The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Henry Seligman

  The letters had their effect; a pension bill was passed in 1870. Characteristically, Mrs. Lincoln, who later became insane, never thanked the Seligmans. But from their letters it is clear that they never expected her to be grateful; they were expressing nothing more than their “devotion to the Name of Lincoln.”

  America, “the land of infinite promise,” had become a sacred object in Joseph Seligman’s mind. It was one of the few things about which he would permit himself to be sentimental. In 1874 his third eldest daughter, Sophie, had consented to marry Moritz Walter, the son of another prominent German Jewish family (I. D. Walter & Company were woolen merchants). While plans for Sophie’s engagement party were under way, a young justice of the Alabama Supreme Court arrived in New York from Montgomery to try to obtain a loan from New York bankers for his state. He contacted the pro-South Lehmans, who, in addition to their cotton brokerage business, had taken on the job of fiscal agents to Alabama shortly after the close of the Civil War. But the Lehmans were unable to help, and the judge was about to return home empty-handed when a friend suggested the Seligmans. With their reputation as ardent supporters of the Union cause, they seemed an unlikely source, but the judge was willing to try.

  Joseph Seligman received him, listened to his plea, then said with his customary formality, “Will you do me and my family the honor of dining with us this evening? We are announcing the engagement of our daughter. Perhaps at the party we’ll be able to give you a more definite answer about the loan.”

  It was a large party, with dozens of Seligmans, Walters, relatives, and friends. There were cheers, toasts, and speeches. Then Joseph, the leader of the family, stood up to speak—of Sophie’s heritage, wandering back to the Baiersdorf he had known as a boy, his first trip to America with one hundred dollars sewed in the seat of his pants, his Mauch Chunk days, his peddling adventures in the South. While the bemused judge listened, Joseph began a long story about a young Jewish peddler in Selma who, as a result of an unjust accusation and religious bias, was about to be sentenced to prison until the young son of an Alabama judge stood up in his defense. “That friendless peddler,” said Joseph, “was myself, and the judge’s son is the Alabama Supreme Court justice who honors our table tonight.” Turning to the Southerner, he said, “Sir, if you will call at my office in the morning, my brothers and I will be happy to advance your state one million dollars—at 6 percent interest.”

  “It was exactly the sort of grand gesture,” commented one of his sons, “that my father liked to make.”

  But it was more than that. Family, friends, marriage, business—Joseph saw these as ingredients in a mixture of thickening consistency. Engagements, marriages, and the births of children all served to enrich the concoction; on these occasions money transactions nearly always took place, only to bind the elements closer together—the more the money, the tighter the bond.

  The Southerner had felt a little odd and out of place at the party “among the Jewish haute bourgeoisie,” as he wrote later. To Joseph, it was part of his new picture of himself. He had already served on boards (of the “Katy,” for instance) with men like George C. Clark and August Belmont. His firm had begun to cosponsor multimillion-dollar issues with J. P. Morgan, who was becoming a major financial figure. With Felix Adler he had discussed founding the Ethical Culture Society, which Joseph did not think of as a “conversion” from, but perhaps an American substitute for, Old World Judaism. Having lunch at the White House or a gentile to dinner; commercial banking; Mrs. Potter Palmer’s laughter; California’s wheatfields, sixteen-quart-a-day cows, and fast-growing century plants; his wish to own his own house; caring for Mrs. Lincoln; even his hectic activities with “the d—d railroads” that were growing across the American landscape even faster than the fastest-growing century plant—in Joseph’s mind they all added up to a perfectly assimilated Jew in America.

  *Some local booster must have been trying to impress Joseph with this tall tale. Century plants cannot grow at the rate of half a foot a day, even in San José.

