The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Adolph was nearsighted, and heavy-lensed spectacles were prescribed. The glasses, at least, protected him from the slaps, and he seemed to withdraw behind them into a private world of worry and hope. At the age of ten he had heard terrible news. His dead mother whom he had loved so much had suffered from “melancholia.” Now one of his older sisters showed the same disturbing symptoms, and had to be carefully watched. Adolph himself began to nourish a secret fantasy—a dream of escape, and travel, and of riches with which to buy treasures that even “der reiche Lewisohn” could never afford, riches that could buy not only freedom from the black cobbled streets of Hamburg but something that Adolph began to see as a kind of grandeur and stature. The squinting, overweight boy became, in his own mind, a secret potentate.

  Aside from the Scriptures, there was little to read in the Lewisohn house. But there were newspapers of sorts. There were two Hamburg dailies—Der Freischütz and Nachrichten—but these were not sold outright; they were loaned or rented. The papers were delivered, read for an hour or so, then picked up again and carried on to another family. Naturally, when each paper arrived at its appointed hour, the senior member of the family—Adolph’s father in his case—got to read it first. By the time it got to Adolph it was usually time for it to be collected again.

  An exception to this publishing practice was Die Fremdenliste, “the list of strangers.” This stayed in the house because it was not so much a newspaper as an advertising handout paid for by various Hamburg hotels, listing the commercial and other travelers who arrived from out of town. At first glance, Die Fremdenliste may not seem much more exciting than reading a telephone book, but for Adolph Lewisohn poring over the list of strangers had a special fascination. The strangers had strange names, and they came from exotic ports, and he could let his imagination go and create exciting histories and daring exploits for them all. The strangers became his intimates as he fleshed them out and let them populate his waking and sleeping thoughts. Many were titled personages, and Die Fremdenliste carefully listed each arrival according to his status, wealth, and importance. Royalty came first—the visiting kings, princes, and dukes. Then came courtiers and those with powerful royal connections. Then came religious titles, then generals and counts and barons. After these came the rentiers, the landed gentry who lived on their incomes. And last of all, at the bottom of the list, were placed the “Kaufmänner” or merchants. Adolph, the merchant’s son, set his sights on the princely category.

  At times Die Fremdenliste published bits of general news. Here, for instance, Adolph learned of the rich gold fields that had been discovered in California. He also read how fellow Germans and fellow Jews like the Seligmans were becoming titans of American finance. And the Seligmans had originally been simple country folk, not even successful merchants!

  At the age of fifteen Adolph went to work for his father. He was sent on a two weeks’ business trip to Frankfurt and Zurich, his first taste of travel outside Hamburg and, as it turned out, his first real taste of the kind of grandeur he had dreamed about. Returning from Frankfurt he made an illicit side trip to Wiesbaden, one of the grand spas of the day, and one starry night he stood outside the window of the great gambling casino and watched women in furs and jewels and men in monocles and cutaways move slowly through the gilded and mirrored rooms under heavy chandeliers where, as he said later, “to me everything looked beautiful!” A few months later his father sent him on another business mission to Schleswig-Holstein, and from Schleswig he was required to visit a small island off the coast, a half-hour’s boat trip away, his first sea voyage. He was seasick both over and back, and when he returned to Germany, he said, “I was seasick, but I shouldn’t have been because I’m going to America.” His father laughed at him.

  Adolph’s father had sent an agent to New York to be the firm’s sales representative, but it turned out that the man was not as trustworthy as the senior Lewisohn had supposed. Two of Adolph’s older brothers, Julius and Leonard, were sent over to replace him and soon wrote home to Germany asking for another brother.

  Adolph’s father knew that Adolph had “liberal tendencies,” and Sam had the usual parental fear that, once in America, Adolph would abandon orthodoxy. But at last Sam consented. Adolph was to sail on the Hamburg-America packet ship Hammonia, and all the way down the Elbe on the tender his father lectured him on the importance of keeping the dietary laws, asking him to swear never to give up the tenets of his faith, and Adolph “tried to promise.” As young Adolph started up the gangplank, his father became terribly agitated and cried out, “It’s natural that you should be upset too, my son!” But Adolph wasn’t a bit upset. And when his father gripped his hand and said, “If you’ll promise not to cry, I won’t cry either,” Adolph Lewisohn stood for several minutes, trying to cry to please his father, but, as he wrote later, “I could not dissemble. To me, there was nothing to cry about.” It was the happiest moment of his life.

