by Susan Jacoby
In addition to a distinguished career, Harold also enjoyed delightful-sounding hobbies. An article in a 1954 issue of Boats, a magazine chronicling the history of recreational boating in America, paints a charming picture (mainly from Harold’s diaries and his son’s reminiscences) of the life my great-uncle built with his close-knit family—the harmonious and satisfying domestic life my grandfather never had. Professor Harold Jacoby, the article explained, was typical of “skippers” who owned small craft and sailed for pleasure in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Accompanied by his wife and son, Harold cruised around Long Island Sound and Cape Cod in a twenty-seven-foot catboat in the days when, as the magazine pointed out, “ ‘yachting’ was generally considered the preserve of bankers, railroad presidents, and oil men.” In 1906, Harold traded in his sails for a twenty-eight-foot power boat, one of the earliest raised-deck cruisers on Long Island Sound. In winter, he moored his cruiser in Greenwich, Connecticut, “and on clear weekends the Professor and young Mac [his son] proceeded to Greenwich of a Friday evening, walked out on the ice to the boat, and clambered aboard. Before he even changed his clothes, the Professor would fire up the galley stove and have a pot of tea brewing. Saturdays they fished through the ice, went iceboating, and visited their oystermen friends. Saturday night’s dinner was a full-pot oyster stew….the good Professor had found, as have many professional men since, that a boat is a perfect place in which to leave shore routine far behind.” In 1912, Harold traded in the cruiser for a houseboat, so that his entire family could spend the summer on the water. Mac Jacoby Jr. recalls his father, the young “Mac” in the article, telling loving stories about the time the family spent together, and he and his father spent by themselves, on their succession of boats. My grandfather had also owned a sailboat, but it was sold in 1915—presumably to pay off debts. More to the point, by the time Oswald was in his forties, he rarely spent an entire weekend—on land or sea—with his family.
If my grandfather really thought his brother was a bore, he was wrong. Delving into a murky family past is a process that produces many surprises, and the discovery of my great-uncle’s large published body of work has been a source of pure enjoyment. The more I read him, the more I realized how much I would have liked him. He was a popularizer of science, gifted with the capacity to explain abstruse matters in down-to-earth, vivid images and language intelligible to a population that was simultaneously fascinated by the rapid turn-of-the-century advances in science and consumed by superstition. Reading Uncle Harold’s books and essays, directed toward readers who were the equivalent of today’s audience for the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, I have been struck by the parallel between the ambivalent attitude to science at the turn of the last century and the combination of reverence and ignorance that shapes public attitudes toward science and technology today. Harold Jacoby, like most educated men of his generation, was convinced that fundamentalist religious creeds, as well as belief in older superstitions like astrology and fortune-telling, would fade away during the twentieth century. And why not? The proliferating inventions and scientific discoveries in the last three decades of the nineteenth century were, in many respects, far more transforming, and more conducive to belief in the triumph of rationality, than the computer revolution in the closing decades of the twentieth century. From the X ray that, for the first time, laid bare the body without cutting it open, to the electric light that finally gave men power over night, late Victorian science and inventiveness stripped away the mystery of what had previously been unseen and therefore unknown and unknowable. In this environment, my great-uncle attempted to explain the difference between real science and pseudoscientific, crackpot exploitation of the new discoveries.
His first collection of essays, Practical Talks by an Astronomer, was published by Scribner’s in 1902. Throughout the book, which covers subjects ranging from advances in navigation to the scientific uses of photography, Professor Jacoby took up the cudgels on behalf of rationality. “The public attitude toward matters scientific is one of the mysteries of our time,” he observed.
It can be described best by the single word, Credulity; simple, absolute credulity Perfect confidence is the most remarkable characteristic of this unbelieving age. No charlatan, necromancer, or astrologer of three centuries ago commanded more respectful attention than does his successor of to-day….We have had the Keeley motor and the liquid-air power schemes for making something out of nothing. Extracting gold from sea-water has been duly heralded on scientific authority as an easy source of fabulous wealth for the millions. Hard-headed business men not only believe in such things, but actually invest in them their most valued possession, capital.
