The Jews in America Trilogy

"Our Crowd," The Grandees, and "The Rest of Us"

Stephen Birmingham

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781504038959
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

Three New York Times bestsellers chronicle the rise of America's most influential Jewish families as they transition from poor immigrants to household names. In his acclaimed trilogy, author Stephen Birmingham paints an engrossing portrait of Jewish American life from the colonial era through the twentieth century with fascinating narrative and meticulous research. The collection's best-known book, "Our Crowd" follows nineteenth-century German immigrants with recognizable names like Loeb, Sachs, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. Turning small family businesses into institutions of finance, banking, and philanthropy, they elevated themselves from Lower East Side tenements to Park Avenue mansions. Barred from New York's gentile elite because of their religion and humble backgrounds, they created their own exclusive group, as affluent and selective as the one that had refused them entry. The Grandees travels farther back in history to 1654, when twenty-three Sephardic Jews arrived in New York. Members of this small and insulated group—considered the first Jewish community in America—soon established themselves as wealthy businessmen and financiers. With descendants including poet Emma Lazarus, Barnard College founder Annie Nathan Meyer, and Supreme Court Justice Benjamin N. Cardozo, these families were—and still are—hugely influential in the nation's culture, politics, and economics. In "The Rest of Us, " Birmingham documents the third major wave of Jewish immigration: Eastern Europeans who swept through Ellis Island between 1880 and 1924. These refugees from czarist Russia and Polish shtetls were considered barbaric, uneducated, and too steeped in the traditions of the "old country" to be accepted by the well-established German American Jews. But the new arrivals were tough, passionate, and determined. Their incredible rags to riches stories include those of the lives of Hollywood tycoon Samuel Goldwyn, Broadway composer Irving Berlin, makeup mogul Helena Rubenstein, and mobster Meyer Lansky. This unforgettable collection comprises a comprehensive account of the Jewish American upper class, their opulent world, and their lasting mark on American society.

“Our Crowd”

The Great Jewish Families of New York

For the children:

Mark, Harriet, Carey

Contents

PREFACE

PART I A PARTICULAR PRINCIPALITY

1 “People We Visit”

PART II OUT OF THE WILDERNESS (1837–1865)

2 “Mount Seligman”

3 “Mount Beautiful”

4 On the Road

5 Mrs. Rankin’s Galoshes

6 On to the City

7 Matters of Status

8 Matters of Style

9 To the Gold Fields

10 “This Unholy Rebellion”

PART III INTO THE MAINSTREAM (1866–1899)

11 Peddlers in Top Hats

12 The “Our Dear Babette” Syndrome

13 “Getting Our Feet Wet”

14 “The D—d Railroads!”

15 “My Bank”

16 The Assimilationists

17 “The Haughty and Purse-Proud Rothschilds”

18 The Seligman-Hilton Affair

PART IV THE AGE OF SCHIFF

19 “A Complex Oriental Nature”

20 “Your Loving Kuhn, Loeb & Company”

21 The Emerging Giants

22 Mr. Schiff vs. Mr. Loeb

23 Portrait of a Father

24 The Mittelweg Warburgs

25 Marriage, Schiff Style

26 “The Battle of the Giants”

27 “Der Reiche Lewisohn”

28 The Poor Man’s Metal

29 Further Adventures Underground

30 Twilight of a Banker

31 The Ladies

32 Sons, Doubters, Rebels

33 Elberon, and Points North and South

34 The Guggenheim-Lewisohn Battle

35 Monsieur Journet’s Nightgown

36 The Great Battle of 1109 Fifth Avenue

37 “Witty and Interesting Personalities”

38 The Equitable Life Affair

39 “I Enclose My Check for $2,000,000 …”

40 The “Sinister Transmutation”

41 Calamities and Solutions

42 The Rise of a House of Issue

43 “Pflicht und Arbeit”

PART V NEW YORK 21, N.Y.

44 The End of a Line

45 The Fall, and After

46 The End of a Dream

47 Where Are They Now?

48 “Familiengefühl” … and No Bare Feet at Dinner

Index

Preface

It was my intention, when I undertook to write this book, not to write a book that would be simply “about rich people.”