  When he got to New York—it was 1867, just two years after his contemporary, Jacob Schiff, had made his first trip to America—Adolph wrote home to his father:

  The city leaves nothing to be desired.… Everything is as grandiose and animated as possible. Life here not only corresponds to my expectations but even exceeds them. We have very nice rooms, which, of course, cost also a nice sum of money ($55.00 a week with board, on Broadway). The business hours are from eight o’clock in the morning until half-past six in the evening without interruption, but then you have the evening for yourself.… I like this very much, as in Hamburg I mingled with strangers. I am getting along quite nicely with my English.

  He also assured his father that, “of course,” the firm did not do business on the Sabbath. It was an assurance he would be required to repeat up to the time of his father’s death, even though, in fact, the opposite was true.

  “What I did resent,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir dictated when he was an old man, “was that my father was so bent on the strict orthodox forms that he insisted on our devoting ourselves entirely to that way of life, letting everything else go that might interfere with it.” In New York the Lewisohn boys bought some lard for export to Hamburg. When old Sam Lewisohn heard of this transaction, he cabled the boys with orders to dispose of the lard immediately; he would not accept it, and he refused to deal in it. He could, and did, deal in pigs’ bristles because bristles were inedible. But lard was edible and violated kosher restrictions. Sabbath strictures stated that the orthodox Jew could carry nothing on his person except his clothing, unless it was carried within an enclosed courtyard. Sam Lewisohn had no courtyard, and, as Sam pointed out, since the city gates were not closed on Saturday, the entire city could not be considered a courtyard, either. This meant that nothing could be carried, not even a handkerchief. If one of his children needed a handkerchief on the Sabbath, Sam said the handkerchief must be knotted about his arm—worn, in other words, as part of his clothing.

  Sam Lewisohn would not even allow the key to his house to be carried on the Sabbath. Since some coming and going was necessary, and since Sam did not like to ring his own doorbell, the key to the house was ritually placed on a little ledge outside the door, next to the lock, on Friday, so it could be used on Saturday without carrying it. Adolph could never understand why his father bothered to lock the door in the first place.

  No fire could be lit in the house between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday. In the pregas days some of Sam’s Jewish neighbors in Hamburg brought hot dishes to a community stove on Friday, where they would be kept warm for Saturday. But since this involved carrying—from public stove to the house—on the Sabbath, Sam would not permit it, and the Lewisohns ate only cold dishes on Saturday, even in the coldest winter, in a cold house. “Every Saturday and every holiday morning,” wrote Adolph, “saw us all at the synagogue. I suppose Jesus Christ did the same, because the New Testament tells us that he drove the money-changers from the Temple and that at times he preached in the synagogue.” He added, somewhat slyly: “As a pious
Jew, he must have attended the synagogue, although I suppose that toward the end of his life the authorities would not let him preach. Perhaps if he were to appear today and preach as radically as he did then, he would not be allowed in the more conservative Christian churches.”

  From his study of his Fremdenliste, Adolph had observed how German society of his day had become rigidly stratified. Unless ennobled by a “von,” no businessman, merchant, or professional man was hoffähig, or received at court. It was a stony rule that the nobility and the common people never mixed, nor spoke to, nor even acknowledged each other—nor was it as simple as that. The nobility was stratified within itself, as was the nonnobility. Each German belonged to his Kreis, his little group, and any intercourse between these groups was not only not done, it was considered dangerous. Mingling of the classes invited disorder, a state the German feared the most. The wife of a doctor did not speak to the wife of an architect; the architect’s wife did not speak to the merchant’s. This continued down the many rungs of the social ladder until the wives of tailors refused to speak to wives of shoemakers. The Jew, of course, occupied his own isolated position, and Adolph, who wanted friends almost as much as he wanted to be rich, came to America believing that a preoccupation with Jewish ritual and “feelings of Jewishness” only intensified the Jew’s isolation from the world around him, and made him seem—and feel—more alien and aloof.