My great-uncle’s talent for bringing abstractions down to earth—a quality that must have served him well as a teacher—is evident in a lengthy 1927 interview on the subject of Albert Einstein’s genius. “Years ago if I were to direct you to a certain man’s address,” Professor Jacoby told a reporter for the New York Evening World, “it would have been sufficient to say that he lived at 118th Street and Broadway. Then, as time went on, I would have to make that more explicit by saying that he lived at 118th Street and Broadway on the eighteenth floor. In other words, I had to give you three dimensions, instead of only two.
“Then Einstein came along and said the time element was important: that you would have to add to the other directions the time, say 1927, and that your complete directions would now include, ‘118th Street and Broadway, the eighteenth floor, and 1927.’ That was original, for previous scientists regarded time and space as different entities, to be considered separately. Yet Einstein insisted that both should be considered together, for otherwise, if you left out the time, it would mean you had reached the given address at the wrong time and found the building crumbled away in old age.”
There is no evidence that Harold’s career at Columbia was hampered by his being a Jew—in part because he entered academia before administrators and trustees of elite universities became concerned about the rising number of student applications from Jews and began instituting measures, formal and informal, to deal with what they perceived as a “Jewish problem” on their campuses. In A History of the Jews in America, Howard M. Sachar cites a remarkable and revealing statistic: throughout the 1920s, in the entire country, fewer than one hundred Jewish professors were employed as full-time faculty in the arts and sciences. Considered from that perspective, it is easy to understand why Harold’s Jewish origins remained a sensitive subject, to be downplayed and concealed from the next generation, long after he had become the much-lionized Professor Jacoby, a fixture on the Morningside Heights campus. My great-uncle established himself at Columbia, as a student and a teacher, before university officials (at Columbia and throughout the Ivy League) became deeply concerned about the rise in Jewish student enrollment as a result of the post-1880 immigration. Upper-class anti-Semitism intensified as the Jewish student presence at first-rank universities became more visible at both undergraduate and graduate levels. In 1905, a year after Harold Jacoby was promoted to full professor, the newly wed Eleanor Roosevelt, who only later discarded the prejudices inculcated by her upbringing, mentioned casually in a letter to her mother-in-law that it must be terrible for Franklin to be surrounded by so many Jews in his classes at Columbia Law School. Such ingrained prejudices, typical of that era and social class, were shared by many of the trustees and administrators of Ivy League universities. If Harold had earned his doctorate after 1900, he probably would not have had the chance to rise through the academic ranks and become one of those fortunate one hundred exceptions.
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AS A LAWYER starting out in the 1890s, in a profession where social contacts counted for a great deal, my grandfather would have been affected more directly than his elder brother by anti-Semitism. The old-line, non-Jewish New York law firms were of course closed to him: he could choose between going into practice for himself or joining a Jewish firm. But before Oswald was permitted to begin
law school, his father insisted that he give the family business a try.
I felt my first flash of empathy for my grandfather—for I had considered his life only in terms of its impact on my father—when I spotted a three-year lacuna in his generally triumphal youthful vita. He had dreamed of becoming a lawyer since childhood—years later, Cardozo alluded to those youthful ambitions in an inscription to my grandfather on the flyleaf of a book—but Max insisted that his younger son go to work for him upon his graduation from Columbia in 1890. Harold, as a budding scientist, was exempted from the common Victorian paternal mandate that a son follow in his father’s footsteps. Oswald, who had graduated first in his class, was tethered to the business for two years. At the end of 1892, Max relented and allowed his son to enroll in New York Law School. (Since Columbia was the preeminent law school in the city, it is somewhat surprising that my grandfather studied elsewhere. One wonders whether he had had enough of being the younger brother at an institution in which the elder brother was already making a name for himself on the junior faculty.) In his law school graduating class of two hundred, Oswald took first prize for a graduation essay titled “The Doctrine of Latent Equities as Affecting the Rights of Assignees.” The essay was reprinted in a publication of the New York State Bar Association, a signal honor for a young man who had not yet been admitted to the bar. This nugget of information, describing a youthful achievement in such great detail, appeared in 1914 in a puff piece in which all of the material had obviously been supplied by the subject. That my grandfather chose to focus on a twenty-year-old honor is, in itself, a poignant comment on his state of mind and professional status in midlife.
