The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  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 book; by Angeline’s is the Book of Common Prayer. Willie Walter, Mrs. Gordan’s grandfather, used to frown at the pictures when he entered the room and mutter, “It was not a mixed marriage. It was not!”

  By strict crowd standards, one does not have to marry out of the faith to enter into a mésalliance. Years ago, Samuel Sachs’s daughter, Ella, married a man named Harry Plotz, who was Polish, and there was a terrible fuss. It was not that young Plotz talked Socialism, but he talked Socialism so loudly. At about the same time, when Alva Bernheimer, who was definitely in the crowd, married the late Bernard Gimbel, who was not, this was considered an unfortunate match. The crowd considered the Gimbels “storekeepers.” Someone said, “One department store family is enough,” meaning the Strauses. Needless to say, with Gimbel’s and Macy’s the great Herald Square rivals, no Gimbel ever married a Straus.

  When Gerald Warburg married Natica Nast, the daughter of Condé Nast, the crowd was just as startled. For a long time Natica, although a Catholic, was referred to as “a little Huguenot girl,” and, by her mother-in-law, as “a girl of French extraction.” The crowd still seemed unprepared, a generation later in 1950, for Felicia Warburg’s marriage to Robert W. Sarnoff—whom one member of the crowd explained was “the son of that Russian radio man,” Brigadier General David Sarnoff, chairman of the board of RCA. People had also sniffed in the 1920’s when it was announced that John L. Loeb, son of Carl M., was engaged to marry the Arthur Lehmans’ youngest daughter, Frances. At the Seligmans’ Fishrock Camp in the Adirondacks someone said, “But those Loebs aren’t the Loebs!”

  But when R. Peter Straus married Ellen Sulzberger, the crowd was pleased to note that some people, at least, were doing the traditional—if increasingly rare—thing by marrying “within the crowd.”

  As happens in any social group, the German Jewish crowd in New York has become stratified, and a certain pecking order has evolved based on seniority. There is an Old Guard—families who migrated to America between 1837 and 1860—which would include the Seligmans, Lehmans, Strauses, Sachses, Goldmans, and “perhaps” the Guggenheims. The Guggenheims are a problem because, though they arrived in America relatively early (but not so early as the Seligmans and Lehmans), they did not become staggeringly rich until relatively late, and did not arrive on the New York scene until 1888, at which point the other German Jewish families had already coalesced into a fixed group. It took the crowd a while to get used to the explosive presence of the Guggenheims. As Peggy Guggenheim (whose mother was a Seligman) says of her two grandfathers, “Mr. Guggenheim far surpassed Mr. Seligman in amassing an enormous fortune and buying up most of the copper mines in the world, but he never succeeded in attaining Mr. Seligman’s social distinction.” In fact, the Seligmans were upset when Peggy’s mother consented to marry Mr. Guggenheim. They dispatched a curt wire to Paris relatives saying, “Florette engaged to Benjamin Guggenheim, smelter.” Everyone chuckled at the droll way the message became garbled crossing the Atlantic. It read, “Florette engaged. Benjamin Guggenheim smelt her.” Also Old Guard are the descendants of Solomon Loeb (of Kuhn, Loeb), though he was a somewhat younger man than the progenitor Seligmans and Lehmans, and did not move from Cincinnati to New York until 1865.

  Another member of this first generation of German Jewish immigrants—though he was never a part of the Old Guard “crowd”—was August Belmont. As German Jewish life became fuguelike, his influence provided an odd and troubling counterpoint.

  Such names as Lewisohn, Schiff, and Thalmann belong to a younger generation who migrated to New York soon after the Civil War. The Warburgs and Otto Kahn belong to a third, still younger group who came in the 1890’s. Kahn, Schiff, and the Warburg brothers became imposingly rich, and all three names became polarized around Kuhn, Loeb & Company. There is a general feeling that these youngsters did not have to work quite so hard for their money as the Old Guard did. A split began to develop within the crowd, between the bright, young, very rich “new group” and the settled, established, not-quite-so-rich “older group.” It was not only a difference in ages, but a difference in how the two groups “did things.” Though they all saw each other and entertained each other, there were—emotionally, at least—two crowds.

  The Warburgs like to point out that
the Warburg family were well-to-do bankers in Germany long before any of the Seligmans or Lehmans, who were poor, even dreamed of coming to America. The Lehman-Seligman camp is apt to say, “The Warburgs weren’t anybody until they married into the Schiffs, and Schiff wasn’t anybody until he married into the Loebs, so there you are.” The Warburgs say loftily, “We came to America and showed all the others how to do it.” To this, one of the Lehmans has replied sharply, “They tried to tell everybody how to do it, is what they mean. Our family never had much to do with that Schiff-Warburg group. We considered them terribly bossy. Of course there were some people who tried to play their game. It was called ‘Keeping up with the Schiffs.’” “It must be terrible,” Lord Lionel Rothschild is supposed to have said, “to be a Jew and not be named Rothschild.” Clearly he was unaware of what was going on across the Atlantic in New York.

  Today in New York, when members of the crowd get together, long hours can be spent arguing about which of the great German Jewish families is the greatest, or grandest, or has accomplished the most, or contributed the most. Which is the grandest of the families Cleveland Amory has labeled “The Jewish Grand Dukes”? Several think the Schiffs and the Warburgs, on the basis of their philanthropies alone, should receive the palm. Others champion the Strauses, who, though their money was made “in trade” (some Strauses branched out into banking), have not been idle as philanthropists either, and have also contributed notable figures to the worlds of American diplomacy, publishing, and public service. Others argue that, if one is going to talk about public service and government, one must give first place to the Lehmans, who have contributed a New York Governor and U.S. Senator (Herbert), a prominent jurist (Irving), a major American art collector (Robert), and a promising young politican in the fourth generation (Orin).