The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Seventy-five witnesses were a difficult act to follow, but of course one voice remained to be heard to close the show: Uriah’s. He had reached his finest hour. On December 19, 1857, at ten in the morning—the trial had now gone on for more than a month—Uriah rose to his feet and began: “My parents were Israelites, and I was nurtured in the faith of my ancestors.…” Three days later, on December 22, he concluded with the words: “What is my case today, if you yield to this injustice, may tomorrow be that of the Roman Catholic or the Unitarian, the Episcopalian or the Methodist, the Presbyterian or the Baptist. There is but one safeguard, and this is to be found in an honest, wholehearted, inflexible support of the wise, the just, the impartial guarantee of the Constitution. I have the fullest confidence that you will faithfully adhere to this guarantee, and, therefore, with like confidence, I leave my destiny in your hands.” The members of the board looked stunned and glassy-eyed. Uriah sat down to what a reporter called “a spontaneous outburst of heartfelt applause.”

  “It was,” commented a Washington newspaper, “one of the most glorious, if not brilliant, pleas ever made in the history of the United States Navy: a plea that ‘right should be done!’ This became the crowning triumph in Uriah Levy’s career: it was a half-century of experience speaking, experience as a seaman, but most important of all, experience as an American Jew.”

  The court’s verdict was unanimous: “Levy is morally, mentally, physically and professionally fit for the Naval Service and … ought to be restored to the active list of the Navy.”

  Now that the secret was out, that anti-Semitism afflicted America, too, as it had done for centuries in reactionary Europe, and lay there for all to see—live, quivering, and unpleasant, a fact that had to be dealt with in the armed services as in civilian life—the immediate reaction was one of extreme embarrassment. Now the Navy set about, very late in the game, to atone for the way it had treated Uriah. After years of ignoring his requests to be assigned sea duty, he was, barely four months after the court of inquiry had reached its verdict, respectfully asked by the Secretary of the Navy if he would care to take command of the sloop Macedonian, being outfitted in Boston, and sail it to join the Mediterranean Fleet. Uriah replied gracefully that he would be honored, and then—perhaps in a spirit of wicked humor—added an outrageous request. He would like to take his wife along. She was, he explained, “an orphan, and not a native of this country, without any protection during my absence.”

  It was an unheard-of request. Never before in American naval history—nor since, for that matter—had a captain been permitted to carry his wife aboard. But the Secretary of the Navy, in his new mood of trying to placate Uriah Levy, replied promptly that this would certainly be possible.

  Virginia Lopez Levy often seemed in need of some sort of “protection.” A curious woman, with an enormous interest in herself, she wrote extensive memoirs in later years, in which she speculated at length about the secret of her immense charm and attractiveness to men. She once asked one of her many men friends, a poet named Nathaniel Parker Willis, whether he could put his finger on what made her so desirable. “I said,” she wrote, “‘I think you know me well enough to realize that I am not a vain woman—but it would be idle and ungrateful for me to pretend that I was unaware of the kindness and attention showered on me. Will you tell me the truth, to what do you attribute this popularity I am fortunate to enjoy?’”

  The poet replied—according to Virginia—as follows:

  You have indeed set me a hard task. You ask a mere man, an admirer and a poet, to be absolutely truthful to a young and interesting woman, but as your wish is my command, I will do my best. The beauty of a vain woman may command the adoration of men, but it rarely inspires their love. Your power is potent because you use it so little. The infinite variety of your charm is as elusive as yourself and therefore difficult to define, but the brilliant bubbling effervescence of your youth is like a sparkling glass of champagne that you give us enough of to exhilarate without intoxicating. Do you wonder that we quaff it to the last drop?

  A sculptor in Florence once asked her to pose for him and—again, according to Virginia—“He wanted me to sit for his Allegro. I asked how she was depicted. He said ‘buxom, blithe and debonair.’ I positively refused to pose for anyone described in this manner, as I was short and plump and possessed of la beauté de diable.”

