The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  “Of course.”

  “If a house is safe enough for the servants, it is safe enough for the mistress,” said Mrs. Seligman, and went on with her embroidery.

  At ten o’clock, her usual hour, she prepared to retire. As she rose to go to her bedroom, she said to one of her nephews, “If things become too dangerous, I count upon your waking me.” In her bedroom she undressed and turned down her bed. This was her only concession to the situation, that she did not ring for one of her maids to turn down the coverlet for her.

  A few feet away from her bedroom wall, a tower of flames rose into the night. Above her, through the night, her roof caught fire repeatedly. Just before midnight, the blazing husk of the Windsor tipped, swayed, and came thundering down, missing the Seligman house by inches and scattering fiery bricks on the roofs of the Seligmans’ and the Goulds’. Mrs. Seligman slept on. The Goulds had evacuated their house hours before.

  Babet Seligman, Joseph’s widow, was a much more modest lady, who was always rather awed by the ways of her aristocratic sister-in-law. After her husband’s death Babet went into heavy mourning, and, though she survived Joseph by nearly a quarter of a century, she never emerged from her widow’s weeds and never again appeared at any large social gathering or public function. Her entertaining was limited to little family dinners. Edward, her coachman, also went into perpetual mourning for his master, in a black uniform with the monogram “J.S.” stitched in black on the sleeve. Edward, in fact, became Babet Seligman’s one male friend. On their rides through the park they chatted through the speaking tube.

  Quite another story was James Seligman’s wife, Rosa. Rosa was a Content, and James married her when she was just seventeen, a beauty with a highly bred, olive-skinned Modigliani face and huge dark flashing eyes. But she had a violent and unpredictable temper, and the Contents had made it quite clear that they thought Rosa was marrying beneath her station, and that they had consented to the union simply because James Seligman was rich.

  By the 1880’s James’s and Rosa’s had become a notably unhappy marriage. Rosa was an excellent dancer, but James was not. “Germans,” she used to say contemptuously, “are always heavy on their feet.” She took her Content heritage seriously, and enjoyed referring to the Seligmans as “the peddlers.” It soon developed that she was an almost compulsive spender. James was miserly in his personal spending, but the family said that this was because it cost him so much to pay Rosa’s bills. She demanded furs, dresses, jewels, and beautiful houses, and James got them for her. She insisted on numerous servants, and he hired them for her, even though she often pointed out that the servants had more distinguished pedigrees than the Seligmans. She had an English butler whose first name was the same as her husband’s, and it amused her to say, in front of dinner guests, “James, will you please tell Jim that dinner is ready?”

  She raised eight children, but would let none of them bring friends into the house, claiming that other people’s children were inferior and probably germy. In her youth Rosa’s behavior had been attributed to “temperament,” and she was considered “high-strung.” As she grew older, her conduct grew increasingly erratic, her outbursts and tantrums more frequent and alarming. Soon Seligman family letters began to refer darkly to “our family skeleton”—not a reference to Rosa, but to the fact that James had sought solace in a young mistress. Rosa began to spend most of her days in department stores, where she would astonish salesgirls by leaning across counter tops and whispering confidentially, “When do you think my husband last slept with me?”

  Rosa Content Seligman may have been odd, but her children were even odder. One daughter, Florette, married Meyer Guggenheim’s son, Benjamin (the “smelter” of the Seligmans’ cablegram), and that union produced the art-collecting Peggy Guggenheim, who, in her autobiography, wrote that most of her Seligman aunts and uncles were “peculiar, if not mad.” She also insists that James and Rosa had eleven children, though The Seligman Family Register, privately published in 1913, lists only eight. What became of the other three, if they ever existed, is a family mystery. The eight remaining were certainly colorful.

  One aunt, wrote Peggy Guggenheim,

  was an incurable soprano. If you happened to meet her on the corner of Fifth Avenue while waiting for a bus, she would open her mouth wide and sing scales trying to make you do as much. She wore her hat hanging off the back of her head or tilted over one ear. A rose was always stuck in her hair. Long hatpins emerged dangerously, not from her hat, but from her hair. Her trailing dresses swept up the dust of the streets. She invariably wore a feather boa. She was an excellent cook and made beautiful tomato jelly. Whenever she wasn’t at the piano, she could be found in the kitchen or reading the ticker-tape. She had a strange complex about germs and was forever wiping her furniture with Lysol. But she had such extraordinary charm that I really loved her. I cannot say her husband felt as much. After he had fought with her for over thirty years, he tried to kill her and one of her sons by hitting them with a golf club. Not succeeding, he rushed to the reservoir where he drowned himself with heavy weights tied to his feet.