  16

  THE ASSIMILATIONISTS

  At the time of the Panic of 1873, Harper’s Weekly published a three-panel cartoon depicting the three kinds of men who were, supposedly, involved in the debacle. In the first panel, above the caption “Lost,” sat the disconsolate small-businessman, head in hand, brooding over his empty desk. In the second was “The Paying Teller,” perspiring, in shirt sleeves, frantically paying out handfuls of greenbacks in the public run on commercial banks. In the third, above the word “Gained,” was the private banker, sitting, with his hands on his knees, on his fat bags of gold. Though the name on the latter’s window was the fictitious “Catch ’Im & Pluck ’Im, Bankers,” the cartoonist’s intent was immediately apparent, for the banker’s gloating, bearded face was heavily Semitic.

  If any of the German Jewish bankers noticed this slur at the time, as they must have, none of them commented on it.

  Formal anti-Semitism is based on certain specific assumptions: that Jews are recognizable from all other people as a “nation,” and should not be treated as fellow citizens; and that Jews are, from birth, unpatriotic to their adopted country. It argues an “international plot” of Jews to take over the world by such quaint measures as “the use of liquor to befuddle the brains of Christian leaders.” (In 1903 these accusations were supported by the publication of a thoroughly spurious “document,” The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.) But anti-Semitism is not always formal, nor does it always display such definite symptoms. Often it is a vaguely defined “aversion,” based on distrust or—when aimed at wealthy Jews—jealousy. Even New England, where Jews were widely admired, produced some anti-Semites for some thoroughly peculiar reasons. John Jay Chapman, for instance, was for many years what one might call a rabid pro-Semite. He claimed that the Jews represented a concentration of every human virtue, and insisted that they were smarter, braver, stronger, kinder, more pious and more moral than any other people. He considered them one of the world’s great wonders, and compared them to the Parthenon and the Pyramids. Then Mr. Chapman took a trip to Atlantic City, where he witnessed Jewish families sunning themselves on the beach. He was so embittered at the discovery that Jews were no different from anybody else that he turned against them, and denounced them as stupid, uncritical, and “inferior.”

  In the years following the Civil War, as men like Joseph Seligman grew prosperous and performed feats that were reported in the newspapers, there was bound to be, among men less successful, a certain envy. And among the more powerful there were fear and a growing determination to keep men like Joseph Seligman “in their place.” Joseph was now cooperating with John Pierpont Morgan, that curious and crotchety son of an expatriate New Englander who had turned to private banking, and who had returned to New York at a propitious moment, just before the outbreak of the war. If the Seligmans had been hurt by their association with Jay Gould and the “gold conspiracy” of a few years earlier, they were not helped by their new relationship with Morgan. Morgan was more feared than adored in Wall Street, and his own record for honest dealings was not entirely clean. Moreover, though Morgan was not an anti-Semite, he was a thorough snob. He treated the German-accented Joseph Seligman sniffily and condescendingly, and always insisted that Joseph come to his office to discuss business; he would not go to Joseph’s. Joseph, meanwhile, disliked Morgan and was moved to comment, “Morgan—J. P. of Drexel, Morgan—is a rough, uncouth fellow, continually quarreling with Drexel in the office.”

  The term “social climber” had come into existence as New York society congratulated itself with the notion that “everybody and his cousin” who were outside its confines wanted desperately to get in. There were “nice people,” and there were “common people,” and as a rule of thumb all people with accents were common. German Jews who aspired to social acceptance, or even equality, encountered a heightening wall of exclusion. Furthermore, it was not a wall being built entirely by genti
les.

  The Sephardic merchant families, “remarkable for their haughtiness, high sense of honor and their stately manners,” according to a contemporary chronicler, occupied a quiet but secure place in society, Ward McAllister notwithstanding. A number of men of old New York gentile society, including a Hamilton and a DeLancey, had married Sephardic Jewesses. There were Sephardim in all the best clubs. The Union Club, New York’s most exclusive, contained several Hendrickses, Lazaruses, and Nathans, along with Mr. McAllister. (In 1863 a group of dissident members resigned when the Union Club refused to expel Judah P. Benjamin, not for being a Jew but for being a Southerner and one of the financial wizards of the Confederacy; this group then organized the Union League Club and, in a flourish of Northern patriotism, immediately took in the North’s financial wizard, Joseph Seligman.) Moses Lazarus, father of Emma, had been a founding member of the Knickerbocker Club, New York’s second-most exclusive. The Sephardim made the most of their entrenched position, and, if German Jews found the gentiles in New York society indifferent, they found the Sephardic Jews almost unapproachable.