  In New York, once, arguing with a friend who said, “Jewishness is drawn in with our mother’s milk,” Adolph replied with a smile, “Well, that doesn’t apply to me. I had a Christian wet nurse. Perhaps that explains why I get along with the Christians better than you do, and why I have so many Christian friends.”

  “I could never see,” he said on another occasion, “why it should be considered bad to be a Jew. Some Jews are noisy and offensive. So are some gentiles. Noisy, offensive gentiles should be avoided. So should noisy and offensive Jews.”

  When he encountered anti-Semitism, he liked to analyze it in a businesslike way. As a fifteen-year-old in Hamburg, he had seen a performance of The Merchant of Venice, and had been startled by, and “did not approve” of, the portrayal of Shylock in the play. He proceeded to make a careful dissection of Shylock’s character and behavior. “I could not understand why Shylock should be regarded as a mean character,” he wrote. “Shylock had not asked for credit from anybody or committed any wrong or crime. He was simply living his own life with his family.” Then, said Adolph,

  Along came some Christian gentlemen who wanted a loan, and they applied to Shylock who must have been pretty good at thrift as he had plenty of ready money. One of these gentlemen proposed to borrow a large sum and Shylock drew a queer contract, but Antonio did not have to sign if he did not want to agree to it. Of course, Shylock could not have been entirely sane or he would not have exacted the cutting off of a pound of flesh. That certainly was not good business, as he would not have benefitted by it.

  Later on in the play, Lewisohn pointed out,

  Shylock was offered three or five times the amount of the loan and could have made a small fortune out of his contract. If he had done this, there might have been some reason for making him out a bad character. But Shylock’s sense of honor was stronger than his desire to gain. They had treated him cruelly, taking his daughter and through her had stolen his property. Considering what it meant to be a Jew at that time, to have his daughter marry outside his faith, Shylock’s feeling of outrage and revenge was not unnatural.

  Then Lewisohn added: “I think that history tells us that the Jews did not always act as impractically as Shylock did in the play.”

  Adolph drew a business moral from Shylock’s story: never to make a “queer contract,” and never to extract an excessive profit from a trade. In 1873 he was still an employee of his father and his older brothers, but he occasionally had a chance to buy and sell on his own. In the summer of that year he was sent back to Europe on a feathers-and-bristle-buying assignment. He had wanted to sail on the fancy new Hamburg-America liner Schiller, one of the most luxurious of its day. Reluctantly, however, he decided that “it looked better for business” if he took an older, less showy ship, and so he chose the Hammonia again. It was a lucky decision. The Schiller went down in mid-Atlantic with no surviving passengers. Another passenger aboard the Hammonia who had changed his booking from the Schiller was Senator Carl Schurz. Adolph used the booking coincidence as an excuse to introduce himself to Schurz (a former major general in the Union Army, later to become Secretary of the Interior under Hayes), and made a friend.

  Adolph disembarked at Plymouth, went up to London to visit the bristle market, and made plans to continue on to Hamburg. But he was still an inexperienced traveler. After buying his rail and steamer tickets and paying his hotel bill, he found that he had no money left to pay for meals on his journey. On the train to Dover he struck up a conversation with “a Christian gentleman” who mentioned that he had meant to buy some chamois gloves while in London. Adolph replied that, as it so happened, he had bought several pairs, which he would be happy to sell. He sold them, and at a little profit “which seemed fair, since I was by then the exporter of the gloves from London, and the gentleman would have had to pay considerably more in Paris,” and the money was enough to feed him until he got to Hamburg. Like Shylock’s, Adolph’s “sense of honor was stronger than his desire to gain.”

  Adolph Lewisohn was then twenty-four, and he had not seen his father in six years. When he arrived in Hamburg, it was a Saturday, and when he entered his house, his father, in his long Sabbath robes, rose to meet him and cuffed him soundly on the ear. Adolph had been carrying his valises.