  Another of Rosa’s daughters grew to be enormously fat. Despite this handicap she convinced herself that she had had a long and passionate love affair with a druggist. She even knew his name—Balch. The family tried to persuade her that the druggist Balch was imaginary, but to no avail. She was so overridden with guilt and remorse that she became “melancholic” and had to be placed in a home.

  James’s son Washington had curious dietary theories, and lived on charcoal and cracked ice and almost no food. His teeth were black from chewing charcoal, and the ice he sucked between the bites of charcoal made him a somewhat noisy dinner companion. Whiskey was also a part of his diet, and he always had a glassful before breakfast. He had his suits constructed with a special zinc-lined pocket to hold his ice cubes, and once, when his tailor mistook Washington’s instructions, Washington cried out, “No! No! The right pocket is to hold the ice! the left pocket is for the charcoal”—to the bewilderment of other customers in the shop. At a very early age he had adopted the practice of threatening to commit suicide unless his father gave him what he wanted and, as a result, he was permitted to keep his very own mistress in his room—a room none of the rest of the family was permitted to visit. He was certainly a trial. Finally, however, he carried out one of his threats and shot himself in the temple.

  Another brother had a neurosis the opposite of his mother’s. He refused to spend any money at all. In order to eat, he showed up at his relatives’ houses at mealtimes, usually saying he wasn’t hungry and then devouring everything in sight. He repaid his hosts with after-dinner entertainment; it was always the same. He placed chairs in a long row, and then slid and wiggled along the seats on his stomach. His act was called “the snake.”

  Brother Eugene had been an infant prodigy, and was ready for college at the age of eleven. So as not, to be conspicuous, he waited three years and graduated from Columbia at eighteen with the highest honors in his class. He became a practicing lawyer, and a bachelor, whose only pronounced peculiarity was his obsession about cleanliness. He bathed six or seven times each weekday, and much oftener on Sundays. De Witt Seligman also had a law degree, but he never practiced. His favorite pastime was writing plays, none of which was ever produced. Playwriting experts used to say that De Witt had talent—at least for getting his characters into suspenseful situations and predicaments. The only trouble was, he could never quite figure out solutions for the troubles his characters had got themselves into. Invariably his plays ended in a way that reflected their author’s dilemma: a gigantic explosion took place, eliminating everybody.

  Jefferson Seligman had ways more beguiling than any of his brothers and sisters. Jeff married a girl named Julia Wormser for whom he cared little. The couple soon separated, and Jeff took two small hotel rooms in the East Sixties where he began a life devoted to keeping young ladies clothed and warm. Peggy Guggenheim has said that her uncle’s rooms
were stocked with fur coats, and “Almost any girl could have one for the asking.” Geoffrey T. Hellman, on the other hand, has written that Jeff kept closets full of dresses from Klein’s which were equally available to all his friends. Probably he went through a fur-coat period, and then, for reasons of economy, followed this with a dresses-from-Klein’s period. It is known that his sister Florette once visited him and seized a supply of dresses in her size, saying, “I don’t see why I shouldn’t have some, too!”

  Jeff had some charming social theories. Once, in a newspaper interview, he came out strongly against the practice of shaking hands, saying that this custom sped the transmission of germs. Instead of handshaking, he recommended kissing. He also suggested that the New York Street Cleaning Department should not sprinkle streets their entire length, but leave little dry gaps every block or so, so that old ladies could cross without getting their feet wet.