  She appears to have been an inveterate flirt, and there was a curious episode at Monticello, one day when Uriah was out of town, in which Virginia became involved with a number of spirited college boys who, for some reason, happened to be passing through. She girlishly ordered them off the property, but they refused to go. And after a romping chase over stone walls, through gardens, and in and out of arbors and bowers and gazebos, Virginia wrote that “We all parted friends.”

  Virginia accepted full credit for the fact that her husband’s request to bring her along was granted. “The popularity I was fortunate enough to enjoy with the men in power,” she wrote, “won for me the unusual distinction of being allowed to accompany my husband. This privilege, which has never been granted since, was passed by both houses and granted without protest.”

  Her “infinite variety” made her quite a handful for her aging husband. He tried to keep pace with her youthful energy, and dyed his graying hair and moustache jet black. But he also found her an expensive commodity, and whenever they quarreled it was over the extravagant amounts she spent on clothes and trimmings. And she was very nearly too much for the Macedonian, where the presence of a solitary female among an all-male crew was, not surprisingly, disruptive. In his diary, a junior officer wrote: “She seemed determined to show off her dresses for every time she came on deck she had a different one.” On another occasion, this same officer was disturbed to enter the captain’s cabin on an errand and to find “the tables and chairs covered with ladies’ apparel, hoops and skirts, bonnets and shoes, etc. etc.”

  Virginia, on the other hand, found life on shipboard most agreeable, and seemed, at times, to be going out of her way to be kind to the younger officers—particularly at times when the captain was on duty on the bridge and she was alone with time to kill in her cabin. And she enjoyed the stops at Mediterranean ports, where she mingled, as she put it, among “the exalted circles of European society.” Everywhere, she wrote, she was admired. From her memoirs: “My sojourn in Italy was as enjoyable as my stay in Egypt. Particularly so in Naples, where I occupied an apartment for some time. Captain Levy was compelled to leave, but everyone was very kind to me, including our Ambassador & his wife, Mrs. Chandler.… Spent Yom Kippur with Baron and Baroness Rothschild, who had a synagogue in their home. I have always admired the Rothschild family, and in whatever country I met them was impressed with their nobility of character. They understood perfectly noblesse oblige.” She dashed off to Paris, where “I went to a fashionable modiste … and told her I wanted a white tulle gown, as simple as she could make it, and told her I must have it in time for the ball. She was horrified. Madame must have brocade and point lace, but I insisted on the tulle, and she reluctantly agreed to make it. The night of the ball when these old duchesses adjusted their lorgnettes to look me over and pronounce me charmante, I thought I had made a wise selection. But neither the gown nor I had anything to recommend us but our freshness. I have never seen such a collection of jewels and ugly women in my life!”

  Her favorite ball that season was the “wonderful costume ball given by the Emperor Napoleon III and where the Empress Eugenie was masked … the splendor of its costumes, the scintillation of its lights, the rhythm and intoxication of its music, I think, went a little to my head and I felt that in order to enter into the spirit of the evening I must indulge in a violent flirtation.… I learned later that my partner was Prince Metternich.…”

  Virginia must have been a trial to Uriah, but there were other compensations. In February, 1860, Uriah Levy learned that he had been placed in command of the entire Mediterranean Fleet, and had been elev
ated to the rank of commodore, which was then the Navy’s highest rank. The fleet celebrated this event by presenting him with a thirteen-gun salute. And so Uriah Levy, scorned and beleaguered most of his life in the service, had all the luck at last.

  It was all he wanted. The board of inquiry trial had taken its toll on him. He had begun to complain of “stomach distress,” and there were other signs that he was getting old. In 1861, he and Virginia came home to the big house in Saint Mark’s Place in New York. In April of that year Fort Sumter surrendered, and suddenly the Navy officer corps was split along North-South lines. War seemed inevitable, and many officers returned to the South to count themselves with the Confederacy. Uriah, though he owned property south of the Mason-Dixon Line, announced his allegiance to the Union, and even talked excitedly of Navy service in the Civil War. But early in the spring of 1862, he came down with a severe cold. It developed into pneumonia. On March 22 of that year he died in his sleep, with Virginia at his side.

