The Grandes Dames

by Stephen Birmingham

  Oddly, although J.R. hated spending money, he loved giving it away, and ironically, the recipients of his philanthropy were the poor. His particular concern was the plight of black schoolchildren in the South who were being educated under the “separate but equal” system, and he began building what became known as Rosenwald Schools. All told, 5,357 schools, shops, and teachers’ houses were built with Rosenwald money in 883 counties of fifteen southern states. In these black school-houses two portraits hung side by side, Abraham Lincoln’s and Julius Rosenwald’s. He established the Rosenwald Fellowships to aid blacks in higher education, and both Ralph Bunche and Marian Anderson were Rosenwald beneficiaries. All told, in his lifetime, J.R. gave away $65,000,000, but he still would not buy his children tennis balls.

  His philanthropies, of course, fed his expanding ego. Unlike other Jewish philanthropists such as Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, and Otto Kahn, J.R. did not adhere to the Talmudic principle that “twice blessed is he who gives in secret.” He loved to see his name attached to his gifts. He argued that, if he were going to achieve some sort of immortality on earth, he wanted to be immortal for the right reasons. Too many famous and successful individuals went down in history with their names attached to objects unworthy of them. Count Karl Nesselrode, for example, was not known as a great statesman and diplomat but as a fruit custard pie. The singer Nellie Melba was immortalized as a peach dessert, and the coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini ended up on a menu as a chicken casserole. The only thing J.R. refused to have his name attached to was an art museum. This was because he knew that other wealthy collectors were never eager to donate to a museum which already wore the name of an original benefactor—a Carnegie Museum, a Frick Museum, an Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  His daughter Edith, born in 1895 when her father was still a man of simple tastes and modest means—the year Uncle Aaron Nusbaum first drew the family into Sears, Roebuck—was now a young woman and had watched her father’s progress from the bottom of the ladder to the top, from a men’s clothier to a national philanthropist and tycoon. Of his five children Edith was temperamentally the most like him. She had certainly learned a lot from him, from the good side and the bad. When her little sister Marion complained to Edith that all the children in her school were teasing her and laughing at her because of her hand-me-down, patched-together clothes, Edith simply marched Marion off to Marshall Field’s and bought her a new wardrobe, charging everything to their father. For all her father’s tightfistedness, she knew that all Rosenwald bills were paid by one of the staff of secretaries, and that J.R. never even saw them. Edith was like that. She got things done in a quick, high-handed way. But it would not be until Edith Rosenwald married Edgar Bloom Stern of New Orleans that little Effie would begin to come into her own as her father’s daughter, and start to show her husband’s city a thing or two.

  10

  J.R.’S DAUGHTER—R.A.U.

  Julius Rosenwald, it might be gathered, did not support causes simply because they were fashionable or trendy. Building schools for blacks in the rural South was an unheard-of preoccupation in the early 1900s—so unfashionable that J.R.’s contributions went virtually unnoticed for a number of years, except, of course, by the recipients of his gifts. (At the time, his German Jewish counterparts in New York, such as Schiff, Warburg, and Louis Marshall, were toiling in a totally different direction: establishing hospitals, settlement houses, and loan societies to aid the great wave of Jewish immigrants that had arrived in America from the pogroms of Tsarist Russia and Poland.)

  J.R. explained his interest in “the Negro,” as he put it, this way: As a Jew, he considered himself a member of a race that had endured discrimination and persecution for centuries; he identified with the plight of southern blacks, he said, and just as education had provided the Jew with an avenue out of the ghetto, the same would hold true for the blacks. Also, he had read and been deeply impressed by Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. Later, he had met Washington and been impressed with the man. He had invited Washington to Chicago, and honored him at a large fund-raising luncheon at the Blackstone Hotel—the first time the hotel had ever entertained a black guest. In return, Washington placed Julius Rosenwald on the board of trustees of his Tuskegee Institute.

  To be sure, Booker T. Washington’s views would later be denounced as simplistic by many blacks. Washington stressed schools for blacks that taught manual arts and trades, designed to lift blacks out of poverty and into the ranks of the blue-collar working class. J.R. very much approved of all this. It might be pointed out that Sears, Roebuck & Company was also a working-man’s store. If there was a somewhat more commercial motive behind the Rosenwald philanthropy—to create a whole new market of blue-collar customers—he was wise enough not to make a point of it. Suffice it to say that Sears today has a large and loyal black clientele.

  J.R. also differed from his German Jewish counterparts in New York in that he did not insist that his daughters make dynastic marriages within “the crowd.” His son William might argue that J.R. was too busy running Sears to care whom his children married, but J.R. did say that all he asked of his sons-in-law was that they be hard-working and honest and able to support their wives. Edgar Bloom Stern of New Orleans, when he married Edith Rosenwald, was by no means rich on the Rosenwald scale, but he was respectably prosperous.* His family had started in the cotton business in the South with the original Lehman brothers, who later came to New York to found the famous investment banking house, and Edgar was a cotton broker, a member of the family firm, and on the Cotton Exchange. He was a pleasant, mild-mannered man, some ten years older than his wife and clearly fascinated by her energy, enthusiasm, and determination. Determination was a quality which he himself lacked. During their courtship she had extracted a promise from him: when he reached age fifty, he would take a year off from his business, and they would spend that year traveling all over the world. He made the promise and promptly forgot about it, only to be reminded of it years later—a little, it seemed, to his regret.

