Who Knew?
Page 21
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1. Harry Simonhoff, Saga of American Jewry, 1865–1914: Links of an Endless Chain (New York: Arco, 1959), 241.
2. Ibid., 241–43.
...the Guggenheims proved that fair play is good business
In April of 1899, the Smelters Association of Colorado was organized “to fix prices [of copper] and stifle competition.”1 The prospectus stated that their intention was “to combine all the principal smelting works in the United States with the exception of the Guggenheims,” a family in the smelting business.2
In the meantime, the Colorado General Assembly passed a law prohibiting employers from working their men more than eight hours without paying overtime. The Guggenheims accepted the new law, but the Smelters Association of Colorado changed their payment method to an hourly wage carefully calibrated to require eight hours of straight time and four hours of overtime in order to earn the same pay workers were earning before the eight-hour day was passed into law. The Western Federation of Miners answered by going on strike against every smelter of the association.
Since all the other smelters were shut down, the mine owners took their business to the Guggenheim-owned Philadelphia Smelter in Pueblo, Colorado. The strike lasted two months; eventually the eighthour-day law was declared unconstitutional and the twelve-hour day returned. But many miners stayed with the Guggenheims, because they seemed like a better company to deal with.
Obstinately, the association raised processing prices for the small mine owners, and lowered the price it paid miners for gold, thus driving more of them to do business with the Guggenheims.3
Eventually, the association had to come to the Guggenheims, and after some complex negotiations, the Guggenheims took control of the association.4 Of course, trusts were eventually declared illegal on the grounds of restraint of trade, but the Guggenheims proved that fair dealings could also mean good business. They went on to become very philanthropic especially in the field of aeronautics.
In an amazing irony, the Guggenheims sponsored Charles Lindbergh’s cross-country aviation tour after the epic flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Lindbergh turned out to be a Nazi sympathizer who opposed the United States’ involvement in fighting Hitler and the Third Reich.
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1. Edwin P. Hoyt Jr., The Guggenheims and the American Dream (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), 116.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 120, 128.
4. Ibid.
...Guggenheim thought of the New Deal twenty years before Roosevelt
The early part of the twentieth century was critical for workers in America generally and for miners and smelters in particular. The owners ruthlessly exploited their workers, and anybody who complained could be easily replaced by newly arrived immigrants from Poland, China, or perhaps from the Balkan countries. But the workers did complain, and there were major strikes in the metals industry in 1911, 1912, and 1913.1
It was in this atmosphere that Daniel Guggenheim decided that there had to be a better way. The Guggenheim-controlled American Smelter and Refining set up their own bureau of labor relations in order to care for any labor problems that might arise. In 1915 the Wilson administration’s United States Industrial Relations Commission was holding hearings and Daniel Guggenheim was called to testify.
His response to the commission was an astounding statement considering that at that time there were no child labor laws, and management routinely opposed independent unions. Guggenheim stated:
There is today a great difference between the rich man and the poor man. To remedy this is too big a job for the state or the employer to tackle single-handed. There should be a combination in this work between the Federal government, the state, the employer, and the employee. The men want more comforts – more of the luxuries of life. They are entitled to them. I say this because humanity owes it to them.2 [Italics added]
He went on further to state:
I think the State should furnish work for the men who lack employment. You may call me Socialistic if you like, but it is a job of the United States to look after its people. Were it not for the philanthropic work, there would be a revolution here. But sufficient help is not given in this case. People won’t give up the money they make easily, even if they have more than they need. So the government must raise the money – raise it by taxing the estates of the rich, if you will – but the United States must raise it some way.3 [Italics added]
This prophetic statement was uttered almost two decades before Roosevelt’s New Deal attempted exactly what Daniel Guggenheim was proposing!
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1. Edwin P. Hoyt Jr., The Guggenheims and the American Dream (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1968), 235.
2. Ibid., 234–35.
3. Ibid., 235–36.
...Jews were heavily involved in prostitution
At the turn of the twentieth century, when masses of immigrants were flooding into America, it was only a short time before the long hours in the sweatshop, the grinding poverty of a system designed to exploit cheap immigrant labor, and the hopelessness of finding a way out of their misery began to take its toll on the lives of the Jewish newcomers to the goldene medina, the “golden land.”1
Some immigrants turned to violent crime, some became professional boxers, still others turned to prostitution – most of them women but a few men as pimps and white slavers.2
From November 1908 to March 1909, the New York City magistrate’s office listed foreign-born prostitutes as 154 French, 64 German, 31 Italian, 29 Irish, 10 Polish, and 225 Jewish.3 Of course, not much can be inferred from raw figures. However, the problem was not limited to New York City. A visiting rabbi from the Transvaal province in South Africa reported widespread Jewish prostitution in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Lourenco Marques, Beira, and Salisbury. A schoolmaster reported trafficking of Jewesses by Jews in Alexandria, Cairo, and Port Said in Egypt.4
The condition spread as far as Calcutta and the free ports of China. Other reports emanated from Constantinople, where the traffickers were reputed to have their own synagogue. Of the 199 licensed brothels in Buenos Aires, Argentina, 102 had Jewish madams and fully half of the prostitutes were Jewish.5
In a relatively short time, improved economic conditions, the effectiveness of the legendary Jewish social services programs, and a corresponding curtailment of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe all contributed to the virtual eradication of a disgraceful blight on the Jewish immigrant community.6
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1. Melvin Konner, Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), 335.
