The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  One day in 1930 a mysterious visitor, identified only as “a Hungarian,” appeared at Miss Bohmer’s office and asked to borrow two hundred thousand dollars of Julius Kessler’s money. Miss Bohmer cabled Kessler for instructions. Rather testily, Kessler cabled back that the Hungarian was his friend, and that she should give the man whatever he wanted. Miss Bohmer wrote out the two-hundred-thousand-dollar check, and then wired Kessler to tell him that that was the end of his American money supply. Kessler replied that he was aware of this, and Miss Bohmer then wanted to know how her salary was to be paid. It wasn’t, Kessler informed her in his cabled response. He had no further need for a secretary. She was fired. Miss Bohmer, a spinster who had spent many years in Kessler’s service, went home that night and, apparently despondent, swallowed a bottle of poison, and died.

  Over the next two or three years, Kessler made occasional visits to the United States to look up old friends in the liquor business and to offer his services as a “consultant” for as little as two hundred dollars a month. He was by then almost eighty, and most of his old friends, embarrassed for him, pushed checks across their desks for him while declining his services. Proudly, Kessler tore up the checks and returned to Budapest, and poverty.

  Then, in 1934, a mutual friend of Kessler’s and Sam Bronfman’s named Emil Schwartzhaupt (the mysterious “Hungarian,” perhaps?) came to Mr. Sam with a suggestion that something be done to help out the aging, ne’er-do-well Kessler. Surprisingly—since Mr. Sam barely knew Kessler—Mr. Sam immediately agreed, saying that “to do this good deed would redound to the credit of the Industry.” He then announced the creation, as a subsidiary of the Seagram Corporation, of the Kessler Distilling Corporation, with Julius Kessler as its president and chairman of the board. Master Blender Calman Levine was assigned the job of creating a new blend, to be called Kessler’s Special, which was to be of high quality but to sell in the medium-price range. It was a difficult assignment, but Levine eventually came up with a formula that satisfied all the requirements—a superior blend that would be affordable by the workingman.

  Levine even stepped outside his normal field of expertise and designed a special bottle and a special label for Kessler’s Special, with Mr. Sam kibitzing over his shoulder, saying, “Make the name ‘Kessler’ bigger—bigger.” Together, they planned an elaborate advertising and promotion campaign, and a national marketing strategy for Kessler’s Special. In fact, no one at Seagram’s could recall Mr. Sam’s working so hard over, and giving so much of his personal time to, the launching of a new brand since the Crown brands had been introduced. Even more unusual was the use of the Kessler name on the label. No Seagram brands had ever been given names that sounded remotely Jewish. There was no whiskey called “Bronfman’s Special,” nor did the Bronfman name appear, even in the tiniest print, on any Seagram label. Why was Mr. Sam so intent on immortalizing this elderly gentleman?

  Mr. Sam even announced that, from now on, Kessler’s Special was going to be his personal drink. When the new brand, amid much publicity and hoopla, appeared on the shelves, it was an immediate and huge success. Julius Kessler, in his eighties, became a millionaire. He also became an instant old friend, despite the disparity in their ages—Mr. Sam was then in his lusty early forties—of Sam and Saidye Bronfman, and became a frequent houseguest at Belvedere Palace in Montreal. In fact, Julius Kessler became a part of a frequently told Bronfman family story—told to illustrate the early signs of business acumen on the part of Mr. Sam’s elder son Edgar, even as a little boy. Little Edgar, then about six, admired a musical watch that Julius Kessler wore on a watch chain. Kessler said that, if Edgar liked the watch, he would give it to him as a bar mitzvah gift. Said Edgar, “But you’re an old man now, and you may not be here for my bar mitzvah.” With that, Kessler removed the watch and presented it to Edgar Bronfman on the spot.

  Along the corridors of Seagram’s, of course, there were many jokes about Kessler’s Special. “Kessler certainly is special,” they said, “special to Mr. Sam.” That the boss should have made such a Herculean effort, at such great expense, just to help out an octogenarian whom everyone else had written off as a loser seemed inexplicable. Good deeds on such a scale were not at all Mr. Sam’s style. Unless, of course, there was blackmail involved, and Kessler “had something” on Mr. Sam from Prohibition days, when, it was assumed, there had been much dirty work at the crossroads that Kessler could have known about.

