society. The Vanderbilts were dismissed as new money, frozen out by the old-money families who considered themselves the city’s true elite. Many of Cornelius’s sons and daughters had tried and failed to break through.
Alva decided she would succeed where they had failed, and she knew it would require something spectacular. She commissioned Richard Morris Hunt, one of the most celebrated architects of the Gilded Age, to build a French Renaissance-style château on Fifth Avenue. The so-called Petit Château was a striking structure, its asymmetrical exterior combining turrets and Gothic ornamentation. Construction cost three million dollars, the equivalent of roughly ninety million today.
At the same time, she had Hunt design a lavish 110-room wooden home called Idle Hour on Long Island. But the buildings themselves were only part of the statement. When the Fifth Avenue mansion was completed in 1882, Alva christened it with a lavish masquerade ball to which one thousand guests were invited. According to the account, she deliberately excluded Caroline Astor, the reigning queen of New York’s elite Four Hundred, knowing that Astor would be forced to call on Alva to secure an invitation for her daughter.
The ploy worked. Astor came calling, and at the ball she reportedly declared that the time had come to accept the Vanderbilts. The family finally achieved the social status they had long sought. The cost was enormous.
The ball alone was believed to have cost around a quarter of a million dollars, nearly ten million in today’s money. Alva’s appetite for extravagance only grew after 1886, when William inherited sixty-five million dollars from the Vanderbilt estate. She commissioned a yacht named Alva, which was for a time the largest in the world. She received another spectacular gift: Marble House, a fifty-room summer cottage in Newport, given to her by William on her thirty-ninth birthday at a cost of eleven million dollars, roughly three hundred and sixty million today.
This lavish spending and social triumph sowed the seeds of the family’s decline. Alva’s in-laws grew jealous of her mansions and her status, and they responded by building enormous homes of their own. Throughout the late nineteenth century, the Vanderbilts poured hundreds of millions of dollars into their construction projects. By the 1910s, no member of the family ranked among the richest people in the United States.
A few generations later, in the 1970s, hardly any of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s nearly six hundred living descendants could be described as millionaires. Alva’s marriage, meanwhile, had become unhappy. William had been unfaithful for years, and Alva grew increasingly restless. The divorce, when it came in 1895, was a shock, but it was followed almost immediately by her second marriage to Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont in January 1896.
Belmont came from an extremely wealthy New York banking family. The speed of the remarriage raised eyebrows, but Alva’s divorce settlement had already given her more than ten million dollars, over a quarter of a billion in today’s money. She had no need to marry for money. What she and Oliver shared was a growing interest in politics.
Oliver had long been active in the Democratic Party, serving as a delegate to the national convention in 1900 and winning election to the House of Representatives the following year. Alva acted as his political ally. Her interest in women’s participation in politics intensified. The suffrage movement had emerged in the late 1840s but only gained real momentum after the Civil War.
Alva was inspired through her friendship with Ida Husted Harper, a suffragist who had collaborated with Susan B. Anthony on the history of women’s suffrage. Across the Atlantic, British suffragists under Emmeline Pankhurst had begun using increasingly militant tactics. Alva had no interest in terrorism, but she brought her considerable wealth to bear on the cause.
In 1909, she helped establish the Political Equality League and became an energetic campaigner, speaking at rallies and holding events. She also moved the league to support labor strikes in New York, seeking allies among workers who had made the fortunes of the Vanderbilts and other Gilded Age families. The alliance was not without contradictions, but her support was unflinching. When strikers were arrested, she spent considerable sums to secure their release and spoke at a major rally in their support at the Hippodrome Theater on Sixth Avenue.
By the end of the 1900s, Alva had joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association. She traveled to London as a delegate to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, meeting figures like Pankhurst and returning with renewed determination. In the 1910s, she moved into lobbying and began buying segments of the print media to promote the cause. By the mid-1910s, she was one of the leading figures in the American suffrage movement.
The years of campaigning finally paid off. In 1918, the British government granted women the vote, albeit with significant restrictions. The United States followed quickly. Congress passed a measure in 1919, and on August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, prohibiting the federal government and individual states from denying any adult citizen the right to vote on the basis of sex.
With her life’s work largely accomplished, Alva made a strange decision. She left the United States for France, a country where women would not gain the right to vote until 1945. Her daughter Consuelo lived there, and Alva moved to be nearer to her. She continued to play a part in the movement from abroad as efforts were made to ensure that women could actually exercise the vote they had legally won.
In 1932, she suffered a stroke in Paris and died there in January 1933. Her body was returned to New York, and her funeral procession down Fifth Avenue was accompanied by a contingent of leading suffragists.