At age twenty-four, as soon as he was admitted to the bar, Oswald chose to open his own law office in the financial district instead of joining the Jewish law firm where he had worked as a clerk while studying for the bar examination. He began to build a broad general practice that included civil and criminal cases, with a specialty in the lucrative field of fire insurance law. Oswald did extremely well financially during those early years; in 1900, when he married Edith Sondheim, his annual income was more than $20,000 a year (more than $150,000 today). Oswald frequently wound up with large settlements for his clients because he was noted for his ability to win over juries; even in an era of primitive safety laws, damage awards were rising. Especially after Theodore Roosevelt replaced the assassinated William McKinley as president and ushered in an era of more progressive social legislation, many insurance companies preferred negotiating a settlement to facing an aggressive lawyer—which Oswald definitely was—in a jury trial.
In addition to his insurance specialty, my grandfather took on a variety of quixotic cases in which he usually wound up on the side of the underdog (though not necessarily an innocent underdog). In fraud, libel, and divorce cases, he represented both defendants and plaintiffs. Oswald Jacoby’s choice of clients sheds considerable light on his character: he repeatedly and successfully represented con men who, instead of bilking widows and orphans, had applied their deceptive talents to large companies. These clients, while not Robin Hoods, tended to be sympathetic figures to juries.
My grandfather’s career was also influenced by the fact that he, like many German-descended Jews before World War I, was a progressive Republican who believed in activist government in both domestic and foreign affairs. German Jewish Democrats were the exception rather than the rule at that time. Even the exceptions, like Henry Morgenthau Sr. (whose son, Henry Jr., would become Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury), carefully described themselves as “Cleveland Democrats.” While they had strongly supported former president Grover Cleveland, they wished to distance themselves from William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1896, 1900, and 1908. (Bryan’s Christian fundamentalism was naturally viewed with great suspicion by Jews, and his most famous metaphor, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold,” did nothing to ameliorate those suspicions.) Teddy Roosevelt, who, as police commissioner of New York, had maintained excellent relations with wealthy German Jews as well as with representatives of the newer, poorer Eastern European immigrants, was a Republican who enjoyed particularly broad support within the city’s Jewish community. As president, his advocacy of laws to ease the plight of the poor—coupled with such gestures as his 1906 White House invitation to a delegation from the American Conference of Rabbis—reinforced the esteem in which he was held by Jews. My grandfather, who did not care about rabbis but did care about social legislation, supported Roosevelt as the Republican candidate in 1904 and as the Progressive third-party candidate in 1912.
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IN 1908, many of Oswald Jacoby’s affinities—his delight in the spectacle of respectable executives with egg on their faces; affinity for rogues; talent for swaying juries; and Republican political sympathies—came together in a grand larceny trial that made front-page news. He served as the defense attorney for a colorful political hanger-on and shady behind-the-scenes manipulator named Broughton Brandenburg.
The extensive newspaper accounts of my grandfather’s behavior during the trial, and his subsequent attitude toward the case, offer real insight—as well as the only confirmation from sources outside the family—into the character of a man who enjoyed living on the edge and whose own ethics were flexible. The glamorous and sometimes unscrupulous patriarch, as described by both my father and uncle, was very much on display in Oswald’s conduct of the Brandenburg case. Yet the Brandenburg affair would fascinate me even without the family connection, for it also offers a cameo portrait of what has, and has not, changed in journalistic and legal ethics since the beginning of the twentieth century.
Brandenburg was charged with forging Cleveland’s signature on a political essay and then selling it to The New York Times. The “literary agent,” as the Times described the defendant, had ties to both Democrats and Republicans. He turned up in the offices of the Times in August 1908, bearing a typewritten manuscript, with a handwritten signature allegedly written by Cleveland. In the essay, the former Democratic president made it clear that he favored the Republican presidential candidate, William Howard Taft, over Bryan, the nominee of his own party.
