by Ron Chernow
Felix wanted his sons to furnish proof that American Jews were true-blue patriots, telling Frederick that “unless the Jews become the best citizens of the country to which they have sworn allegiance, neither their happiness nor their safety can be assured.”12 When Felix learned that a man named Levy wanted to sell Thomas Jefferson’s home, Monticello, at an exorbitant price for a national shrine, he sent Judge Jonah A. Goldstein to negotiate with him. As Goldstein recalled, Felix “didn’t like the fact that a man named Levy was trying to make money out of a national shrine and he thought that would affect the relationship between Jews and people down south and in other parts of the country.”13 Citing a nameless donor, Goldstein offered Levy $250,000 in top-grade securities to donate Monticello to the U.S. government. Levy died before negotiations were completed, and Monticello was finally bought through a foundation. “But Warburg was willing to give that big money without his identity being known solely because he didn’t want to have a Jew named Levy trying to cash in on the title to the Jefferson home,” said Goldstein.14 Such actions tacitly answered unspoken accusations that Jews were grasping and disloyal.
The final contradiction in the Friedaflix home concerned their marriage, a happy match filled with strange undercurrents. As mentioned, Frieda became partially deaf, like Jacob, after Edward’s birth and couldn’t hear the sotto voce wisecracks that passed between Felix and the children. This relegated her to an inferior position and made her the hapless butt of many gags at table. Felix always shone and twinkled to Frieda’s detriment. He seemed full of gaiety while she lacked humor. Felix loved the Carol, while Frieda hated sailing. The partly deaf Frieda didn’t share the Warburg love of music. And while Felix dealt with their sons in a droll, bantering style and wrote affectionate poems to Carola, Frieda worked at being a good mother. When her children were at school, she wrote to them daily and never abandoned the strict sense of duty she had inherited from Father. Frieda assumed the hard part of parenting, while Felix blithely and, one suspects, somewhat irresponsibly enjoyed himself.
For all his talk of duty, Felix had a weakness for pretty women and exploited the usual Victorian double standard: He ran around while Frieda stayed at home, the dutiful wife. Vivacious and fun loving, he squired mistresses openly about town. “He had lots of ladies,” said his niece. “He said they weren’t mistresses, but he took them to the opera with orchids on their front.”15 The grandchildren were puzzled to find Frieda absent from the Carol but Irene Wyle, Hulda Lashanka, or some other lady friend present. Small wonder that Frieda learned to loathe the love boat.
Felix had distinctive tastes in women, favoring aspiring opera singers with substantial, well-sculpted bosoms and Wagnerian girth. He promoted their careers through auditions with Otto Kahn. It became a joke at 1109 that when Felix went off to “ride his bicycle,” he was cycling off to a rendezvous. After a time, the boys noisily teased: “Are you going out to ride your bicycle, Father?”16 Frieda was straitlaced but pragmatic and bowed to painful realities. Whatever her suffering, she tolerated the mistresses. Her old-fashioned, self-sacrificing attitude saved the marriage and perhaps made it a happy, if highly unequal, one. But it presented the children with a picture of Felix as a happy hedonist. They were exposed to a lot more than the legendary philanthropist and perhaps imitated Father more closely than he cared to admit.
The search for an identity would be a long and arduous one for Felix’s children, draining away enormous psychic energy. Perhaps it was easiest for Freddy, the eldest, who was bright, jovial, and quick-witted. At one point, he bolted to Lehman Brothers when Kuhn, Loeb refused to make him a partner straight off; otherwise he spent his life at the family firm. Things were far less simple for the second son, the high-strung, outrageously funny Gerald. Slim, handsome, debonair, with piercing eyes and wavy black hair, he had an aristocratic air and a constant, boyish crush on some lady. He loved to ride and play tennis, fitting the Woodlands style of English gentry. Beneath the surface contentment, however, lay a complex, fearful, and insecure young man. As his brother noted, “He wouldn’t fly in airplanes, he hated islands, he suffered paralyzing stage fright, not to mention claustrophobia.”17
Surprisingly, Gerald’s musical passion was often a source of friction, not harmony, with his father, who was a director of the Metropolitan Opera and the Philharmonic Society. Felix subscribed to so many concert series that they kept him busy nearly one hundred evenings each year. At the Metropolitan Opera, the conductor, Bodansky, would bow to him before taking up the baton. If the bassoonist missed a note, Felix and Bodansky would turn in unison and glare at the culprit. For chamber music concerts at 1109, the Warburgs set up rows of gilt chairs in the music room. The four Stradivarius instruments owned by Felix sometimes figured in these concerts. At one musical evening in 1924, Felix invited three friends to bring their “Strads” “so it seemed as if Stradivarii were being made in Hoboken in a baker’s shop,” Felix said.18 As he got older, Gerry played Felix’s Stradivarius cello that dated from 1725, La Belle Blonde.