  Uriah’s last will and testament managed to say a good deal about his zeal as a patriot, as well as the size of his ego. One of his bequests was for the erection of a statue of himself, “of the size of life at least” and “to cost at least six thousand dollars,” above his grave, on which he wished inscribed: “Uriah P. Levy, Captain of the United States Navy, Father of the law for the abolition of the barbarous practise of corporal punishment in the Navy of the United States.” He then directed that Monticello—the house and acreage—be left “to the people of the United States,” but he attached an odd proviso. He asked that the estate be turned into “an Agricultural School for the purpose of educating as practical farmers children of the warrant office of the United States Navy whose Fathers are dead.” Was this Uriah’s idea of a joke, or a serious gesture aimed at turning swords into plowshares? Why should the children of dead warrant officers be taught farming? Perhaps Uriah, who considered himself a gentleman farmer as well as a Navy officer, felt that the two occupations complemented each other. In any case, his will left the condition unexplained. There were a number of charitable bequests, and gifts to relatives. Virginia was directed to receive the minimum that the law allowed.

  Needless to say, Virginia was not happy with this state of affairs, nor were members of Uriah’s family, who had looked forward to splitting up the vast and valuable acreage at Monticello, and who might have been willing to spend less on a monument to the deceased. After Uriah died, his will was contested and his estate went into litigation for several years. Finally the will was broken, and Monticello went to one of Uriah’s nephews—appropriately named Jefferson Levy—who, with his family, maintained the big place until 1923, when a Jefferson Memorial Foundation purchased it from him for half a million dollars, a respectable gain on the $2,700 Uriah Levy had paid for it. Virginia Levy remarried rather soon after her husband’s death, thus disqualifying herself from much more than the share of the estate she already had received. She survived Uriah by an astonishing sixty-three years, and died in 1925. So it was that the widow of an officer of the War of 1812 lived well into the flapper era. She did not, however, live to see the launching of the destroyer U.S.S. Levy during World War II. At the height of the war, the Levy was described by the New York Herald Tribune as one of “the swift and deadly sub-killers.” It was an appropriate monument to Uriah—more appropriate than the life-size statue, which never came to be.

  * A copy of the Jefferson statue stands in the council chamber of City Hall in New York City.

  16

  THE JEWISH EPISCOPALIANS

  Uriah Levy’s death had been as well publicized as his life, and to the Jewish Old Guard it was all a little embarrassing. He had become the best-known Jew in America, with the word “Jew” emblazoned all over him, and his disputatious image—combined with his wife’s flamboyant one—was not exactly the one the Jews wished to cultivate. Families such as the Nathans went to pains to explain that Commodore Levy was “not typical,” and should therefore not be treated—as he himself had obviously wanted to be treated—as some sort of spokesman for the race.

  The Sephardim neither needed nor wanted a spokesman. They had integrated quietly into urban American life, and had become gentlefolk. For these people, their Jewishness was something to be kept privately in the background, not to be noisily defended, or boasted or complained about, in the manner of a Uriah Levy. If they wished to be known publicly for anything, it was for their cultivation, breeding, good manners, and good works. It is perhaps ironic that, as the Jewish elite turned from mere moneymaking, almost with a disdainful dusting of their hands, to more elevated pursuits of the mind and spirit, they assured themselves of a less forceful role in America than the one they might have played.

  There were, in fact, a number of Sephardic men who took pride in the fact that they did nothing at all. Mr. Alfred Tobias was one of these elegantly situated men. The Tobiases were a Sephardic family, originally from Liverpool, who had made a considerable fortune manufacturing chronometers. The first Tobias to emigrate to America, whose name was Tobias I. Tobias, secured himself rather thoroughly to the New York Sephardic elite when four of his children, Henry, Fanny, Harriet, and Alfred married four of Harmon Hendricks’ children, Roselane, Uriah II, Henry, and Hermoine. Alfred Tobias’ sole occupation was “handling his investments”—a task he obviously performed quite well, for he increased his own considerable inheritance as well as those of his already wealthy Hendricks wife, and his wife’s two orphaned nieces.

