The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But Joseph’s true feelings were best expressed in a note to Isaac in which he said snippily: “I am aware of the difficulty in dealing with so purse-proud and haughty a people as the Rothschilds, and were it not for the fact that it is an honor for us to be published in connection with them I would not have anything to do with the loan.” And yet Joseph added: “Having broken the ice, I wish you to cultivate this connection.”

  There were other compensations. Joseph was able to write, with understandable pleasure: “Morgan—J. P. of Drexel, Morgan—is very bitter in his jealous expression about our getting the loan.”

  Then, in the autumn of 1874, Baron Rothschild summoned Isaac Seligman to his office to give him a piece of news. Some $55 million worth of United States bonds were to be offered for sale, and, the Baron suggested, the issue might be backed by a combination of three houses—the House of Rothschild, the House of Morgan, and the House of Seligman. For the first time, August Belmont would act as agent for both the Rothschilds and J. & W. Seligman & Company. Needless to say, Isaac accepted. The Seligmans were now participating in the most powerful financial combination in the history of banking.

  At last the Seligmans were able to consider themselves the Rothschilds’ peers. The Seligman-Belmont-Morgan-Rothschild alliance, furthermore, was so successful that by the end of the decade there were complaints on Wall Street that “London- and Germany-based bankers” had a monopoly on the sale of United States bonds in Europe—which they virtually did. The Seligmans were now being called “the American Rothschilds,” and Joseph, beginning to believe his own splendid myth, went so far as to suggest that his brother Isaac should be knighted.*

  In Paris party-loving, party-giving William Seligman, now weighing over 250 pounds, was a social success, and was meeting, as he wrote home to Joseph, “all the nobs.” Though Joseph had once disapproved of William’s frivolous pursuits, he now applauded them. His earlier threats of defection were forgiven, and Joseph wrote to William assuring him of the importance of the contacts he was making, urging him to meet more nobs. Joseph wrote to Richard C. McCormick, U.S. Commissioner General, to ask: “In filling the offices for Commissioners in Paris, please do not omit to appoint Mr. William Seligman, of course as Honorary Commissioner, without pay, as brother William is at the head of a large American banking house in Paris and entertains all nice Americans.” Joseph began instructing his other brothers to cultivate a Rothschildian kind of elegance and grandeur.

  It worked with some better than others. At a large reception in Frankfurt, Henry Seligman found himself standing on the opposite side of the room from Baron Wilhelm von Rothschild of the Frankfurt branch. A friend whispered to Henry, “That’s Baron von Rothschild. Would you like to meet him?” “Certainly,” said Henry. “Bring him over.” The friend hurried across the room to the Baron and said, “Mr. Henry Seligman is here and would like to meet you.” “And I should very much like to meet him,” replied the Baron. “Bring him over.” Neither would cross the room. They never met.

  In London Isaac understood the simple rule of Rothschild protocol. It was he who must always go to the Rothschild offices in New Court. The Baron would never deign to visit him, and Isaac would not have had the impertinence to ask him to.

  But in New York the Seligman-Rothschild alliance did little to further the Seligmans’ progress toward assimilation. As the decade drew to a close, there were more dark mutterings of an “international conspiracy” of Jewish bankers to take over the world’s money. These were still rumbling undercurrents, but it would take no more than a single curious and sad episode, an episode that might have been no more than a tempest in a teapot, to make these feelings erupt into the public consciousness.

  *The Kleinworts of London were held in almost equal awe. Walter Sachs recalls how, as a boy of fifteen, he was groomed for weeks by his parents on how to behave at a Kleinwort dinner in Denmark Hill, and remembers the “terrible humiliation” at a gaffe he made there. On the evening of the dinner, he was so nervous that, when the Kleinworts’ front door opened, he bowed and then shook hands with the chief butler.

  *Isaac never was, but his son became Sir Charles Seligman several years later.

  18

  THE SELIGMAN-HILTON AFFAIR

  Mr. Alexander T. Stewart was no stranger to Joseph Seligman. Stewart operated A. T. Stewart & Company, in Ninth Street, the largest retail store in New York. With its wholesale operation in Chicago, Stewart’s was the biggest store in the country.