To be sure, none of the families here portrayed is needy. Far from it. But—to me, at least—their accomplishments and their contributions to the special spirit and élan, as well as to the physical appearance, of New York City make the fact of their wealth seem secondary. It was my feeling, when I considered this book, that such names as Lehman, Lewisohn, Schiff, Loeb, Warburg, Guggenheim, Seligman, Kahn, Straus, Goldman, and Sachs are nationally, and in most cases internationally, known. They stand for banking and industrial efficiency, government service, philanthropy, and vast patronage of the arts, science, and education. And yet, due to a persistent reticence and unwillingness to boast—which in themselves are noble attributes—the men and women who made these names celebrated are little understood as human beings. It was my hunch that behind the marble façades lived people with as much capacity for folly, and grandeur, as human beings everywhere. It should come as no surprise that this turned out to be the case.

As a novelist, my interest has always been in the romance of people, and I suppose I am always a bit more concerned with what people are than what they do. And so one question may call for an answer: What is particularly significant about these German Jewish banking families? As a reader, I am an habitual peeker-ahead at endings, and so I shall open the book with the same thought as the one I close it with: These German Jewish families are more than a collective American success story. At the point in time when they were a cohesive, knit, and recognizably distinct part of New York society, they were also the closest thing to Aristocracy—Aristocracy in the best sense—that the city, and perhaps the country, had seen.

Obviously, it was not possible to take up each of the hundreds of people who composed, and compose, “our crowd.” I have tried only to write about those men and women who to me seemed either the most exceptional, or the most representative, of their day.

I want to thank a number of people who have been particularly helpful with information, guidance, and suggestions in the preparation of this book.

I am indebted to Geoffrey T. Hellman for permission to quote from his published material, for supplying me with documents, manuscripts, letters, photographs, and personal reminiscences of his family, the Seligmans, as well as for magically unearthing the unpublished autobiography of Adolph Lewisohn, which neither Mr. Lewisohn’s children nor grandchildren knew existed. I am grateful to Mrs. Joseph L. Seligman of New York for further material on her husband’s family; to Mrs. Carola Warburg Rothschild for similarly kind and gracious assistance with memories and family papers pertaining to the Warburgs, “old” Loebs, and Schiffs, and for giving me access to the memoirs of her mother, the late Frieda Schiff Warburg. I also thank Mrs. Dorothy Lehman Bernhard, and her sons Robert A. and William L. Bernhard, for insights into the Lehman clan; Mrs. Phyllis Goodhart Gordan, for data concerning the Goodharts and Walters; Mr. Frank Lewisohn and Mrs. Joan Lewisohn Simon, for their help with Lewisohn recollections.

I am deeply grateful to Mrs. August Philips (Emanie Arling) for permission to quote from her novel, Red Damask (which she wrote under the name Emanie Sachs), for her spirited recollections of the days when she herself was a part of “the crowd,” and for her enthusiastic interest in my project. To Mr. Walter E. Sachs, I am indebted for Sachs and Goldman family and business reminiscences, as well as for access to his own unpublished autobiography. I would like to thank Messrs. Lee Klingenstein of Lehman Brothers, Carl J. White of J. & W. Seligman & Co., Benjamin Sonnenberg, James F. Egan, Norman Retchin, David L. Mitchell of S. G. Warburg & Company, Ltd., and Professor Oscar Handlin of Harvard for their suggestions and pointers during various stages of the book, and Beverley Gasner, who read the book’s first draft with an especially finicky eye.

This is the moment, too, to say a special word of thanks to Mrs. Mireille Gerould, who took on the job of financial researcher for the book with cheerful vigor, despite the fact that her research took her through periods of banking history when records, if kept at all, were kept most sketchily.

Though each of the people above has contributed to the book, I alone must be held responsible for its shortcomings.

I would also like to thank my friend and agent, Carol Brandt, for her coolheaded guidance of the project from the beginning, and to say a special word of praise to my friend and wife, Janet Tillson Birmingham, whose typing endurance is supreme and whose editorial hunches and suggestions are unerringly right. At Harper & Row, for their enthusiasm and moral support, I am grateful to Cass Canfield and the Misses Genevieve Young and Judith Sklar and, last but hardly least, to my editor, Roger H. Klein, who was first to propose that this was a book worth writing, and whose intelligence and taste have, in the process, affected nearly every page.

S.B.

PART I

A PARTICULAR PRINCIPALITY

1

“PEOPLE WE VISIT”

By the late 1930’s the world of Mrs. Philip J. Goodhart had become one of clearly defined, fixed, and immutable values. There were two kinds of people. There were “people we visit” and “people we wouldn’t visit.” She was not interested in “people we wouldn’t visit” When a new name came into the conversation, Mrs. Goodhart would want to know, “Is it someone we would visit? Would visit?” She had an odd little habit of repeating phrases. If one of her granddaughters brought a young suitor home, she would inquire, “There are some Cohens in Baltimore. We visit them. Are you one of them? One of them?”

