The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Still, though there was literally nothing about the Russians of which the Germans approved, the Russians could not be ignored. There were simply too many of them. Clearly, the Germans would have preferred it if the Russians had never come, but there they were. For a while, the United Hebrew Charities and the Baron de Hirsch Fund—a £493,000 trust established by the German capitalist for the specific purpose of helping Jewish immigrants settle in America—embarked on programs to inspire Eastern Europeans to settle elsewhere than New York. These organizations, trying to sound charitable, pointed out that the “country air” in New Jersey or the Catskills would surely benefit the immigrants. They met with little success. In 1888 two hundred Jews were shipped back to Europe in cattle boats. But what were two hundred out of hundreds of thousands? Uptowners, increasingly alarmed, attempted to have laws passed in Washington to restrain further immigration. But the tide could not be stopped.

  The next logical step, as far as the Germans were concerned, was to try, if possible, to reshape these shabby immigrants along what the Germans considered “acceptable” German lines—to clean the immigrants up, dust them off, and get them to behave and look as much like Americans as possible. The East Side settlement houses, originally little more than delousing stations, were set up. The United Hebrew Charities began providing free lodging, meals, and medical care for immigrants, and sponsored entertainments and lectures—on manners, morals, marriage, and the dangers of socialism—designed to show the poor Russians the unwisdom of their former ways. When refugees overflowed Castle Garden and the rooming houses nearby, the New York Commissioner of Emigration opened the Ward’s Island buildings, and Jacob Schiff contributed $10,000 for an auxiliary barracks.

  Others contributed in their own way. A particularly busy lady of the period was Mrs. Minnie Louis, a voluble woman whose ample body was overstuffed with good intentions. Minnie was not exactly a member of the German “crowd” of the highest social standing, but she represented its point of view. And if, since the Sephardim had Emma Lazarus, the Germans wanted a poet of their very own, Minnie filled the role. In a poem, addressed to the immigrant Russians, she explained “What It Is to Be a Jew.” She started by declaring what a Jew wasn’t:

  To wear the yellow badge, the locks,

  The caftan-long, the low-bent head,

  To pocket unprovoked knocks

  And shamble on in servile dread—

  ’Tis not this to be a Jew.

  But, she added:

  Among the ranks of men to stand

  Full noble with the noblest there;

  To aid the right in every land

  With mind, with might, with heart, with prayer—

  This is the eternal Jew!

  Be a man, in other words, like Jacob Schiff or Solomon Loeb or the Lehmans, Warburgs, Seligmans, and Lewisohns. It was a large order. Jacob Schiff admired the poem. The Russians admired it less.

  Minnie Louis, in her stone marten cape, became a familiar figure on the Lower East Side, where she passed out cookies and exhorted immigrants to stop speaking Yiddish and cut off their curls. But to the Russians Minnie became an object of suspicion. On the Lower East Side it was widely rumored that she was not a Jew at all but a Christian missionary.

  It would take more than poetry and cookies to elevate the immigrant to what the Germans considered his proper station. And so, led by men like Jacob Schiff, the massive programs of philanthropy began. As the American Hebrew sorrowfully observed, “All of us should be sensible of what we owe not only to these … coreligionists, but to ourselves, who will be looked upon by our gentile neighbors as the natural sponsors for these, our brethren.” The Germans took up this task with a heavy collective sigh, as if assuming the white man’s burden. This was the atmosphere of philanthropy—money was given largely but grudgingly, not out of the great religious principle of Zedakah, or charity on its highest plane, given out of pure loving kindness, but out of a hard, bitter sense of resentment, embarrassment, and worry over what the neighbors would think. Many wealthy gentile families were enlisted to aid the Germans in their heavy chore of uplifting the Russians. In the 1890’s Mrs. Russell Sage, Warner Van Norden, and Henry Phipps all contributed importantly to the United Hebrew Charities, and Mrs. Josephine Shaw Lowell established her East Side Relief Work Committee to “put our poor ‘Hebrew Jews’ at work and to clothe the poor Negroes of the Sea Islands.”*

  As the wheels of philanthropy began to turn, pulling its heavy load of impoverished humanity behind it, any spirit of benevolence that might have existed at the outset grew less. Philanthropy became something very close to patronage, with the Germans, the patron lords, doling out funds to the poor, the miserable, the dependent and the patronized, the new “huddled masses.” From a tithing system of raising money, something painfully like taxation developed, and wealthy Germans, having been brusquely informed of how much they were expected to contribute, emerged from meetings of the United Hebrew Charities with red and angry faces.