  There were a number of intriguing pieces to the puzzle, but no clear solution. Who, for instance, was the mysterious Hungarian? Was he part of the scheme, and was the two hundred thousand dollars his fee for helping Mr. Kessler bring it off? But four years had elapsed between the Hungarian’s loan and Mr. Sam’s magnanimous gesture. Or was this time merely allowed for the scent to cool? And what was to be made of Miss Bohmer’s sudden suicide? True, it was 1930, the Great Depression was settling in, her longtime boss had treated her very shabbily, and she may have felt at the end of her rope. Or was it not really a suicide at all? Did Miss Bohmer, in underworld terms, “know too much,” and need to be got rid of?

  Then there was the ambiguous role of Emil Schwartzhaupt, the first to suggest the good deed to Mr. Sam. That same year, 1934, Mr. Sam concluded a—for him—rather unusual business deal with Mr. Schwartzhaupt. Schwartzhaupt owned the Calvert distillery at Relay, Maryland, and Mr. Sam wanted to buy it. Instead of making Schwartzhaupt an offer, which would have been customary, and waiting for Schwartzhaupt to come back with a higher price, then agreeing on a figure in the middle, Mr. Sam told Schwartzhaupt to name his figure. Whatever it was, Mr. Sam would pay it. There would be none of the usual haggling. Schwartzhaupt named his price, and was paid. Later, Schwartzhaupt would grumble that he had probably named too low an amount.

  Mr. Schwartzhaupt, however, had done all right. He had already become the second-largest shareholder in Schenley’s, having sold his Bernheim Distilling Company in Louisville to Lew Rosenstiel, Mr. Sam’s bitter rival.

  The year 1934, the first full year of Repeal, was a hectic one throughout the revived American liquor industry, a year of fast deals, scrambling for markets, price wars, hastily patched together new laws and regulations, and sudden changes. Many facts that might have come to light were irretrievably lost in the shuffle of that uncertain year, and all the principals in the Kessler affair are now dead. The Seagram Corporation, in response to queries, remains officially unaware of any underhanded dealings that may or may not have gone on, but is also unwilling to forward such queries to the Distilled Spirits Institute, of which Seagram’s is a member. Seagrams offers only one explanation for Mr. Sam’s beneficence to Julius Kessler: it was a “good deed.”

  If so, Mr. Sam was certainly consistent. Even after Julius Kessler’s death, Mr. Sam remained loyal to Kessler’s Special whiskey, and devoted special attention to the way the brand was marketed and promoted, loudly announcing, “A Kessler’s and soda, please!” whenever he ordered a drink in a public bar or restaurant. But then, after all, Kessler’s whiskey had become a money-maker for Seagram’s. It still is.

  But Mr. Sam himself may have had the last word on the whole subject. Looking over the galley proofs of his company’s carefully laundered official history that was to be included in one of Seagram’s annual reports to its stockholders, Mr. Sam slammed the pages down and said, “This is so much bullshit. If I only told the truth, I’d sell ten million copies!”

  As the dark years of the 1930s marched forward in Europe, and as Nazi Germany grew in power, more and more American Jews were becoming aware of the increasingly institutionalized anti-Semitism that would lead to Hitler’s Final Solution for the Jews of Europe. By 1933, it was apparent that Hitler’s rantings were more than political rhetoric, and Americans were warily eyeing the deteriorating situation in central Europe. That was the year when Rose Pastor Stokes became ill, and her malady was diagnosed as cancer of the breast. A physician in Germany had announced great strides in the treatment of cancer—the doctors of German
y were still considered the finest in the world—and her husband and friends decided that she should be sent to Germany for medical care. There was no small amount of risk, to be sure, because of the Nazis, and there was also the problem that neither Rose nor her husband had any money.

  In April of that year some five hundred of her old friends and admirers held a meeting at New York’s Webster Hall to try to raise funds for the trip abroad. The chairman of the gathering, Alexander Trachtenberg, claimed that Rose’s cancer had been caused by the brutal kicking and beating she had received from a policeman during the garment strike in 1917. Her new husband confirmed the incident, but said that it was probably just a contributing factor. Enough money was raised to send Rose to the German doctor.