At an early age, Gerald was given Jim Loeb’s half-sized childhood cello, but was also told that it was harebrained to become a professional musician and that artists were wild, Bohemian wastrels. While Gerald was at Middlesex, Felix encouraged him to play his cello and piano, though he feared Gerald might choose a musical career. At 1109, Gerald would sit at the concert grand piano and tap out jazz, Gershwin, or Cole Porter tunes. Sometimes Felix sang Schumann Lieder in his pleasant baritone while Gerald accompanied him. “There was always a double message about music,” said Gerald’s daughter. “Music making as an amateur was fine, but it was déclassé to do it as a professional.”19
Already at Middlesex, Gerry experienced terrible conflict, trying to be a gentleman and good sport but also an artist. (He once combined both roles famously, playing ragtime on an upright piano on the lawn outside while a fire burned in a dorm. Later, he said he fiddled while Rome burned.) Gerry longed to go to a conservatory, but Felix insisted he go to Harvard. Defying his father, Gerry worked hard at flunking out of Harvard—he walked out of one exam—and was disappointed to get a Gentleman’s “C” freshman year when he had striven mightily to fail. After his brief stay at Harvard, Gerry spent some time at the Institute of Musical Art.
Having saturated the boy with music, Felix was upset that his gifted son wanted to be a professional cellist. To settle matters, Felix took him to audition before violinist Franz Kneisel. After Gerry played, Felix said, “Has the boy got talent?” “Talent he’s got,” said Kneisel, “as long as he’s ready to starve for it.” “That,” Felix retorted, “is the only thing I can’t provide.”20 Felix was only persuaded to support Gerry’s ambition by Kay Swift, Jimmy’s wife, herself a professional pianist. She said Gerry had talent, even if he probably lacked drive.21 Frieda supported Gerry’s ambitions, but Felix never overcame his feeling that gentlemen should confine music to the amateur sphere.
During his Harvard year, Gerry had fallen in love with a non-Jewish New England girl. As a result, Felix decided to send him to study cello in Vienna with a Professor Buxbaum. There Gerald shortly met his first wife, the beautiful Viennese Marion Bab. Though born Jewish, she had been raised as a Protestant by her parents because of Austrian anti-Semitism. When she married Gerald in 1922—Felix had to call upon his connections to find a rabbi willing to marry them—she reconverted back to Judaism. With so much anti-Semitic agitation in Vienna, Felix advised Gerald not to ride around in a big car, for the natives “would find out in no time that this is a rich, Jewish, American boy.… As you no doubt know, there are riots every day in the attempt to keep Jewish students out of the universities.…”22
At first, it seemed the Warburg name might assist Gerald’s career. He and Buxbaum played concerts in Austria and Germany, with Felix subsidizing their quartet. In late 1924, when they played Hamburg, Uncle Max told someone in his office to buy the remaining seats in the concert hall. The man was supposed to go at the last minute, but instead went strai
ght to the hall and purchased several hundred tickets. That night, when Gerry stepped on stage, he faced an audience papered almost entirely with M. M. Warburg staff, who applauded with lusty abandon. Backstage after the concert, a flushed, excited Gerry told Max that he and Buxbaum were so pleased that they planned to visit Hamburg again. Max, alarmed, had to confess what had happened, and Gerry said his father had done the same in the past. Max deducted the concert from Felix’s Hamburg account and never invited Gerry to play again.23
Although Gerry would become a top American cellist, the family patronage hurt him, even after he made his debut at Carnegie Hall as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. (As a financial angel of the orchestra, Felix packed the house for the concert.) People felt they didn’t need to support a rich kid by buying tickets to see him or putting him on a program. The beautiful Stradivarius provoked publicity, but distracted newspaper attention from the player. Gerry was also an anxious performer, who did best in private. Before concerts, he was sick with fear and afterward emotionally spent. Gerry would always believe that he had never achieved his just desserts as a musician. The privileged birth, which would have provided an entrée in any other career, proved an insuperable handicap in this one.