Hot news, but there was one small problem: Cleveland had been dead since June 24. Backed up by the executor of Cleveland’s estate, Brandenburg convinced the Times that the former president, assuming that Bryan and Taft would be nominated by their respective parties, had written the article and authorized its sale before his death. The Times went ahead and published the piece, on the front page of its Sunday magazine section, on August 30, and a delighted Republican Campaign Committee obtained the reprint rights, again through Brandenburg, for $300. Soon afterward, much to the chagrin of the Times, Cleveland’s widow protested the publication of the article and claimed that the signature had been forged (though she and everyone involved agreed that the piece accurately reflected the late president’s well-known anti-Bryan and pro-Taft convictions).
The willingness of the Times to deal with Brandenburg in the first place is something of a mystery, for the thirty-one-year-old hustler already possessed an unsavory reputation. He had been publicly implicated in an attempt, inspired by the National Association of Manufacturers, to blackmail Samuel Gompers into resigning the presidency of the American Federation of Labor. In an era when labor had few rights but workers were beginning to organize, big business correctly regarded Gompers as a formidable adversary, and Brandenburg, acting on behalf of the manufacturers’ lobbying organization, had offered the AFL president permanent financial support in return for a signed “confession” that he had been living an “immoral” and “evil” life. The Times itself had reported the failed blackmail scheme after Gompers and the AFL leaked the story to one of the paper’s Washington correspondents.
A particularly embarrassing detail, brought out by my grandfather father during Brandenburg’s trial and seized upon gleefully by the New York World and New York Herald, was that the Herald had rejected the manus
cript before Brandenburg successfully peddled it to the Times’s Sunday editor. Moreover, the Times had compounded its embarrassment with an accompanying editorial, under the headline “Grover Cleveland’s Article,” painting a portrait of the hardworking statesman composing the thought-provoking essay in his study, “just before his last illness.”
Two months after the article’s publication and Mrs. Cleveland’s disclaimer, Brandenburg was arrested on the charge of grand larceny. With extraordinary chutzpah, he compared himself to the unjustly accused victim of French anti-Semitism, Captain Alfred Dreyfus. Brandenburg did not claim to be the target of anti-Semites but instead declared himself a victim of conspiratorial Democrats wishing to discredit Cleveland’s endorsement of Taft. The newspaper stories do not reveal whether Brandenburg himself was Jewish, but his last name (even though there may also be non-Jewish Brandenburgs of German descent) and the Dreyfus comparison are certainly suggestive. That Brandenburg picked a Jewish lawyer to defend him is also suggestive but hardly conclusive in New York City, where Jewish lawyers were certainly no novelty by 1908. No doubt the determining factor in the choice of Oswald Jacoby was his reputation as a litigator who possessed—as he would demonstrate in Brandenburg’s defense—a keen sense of how best to appeal to sophisticated New York jurors.
During the trial, Oswald confounded the district attorney, who had lined up a parade of handwriting experts to testify for the prosecution, by having his client freely admit that he was the one who signed the article. Oswald then led the jury to focus on the judgment of the Times editors who bought the manuscript rather than on the behavior of his client. The jury had already learned from defense witnesses that Brandenburg had met with Cleveland several months before his death, discussed a prospective series of articles, and received authorization to act as the president’s agent. Moreover, the executor of the estate had reaffirmed Brandenburg’s commission (to him and to the Times editor who asked whether Brandenburg was authorized to sell the rights) after Cleveland’s death. One of Oswald’s shrewdest maneuvers was to keep Mrs. Cleveland’s testimony—she had no firsthand personal knowledge whether her husband had or had not written the article—out of the record. My grandfather understood that he was much more likely to win his case by grilling evasive Timesmen than by cross-examining the grieving widow. As the Times noted mournfully, “Mr. Jacoby…put so much opposition in the way of Mrs. Cleveland’s testimony that her journey from Tamworth to New York specially to take the stand was of practically no avail.”