2. Ibid., 336–37.
3. Ibid., 336.
4. Ibid., 337.
5. Ibid.
6. For more on the subject see Rich Cohen, Tough Jews (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), and Allen Bodner, When Boxing Was a Jewish Sport (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997).
...entering the wrong door can change a life
In 1900, four days after his arrival in America from Russia, nine-yearold David Sarnoff was hawking the Yiddish daily newspaper Tageblatt. So resourceful was young David that he earned as much in two hours as a sweatshop worker could earn in a day and had time for school.1
There David encountered a teacher who was using Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to spew anti-Semitic venom in the classroom. When David objected, he was taken to the principal’s office where the teacher delivered an ultimatum: he would resign if David was not expelled from his class. David countered that he had connections in the media, and that it would not look good for the school to be portrayed as fostering anti-Semitism. The principal accepted the teacher’s resignation.2
After having purchased a newsstand for his family, David began to look for a job. He applied to be a bicycle messenger for the New York Herald, was accepted, and told to report to the personnel office. By mistake, David entered the wrong door and went into the offices of the Commercial Cable Company where he was given a job deliveri
ng telegrams.
In order to understand the priorities involved in delivering the telegrams, David taught himself Morse code. Soon he was tapping out coded messages with a counterpart across town. David soon was promoted to the position of a telegrapher. He was still spending four hours a day picking up and delivering the newspapers to the family newsstand.3
When David asked for time off without pay to sing in the synagogue choir on the High Holy Days, he was immediately fired. To add to his woes, the choir director reduced his pay by a nickel, because he could no longer hit a high C. However, he landed a new job as a radio operator for the navy.
One night, back in New York at a special station atop Wanamaker’s Department Store, David picked up a signal from the SS Olympic, one of the ships on the way to help rescue survivors of the sinking Titanic. David stayed at his post for seventy-two hours receiving and sending news of the tragedy. In that short period of time, Sarnoff became a media sensation. The instant fame and his rise in the organization culminated in his becoming general manager of the company, by that time known as the Radio Corporation of America, RCA.4
David Sarnoff ‘s talents would have certainly made him a success in life, but had he not entered by the wrong door when he applied for the job, his life would have been much different.
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1. Stephen Birmingham, The Rest of Us: The Rise of America’s Eastern European Jews(Boston: Little, Brown, 1984), 93–94.
2. Ibid., 96.
3. Ibid., 98.
4. Ibid., 98–101.
...Harry Kane was a minor-league sensation but a major-league flop
Harry Kane (born Cohen) was a left-handed pitcher for Springfield in the Missouri Valley League. In the 1902 season, he won twenty out of twenty-one games including three no-hitters. That year he was promoted to the major-league St. Louis Browns, but his debut was undistinguished. His earned run average was 5.48, and in 1903 he was back to the minor league in Springfield.
That season he again pitched three no-hitters. He also pitched a double-header winning both games with three-hit shutouts. He was again promoted to the major leagues, this time to the Detroit Tigers, but the 1904 season found him back in the minors. In fifty-one innings he did not allow a single run. In 1905 he pitched for Savannah and pitched a thirteen-inning no-hitter which he lost 1-0.
In 1905, he was back in the major leagues, this time with Philadelphia. His record was 1-1 including a five-hit shutout of the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1906 he pitched in six games for the Phillies. He quit playing in 1906 leaving a record of fifteen major-league games played. He won two, lost seven, and had an earned run average of 4.81.
He became an umpire in 1906.1
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1. Peter S. Horvitz and Joachim Horvitz, The Big Book of Jewish Baseball: An Illustrated Encyclopedia and Anecdotal History (New York: SPI Books, 2001).
...a Jewish girl went into business in order to buy a blouse
Josephine Esther (Esty) Mentzer was born in 1908 to an immigrant Jewish family in New York. She began to hone her marketing skills in her father’s hardware store and in her half-brother’s dry goods store. However, she found her real calling when she began to sell a face cream developed by her uncle, who was a chemist. Esty herself experimented with the cream for about twenty years before it was perfected.1 She sometimes went to beauty salons where she gave free face cream treatments to women who were waiting for their hair to dry. She had a good product, and many women bought it.2
An incident in a beauty parlor proved to be a pivotal moment in Esty’s life. An elegant-looking woman entered the salon wearing a blouse that Esty admired. When she asked the woman where she bought it, the woman replied, “What difference could it possibly make? You could never afford it.” Esty was humiliated and vowed that some day she would be able to buy anything she wanted.3
At the age of nineteen, Esty married Joseph Lauter. They had two sons, but Esty continued to market cosmetics. She always carried samples of her products wherever she went. After a while, her husband quit his job to help Esty in her business. They got their big break in 1948 when Saks Fifth Avenue placed a sizable order. Esty and Joseph made up the creams in their factory, a converted restaurant. Esty personally worked the counter and Saks sold out their supply in two days.4 Other stores including Bloomingdales, Marshall Field’s, Neiman-Marcus, Harrods in London, and Galleries Lafayette in Paris began to carry their products. Esty and Joseph began to make their fortune and Esty now spelled her name “Estee,” also changing Lauter to “Lauder.”5
In 1998 Estee Lauder controlled 45 percent of the American market in cosmetics, and had sales of $3.6 billion in 118 countries. The Lauder family shares were worth more than $6 billion.6 Estee Lauder could now buy the blouse she so admired and anything else she might desire!