  “Sometimes, in those days,” he wrote, “my dreams seemed a long way from coming true.”

  28

  THE POOR MAN’S METAL

  Copper, “the ugly duckling of metals,” had long been considered the poor man’s metal, despised for its very abundance. Because there was so much copper in the world, it was one of the world’s least expensive and most neglected metals, used as the basis for the cheapest coins and utensils. There was copper all over the Western Hemisphere, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, and the thrifty Mormons ignored one of the largest copper lodes of all, just outside Salt Lake City; no one bothered to put money into the relatively expensive recovery process to turn crude into finished ore. The dawning age of electricity, however, was beginning to change all this.

  Adolph Lewisohn first became interested in copper in the 1870’s when, with a visiting cousin from Germany, he made a bristle-selling trip to Boston. While there he watched a demonstration by a young man named Thomas A. Edison. Edison claimed he could record human voices on little metal spools. Adolph spoke into Mr. Edison’s contraption and, to his amazement, heard his voice played back. Edison then told Adolph that the day was not far off when voices would be transmitted across continents by wire—copper wire. Talk such as this began to make copper shares fluctuate wildly on the market.

  At that point most American copper was mined in the Lake Superior region of Michigan, and in 1877 the American market found itself glutted with copper and a great deal of the metal was sold for export to Europe at a low price. Then, in 1878, there was a sudden copper shortage and the price of copper rose sharply, so high that American manufacturers were having to import cheaper copper from European mines. This unusual situation gave Adolph and his brothers an unusual idea.

  All copper imported to the United States from Europe was subject to five cents per pound duty. But there was a loophole in the customs regulations, and American-mined copper—such as the hundreds of tons of the stuff that had been sold cheaply to Europe the year before—could be reimported without the payment of any duty at all. There were a few technicalities. In order to be reimported duty-free, American copper was to be shipped back to this country in the same casks in which it had been shipped out, as proof of its American origin. Also, the European seller of this copper was to provide a certificate saying that the reimported met
al had, indeed, originated in America. In a fast-moving market, after a shipment had changed hands several times, certification was not easy to get.

  The copper Adolph and his brothers ordered carried no such certification. Also, it was no longer in its original casks; it had been uncrated and repacked. But, even with the cost of shipping, it was cheaper per ton than copper available in the United States. The ingots, to be sure, were stamped with the names of the Michigan mines, and perhaps—the brothers hoped—this fact would be sufficient to satisfy customs. Rather like American tourists who have overspent their quota and pray that customs won’t poke too deeply in their luggage, the Lewisohn boys waited for their copper to arrive praying that customs would not hew too closely to the regulations. It was a gamble, and it worked. The shipment passed customs untaxed, and the boys sold the copper quickly.

  A year later, with their growing reputation as copper factors, the boys were offered a chance to buy their first mine in Butte, Montana. The price was low, and Adolph set out for Montana to look over the situation. There was plenty of copper in the hills around Butte, but much of the ore was of low grade and, furthermore, there was no way to get copper out of the area except by mule team, which was prohibitively expensive. Still, Butte was a wide-open town—Montana had not yet become a state—and was full of eager speculators. Adolph bought up a claim called the Colusa mine, and formed a company in Butte called the Montana Copper Company.

  Now the Lewisohns were owners of a mine which produced a product they could not ship. They went to work. The first person they approached was Henry Villard, president of the Northern Pacific Railroad, whom they asked to build a line from Helena into Butte. Villard agreed, but there was a sizable string attached. If the Lewisohns wanted a line built into Butte, they would have to guarantee large freight shipments of ore out—guarantees the brothers were not at all sure they would be able to keep. Next, they approached Jacob Schiff’s sometime friend, James J. Hill, head of the Great Northern, and asked him to build the Great Northern into Butte by way of Great Falls. Great Falls was important because there was water power there, which the Lewisohns figured they could use to set up a smelting and reduction works. Hill also agreed, but only after extracting additional guarantees. The Lewisohns now had $75,000 tied up in one mine which was yielding them no income. The brothers were, Adolph confessed, “very nervous.”