"Our Crowd"

The Great Jewish Families of New York

Stephen Birmingham

• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781504026284
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

The #1 New York Times bestseller that traces the rise of the Guggenheims, the Goldmans, and other families from immigrant poverty to social prominence. They immigrated to America from Germany in the nineteenth century with names like Loeb, Sachs, Seligman, Lehman, Guggenheim, and Goldman. From tenements on the Lower East Side to Park Avenue mansions, this handful of Jewish families turned small businesses into imposing enterprises and amassed spectacular fortunes. But despite possessing breathtaking wealth that rivaled the Astors and Rockefellers, they were barred by the gentile establishment from the lofty realm of "the 400, " a register of New York's most elite, because of their religion and humble backgrounds. In response, they created their own elite "100, " a privileged society as opulent and exclusive as the one that had refused them entry. "Our Crowd" is the fascinating story of this rarefied society. Based on letters, documents, diary entries, and intimate personal remembrances of family lore by members of these most illustrious clans, it is an engrossing portrait of upper-class Jewish life over two centuries; a riveting story of the bankers, brokers, financiers, philanthropists, and business tycoons who started with nothing and turned their family names into American institutions.

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 blocks away, its head high above the heads of others, Mr. Walter also believed that toning down the car’s trimmings made it less “conspicuous.” (After Willie Walter’s death, his heirs sold the Pierce-Arrow to James Melton, a classic-car enthusiast; Melton painted it, polished it, added all sorts of shiny gadgetry, and sold it to Winthrop Rockefeller, who added even more. You should see it now.)

To the city outside, this world seemed exotic and remote. It was envied misunderstood, resented, but more often than not it was simply ignored, which was exactly what members of the Jewish upper class preferred. Overlooked, the group flourished and grew. It developed an outer shell that was opaque and impervious to prying. Within, a territory existed as intricately designed and convoluted as a chambered nautilus, a particular principality cloistered inside the world of the very rich. To those who lived there, it was all there was. It was New York’s other Society—a citadel of privilege, power, philanthropy, and family pride. What was not so apparent was that it was also a citadel of uncertainty and fear. Under the seemliness there was bitterness, jealousy, warfare—no more and no less than in any society. One had to be brought up in the castle to realize that. For even murder, when it occurred, was politely kept “within the family.”

Among the people Granny Goodhart visited were the Loebs, Sachses, Guggenheims, Schiffs, Seligmans, Speyers, Strauses, Warburgs, Lewisohns, and of course other Lehmans and Goodharts. There were also the Baches, the Altschuls, the Bernheimers, Hallgartens, Heidelbachs, Ickelheimers, Kahns, Kuhns, Thalmanns, Ladenburgs, Wertheims, Cahns, Bernhards, Sheftels, Mainzers, Stralems, Neustadts, Buttenwiesers, Josephthals, Hellmans, Hammersloughs, Lilienthals, Morgenthaus, Rosenwalds, Walters, and Wolffs. With the exception of the Guggenheims—who came from German-speaking Switzerland—all these families trace their origins to Germany (a surprising number to Bavaria). They have referred to themselves as “the One Hundred,” as opposed to “the Four Hundred.” They have been called the “Jewish Grand Dukes.” But most often they have simply called themselves “our crowd.”

The men of our crowd made their fortunes as merchants or bankers or—in the now somewhat antique phrase—as “merchant bankers.” Their business monuments include R. H. Macy & Company (Strauses), Abraham & Straus (Abrahams, Strauses, and Rothschilds—“the Brooklyn branch” of the European Rothschilds), and a number of celebrated investment and banking houses in Wall Street, including Lehman Brothers; Hallgarten & Company; Speyer & Company; Kuhn, Loeb & Company; Goldman, Sachs & Company; J. & W. Seligman & Company; J. S. Bache & Company; and Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades & Company. Families such as the Lewisohns and Guggenheims, whose fortunes are usually associated with mining and smelting, also maintained banking houses downtown. Some families, such as the Wertheims, moved from manufacturing (cigars) into banking (Wertheim & Company).

For a long time you either belonged to “our crowd” or you didn’t. For several generations the crowd was strikingly intramural when it came to marriage, making the crowd—to the larger crowd outside it—seem so cohesive and tight-knit as to be impenetrable. The “people we visit” became also the people we married. In the first American generation, a number of founding fathers married their own close relatives. Joseph Seligman and his wife were first cousins, and in the next generation Joseph’s brother’s daughter married Joseph’s sister’s son. Meyer Guggenheim married his stepsister, and a Lewisohn married his own niece—and had to go to Europe to do it since such a union was, at that time, against the law in the United States—and as a result of this match he became a great-uncle to his children and his brother’s son-in-law. Three Seligman brothers married three sisters named Levi; several other Seligmans married Walters, and several married Beers. The Seligmans also followed the Jewish practice of offering widows in the family to the next unmarried son, by which process several women became double Seligmans. Double cousinships abound. Seligmans have also married Hellmans, Loebs, Lewisohns, Lilienthals, Guggenheims and Lehmans; Lehmans, who have married first-cousin Lehmans, have in addition married Lewisohns, Buttenwiesers, and Ickelheimers; Ickelheimers have married Stralems; Stralems have married Neustadts; Neustadts have married Schiffs; Schiffs have married Loebs and Warburgs; Warburgs have married Loebs, who, of course, have married Seligmans.