  When the New York Railway Company was organized in 1871, with its plans for building the city’s first elevated railroad, Joseph and Stewart were on the board of directors, along with Levi P. Morton, James Lanier, Charles L. Tiffany, August Belmont, and John Jacob Astor. The president of the line was a New York politician, Judge Henry Hilton. Judge Hilton’s chief distinction was that he happened to be a friend and political crony of Mr. Stewart’s, and a member of the Tweed Ring.

  Despite their directorial connection, relations between Joseph and Mr. Stewart were not cozy. Stewart was also a friend of President Grant’s, and when Grant had offered the Treasury post to Joseph Seligman, and had been turned down, he had offered it to Stewart, who said yes. Stewart’s friendship with Judge Hilton and the Tweed Ring, however, had made him a number of powerful political enemies, and his appointment was not confirmed by the Senate. This was a bitter disappointment to Stewart, who had wanted a Cabinet post as the capstone of his career. The Scotsman bristled whenever he thought of Joseph Seligman, who had refused the appointment without even bothering to see whether the Senate would approve him or not. Joseph had also been asked to run on the Republican ticket for Mayor of New York, but had replied, “The bank needs me, and my brothers beg me to leave politics and public office to others.” It was no secret that Alexander Stewart wanted to be Mayor. When he heard of Joseph’s refusal, Stewart said, “Who does Seligman think he is? He seems to think politics is only for tradespeople.”

  The uneasy situation was not helped when Joseph was appointed to the “Committee of Seventy”—a group of prominent New Yorkers whose purpose was to eradicate the Tweed Ring, and one of whose chief targets was Stewart’s friend, Judge Hilton. Up to this point, A. T. Stewart & Company had been purchasing its bills of exchange from J. & W. Seligman & Company. When Joseph’s membership on the committee was announced, this relationship suddenly terminated.

  In 1876 Alexander Stewart died, leaving a fortune which turned out to be the largest ever recorded in America. Part of his estate was a two-million-dollar investment in the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga. Stewart’s executor was Judge Hilton.

  Nobody in New York had paid much attention to Henry Hilton until he became the manager of Stewart’s millions. Now he revealed to a society journalist that he was one of “a handful” of New York’s most important men. Perhaps, but when Grant left the White House and Joseph and Jesse held a formal dinner at Delmonico’s for the former President and “forty or fifty guests,” Judge Hilton was not among those invited. Meanwhile, Joseph was going on to even greater triumphs. Wall Street jockeyed feverishly for position with the new President, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Hayes’s Secretary of the Treasury Sherman. Early in 1877 Sherman summoned a representative group of New York bankers, including Joseph Seligman and August Belmont, to Washington, and sent each into a separate room “to work out a plan for refunding the balance of the Government war debt.” Each man submitted his recommendations, and a week later Sherman sent for Joseph and told him that his plan was “by all odds the clearest and most practical,” and would be adopted. (The plan called for building up a gold reserve of approximately 40 percent of the outstanding greenbacks through the sale of bonds for coin—something Joseph was good at.)*

  After working at untangling the nation’s finances through most of the spring, Joseph decided to take a vacation at Saratoga, and to stay at the Grand Union Hotel, which Judge Hilton now managed, where Joseph and his family had often stayed in the past.

  Saratoga was then th
e queen of American resorts, outshining even Newport. Here, each summer, the cream of Eastern society arrived ritually to take the waters of its famous spa, to promenade in parasoled elegance down its wide main avenue, through the spacious public rooms of its large hotels, to perch with top hat and cane on the famous verandas, and to change clothes. A trip to “season” at Saratoga was not to be undertaken lightly, and the capacious Saratoga trunk was invented to accommodate the wardrobes these holidays required. John “Bet-a-Million” Gates once bet a famous dude of the period, Evander Berry Wall, that he could not change his clothes as many as fifty times between breakfast and dinner at Saratoga, and won. Mr. Wall made it through only forty complete changes of costume.

  No one traveled to Saratoga without at least one valet, one personal maid, and a laundress, and to arrive with one’s own chef was not uncommon. By far the grandest hotel in Saratoga was the Grand Union. In its day it was the world’s largest hostelry, covering seven acres of ground with 834 rooms, 1,891 windows, 12 miles of red carpeting and a solid square mile of marble tiling. The edifice and its furnishings were said to weigh seventeen million tons, though how this figure was arrived at is unclear.