  Though she was only fifty-three, she now looked much older. Her famous mane of Titian hair had turned mousy and was streaked with gray, and she wore it carelessly, pulled back with pins and combs. She seemed to have lost all interest in her once-lovely appearance, and the wonderfully delicate and slender figure that Harper’s Bazar had written so admiringly about in 1905 had gone heavy. Her face—she wore no makeup—was lined, and there were dark circles under her eyes. The face, though fuller, coarser, also seemed saddened and sunken from the weight of lost causes. She seemed to have been defeated by both love and time.

  Though she had been called a traitoress and a seditionist, Rose was at heart a patriotic woman. Her patriotism—and that of her fellow founders of the American Communist party—was perhaps idealized, unrealistic, impractical. She saw American society as flawed, but the remedies she fought for were for all Americans, not just Jewish Americans. She had foreseen a social revolution in America, and of course her vision was faulty. In 1933, with fifteen million Americans out of work, the country was probably closer to a revolution than at any other point in its history. But it would not happen.

  Once in Germany, her whereabouts were kept secret to protect her from harassment. But it was announced that she was sending home two trunkfuls of papers—an autobiography that she was writing. If the papers were sent, they never arrived. She died in Germany on June 20, 1933, and her crusade—which she herself may not have altogether understood—was ended.

  On July 24, about four hundred of her fellow Communists met in a drab old hall called the New Star Casino on 107th Street and Park Avenue, at the seedy fringes of Harlem, for a memorial service. Though no note was made of it, it was just a few days past what would have been her twenty-eighth wedding anniversary to James Graham Phelps Stokes, whose Old New York name she had continued to wear so proudly, and her own fifty-fourth birthday. It was noticed that most of those in attendance were women. Rose’s ashes had been flown home from Germany, and her urn was carried in a procession by a special escort and placed on a red-draped card table on a platform. Two prominent members of the Party, Clara Zitkin and Sergei Gussev, made short speeches. A chorus sang revolutionary songs—“Meadowlands,” and “The Peat-Bog Soldiers.”

  Then the audience stood at attention, in silence, for one full minute. The Romance of the Century, and the Cinderella Story of the Lower East Side, was over.

  Later, it was announced that the writing of a biography of Rose Pastor Stokes was “in the hands” of a man named Cedric Belfrage, who was the author of a book called South of God. The biography has never appeared.

  *There were ways to make the claim subliminally, however. In 1941, an advertising campaign was headlined “Seven Yeats.” In smaller print, the copy revealed it meant seven years “since Repeal.”

  †Another somewhat misleading brand name. A number of European liquors, particularly brandies and cognacs, used initials following their names—“V.S.O.P.,” for example, which stands for Very Special Old Pale. Most people not in the know assumed that “V.O.” stood for “Very Old.” In fact, Sam Bronfman had inherited the label from old Joe Seagram’s days in the nineteenth century, and he was said to have used the initials to stand for “Very Own.”

  *Interestingly, there was never a Jewish Man of Distinction.

  12

  WAR

  As the news from Hitler’s Germany grew more alarming, a number of American Jews wondered why no voices of protest had been raised from a number of important places. President Roosevelt had said nothing, and neither had Stalin, nor the Pope. It seemed to many people that a cry of outrage from at least one major world power might give Hitler pause, and persuade him to change his course, but the world powers remained strangely silent, pursuing some sort of policy of wait and see. Hitler, the Jews pointed out, was a man who had shown he could be cowed by much lesser men. Generalissimo Franco had stopped Hitler’s army at the Spanish border with what amounted to no more than a lot of double-talk. And when the Germans had told the king of little Denmark that they could “cleanse” Denmark of its Jews, the king had replied firmly that the Danes would never stand for such a crime against humanity, nor would he. He himself had put on the identifying Jewish yellow armband, and urged his subjects to do the same. They did, and the Danish Jews were allowed to live. Why couldn’t President Roosevelt take such a stand? If he wouldn’t, it behooved wealthy Jews in North America to do what they could on their own.

  For the Jewish fraternity of motion picture producers in Hollywood, however, this was a very ticklish subject. They had so convinced themselves that the success of their movies depended on the movies’ non-Jewish character that they were reluctant, no matter how it might trouble the conscience, to step forward and identify themselves with Jewish causes, no matter how urgent.