  Cousin Florian Tobias was also proud to confess that he had never worked a day in his life at anything that could be called a job, and that he never intended to. Oh, he did a few things. He was an amateur billiard champion, and he practiced every day on his full-size Collender table in the billiard room. He had a small carpenter’s shop in the house, where he turned out beautiful picture frames, taborets, screens, and delicate objets d’art. He was an admitted dilettante, and his only practical chore in life occurred when coal was being delivered for the furnaces of his father’s house in Forty-eighth Street. Cousin Florian always posted himself outside the house, just beside the coal chute—in his best clothes, of course, and in his top hat—where he counted the number of truckloads that went into the cellar, to make sure that the proper tonnages were being delivered. It was not too taxing a job, or life, and Cousin Florian lived to the comfortable age of seventy-four.

  The Hendrickses, meanwhile, were doing nicely. With their copper-rolling mills in New Jersey, their big country estate at Belleville, and their town house at 414 Fifth Avenue, they were among the richest of the Sephardic families. They also owned quite a bit of Manhattan real estate, including the blocks between Sixth and Seventh avenues from Twentieth to Twenty-second streets, and thirty acres along Broadway. (Had the family held on to this, the Hendrickses would be among the city’s biggest landowners today.) Of course, there were some people who considered the Hendrickses to be a little on the dull side, a little stuffy.

  There were also some odd Hendricks family characteristics, and an individual who was accused, in the group, of being a bit “Hendricksy” was someone who was fussy about dirt to the point of neurosis, was obsessive about cleanliness, or repeatedly washed his hands. Several Hendrickses were complusive hand-washers, and would never touch a stranger for fear of contamination. Once, so a story went, someone said to one of the Hendrickses at the opera, “Aren’t the acoustics in this opera house terrible?” Sniffing, Mr. Hendricks replied, “Really? I don’t smell anything.” But when the United States government needed money to pay for the War of 1812, the Hendrickses point out, President Madison sought loans from individuals. Henry C. de Rham, of the old New York de Rhams, offered $32,300. Harmon Hendricks topped him with $42,000.

  By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Sephardim of New York and other cities were leading lives of comfort and reassurance. If you lived on Fifth Avenue, and most “nice” families lived on or just off it—it ran, after all, along the spine of Manhattan, and one had the nicest
views from there—your house probably had a small black box affixed to an inside wall, near the front door. You pulled the handle on the box, a pleasant whirring sound emerged, and presently a messenger boy in knickers and blue cap appeared at your doorstep to carry a letter uptown, or to fetch an order from the druggist’s. You rang a servant’s bell, it tinkled distantly from the panel in the downstairs kitchen, and within moments a servant appeared to do your bidding. Such were the amenities of those long-ago days. And yet the servants’ rooms in the old brownstones were never supplied with baths. Maids, when they bathed at all, were required to use the basement laundry tubs. Wells, where fresh water was drawn, were right on Fifth Avenue.

  At the same time, doorknobs were of plated silver, and satin draperies with heavy tassels hung over window curtains of thick lace. Furniture was of gilt rosewood, covered with tufted satin, and tables were of ebony, inlaid with marquetry. A card receiver stood near every entrance. It was the fashion to have, in every formal room, a center table holding ornaments—the Boyer statuettes or the Manet bronzes, or perhaps a Monte Verdi depiction of Benjamin Franklin chaining the lightning. Thanks to the magic of electricity, the house of important downtown businessmen could be supplied with private tickers from the New York Stock Exchange. Mr. Jefferson Levy, Uriah’s banker nephew, who later became a congressman, rather topped everyone in the Sephardic community. He also had a ticker from the London Stock Exchange.