  Edith was a small, trim woman with a thin, handsome face, bright eyes, and an attractively crooked smile. She had vivid red hair and the temperament that is often associated with redheads. Her education, in the tradition of moneyed young ladies of the era, was minimal but genteel—the social graces: how to preside at a tea table, how to dance, play the piano, a smattering of French and Italian, tennis, horsewomanship. She had never actually graduated from high school, but she had been brought up in the tradition that with wealth went civic responsibility. Like her father, she was a very organized person, and it was said of her that if Edith were ever stranded on a desert island the first thing she would do would be to organize the grains of sand on the beach according to size, shape, and color.

  When Edith Stern arrived in New Orleans as a bride just before the First World War, she found a very different sort of world from the one she had left behind in bustling, no-nonsense Chicago. New Orleans was—and is—a dreaming city, full of secrets and rites and arcane rituals, a city of hidden courtyards and fountains behind high bougainvillaea-covered walls and filigreed iron gates. It was a city of mysteries guarded from outsiders—who will the Queen of Carnival be?—a girlish city of whispers and giggles and gossip. Sultry in summer, damp in winter, it was a city that seemed to have been frozen in time somewhere in another century. It was also a city so entrenched in prejudice that prejudice had become a social art—not so much against Jews or blacks as against anyone you didn’t really know. It was a city of the dainty, flirtatious, lazy southern belle, whose pose, at least, was helplessness and a weakness for Coca-Cola laced with a tot of Bourbon. When Edith Stern first arrived in New Orleans, she was not entirely pleased with what she saw.

  What she saw was a community pleasantly congealed in a state of civic lethargy. Public philanthropy was virtually nonexistent. In general, the Jews of New Orleans were more charitable and public-spirited than the Christian majority, but even the Jews were not contributing to the extent t
hat they were in other cities. The total preoccupation of New Orleans appeared to be its annual Mardi Gras, and no sooner had the curtain been rung down on one year’s Carnival revels than the city’s leaders sat down to begin another year-long planning for the next. The various Krewes—the Krewe of Comus, the Krewe of Rex—that ran the Carnival were, Edith quickly realized, based not only on snobbery but on fantasy and myth. The identity of Rex, for example, the King of the Carnival, was supposed to be a closely guarded secret. Everybody in town knew who he was: And the Queen—“Princess Summer-Spring-Winter-Fall”—was supposed to be the lucky debutante who found the gold coin in her piece of cake after it had been cut. No one wondered how it could be that, immediately after she had found her coin with a cry of gay surprise, the girl and her parents would drive home to host a gala catered dinner dance for six hundred guests under a tent, to celebrate the lucky accident.

  The Carnival balls, meanwhile, excluded Jews. Early on in her New Orleans career, Edith Stern made it a conspicuous point to leave the city with her husband during Mardi Gras as an expression of disapproval. Soon other prominent Jewish families would follow the Sterns’ example.

  Obviously, Edith decided, if one were going to change the ways of an inbred and ingrown city, one needed an imposing platform from which to do it—a stage, such as Eva Stotesbury and Isabella Gardner created for themselves at Whitemarsh Hall and Fenway Court. The architects William and Jeffrey Platt were summoned from New York, and plans for a great estate in suburban Metairie were laid out, an estate that would include a grand Greek Revival house and acres of formal gardens. “We’ll do the house,” her husband told her, “on one condition—that you never look at a single bill.” This was a little odd, of course, because the house would be built entirely with Edith’s money, but it was like Edgar—supportive, making her feel that whatever she did was perfectly all right with him.

  Interestingly enough, J.R.—the man who had raged at his children when a light bulb was left burning—was delighted with the idea of Edith’s building a splendid house. Had he mellowed in his older age, or was it just, as his children suspected, that he was happy to see them married so that they would not come home and be a burden to him? In any case, J.R. contributed generously to the construction of the house; when he visited, Edgar Stern would often find a bookmark in a book he was reading replaced by a check from J.R. for many thousands of dollars.

  The estate was called Longue Vue, and when it was finished in the early 1920s it was considered one of the most beautiful houses in the South, and the view was long indeed—clear to the shores of Lake Pontchartrain. It was a place designed for grand entertainments, and it was not long before Edith’s parties were the talk of the city. Wisely, for her formal bow to New Orleans society Edith chose not to appear as a haughty northerner bent on changing an old-fashioned city’s backward ways (though this was exactly what she had in mind). Instead, she made a display of embracing local customs—giving her estate a French name was part of this campaign—and cuisine. For her parties Edith always offered favorite local dishes and in lavish amounts: whole oyster bars set up with hundreds of raw and fried oysters, gumbo, grillards—a regional dish of veal with grits—and, finally, café brûlot, over whose flaming bowl she presided. As a hostess, she simply set out to out—New Orleans New Orleans. Over her lifetime she would earn many nicknames in addition to Effie, but one of her husband’s pet names for her was “Angèle, my Yankee Creole.”