  The German Jews, by the 1870’s, were called “Forty-Eighters,” after the pivotal year of their migration from Germany. A careful distinction was drawn between Jews of the “Nathan type,” and those of the “Seligman type,” between “the better class of Jews” and “vulgar Jews,” between “Sephardic” and “German,” and, finally, between “refined Hebrew ladies and gentlemen” and “Jews.” The more the Germans insisted that they were “Hebrews,” not “Jews,” the more the Sephardim tried to disassociate themselves from the accented newcomers by stressing their ancient Spanish heritage.* In 1872 a New York society journal featured the news of a “fashionable Hebrew wedding,” pointing out that the bride and groom were both members of “old American Sephardic families.” It began to be clear that, no matter how much they might wish to be, immigrant Germans were not really quite “American.” In exactly the same fashion, and for the same reasons, native New York Catholic families looked down on the newer-arrived Catholics from Germany and the “shanty Irish,” who had come to escape the potato famine.

  In the gaslit New York of 1876, the hand torch of the Statue of Liberty, the gift from France, sprouted surrealistically from a street corner at Fifth Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street—part of a campaign to raise money to get the rest of the statue assembled on an island in the harbor, where it would welcome immigrants to the New World. (France had contributed $450,000 toward the erection of the statue, but expected the United States to contribute an additional $350,000 for the construction of a pedestal. For several years, while Americans bickered over who should pay this bill, the rest of Bertholdi’s 225-ton lady reposed in a warehouse.) Emma Lazarus had written her lines, “Give me your tired, your poor …” to be inscribed upon the base of the controversial gift. Miss Lazarus’ lines had a majestic ring. But—or so it seemed at the time—they also conveyed a somewhat condescending tone. Seligmans, Lehmans, and Goldmans may have arrived tired and poor, but did not enjoy being called “the wretched refuse” of some teeming European shore. Many German Jews in the 1870’s, perhaps overquick to sense a slight where none was intended, interpreted Miss Lazarus’ words as a snide comment on their own humble immigrant beginnings. Subscribing funds for the statue’s erection on Bedloe’s Island became largely a Sephardic project, eschewed by Germans. Such forces served to draw the Germans even closer to one another, into their own “Hebrew Select,” with their own exclusive standards.

  There was another force building against them. After the Panic of 1873 bankers as a class found themselves under a cloud. To be a “merchant banker” or a “financier” was becoming a less than praiseworthy occupation. “Wall Street,” from the street of enterprise, was becoming a national symbol of avarice and evil—“the wickedest street in the world.” Men like Joseph Seligman were in a line of work that was becoming less and less “respectable.”

  There was of course one German Jewish banker in the Union Club. His name was August Belmont. (There were more if one counted his sons, Perry, Oliver H. P., and August, Jr.) By the 1870’s, however, another of his strange character changes had taken place. Though he still headed August Belmont & Company, bankers, he had begun to prefer to be known as a “diplomat.” (In 1853 he had been made United States chargé d’affaires at The Hague, and from 1855 to 1858 he was the resident American minister there.) He had taken up the sport of kings, and the Belmont colors—and regal colors they were: scarlet and maroon—were established. The Belmont coachmen’s livery consisted of maroon coats with scarlet piping and silver buttons embossed with “the Belmont crest” (which many said he himself had designed after studying those of European royal families), and black satin knee breeches with silver buckles. All his carriages were painted maroon with a scarlet stripe on the wheels. A lady correspondent of the day described the appearance of August Belmont in his coach-and-four as “overpoweringly commanding. One thought of … a King.” Belmont’s “image” was complete, but his ways remained difficult, contradictory.