  Furthermore, their attitude was reinforced by none other than the man whom Roosevelt had appointed as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in 1937—Joseph P. Kennedy. Just back from London, Kennedy had called a secret meeting with some fifty of Hollywood’s leading motion picture men, including Goldwyn, Mayer, the Schencks, the Warners, Fox, and Zukor. In firm tones, Kennedy had told them that, as Jews, they must not protest what was going on in Germany, and must keep their Jewish fury out of print and off the screen. Any Jewish protests, Kennedy insisted, would make a victory over the Germans impossible. It would make the world—and the United States public in particular—feel that what was going on in Europe was “a Jewish war,” and a Jewish war would not be a popular idea, would actually increase anti-Semitic feeling in the United States. Kennedy delivered the same argument to a group of New York’s Jewish businessmen in the banking and fashion industries. In New York and Hollywood, the leading Jews quietly agreed to Kennedy’s plea for silence, and to keep any Jewish feelings, along with their Jewishness, under wraps. Whatever Kennedy’s intentions may have been, it was curious, even chilling, advice.

  But it was advice that many Hollywood men were probably somewhat relieved to hear. It eased them of some guilt they might have felt, and after all, it came from a very highly placed source. Not only was Kennedy very rich, but he was also a high government official. Furthermore, he was a power on Wall Street, where he had headed the Securities and Exchange Commission, and much in Hollywood rode on what Wall Street said. He was also a considerable force in the motion picture business, thanks to, of all people, David Sarnoff.

  Back in the 1920s, Sarnoff had predicted that the radio and the phonograph would be combined, and that a national network—or “chain,” as he called it—of radio stations would be created, whereby a program originating in, say, New York, could be transmitted simultaneously from a series of high-wattage towers across the country. With the advent of sound in motion pictures, Sarnoff saw that talking pictures meant business for RCA, too, since all the components that went into sound for movies were actually by-products of radio science. Sarnoff had proposed that RCA get a foothold in the movie business, and with that in mind he approached Joe Kennedy in 1927.

  Kennedy owned a substantial piece of a small production company called Film Booking Office, which had a friendly relationship with the large Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of theaters. Kennedy also had an interest in another film company, called Pathé Pictures. At the ti
me, however, Kennedy’s interest in films seemed mostly to be based on his relationship with Gloria Swanson, and his desire to promote her career. David Sarnoff proposed to Kennedy that, with half a million dollars of RCA’s money thrown into the pot to sweeten the deal, Film Booking Office, Pathé, and Keith-Albee-Orpheum might be merged to form a new studio that would rival the existing Big Five. Kennedy liked the idea, and the result of the merger was RKO Pictures (Radio-Keith-Orpheum). It was certainly a nice thing for Kennedy, who saw his RKO stock climb from twenty-one to fifty dollars a share just before the Crash, when he sold out at the top.

  Later, Kennedy would claim that the idea for forming RKO was his own, but his biographer, Richard J. Whalen, in The Founding Father, refuted this, and called the creation of the new company “Sarnoff’s grand design.” For such coups as this, Sarnoff was rewarded with the presidency of RCA in 1930. And in Hollywood, where Kennedy made himself president of RKO, there was awe. Adolph Zukor had asked, “A banker? A banker in this business? I thought this was a business for furriers.”

  Kennedy, when not telling Hollywood producers what they should or shouldn’t do, could also be very useful to his movie friends. As ambassador, he had made high-level connections in London, and England at the time was the second most important market for American-made films. In a confidential memo to Sam Goldwyn, Joseph M. Schenck in MGM’s New York office was able to report that, working through State Department channels—and in coded telegrams that Kennedy had let Schenck see—Kennedy was developing a formula whereby the film industry could withdraw, and transfer out of England, much more money than had been allowed by law. A five-million-dollar ceiling had been in force for such withdrawals, but Kennedy had assured Schenck that this ceiling could be raised to between twenty and thirty million. Furthermore, the money would come out of England in dollars, not English pounds, which was important since the pound was in a weakened, war-frightened state. Schenck warned Goldwyn not to try to interfere with Kennedy’s plans since, as Schenck put it, Kennedy was a “tough customer and resents anyone who tries to go over his head or that of the State Department.” In his ambassadorial role, Kennedy would deal directly with the British chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir John Simon. Was any of this legal? Who knew? But it did seem an odd bit of extracurricular activity for our American ambassador. And it showed that Hollywood was more than a little frightened of Mr. Joseph P. Kennedy.