  “If she had wanted to,” her son Philip said in 1981, “she could have organized General Motors. We used to say that if Mother couldn’t get a seat on an airplane, she’d buy the airline.” One of her favorite retorts, when told that something she wanted done would be difficult if not out of the question, was “Don’t be ridiculous!” “Don’t be ridiculous!” she would cry if told that ten thousand Japanese lanterns, which she wanted to decorate her gardens for a party, were not available in the entire South. Hours later, they would be flown in from somewhere. For her parties she kept elaborate lists, everything referenced and cross-referenced, of guests, menus, flowers, table settings, wines, indoor and outdoor décor, the waiters’ uniforms, what the musicians would wear and what the musical selections would be. As she moved through her day she carried a thick sheaf of papers, checking off chores that had been completed against those that remained to be done. Through entertaining, Edith and Edgar Stern established themselves as members of New Orleans society—parties were what New Orleans was really all about, anyway—and when the New Orleans Country Club was organized, the Sterns were among the very few Jewish families invited to be charter members.

  As the children—Edgar, Jr., Audrey, and Philip—came along, their birthday parties became a part of Edith’s repertoire of entertainments and were always lavish affairs. One children’s party, for example, was a full-scale circus held under a striped tent, complete with dancing bears and performing seals. The children were supplied with play money to admit them to the sideshows. At the same time, in the tradition of J.R., the Stern children’s allowances were smaller than any of their friends’. It was supposed to be their father’s chore to pass out these weekly sums, but he inevitably forgot to do so and on Saturdays, when the allowances were due, Edith took to wearing a dress that had nickels for buttons, to remind him. “And,” Philip Stern recalls, “a nickel a week was about all we got.”

  The Stern children were born into an era when “progressive” education had become the fashion, and, reading every book and article she could find on this subject, Edith Stern quickly made herself an expert. The New Orleans school system, she discovered, was as casually organized as the rest of the city. The public schools were hopelessly inadequate and out of date, and the few private schools, where the “best” families sent their children, were not much better. It was in the area of education that she first decided to reform New Orleans; when she approached other mothers, however, she found interest but no real enthusiasm or willingness to work. The women of New Orleans, she once said, “gave nothing at all. Southern women are brought up to be decorative not forceful, modest not vital. I must have seemed a monster to them.” Monster or not, her oldest child was approaching nursery-school age, and so Edith simply built a nursery school of her own. It stands today as the Newcomb Nursery School. That done, she next began building the Metairie Country Day School, hiring the headmaster and teaching staff, and opened its door to a first-grade class in 1929, the autumn of the Great Crash. Crash or no, she continued to add a grade a year until she had the customary eight. Like its forerunner, Metairie Country Day still operates and is considered the preeminent elementary school in the city.

  In the course of her school building, Edith found herself sparring with the city’s bureaucracy over zoning variances, building codes, and fire codes. In the process of dealing with building inspectors and other local politicians, she learned what everyone else in town had merely taken for granted—that political corruption in New Orleans was as much a genteel tradition as Mardi Gras, that bribery and graft had been elevated almost to the level of an art form. All the best people were involved in it in one way or another. This led Edith Stern to investigate the means by which some of these politicians were elected to office. She found, among other things, that many voters who could read and write were listed as “illiterate,” which meant that a voting commissioner could accompany them into the voting booth and instruct them how to vote. Perfectly able-bodied men and women were listed as “disabled,” and were given the same assistance. She unearthed voters who were registered under a variety of names, thus permitting them to vote dozens of times apiece. She also found voters whose actual whereabouts were in the local cemeteries. It was the New Orleans blacks, of course, who were the most victimized in these schemes, and blacks who were unwilling to go along with them were afraid to vote at all. After getting permission to examine the city’s voter rolls, she announced that she had found at least 10,000 illegally registered voters, and that this was only the tip of the iceberg.

&
nbsp; If J.R.’s work with black causes had not been particularly fashionable in Chicago and the Northeast, his daughter’s crusade for black enfranchisement and an honest voter-registration system in an old, tradition-ridden southern city was even less so. Nor did her announcements about voter fraud in the local papers endear her to the politicians. There were threatening letters. There were anonymous telephone calls. Edith Stern paid them no heed. In a modest office she set up the Voters Registration Service, which had a twofold purpose: to get the phony registrations off the rolls and, at the same time, to educate the black population in the importance of what she was trying to do.

  Obviously, she was helped in her enormous and unpopular task by the fact that she was very rich. But Edith’s power was more than the power of her purse. There was also the power of her don’t-be-ridiculous personality. A tiny woman, she charged into situations with such force that lethargy and indifference gave way before her like the waters of the Red Sea. Seeing how effective she could be, other New Orleans women now began to go along with her. (And who would want to be left out of the best parties in New Orleans?) Soon she had marshaled a small army of women for her Voters Service, and she organized a “broom parade” of socially prominent women who, brooms in hand, marched on City Hall, the message, of course, being that it was time to sweep the rascals out. Within a year, a mayor was out of office and Edith’s Voters Service was supervising registrations. It has done so ever since.