  Edith Wharton, in The Age of Innocence, presented a thinly disguised portrait of August Belmont in the fictional character of Julius Beaufort—a man whom, one of Mrs. Wharton’s characters comments, “certain nuances” escaped. Said Mrs. Wharton:

  The question was, who was Beaufort? He passed for an Englishman, was agreeable, handsome, ill-tempered, hospitable and witty. He had come to America with letters of recommendation from old Mrs. Manson Mingott’s English son-in-law, the banker, and had speedily made himself an important position in the world of affairs; but his habits were dissipated, his tongue was bitter, his antecedents were mysterious.

  Beaufort’s wife, who “grew younger and blonder and more beautiful each year,” always appeared at the opera on the night of her annual ball “to show her superiority to all household cares.” So did Mrs. August Belmont. On the social battleground of Newport, Caroline Belmont had also made several blood enemies, and there was a list of people in the Rhode Island colony to whom the Belmonts never spoke. Of Beaufort/Belmont, one of Mrs. Wharton’s characters airily explains, “We all have our pet common people.” But, Mrs. Wharton adds, “The Beauforts were not exactly common; some people said they were even worse.”

  By the mid-1870’s the “mystery” of August Belmont’s past—his Jewish heritage—was probably the worst-kept secret in New York. But since it was considered an improper dinner-table topic, everyone in society pretended that there was, indeed, a mystery. They cleared their throats meaningfully when Belmont’s past was mentioned, and let it go at that.

  The thing about August Belmont that impressed the other German Jewish bankers was, of course, that astonishing religion change, that dazzling mixed marriage, that leap out of the ghetto into the perfumed upper air of New York society. The others were eager to be accepted by their new city too, but were unprepared for any move as drastic as his. Privately, they were shocked by the spectacle of Belmont; it seemed to them dishonest. It was one thing to wish to assimilate, but quite another to deny a whole tradition; one thing to embrace a new culture, but another to betray an old. Yet they regarded Belmont with mixed feelings—part admiration for his daring, part distrust of his motives.

  Belmont’s manner toward his former coreligionists was, in the meantime, disarming. “Belmont was a bit too jovial today,” Joseph Seligman wrote in 1873. When the two met at their railroad board meetings, August Belmont always greeted Joseph with a “Hullo, Seligman!” in his gritty voice. Joseph, out of deference, always called Belmont “Mr. Belmont,” but one day in 1874, feeling bold, Joseph cried out, “Hullo, Belmont!” Belmont’s face froze. He chose an interesting way to punish Joseph for his overfamiliarity. For the next few months, he elaborately misspelled Joseph’s name on correspondence as “Selligman,” “Seligmann,” or “Suligman.”

  Then there was the matter of J. P. Morgan. While Morgan was willing to participate with the Seligmans on certain bond issues, he sometimes seemed a bit more willing to
do business with Belmont. Actually, Morgan, who understood the Belmont-Seligman rivalry perfectly, was beginning to use both men to suit his own needs, playing one against the other whenever the opportunity arose. But Joseph was convinced that Morgan’s freeze-and-thaw attitude toward him was simply because he was Jewish and Belmont wasn’t.

  August Belmont defined a dilemma for New York’s other German Jewish banking families: how much Jewishness to abandon, how much gentile Americanization to absorb.

  Over the years the Sephardim in America had gradually modified their religious services to conform more closely to the prevailing Protestant ways. Early in the 1800’s Temple Shearith Israel had introduced English into the service. The cantors, or chazonim, began to assume the dignity, and the dress, of Protestant clergymen and were called “Reverend.” The public auctioning of honors, which began to seem undignified, was discontinued. Other modifications evolved slowly. But the German Jews, though there had been steps toward Reform in a few big-city congregations in Germany and in England, felt they must Americanize their New York synagogue in a bold and abrupt sweep.