Today the intermarriage within the crowd presents a design of mind-reeling complexity. But envision a dewy cobweb in the early morning on a patch of grass. Each drop of dew represents a great private banking house; the radii that fan out are sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters, and the lacy filaments that tie the whole together are marriages. Kuhn, Loeb & Company was originally composed of a particularly tight network of love—with Kuhn and Loeb (who were brothers-in-law) both related to Abraham Wolff, another K-L partner whose daughter married yet another partner, Otto Kahn. A Loeb son married a Kuhn daughter, and another Loeb daughter married another partner, Paul Warburg, while Jacob Schiff’s daughter Frieda married Paul Warburg’s brother Felix (a partner too). This turned an aunt and her niece into sisters-in-law, and made Paul his brother’s uncle.

At Goldman, Sachs, two Sachs boys married Goldman girls, and another Goldman girl married Ludwig Dreyfus (a G-S partner), who was related by marriage to the above-mentioned Loebs, and a Sachs daughter married a Macy’s Straus, while another Sachs daughter married a Hammerslough whose sister was married to a Rosenwald of Sears, Roebuck & Company. (Not surprisingly, when Sears puts a new stock issue on the market this is done by Goldman, Sachs & Company.)

The two founding fathers of J. S. Bache & Company, Leopold Cahn and Semon Bache, were linked in marriage as well as business, with Leopold married to Semon’s wife’s sister. Semon’s son, Jules, married Florence Sheftel, the sister of another Bache partner. At Hallgarten & Company four principal partners—Charles Hallgarten, Bernard Mainzer, Casimir Stralem, and Sigmund Neustadt—were similarly intertwined: Hallgarten married to Mainzer’s sister, and Stralem married to Neustadt’s daughter. Heidelbach, Ickelheimer & Company was founded, in 1876, as the result of a marriage, when Isaac Ickelheimer married Philip Heidelbach’s daughter. At a Westchester party recently, a Klingenstein, related to Lehmans, and a Kempner, related to Loebs, were asked if they weren’t also related to each other. “I suppose so” was the reply.

For many years Wall Street firms such as these obeyed a kind of Salic law, with partnerships descending only to sons and sons-in-law. This discouraged outsiders and encouraged intermarriage. “In the old days on the Street,” says one stockbroker, “your relatives were the only people you could trust.” There was another reason. In the old days, if you were a Jewish immigrant, the only person you could turn to if you needed money was a relative. For forty-four years after its founding in 1867, Kuhn, Loeb & Company had no partners who were not related by blood or marriage to the Loeb-Kuhn-Wolff family complex. For nearly fifty years after Goldman, Sachs was founded, all partners were members of the intermarried Goldman and Sachs families. The Lehmans hardly seemed to need intermarriage at all; until 1924, nearly seventy-five years after the firm was founded, all the partners were named Lehman.

Two firms one might suppose had sprung from the same forebears—Kuhn, Loeb and Carl M. Loeb, Rhoades—did not. The Loebs of Kuhn, Loeb are no kin to the Loebs of Loeb, Rhoades, who are no kin to Harold Loeb and no kin to Gerald Loeb, the financial writer who works for E. F. Hutton & Company, nor to Leopold and Loeb who were a thrill-killing team from Chicago. The two New York banking families are always getting mixed up, even by the New York Times, which is usually most careful about such matters, but the descendants of Solomon (Kuhn, Loeb) Loeb, an earlier immigrant and founder of the more venerable house, are known in the crowd as “the real Loebs.” Presumably, the descendants of Carl M. (Loeb, Rhoades) Loeb are unreal Loebs. The Rhoades name came in as a result of a nonmarital merger. Nobody knows quite why the name is retained (there are no Rhoadeses in the firm), unless for its overtones of Scholars and the Colossus of almost the same name. But by taking a tortuous route through Lehmans and Seligmans, it is possible to get these two Loeb families related to each other, by marriage.

The pattern of intermarriage has not always been strictly adhered to. Whenever someone marries “outside the crowd,” someone is bound to comment that German Jewish society isn’t a knit thing any more, that the structure is falling apart. Mixed marriages, anti-Semitism, and conversion are three linked themes that reappear often in the fugue of German Jewish life in New York. The Contents, for example, are a family of Dutch Jewish origin who were in New York long before the first Germans arrived. A number of German families have married Contents, and, as a result, Mrs. John D. Gordan,* a scholarly Bryn Mawr trustee—a granddaughter of Granny Goodhart—fell heir to two handsome Content family portraits. Painted in 1833, they are of Simon Content and his wife, Angeline, and each contains a mysterious detail. By Simon’s hand rests the Hebrew prayer bo...