  Jeff Seligman had the health and welfare of the whole human race at heart. He had been made a partner in J. & W. Seligman & Company, but he was never really interested in banking, and there is no evidence that he did any work, executed a single order, or participated in a single decision. But instead, as Geoffrey Hellman has written, “Somewhere along the line he got off on a novel tack. He began to establish himself as the fruit-and-ginger Seligman.” He had a theory that plenty of fruit and ginger was good for the body and good for the brains, and he arrived at the office each morning with his basket of fruit and his box of ginger. Starting in the partners’ room, where the brains of the company were supposedly concentrated, he distributed his goods to his cousins and uncles. “On even the busiest days, the partners would accept the fruit and ginger Jeff offered,” a former Seligman employee told Hellman. “He would then distribute the remainder to the lower echelons. One day, when I was talking to one of the partners in the partners’ room, Jeff gave me a banana. I went back to my desk in another room, and a little while later Jeff showed up and started to hand me an orange. He peered at me, and withdrew the orange. ‘You’ve already had your fruit,’ he said.”

  J. & W. Seligman eventually established a dining room on the top floor of their Wall Street building, and, having checked to make sure that the kitchen contained plenty of fresh fruit, Jeff was able to discontinue his fruit line, but he continued to serve ginger. Jeff Seligman was Peggy Guggenheim’s favorite uncle. She called him “a gentleman of the old school.”

  Peggy’s mother, Florette, was not without her little quirks. She had a strange nervous habit of repeating phrases three times. Once, when stopped by a policeman for driving the wrong way down a one-way street, Florette replied, with some logic, “But I was only going one way, one way, one way.” Another family story insists that Florette once told a clerk in a department store, “I want a hat with a feather, a feather, a feather,” and was sold a hat with three feathers.

  Peggy Guggenheim has referred to her mother’s and grandmother’s circle of friends as “the most boring ladies of the haute Jewish bourgeoisie.” But Peggy was a rebel, and the bore is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly these ladies did not bore each other. They gathered in their uptown drawing rooms over their silver tea services, on their regular afternoons, and discussed the topics of the day, one of which, by 1888, was “What shall we do about the Guggenheims?” The others were children, clothes, health. Mrs. Semon Bache advised that children under three years old should be fed fruit sparingly. Bananas were especially dangerous. “After a baby is one year old, he may be fed a teaspoonful of orange juice occasionally,” she commented. “But only if he’s in perfect health.” Mrs. Lazarus Hallgarten was concerned about “promiscuous bathing,” for not only were women appearing on the beaches in snug-fitting bathing skirts and blouses but, of all things, stockings that exposed the toes. Mrs. Mayer Lehman commented that “The laced shoe is rapidly gaining followers,” and wondered how the others in the group felt about this development. Mrs. Solomon Loeb had heard of a new cure for whooping cough: “A handful of dried chestnut leaves boiled in a pint of water—a wineglassful once an hour.” And so it went.

  In the evenings the families entertained each other at dinners large and small. The women were particularly concerned about what was “fashionable,” and why shouldn’t they have been? Many of them had been born poor and in another country, and now they found themselves stepping out of a cocoon and into a new and lovely light. They felt like prima donnas, and, now that their husbands were becoming men of such influence and substance, they wanted to be guilty of no false steps in their new land. They wanted desperately to be a part of their period, and as much as said so. Beadwork was fashionable. One had to do it. It was the era of the “Turkish corner,” and the ladies sewed scratchy little beaded covers for toss pillows. At one dinner party, while the ladies were discussing what was fashionable and what was not, Marcus Goldman rose a little stiffly from the table, folded his heavy damask napkin beside his plate, and said, “Money is always fashionable,” and stalked out of the room.

  * By 1880 the Goldman topper transported as much as $30 million worth of paper a year.

  32

  SONS, DAUGHTERS, REBELS

  The eight original Seligman brothers had sired, between them, thirty-six sons, and their sisters and brothers-in-law had been responsible for eight more. It was an impressive total. But out of it, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, it began to seem that there were painfully few boys who had any interest in, much less talent for, banking. Joseph’s oldest son, David, accepted a partnership at J. & W. Seligman, but he showed up at the office only once every week or so, usually to check on the state of his own portfolio. Another son, Edwin R. A., taught political economy at Columbia, and another, Alfred Lincoln, was artistic. He and his wife Florine, who were childless, conducted salons.