  Not surprisingly, the Russians, on the receiving end of this charity, had no trouble sensing the spirit in which it was given. Uptown social workers and investigating teams invaded the Lower East Side, poking through blocks of railroad flats, clucking about filth and garbage, and asking impertinent personal questions—often to people who, in their own circle, were considered men of consequence. The Germans, however, were frequently surprised that the Russians, having accepted their largess, did not always respond with gratitude. As the Yiddishe Gazette reported in 1894:

  In the philanthropic institutions of our aristocratic German Jews you see beautiful offices, desks, all decorated, but strict and angry faces. Every poor man is questioned like a criminal, is looked down upon; every unfortunate suffers self-degradation and shivers like a leaf, just as if he were standing before a Russian official. When the same Russian Jew is in an institution of Russian Jews, no matter how poor and small the building, it will seem to him big and comfortable. He feels at home among his own brethren who speak his tongue, understand his thoughts and feel his heart.

  Alas, it is possible that this reporter is speaking of just such German philanthropists as Jacob Schiff. Schiff, for all his giving, lacked the common touch. His buttoned, German sense of superiority was too great. When faced with a Russian, his blue eyes glazed. When the son of a German friend of Schiff’s announced that he had fallen in love with, and wished to marry, a Russian girl, his father cried, “You must have got her pregnant!”

  It was not surprising that, as Russian Jewish families grew prosperous, they established charities to care for their own. Needy Russians began turning their backs on German philanthropy in favor of Russian. Though the United Hebrew Charities opposed it, East Side doctors organized the Jewish Maternity Hospital in 1906, where Jewish mothers could be certain they were being served kosher food (which the Germans also frowned on), and where the relationship between doctor and patient was not one of benefactor to beggar, but of equality. Uptown, at Mount Sinai Hospital, though 90 percent of the patients were Eastern Europeans, there was a rule that no Eastern Europeans could be admitted to the staff.

  Some Russian and Polish Jewish families did, as they began to make money, attempt to copy the German model and assumed German airs. They became the “Kalvarier Deitsch,” and boasted, “Mayn weib iz gevoren ah deitschke un ich bin gevoren ah deitsch.” (“My wife has become a lady and I have become a gentleman.”) But, for their attempts to bask in the glow of German respectability, they were also looked down upon. Many Russians Germanized their names; Selig became Sigmund, and so on. Others took German surnames, but this was often because, if one had a Russian name, it was impossible to obtain credit at an uptown German bank.* And no matter how successful a Russian became, or how hard he tried to Germanify himself, he found the sacred circle of uptown German Jewish society closed to him. Though the Germans gave away millions to the Russian immigrants, they never extended them invitations to their dinner parties, clubs, and dances.

  When, on rare o
ccasions, Russians found themselves inside a German’s Fifth Avenue mansion, they reacted with awe. Felix Warburg, who was even more philanthropic than his father-in-law, Mr. Schiff, had a private little joke which used to amuse his family whenever a recipient of his charity came around. As a boy in Berlin, when the Kaiser’s car sped by it played a little four-note melody on its horn. The joke in Germany used to be that the words to this tune were “Mit unserem Gelt”—“With our money.” Sometimes a Warburg pensioner would come to the Warburg house with a little gift for Felix. Accepting it, Felix would hum the little tune under his breath. It made his children giggle.

  Once Felix invited two Russians to a Jewish charities meeting at his house. He had never met them before, but he knew how to spot them. They were the two who didn’t come in dinner jackets. He overheard this pair standing in front of one of his Italian paintings and saying, “When Communism comes and there’s a division of property, I hope I draw this house.” Felix stepped over to the improperly attired men and said, suavely, “When Communism does come, and there is a redistribution of goods, I hope that if you do get my house, you will also invite me to be your guest, because I have always enjoyed it,” and walked away.