Many of Felix’s acquaintances saw him as a charming, gregarious playboy, yet he reigned over a maze of time-consuming charities. Before his death, Schiff recognized Felix’s new maturity, observing with admiration how he “had really grown very considerably and is doing wonderful work.”24 No longer the snazzy young rake with the dogcart, Felix could pontificate as gloomily about the world as Paul. “One is afraid to open the paper in the morning, fearing that some new, outrageous self-seeking effort is bringing additional misery to millions,” he said in 1923. Max would later note how Felix evolved from a serene, cheerful lover of music and art to “a serious-minded philanthropist who devoted almost all of his spare time to helping others.”25
Felix didn’t really like his Kuhn, Loeb partners and happily escaped into “pipe dreams,” as he dubbed his philanthropy. At work, he had a special cabinet installed to track his fifty-seven charities; a leather flap would flip open to produce file cards on each. “I am like Heinz’s pickles,” he said. “I belong to fifty-seven varieties of committees.”26 He loved the work and said that if he couldn’t do charity with a smile, he wouldn’t do it. A very smart, well-read woman, Frieda also came into her own, serving as president of the Young Women’s Hebrew Association and making a substantial donation to Lillian Wald’s Visiting Nurse Service in her father’s honor.
In the 1920s, Felix and Frieda Warburg held court as the King and Queen of American Jewry. Every Jew with a crazy scheme or pet hope gravitated to 1109 Fifth Avenue, which conjured up images of a bottomless store of wealth. Cyrus Adler has left an evocative image of how Felix was besieged everywhere by dreamers, crusaders, and opportunists. “When he crossed the ocean, his cabin was a sort of center, and I have seen him in hotels in London and Paris, where his anteroom or little parlor almost looked like a public office.”27 Never a great intellect, Felix was extremely intuitive and had a fingertip feel for the most worthy supplicants.
With 1.64 million Jews, New York City now boasted the world’s largest Jewish community, and the Joint Distribution Committee was undisputed colossus of overseas aid. Postwar changes in Europe had isolated many Jews in new nation-states carved from the old, collapsed empires and the Joint sped relief to poor Jews in Poland, Romania, Austria, and Hungary, setting up bread lines and soup kitchens. In 1919, Felix lobbied the State Department and Red Cross to get a one-hundred-million-dollar food appropriation for Poland, which was experiencing dreadful pogroms. In 1921, he made a European tour that convinced the Joint to undertake sweeping economic reconstruction work in Jewish communities.
The group’s executive committee met at Felix’s office at 52 William Street or in the Rembrandt Room of his mansion, named for the etchings on display. From around the world Jews journeyed there to plead their cause. As chairman, Felix received a panoramic view of Jewish suffering. He employed multilingual stenographers, but even they were stymied when Yiddish writer Sholem Asch visited Kuhn, Loeb. Launching into a rapid, idiomatic Yiddish, he overwhelmed the poor stenographer, who appealed to Felix. “What shall I do,” she whispered, “I can’t understand a word.” “Never mind,” Felix replied, “I’ll tell you later.” The impassioned Asch bellowed on for nearly an hour, wringing his hands, tearing his hair, and nearly bursting into tears at one point. When it was over, the bemused stenographer nervously inquired, “What did he say?” and Felix retorted, “Just say Sholem Asch says the Jews in Poland need help.”28
In 1923, Felix met a man from this Eastern European world who would bewitch, enchant, perplex, and infuriate him for almost fifteen years. This Pied Piper was no colorful shtetl character, babbling in Yiddish, but a shrewd, elegant, worldly man with a doctorate in chemistry: Chaim Weizmann. Now a British subject, he smoked expensive cigars, wore Savile Row suits, and had butlers and chauffeurs at his Addison Crescent home in London. With his tony wife, Vera, he negotiated his way with ease through European salons and ministries. Weizmann was perfectly suited to woo the Warburgs, for he shared their urbane, confident style, if not their ideology.