Granny Goodhart’s rules were simple and few. One’s silver should be of the very heaviest, yet it should never “look heavy.” One’s clothes should be of the very best fabrics and make, but should never be highly styled, of bright colors, or new-looking. Mink coats were for women over forty. Good jewels should be worn sparingly. One hung good paintings on one’s walls, of course. But that anyone outside the family and the “people we visit” should ever see them was unthinkable. (House and art tours for charity, where one’s collection could be viewed by the general public, had not yet come into fashion in New York; if they had, Mrs. Goodhart would have considered it a dangerous trend.) She believed that little girls should wear round sailor hats and white gloves, and that boys should concentrate on Harvard or Columbia, not Princeton. Princeton had graduated too many people she did not visit.

She believed that good upholstery improved, like good pearls, with wearing. She did not care for Democrats because she had found most of them “not gentlemen.” It was hard to reconcile this with the fact that her own brother, Herbert Lehman, was Democratic Governor of New York State and was associating with “people like Roosevelt.” She had never visited the Roosevelts, and wouldn’t if she had been asked. As a Lehman, she belonged to one of New York’s most venerable Jewish families (her husband’s family, the Goodharts, were not to be sneezed at either), and she was entitled to her views. And, since most of the people she visited, and who visited her, lived much as she did and felt as she did about most matters, she was able to move through her dowager years in an atmosphere of perpetual reassurance.

She was concerned with her friends’ health in general and with her husband’s in particular. She worried about his tendency to overweight. “Now I think, Philip, you will not have the fish soufflé the soufflé,” she would say to him as the dish was passed to him. (But her maid, Frances, was on Mr. Goodhart’s side; she always managed to slip a little on his plate.) Her husband often used the Wall Street Journal as a screen at the dinner table, and ate behind it.

There were few ripples in the pattern of her life. Once her cook broke her leg, and Granny Goodhart took to nursing the poor woman, who was well on in years herself and had been in the family “forever.” Each night, at table, Mrs. Goodhart would deliver a report on the broken leg’s progress. One night her husband said sharply, “Damn it, Hattie! You mustn’t sympathize with her or she’ll never learn!” Hattie Goodhart went right on sympathizing, of course, but stopped talking about it.

There were occasional other unsettling experiences. She and her friends did not believe in “making a point” of being Jewish, or of being anything, and sometimes this led to confusion. One of her Lehman sisters-in-law, a prominent Jewess like herself, was turned away from a hotel in the Adirondacks because, of all things, the hotel politely said it had a policy and did not accept gentiles! Then there was the visit from the young California psychologist. He was connected with the Institute of Behavioral Sciences, and had been conducting Rorschach tests with college students to determine their reactions to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies in Europe. Granny Goodhart met the young man in New York at the home of her daughter, Mrs. Frank Altschul. Everyone there was talking about what the young man was doing, and, after dinner, he offered to perform a few of his tests on the group. Granny took the Rorschach test, and—to the astonishment of everybody—it turned out that Granny was an anti-Semite!

Still, as one of the grandes dames of German Jewish society, Granny was admired and much loved by her friends. To her grandchildren she was a round little person smelling of wool and Evening in Paris who greeted them at the door with outstretched arms and peppermint candies clutched in both hands, and gathered them in. She may have had her ways, but at least she was true to them.

And, watching this doughty little lady walking slowly through the rooms of her house, it was possible—almost possible—to believe that Granny Goodhart’s ways were eternal ways, and that hers was a world that had always been and would always be.

Most of the people Granny Goodhart visited lived within a clearly defined area—those blocks of prime Manhattan real estate between East Sixtieth and East Eightieth streets, bordered by Fifth Avenue, known in pre-Zip Code days as New York 21, N.Y.—in houses served, in the days before all-digit dialing, by Manhattan’s “great” telephone exchanges: TEmpleton 8, REgent 2, RHinelander 4. It was a world of quietly ticking clocks, of the throb of private elevators, of slippered servants’ feet, of fires laid behind paper fans, of sofas covered in silver satin. It was a world of probity and duty to such institutions as Temple Emanu-El (a bit more duty than devotion, some might say), that stronghold of Reform Judaism, and its rabbi, Dr. Gustav Gottheil, and duty to such causes as Montefiore and Mount Sinai hospitals, the Henry Street Settlement, and the New York Association for the Blind, whose annual ball is one of the great fixtures in the life of the Jewish upper class. For the children, it was a world of discipline and ritual—social as much as religious—of little boys in dark blue suits and fresh white gloves, little girls in dresses of fuchsia satin, learning to bow from the waist and curtsy at Mrs. Viola Wolff’s dancing classes, the Jewish answer to Willie De Rham’s. It was a world of heavily encrusted calling cards and invitations—to teas, coming-out parties, weddings—but all within the group, among the people Granny Goodhart visited, a city within a city.