  Still others of the second generation had become gentlemen of leisure, or had succumbed to what the Morning Advertiser called “the allurements of fleeting pleasures.” In fact, the only Seligman boy out of the forty-four who appeared to have marked financial ability was Joseph’s second son, Isaac Newton, who, upon his Uncle Jesse’s death, became head of the firm at the age of thirty-nine.

  With the easygoing nil admirari attitude they often seemed to affect, the Seligmans never appeared to be unduly concerned about their lack of able and dutiful sons to carry on. Boys were permitted to drift along whatever paths they chose (Jeff, for example, with his nutritionist theories, had once wanted to be a doctor, and had studied medicine in Germany before settling on a Seligman partnership). Other fathers of Joseph’s and Jesse’s generation, however, cared desperately about turning their sons into bankers like themselves, and when twigs did not bend naturally in that direction, force was sometimes used.

  The Lehmans were lucky. All three of the original brothers had competent sons, and by the 1890’s there were five Lehmans in the firm: in addition to Mayer and Emanuel, there were Mayer’s son Sigmund, Emanuel’s son Philip, and a nephew, Meyer H. Lehman, the son of Henry Lehman who had died in the South. The Lehman firm had been cautiously expanding—investing money in an early automobile company, a rubber manufacturer—but it was still a commodity house, trading in cotton, coffee, and petroleum, and was therefore ranked far below other New York banking houses in prestige and importance.

  Solomon Loeb, on the other hand, had founded a banking house that now rivaled the Seligmans’. Forced into the background by his brash son-in-law, Jacob Schiff, Solomon’s one hope had been that the Loeb name could be perpetuated in the firm through his two sons, Morris and James, who, by the time they reached their twenties, began to collapse under the weight of their parents’ towering ambitions and to wilt from the intensity with which they had been trained as children.

  Morris Loeb ran away from home, was found in Philadelphia and returned, and after that point he was carefully watched. He became a shy and nervous young man with quick, frightened gestures and a hunted look in his eyes. He had a terror of mirrors (it was he who had papered the mirror in the Schiffs�
� sitting room), and an even greater dread of becoming a banker. He began to have a fetish about money, and a fear of spending it. He quarreled frequently with his mother about the lavishness with which she set her dinner table, and he once offered her a prize if she could produce a Sunday dinner so simple that there would be no leftovers. (Needless to say, she never won the prize.) Morris scrimped and saved pennies and squirreled them away. (When the Loeb house was demolished many years later, some of Morris’ deposits were discovered behind moldings and beneath floor boards; the wallpaper of one room was interlined with thousand-dollar bills.)

  For all the quirks of his personality, Morris was a splendid student at Dr. Sachs’s school, and though his father explained to Julius Sachs that “He is to be trained, of course, as a banker,” Morris’ best subject was science. He graduated at sixteen, went on to Harvard into the class of 1883, and, since he was the first of his father’s children to go to college, Solomon Loeb said to him, “I have no idea how much an American education costs,” and gave him a blank checkbook. Morris never wrote out a single check, though he got through Harvard with honors.

  By the time Morris was graduated, his father had despaired of making him into a banker. Seeing that their son was, whether they liked it or not, a chemist, Solomon and Betty bent all their efforts toward making him the greatest chemist in the world. His parents proceeded to build him his own, fully equipped laboratory, right on the grounds and next door to their summer house at Elberon. Here Morris seemed happy with his burners and test tubes and lixivia, and his young cousins remember a gentle, absent-minded man who, when they tapped on the door of his lab, would sometimes let them in and entertain them by blowing glass in bright, strange shapes for them. Eventually, Morris got a job as Professor of Chemistry at N.Y.U.

  Morris was married rather late, in 1895 at the age of thirty-two (but it was a Kuhn, Loeb marriage, which pleased his father), to the handsome and statuesque Eda Kuhn, a sort of cousin (Eda’s aunt was Solomon Loeb’s sister, and another aunt had been Solomon’s first wife). If Morris and Eda had had children, the cousinships among the Loebs and Kuhns would have become even more tangled, but theirs was a barren, lonely, and difficult marriage. Sometimes Morris would approach his father and say that he had to get out, away from the world of silk-covered walls and gilt and mirrors; he wanted to run away again—somewhere, anywhere. “But your laboratory is here, Morris,” his father gently reminded him. “Right here on the place. What else could you want?”