Alva Erskine Smith
Alva Erskine Smith was born in Mobile, Alabama, on January 17, 1853, the daughter of a cotton planter.
The Civil War ruined her family, who decamped, like many other Southerners, to Paris. Her family returned to America], this time to New York, after France's defeat by Prussia in 1871. Alva's mother was forced to open a boardinghouse on West 23rd Street. Alva resolved to try to marry a rich man, joining New York's Belle Underground of girls from good Southern families ruined by the Civil War who married New York bankers, brokers and merchants. The technique was for a well-connected female friend to introduce the young woman to a suitable match. Alva had just such a presenter in Consuela Yznaga de Valle, a childhood friend from Natchez, with grand Cuban-Spanish relations, and who later became the Duchess of Manchester. On April 20, 1875, Alva married William Kissam Vanderbilt. Alva proceeded to splurge after she married Vanderbilt and did not rest until she squandered millions.
In the 1880s Alva began a long extramarital affair with Oliver Hazard Perry Belmont. Alva and William K. divorced. On January 11, 1896, Oliver Belmont married Alva, five years his senior.
After Oliver Belmont died in 1908,Alva donated large sums to the women's suffrage movement, both in England and America. She was a lifelong racist. "I was a natural dictator," she wrote of herself. "I enjoyed nothing so much as tyrannizing over the little slave children on my father's cotton plantation." There are historians who now believe that her strong racist attitudes helped to perpetuate barriers against black men and women to keep them from voting.
She moved to France, where she died on January 26, 1933.