It was a world of curious contradictions. It held its share of decidedly middle-class notions (dry-cleaning did not really clean a dress, no matter what the advertisements said—every young girl was taught this), and yet it was also a world of imposing wealth. Granny Goodhart’s lifetime spanned an era, from the Civil War days into the 1940’s, when wealth was the single, most important product of New York City. It was an era when Fifth Avenue was still a street of private houses, and the great mansions to which everyone was periodically invited included Otto Kahn’s sprawling palace, Jacob Schiff’s castle, the Felix Warburgs’ fairy-tale house of Gothic spires. It was a world where sixty for dinner was commonplace (it was Otto Kahn’s favorite number), and where six hundred could gather in a private ballroom without crowding. It was a world that moved seasonally—to the vast “camps” in the Adirondacks (not the Catskills), to the Jersey Shore (not Newport), and to Palm Beach (not Miami)—in private railway cars. A total of five such cars was needed to carry Jacob Schiff and his party to California. Chefs, stewards, butlers, valets, and maids traveled with their masters and mistresses, and a nurse for each child was considered essential. Every two years there was a ritual steamer-crossing to Europe and a ritual tour of spas.

Yet it was not particularly a world of fashion. One would find The Economist, Barron’s, and the Atlantic Monthly on the coffee table more often than Vogue or Town and Country. One would expect to find a collection of Impressionist paintings, or of fine books, rather than elaborate furs or jewels. One worried about being “showy,” and spared no expense to be inconspicuous. Granny Goodhart’s sister-in-law was the daughter of Adolph Lewisohn, a man who spent $300 a month for shaves alone. To keep his Westchester estate from being an eyesore to his neighbors, he employed thirty full-time gardeners to manicure his acreage and nurse his fourteen hothouses. He was so determined that his parties be in the best of taste—for years his New Year’s Eve ball in his Fifth Avenue house was one of the largest in the city—that, to keep his cellars supplied with the best wine and spirits, he ran up an average bill of $10,000 a month. And yet, at the same time, he had become interested in prison reform. When not giving dinner parties for his friends, he could be found at Sing Sing, dining with this or that condemned man in Death Row. He gave the stadium that bears his name to City College because, as he put it, “They asked me to.”

Mr. Lewisohn’s friend and neighbor, Felix Warburg, had a squash court in his city house, another in his country house—which also had a polo field—a yacht, a full Stradivarius string quartet, and a set of black harness horses identically marked with white stars on their foreheads. When Mr. Warburg was depressed, he had a gardener build him a platform high in a tree; from there, Warburg would consider the possibility of clearing another of his famous “vistas” from the surrounding woods. Yet he was so inordinately domestic that, upon checking into a hotel room in a foreign city, the first thing he did was to rearrange the furniture into the coziest possible “conversational groupings.” He liked to give away a million dollars at a clip to a list of some fifty-seven different charities, and yet when his children asked their father how much money he had, he would make a zero with his thumb and forefinger. It was a world, in other words, that gave equal weight to modesty and dignity as to pomp, comfort, and splendor. Jacob Schiff, for whom one private Pullman was seldom ample, could therefore send his son home from a party because the boy’s suit was too “flashy.”

Mr. Willie Walter, whose daughter was married to Granny Goodhart’s son, owned a custom-built Pierce-Arrow which he kept constantly replenished with new Packard engines. An astonishing piece of machinery, it was tall enough for a man to stand in. Mr. Walter suffered from glaucoma, and believed that it was the result of striking his head on the ceiling of a low car. There was, therefore, a practical reason for the automobile’s imposing proportions. The tallest car in New York was always driven with its window shades down, and, both inside and out, its decor was restrained; every bit of chrome was oxidized so that it would have no glare, out of consideration for Mr. Walter’s sensitive eyes. Though the Pierce-Arrow could be seen coming from block...