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1. Deborah G. Felder and Diana Rosen, Fifty Jewish Women Who Changed the World (New York: Kensington, 2003), 182.
2. CBS News, “Cosmetics Mogul Estee Lauder Dies,” April 12, 2004; http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/04/12/national/mail/main611403.shtml.
3. Todd G. Buchholz, New Ideas from Dead CEOs: Lasting Lessons from the Corner Office (New York: Collins, 2007), 86; Sara Alpern, “Estee Lauder,” Jewish Virtual Library, 2007 http://jewish virtuallibrary.org/ jsource/Lauder.html.
4. The Economist 371 (2004): 88.
5. CBS News, “Cosmetics Mogul Estee Lauder Dies.”
6. CBS News, People of the Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 261.
...a Jew put the brakes on Ford
Louis Marshall was the president of the American Jewish Committee from 1912 to 1929. During this time he proved his worth as a master negotiator. In 1912 he convinced the Taft administration to reject extension of the Russo-American trade treaty on the grounds that Russia refused to grant entry visas to American Jews wishing to visit Russia. Six years later he was successful in winning over the Wilson administration to back the granting of minority rights in Eastern Europe.
Perhaps the most surprising of Marshall’s diplomatic successes was in his dealings with the rabidly anti-Semitic car manufacturer Henry Ford. Aside from his widespread distribution of the scurrilous treatise The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Ford published his own newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. This paper was Ford’s vehicle for disseminating anti-Semitism through the editorial page. Not only was Marshall able to convince Ford to cease publication of the paper, but he also convinced him to apologize for the tenor and content of the editorials.
Israel Zangwill once commented wittily that “American Jewry was living under Marshall Law.”1
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1. Howard M. Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 707.
...Jews are probably the most assimilated group in the world
During the period from 1919 to 1933, the United States Army War College was engaged in a particularly virulent campaign of racial anti-Semitism. Paramount among their racial conclusions about Jews was their congenital inability to assimilate into this country and become good Americans.1 This is a strong statement, but Lothrop Stoddard, in his lectures at the war college, failed to explain himself. Moreover, Nazi Germany and its imitators adopted the mantra that it was impossible to assimilate Jews into their society.
The beginning of the answer to this wild allegation might be found in the days of the Roman Empire. During the reign of Claudius in the first century CE, the population of the empire was between 55,000,000 and 100,000,000. It was estimated that there were about 6,944,000 Jews in the empire and perhaps another million in the areas adjacent to it. This meant that the Jewish population of the empire was no less than 7 percent and perhaps as high as 10 percent.2
However, with the rise of Christianity, the Jewish population of Europe dwindled to about 1,000,000, a loss estimated at between 66 percent and 85 percent.3 To what might the loss be attributed? While massacres certainly accounted for a percentage, they do not
explain the decimation of the population. In an era of forced conversions and severe discrimination against those who tried to cling to their faith, conversion was often the only way to relieve the suffering.
Even in areas where persecution was minimal, the Jewish population continued to decline. In 1638 in Italy, the Jewish population was about one per thousand. Put another way, during this period, the Italian population quadrupled, while the Jewish population barely doubled.4
It is an extreme irony that Nazi Germany found 200,000 part-Jewish soldiers and 6,000 full Jews in the Wehrmacht during World War II. Among them were literally dozens of generals and one admiral. It was a monumental task to find and weed out these “undesirables.” Hitler himself made numerous exceptions.5
The statement that the Jews do not assimilate into the larger society is not borne out by the facts.
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1. Joseph W. Bendersky, The Jewish Threat: Anti-Semitic Policies of the US Army (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
2. Cecil Roth, Personalities and Events in Jewish History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1953), 39.
3. Ibid., 40.
4. Ibid., 44.
5. Bryan Mark Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 172–89.
...Brandeis was great because he was a Jew
In 1916 President Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis to become the first Jewish justice on the United States Supreme Court. Wilson was quite surprised at the strength of the opposition to Brandeis’s nomination. Brandeis was accused of being radical, liberal, pro-union, and Jewish. During the struggle, one of Wilson’s advisors said to Wilson, “Isn’t it a shame, Mr. President, that a man as great as Mr. Justice Brandeis should be a Jew?” Wilson responded, “But he would not be Mr. Brandeis if he were not a Jew.”1