  But Adolph Lewisohn, who was always something of an individualist and who often did offbeat, rather surprising things, once decided that he would invite some Russian Jewish families to his Fifth Avenue house to dine. They came, and, to his astonishment and delight, he and the Russians hit it off very well. The crowd was shocked, and asked, “How can Adolph do that?” But Adolph defended his action, and insisted that his Russian friends were not boorish and uncouth at all but that, on the contrary, they were “witty and interesting personalities” and had conversed intelligently about music, literature, and art. “They had read more Shakespeare than I had,” he said.

  But, despite such gestures, the stern wall between German and Russian persisted. In the early 1900’s a group of East Side Jews began to envision a United Hebrew Community, “to effect a union of Jewish societies and congregations in New York City.” But it would take events of violence of a world-wide and unimagined sort to bring this about even partially.

  * Alice later broke the pact, and married Herbert Crowley.

  * In this period, the Germans were forced to face another irritating fact: They were being increasingly equated with Negroes.

  *As a result, in Jewish circles in New York today one can always speculate whether so-and-so, with his German name, is really a German or a secret Pole or Russian.

  38

  THE EQUITABLE LIFE AFFAIR

  One of the most colorful and written-about young men in turn-of-the-century New York was James Hazen Hyde. He had been nicknamed “the hayseed” by his Harvard classmates, but now, five years out of college, he was considered a hayseed no longer.

  Upon the death of his father, H. B. Hyde, the young man had found himself, at the age of twenty-three, the custodian of a billion dollars’ worth of life insurance, and was in charge of the savings of 600,000 individuals who held policies in the senior Hyde’s Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, “Protector of the Widow and Orphan,” the largest insurance company in the country. The Equitable had over $400 million in its treasury. Young Hyde, whose father had built the company from scratch, owned 51 percent of it.

  The minute the Equitable passed into James Hazen Hyde’s hands, he became, in view of the vast ramifications of the Equitable, a director of forty-six other corporations, including the Metropolitan Opera, but whether he had the intellectual equipment to cope with these directorships was doubtful. He was far more interested in enjoying himself. He had a barber imported from Paris to cut his hair and trim his beard in the French style, and, in the restaurants where he liked to stop, he positioned various French chefs, who had nothing to do but await the moments when their employer might drop in and wish some specialty. Hyde loved costume balls, indeed parties of all varieties. He threw a bal masqué at Sherry’s that cost him $200,000. He had a country château on Long Island, with a private “office” in the stables where he entertained “actresses” and other friends; and where “French costume dramas and other entertainments were performed.” A reporter from the Paris Figaro described Hyde’s country office as

  a room full of telephones and electric bells, furnished with fine carpets, old mahogany furniture, sporting photographs and prints, coaching trophies and hunting horns; next to his office is the kitchen, which permits him and his guests to come when the whim seizes them and have supper in the stables more freely and gaily than in the château; I remember a very festive supper that we had there with the thermometer outside fifteen above zero, where ladies donned old postilion hats or bull-fighter bonnets and blew hunting horns while everybody danced the cake walk.

  Life in the city was every bit as vivid as it was in the country, and another reporter describes the dashing young exquisite on his way to his office at the Equitable, “driving jauntily downtown in his private hansom cab, a bunch of violets nodding at the side of the horse’s head, another bunch nodding from the coachman’s hat, and a third bunch breathing incense from the buttonhole of the young man himself.” For all this—and probably because of all this—the financial community suspected that Hyde hadn’t the slightest idea how to run an insurance company. They were quite right. Among the many financiers who wooed him after his father’s death, offering to help him run his company and see to it that he “did the right things” with it, the first to gain Hyde’s confidence was Ned Harriman. With Harriman, also eager to help, came Jacob Schiff and Kuhn, Loeb & Company. Schiff was placed on the board of the Equitable in 1900.

  There were, however, others deeply involved in the affairs of the Equitable. They were the Alexanders, a family of such age and distinction that they snubbed Mrs. Astor, whom they considered “an amusing little upstart.” So grand were the Alexanders that they preferred not to identify themselves with New York at all, and referred to themselves as “an old Princeton family.” The Alexanders were not only large Equitable stockholders. James W. Alexander, head of the clan, had been made trustee, by the elder Hyde, of the younger Hyde’s estate until he reached the age of thirty and, it was hoped, discretion. It was Mr. Alexander’s opinion that James Hazen Hyde’s affairs were in serious need of management—an opinion which, needless to say, young Hyde did not share. Ned Harriman announced that he was stoutly on Hyde’s side, and he said that he “did not think that the Alexanders’ method of management of the Equitable was the right one.”

