Chauncey Depew: Vanderbilt's Railroad Chief and The Treason of the Senate

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Chauncey Depew was born in Peekskill, New York in 1834, descended from Huguenots among the town's original land purchasers and, on his mother's side, from the family of Roger Sherman. After 12 years at the Peekskill Military Academy he entered Yale in 1852, led the Linonian Society and joined Skull and Bones, graduating in 1856 with future Supreme Court justices David Josiah Brewer and Henry Billings Brown. He campaigned for John C. Fremont and Abraham Lincoln, entered the New York Assembly in 1862 and became New York's secretary of state in 1863. In 1865 he turned down the post of U.S. minister to Japan and instead went to work for Cornelius Vanderbilt, becoming attorney for the New York and Harlem Railroad in 1866.

Depew became general counsel of the Vanderbilt system in 1876 and president of the New York Central in 1885, later its chairman until his death. He lost an 1872 race for lieutenant governor as a Liberal Republican, gave the main oration at the 1886 unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, received 99 votes for president at the 1888 Republican convention and nominated Theodore Roosevelt for governor. Elected to the U.S. Senate in 1899, he was the first target of David Graham Phillips's 1906 Cosmopolitan series The Treason of the Senate, which called him a boodler owned by the Vanderbilts, and he left the Senate in 1911. He lived to 93, dying in 1928, and left $1 million to Yale with no restrictions.

• When Depew asked William Howard Taft what he would name the baby in his belly, Taft said a bag of wind would be named Chauncey Depew.
• In 1897 he opened New York City's pneumatic tube mail system, calling speed the hallmark of civilization.
• He smoked 25 cigars a day for decades before quitting at 65, and gave up alcohol at 88.
• Despite 1908 reports that he had gone vegetarian, he said he had only given up red meat and ate poultry.
• The village of Depew, New York, a town in Oklahoma and Depew Park in Peekskill bear his name.