  Still, there is evidence that by 1877 the Grand Union had begun to lose business, and Stewart—and his successor, Judge Hilton—decided that this was because the hotel’s Christian guests did not wish to share the hotel with Jews. Joseph Seligman was therefore advised that the hotel had adopted a new policy and did not accept “Israelites.”

  In view of the tremendous fuss this decision kicked up, one question has become curiously obscured which, today, seems pivotal. That is, did Joseph and his family actually go to Saratoga that summer or were they advised of the hotel’s new policy by mail? Accounts vary. One has it that Joseph “applied for accommodations,” and was rebuffed. Another says that he was told, upon arrival, that he could stay at the hotel this time, but would not be welcomed back “in future.” The majority of reports insists that a Seligman party did, physically, appear at the hotel and was turned away by a clerk at the desk, whereupon Joseph and party stalked out of the lobby and returned to New York.

  If Joseph did go to Saratoga, he must have gone by train. When he traveled by train, he was usually supplied with a private car by one of his railroads, and he must have departed for Saratoga with the usual complement of trunks and retinue of servants. Did Joseph undertake this ponderous journey to a famous and popular hotel without a reservation? Or did he in fact go to Saratoga knowing quite well what awaited him at the Grand Union, and was the purpose of his trip to make a test case of the hotel’s anti-Semitic policy? His subsequent behavior suggests this, and if that was his intention, he may have acted unwisely.

  Joseph reportedly “treated the whole matter of his repulse lightly,” but Joseph was a fighter and was not in a lighthearted frame of mind when he wrote a scathing letter to Judge Hilton which he then released to the newspapers. The letter was a bitter personal attack on Hilton, and it made front-page copy, with headlines running:

  A SENSATION AT SARATOGA. NEW RULES FOR THE GRAND UNION. NO JEWS TO BE ADMITTED. MR. SELIGMAN, THE BANKER, AND HIS FAMILY SENT AWAY. HIS LETTER TO MR. HILTON. GATHERING OF MR. SELIGMAN’S FRIENDS. AN INDIGNATION MEETING TO BE HELD.

  There followed threats of lawsuits under civil rights laws, charges, countercharges, talk of boycotts and recriminations, ugly name-calling. Judge Hilton did not soothe injured feelings by releasing a letter of his own in which he said: “I know what has been done and am fully prepared to abide by it,” and, “As the law yet permits a man to use his property as he pleases and I propose exercising that blessed privilege, notwithstanding Moses and all his descendants may object.” Fanning the already raging fire, he added: “Personally, I have no particular feeling on the subject, except probably that I don’t like this class as a general thing and don’t care whether they like me or not. If they do not wish to trade with our house, I will be perfectly satisfied, nay gratified, as I believe we lose much more than we gain by their custom.”

  The summer of 1877 was a lean one for news and, in the days that followed, the press—in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, and in tiny towns across the country—leaped on the Hilton-Seligman story, featured it and editorialized about it, printing letters pro and con. In the middle of a performance of a New York play, a gentleman from the audience ran up on the stage and started to make an anti-Seligman speech while ladies in the boxes pelted him with their handbags. Both Joseph and Hilton received scurrilous and threatening letters. When Hilton ran a letter in the New York Times, dropping the unpleasant hint that the Seligmans were little respected by their fellow bankers in Wall Street, officials of Drexel, Morgan & Company, Morton Bliss & Company, the First National Bank, and even August Belmont & Company, stepped forward in a paid announcement to say: “Judge Hilton is under a misapprehension as to the relations of the Messrs. Seligman and their associates, which always have been, and are, of the most satisfactory character.”

  Judge Hilton then added confusion to the chaos by announcing that if Joseph had “taken the trouble” to apply to him, Hilton, “personally,” the hotel would have taken him in.

  The furor grew more vicious, more barbed, with insinuations that the incident had actually nothing to do with anti-Semitism but was merely a business feud—that Joseph was miffed at having lost the Stewart account, and that Hilton was trying to ruin the Seligmans because of Joseph’s role in the anti-Tweed group. It did begin to seem like a money battle when, led by a group of Joseph’s friends, a massive boycott was undertaken against A. T. Stewart’s store, which Hilton also managed.