  J. P. Morgan, meanwhile, had a large interest in another insurance company, the New York Life, and was following events at the Equitable closely. What Morgan had in mind was to buy up the Equitable and add it to the New York Life; he and his client, Jim Hill, thought that the Equitable’s half-billion-dollar treasury could be put to excellent use financing railroad ventures, and this, of course, is exactly what Harriman and Schiff had in mind for their railroads. Soon after Schiff’s appointment to the Equitable’s board, the insurance company began investing in railroad issues recommended, not surprisingly, by Kuhn, Loeb.

  And so the alignment for control of the Equitable—and Hyde—was the same as in the Northern Pacific battle, Morgan and Hill against Harriman and Schiff. The Equitable’s fifty-two directors began taking sides.

  Alarmed with the deteriorating situation, James Alexander, along with other officers in the company, drew up a protest in which they demanded that Hyde give up control of the Equitable and that the company be “mutualized”—that is, that the right to elect directors be taken from Hyde and given to the policyholders themselves. (But Alexander had great influence with Equitable policyholders and so really wanted nothing more than to be able to vote the Equitable’s shares himself.)

  With both the Harriman and the Morgan groups pressing Hyde to sell his Equitable interest to them, Hyde may have felt himself surrounded. Perhaps he simply didn’t care. In any case, for reasons that have never been quite clear, he suddenly sold all his stoc
k in the Equitable to a lone-wolf speculator named Thomas Fortune Ryan. Moreover, the price Ryan paid for controlling interest in the insurance empire was startlingly small—$2,500,000. And when it was announced that dividend income on this amount of stock was only $3,514 a year, things seemed decidedly fishy. “Why?” cried the New York World editorially. “What is the real motive?” For the moment, as the Schiff and Morgan groups silently withdrew, no one was quite willing to say.

  In the storm of threats, imprecations, charges and accusations that followed, James Hazen Hyde departed for Paris. He never returned. In 1929 he appeared briefly in the news again when it was revealed that Durand’s restaurant in Paris offered, as a dessert, a peach flambéed in kirsch called “Poached Peach à la James Hazen Hyde.”

  By leaving when he did, Hyde conveniently avoided getting involved in what followed, which was a full-scale investigation by the Armstrong Committee of the New York State Legislature into the securities dealings of the big insurance companies, particularly the New York Life with Morgan on its board, and the Equitable with Jacob Schiff. Schiff, Morgan, Harriman, and Hill were all called before the committee and its investigative counsel, Charles Evans Hughes. Hughes turned up a number of interesting things. Morgan’s New York Life, in order to hide the fact that it owned stocks—and so it could say in its annual report, “The Company does not invest in stocks of any kind”—had made a number of fictitious loans to its employees. A bond clerk, for instance, was on the books as having received a loan in the sum of $1,857,000, and a fifteen-year-old Negro messenger boy had, according to the company’s accounts, been granted a generous loan of $1,150,000.

  Hughes was particularly interested in Jacob Schiff’s stock sales to the Equitable. The New York State insurance law provided that any director of an insurance company who profited by “selling or aiding in the sale of any stocks or securities to or by such corporation shall forfeit his position … and be disqualified from thereafter holding any such office in any insurance corporation.” Had, Hughes asked, the firm of which Mr. Schiff was a partner, Kuhn, Loeb, sold any securities to the company of which he was a director, the Equitable? Yes, Schiff admitted, he had, but the stocks had been sound and the prices had been fair.* Many of them were for his favorite railroads. He added that, after all, his firm had sold “only” $49,704,408 worth of stock to the Equitable, and this paltry amount of business had been done over five years’ time. He also pointed out that the $49,704,408 worth which Kuhn, Loeb had sold was “only” 16 percent of the total bought by the insurance company over the same five-year span, and finally—the most extraordinary percentage figure of all—that $49,704,408 worth of sales was “less than 3 percent” of Kuhn, Loeb’s business. Schiff had never before revealed a figure that indicated Kuhn, Loeb’s size. Now he had. In the five years from 1900 to 1905, the firm had sold $1.75 billion worth of securities. That meant $350 million a year. In those golden pre-income tax days, such Kuhn, Loeb partners as Schiff, Felix Warburg and Otto Kahn must have brought home very nice pay checks indeed.