Before World War I, Zionism lacked urgency for many Jews. In 1882, Baron Edmond de Rothschild set up the first colony in Palestine, and in 1897 Theodor Herzl created the World Zionist Organization. Apart from small agricultural villages, the Jews in Palestine then consisted mostly of pious, elderly people, who went to study and die on holy soil. The world war destroyed the income sources of these colonists. On November 2, 1917, Britain released the Balfour Declaration, saying that, “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish people.…”29 A month later, General Edmund Allenby captured Jerusalem and emancipated it from four hundred years of Turkish rule. Among other things, Britain wished to cultivate Jewish bankers on Wall Street. The British mandate over Palestine was officially incorporated into the Versailles Treaty.
Even though the Arab population greatly dwarfed the Jewish population, the Arabs took fright at the abrupt influx of Jewish refugees from postwar pogroms in the Ukraine and elsewhere. In 1921, they rioted, forcing the British High Commissioner to limit Jewish immigration. The next year, the League of Nations ratified the British mandate and endorsed a future Jewish national home west of the Jordan River. Despite these conspicuous feats, the Zionist movement was stalled for lack of money and was nearly bankrupt by 1923.
Zionism had to work as an economic proposition and not just as a romantic ideology. With the movement strapped for cash, it couldn’t buy more land to attract more pioneers. Unemployment soared to depression levels and teachers and officials went unpaid. Despite this discouraging situation, lush images of irrigated deserts, drained swamps, and planted trees continued to tantalize Weizmann’s mind. To realize his dreams, however, he needed to divert to Zionism some American Jewish money then flowing to European Jews.
When he decided to woo the rich, American non-Zionists, Weizmann must have done so with some reluctance, for he scorned them as autocrats who patronized the unkempt, ill-bred Jews of Eastern Europe; they might not understand his burning vision of a Jewish state. For German Jews comfortably ensconced on Park Avenue, Palestine seemed a dusty outpost best suited for colonial investment or modest social experimentation. For East European Jews in the Lower East Side slums, by contrast, it was the heady stuff of millennial dreams. Although they had exercised their power benevolently, the conservative “Our Crowd” bankers didn’t want to yield power to Zionists, who often struck them as raw, boisterous upstarts. For these Jewish bankers and lawyers who solemnly asserted their patriotic credentials, the Zionist movement raised the dread specter of dual loyalty which they forever tried to lay to rest. They feared Zionism would only give flesh to the anti-Semitic mythology of a monolithic international Jewry, which commanded the unspoken loyalty of Jews
everywhere. As Schiff had written, “But speaking as an American, I cannot for a moment concede that one can be at the same time a true American and an honest adherent of the Zionist movement.”30 Schiff gave generously to Palestine, but was careful to label himself a “cultural and religious Zionist,” not a “political Zionist.” Only in 1919 did he warm to a Jewish homeland as the best way to absorb the Jewish masses threatened by the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Warburgs weren’t enthused by a Jewish state. Immensely wealthy, on excellent terms with business and political leaders in Germany and America, they had operated successfully in the precarious gray zone between the Jewish and gentile worlds. For all the anti-Semitism they faced, they seemed to be living proof that Jews could advance in their home countries. Max Warburg stubbornly resisted Zionism, lest it reinforce Nazi fantasies of a Jewish Fifth Column. So many people tried to recruit him to Zionism that he established a set policy of giving each advocate a half hour to make his case. He rather narrowly regarded Zionism as a colonial venture and an unprofitable one at that. When publicist Ernst Feder solicited his views on Palestine in 1927, Max brushed the subject aside, saying he already had major interests in Cameroon, Togo, and the Dutch West Indies and that Palestine couldn’t possibly match the lucrative return on these holdings. Noting the prominence of German Zionists in the movement, he quipped that both Jews and Germans were bad politicians and together they would be catastrophic.31
Ancestral home in the Westphalian town of Warburg. Its size shows that the Warburgs were already a family of some wealth and prominence in the sixteenth century. (Courtesy of Anita Warburg)