  Suddenly frightened, Judge Hilton pledged $1,000 to Jewish charities. A Seligman might have his price, but it was more than $1,000. Puck, the comic weekly, ran a two-page cartoon in its Christmas issue of that year, mocking Hilton and, in an accompanying editorial, praised Jews for refusing to be bribed:

  Alas! Poor Hilton.

  It is to be regretted that Mr. Hilton is as unsuccessful as a drygoods man and a hotel-keeper as he notoriously was as a jurist. But the fact remains. He took it upon himself to insult a portion of our people, whose noses had more of a curvilinear form of beauty than his own pug, and he rode his high-hobby horse of purse-proud self-sufficiency until he woke up one day to find that the drygoods business was waning.… Then Mr. Hilton arouses himself. He turns his great mind from thoughts of the wandering bones of Stewart; he brings the power of his gigantic brain to bear upon the great question, “How shall I revive trade?” He has remembered that he has insulted the Jews. Aha! we’ll conciliate them. So out of the coffers that A. T. Stewart filled he gropes among the millions and orders the trustees of a few Hebrew charities to bend the pregnant hinges of their knees at his door and receive a few hundred dollars.

  But in this country the Jew is not ostracized. He stands equal before the law and before society with all his fellow-citizens, of whatever creed or nationality. And the Jew has stood up like a Man and refused to condone the gross and uncalled for insults of this haphazard millionaire, merely because he flings the offer of a thousand dollars in their faces. All honor to the Jews for their manly stand in this instance.

  At the height of the rancor, Henry Ward Beecher, the most noted clergyman of the day, made the Saratoga incident the subject of one of his most celebrated sermons. Titled “Gentile and Jew,” Dr. Beecher declared from the pulpit:

  I have had the pleasure of the acquaintance of the gentleman whose name has been the occasion of so much excitement—Mr. Seligman. I have summered with his family for many years … and I have learned to love and respect them.… When I heard of the unnecessary offense that has been cast upon Mr. Seligman, I felt that no other person could have been singled out that would have brought home to me the injustice more sensibly than he.

  But had Joseph been “singled out,” or had he singled himself out? What had he wanted? Had he, knowing of the hotel’s policy, appeared in Saratoga prepared to be excluded and hoping to c
reate a cause célèbre in which he would emerge a hero, a champion of reason, in both the Jewish and the gentile communities? Or had he, knowing that the Grand Union barred Jews generally, simply not believed that it would bar him, a man of his position and distinction? Men like Beecher and the editors of Puck might hail him as a hero, but the Jewish community of New York was not sure that it had really required a champion of reason for resort hotels. As his old friend Wolf Goodhart said to him privately, “For God’s sake, Joe, didn’t you know that some hotels don’t want Jews? The Grand Union isn’t the only one!”

  Months passed, and the affair continued to dominate the news as other clergymen, following Beecher’s example, had their say and as all figures of importance in New York felt called upon to take a stand. As plans for the “mass protest meeting” in Union Square against Judge Hilton progressed, and as ill feeling continued to mount, with friends turned against each other over the matter, amid ugly cries of “Jew-hater!” and “Jew-lover!” and with anti-Semitic graffiti scrawled on walls, Joseph Seligman, now nearly sixty, grew increasingly aghast at the hornet’s nest of hatred he had stirred up. Privately, he began to beg that the matter be forgotten. At last he approached William Cullen Bryant, who, saying that the incident had already been commented upon “from the mouths of everybody in public places,” sensibly urged that the protest meeting be canceled. It was.

  But the boycott on A. T. Stewart’s store continued, and had a good deal to do with the store’s eventual failure and sale to John Wanamaker.

  Joseph tried to forget it. In the months that followed, he refused to speak of it.

  The Seligman-Hilton affair was the first publicized case of anti-Semitism in America. But rather than extinguish anti-Semitic feeling, it kindled it. By pointing it up, Joseph had made it specific. He had solved no problem. He had merely defined one. Now the battle lines were drawn. The Grand Union’s policy gave other hotels and clubs a precedent, and anti-Semitism in Adirondack resorts quickly became quite blatant, with hotels boldly advertising, “Hebrews need not apply,” and “Hebrews will knock vainly for admission.” At Lake Placid, Melville L. K. Dewey built the largest club in the area, the Lake Placid Club, whose members, Dewey said, would be “the country’s best,” specifically: