When Borgenicht came home at night to his children, he may have been tired and poor and overwhelmed, but he was alive. He was his own boss. He was responsible for his own decisions and direction. His work was complex: it engaged his mind and imagination. And in his work, there was a relationship between effort and reward: the longer he and Regina stayed up at night sewing aprons, the more money they made the next day on the streets.
Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.
Work that fulfills those three criteria is meaningful. Being a teacher is meaningful. Being a physician is meaningful. So is being an entrepreneur, and the miracle of the garment industry—as cutthroat and grim as it was—was that it allowed people like the Borgenichts, just off the boat, to find something meaningful to do as well.* When Louis Borgenicht came home after first seeing that child’s apron, he danced a jig. He hadn’t sold anything yet. He was still penniless and desperate, and he knew that to make something of his idea was going to require years of backbreaking labor. But he was ecstatic, because the prospect of those endless years of hard labor did not seem like a burden to him. Bill Gates had that same feeling when he first sat down at the keyboard at Lakeside. And the Beatles didn’t recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week. They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.
The most important consequence of the miracle of the garment industry, though, was what happened to the children growing up in those homes where meaningful work was practiced. Imagine what it must have been like to watch the meteoric rise of Regina and Louis Borgenicht through the eyes of one of their offspring. They learned the same lesson that little Alex Williams would learn nearly a century later—a lesson crucial to those who wanted to tackle the upper reaches of a profession like law or medicine: if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.
11.
In 1982, a sociology graduate student named Louise Farkas went to visit a number of nursing homes and residential hotels in New York City and Miami Beach. She was looking for people like the Borgenichts, or, more precisely, the children of people like the Borgenichts, who had come to New York in the great wave of Jewish immigration at the turn of the last century. And for each of the people she interviewed, she constructed a family tree showing what a line of parents and children and grandchildren and, in some cases, great-grandchildren did for a living.
Here is her account of “subject #18”:
A Russian tailor artisan comes to America, takes to the needle trade, works in a sweat shop for a small salary. Later takes garments to finish at home with the help of his wife and older children. In order to increase his salary he works through the night. Later he makes a garment and sells it on New York streets. He accumulates some capital and goes into a business venture with his sons. They open a shop to create men’s garments. The Russian tailor and his sons become men’s suit manufacturers supplying several men’s stores....The sons and the father become prosperous....The sons’ children become educated professionals.
Here’s another. It’s a tanner who emigrated from Poland in the late nineteenth century.
Farkas’s Jewish family trees go on for pages, each virtually identical to the one before, until the conclusion becomes inescapable: Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins. They became professionals because of their humble origins.
Ted Friedman, the prominent litigator in the 1970s and 1980s, remembers as a child going to concerts with his mother at Carnegie Hall. They were poor and living in the farthest corners of the Bronx. How did they afford tickets? “Mary got a quarter,” Friedman says. “There was a Mary who was a ticket taker, and if you gave Mary a quarter, she would let you stand in the second balcony, without a ticket. Carnegie Hall didn’t know about it. It was just between you and Mary. It was a bit of a journey, but we would go back once or twice a month.”*
Friedman’s mother was a Russian immigrant. She barely spoke English. But she had gone to work as a seamstress at the age of fifteen and had become a prominent garment union organizer, and what you learn in that world is that through your own powers of persuasion and initiative, you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall. There is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that. The garment industry was boot camp for the professions.
What did Joe Flom’s father do? He sewed shoulder pads for women’s dresses. What did Robert Oppenheimer’s father do? He was a garment manufacturer, like Louis Borgenicht. One flight up from Flom’s corner office at Skadden, Arps is the office of Barry Garfinkel, who has been at Skadden, Arps nearly as long as Flom and who for many years headed the firm’s litigation department. What did Garfinkel’s mother do? She was a milliner. She made hats at home. What did two of Louis and Regina Borgenicht’s sons do? They went to law school, and no less than nine of their grandchildren ended up as doctors and lawyers as well.
Here is the most remarkable of Farkas’s family trees. It belongs to a Jewish family from Romania who had a small grocery store in the Old Country and then came to New York and opened another, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It is the most elegant answer to the question of where all the Joe Floms came from.
12.
Ten blocks north of the Skadden, Arps headquarters in midtown Manhattan are the offices of Joe Flom’s great rival, the law firm generally regarded as the finest in the world.
It is headquartered in the prestigious office building known as Black Rock. To get hired there takes a small miracle. Unlike New York’s other major law firms, all of which have hundreds of attorneys scattered around the major capitals of the world, it operates only out of that single Manhattan building. It turns down much more business than it accepts. Unlike every one of its competitors, it does not bill by the hour. It simply names a fee. Once, while defending Kmart against a takeover, the firm billed $20 million for two weeks’ work. Kmart paid—happily. If its attorneys do not outsmart you, they will outwork you, and if they can’t outwork you, they’ll win through sheer intimidation. There is no firm in the world that has made more money, lawyer for lawyer, over the past two decades. On Joe Flom’s wall, next to pictures of Flom with George Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton, there is a picture of him with the rival firm’s managing partner.
No one rises to the top of the New York legal profession unless he or she is smart and ambitious and hardworking, and clearly the four men who founded the Black Rock firm fit that description. But we know far more than that, don’t we? Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities, and at this point, after examining the lives of Bill Joy and Bill Gates, pro hockey players and geniuses, and Joe Flom, the Janklows, and the Borgenichts, it shouldn’t be hard to figure out where the perfect lawyer comes from.
This person will have been born in a demographic trough, so as to have had the best of New York’s public schools and the easiest time in the job market. He will be Jewish, of course, and so, locked out of the old-line downtown law firms on account of his “antecedents.” This person’s parents will have done meaningful work in the garment business, passing on to their children autonomy and complexity and the connection between effort and reward. A good school—although it doesn’t have to be a great sc
hool—will have been attended. He need not have been the smartest in the class, only smart enough.
In fact, we can be even more precise. Just as there is a perfect birth date for a nineteenth-century business tycoon, and a perfect birth date for a software tycoon, there is a perfect birth date for a New York Jewish lawyer as well. It’s 1930, because that would give the lawyer the benefit of a blessedly small generation. It would also make him forty years of age in 1970, when the revolution in the legal world first began, which translates to a healthy fifteen-year Hamburg period in the takeover business while the white-shoe lawyers lingered, oblivious, over their two-martini lunches. If you want to be a great New York lawyer, it is an advantage to be an outsider, and it is an advantage to have parents who did meaningful work, and, better still, it is an advantage to have been born in the early 1930s. But if you have all three advantages—on top of a good dose of ingenuity and drive—then that’s an unstoppable combination. That’s like being a hockey player born on January 1.
The Black Rock law firm is Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz. The firm’s first partner was Herbert Wachtell. He was born in 1931. He grew up in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers union housing across from Van Cortlandt Park, in the Bronx. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. His father was in the ladies’ undergarment business with his brothers, on the sixth floor of what is now a fancy loft at Broadway and Spring Street in SoHo. He went to New York City public schools in the 1940s, then to City College in upper Manhattan, and then to New York University Law School.
The second partner was Martin Lipton. He was born in 1931. His father was a manager at a factory. He was a descendant of Jewish immigrants. He attended public schools in Jersey City, then the University of Pennsylvania, then New York University Law School.
The third partner was Leonard Rosen. He was born in 1930. He grew up poor in the Bronx, near Yankee Stadium. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. His father worked in the garment district in Manhattan as a presser. He went to New York City public schools in the 1940s, then to City College in upper Manhattan, and then to New York University Law School.
The fourth partner was George Katz. He was born in 1931. He grew up in a one-bedroom first-floor apartment in the Bronx. His parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father sold insurance. His grandfather, who lived a few blocks away, was a sewer in the garment trade, doing piecework out of his house. He went to New York City public schools in the 1940s, then to City College in upper Manhattan, and then to New York University Law School.
Imagine that we had met any one of these four fresh out of law school, sitting in the elegant waiting room at Mudge Rose next to a blue-eyed Nordic type from the “right” background. We’d all have bet on the Nordic type. And we would have been wrong, because the Katzes and the Rosens and the Liptons and the Wachtells and the Floms had something that the Nordic type did not. Their world—their culture and generation and family history—gave them the greatest of opportunities.
Part Two
LEGACY
CHAPTER SIX
Harlan, Kentucky
“DIE LIKE A MAN, LIKE YOUR BROTHER DID!”
1.
In the southeastern corner of Kentucky, in the stretch of the Appalachian Mountains known as the Cumberland Plateau, lies a small town called Harlan.
The Cumberland Plateau is a wild and mountainous region of flat-topped ridges, mountain walls five hundred to a thousand feet high, and narrow valleys, some wide enough only for a one-lane road and a creek. When the area was first settled, the plateau was covered with a dense primeval forest. Giant tulip poplars grew in the coves and at the foot of the hills, some with trunks as wide as seven or eight feet in diameter. Alongside them were white oaks, beeches, maples, walnuts, sycamores, birches, willows, cedars, pines, and hemlocks, all enmeshed in a lattice of wild grapevine, comprising one of the greatest assortment of forest trees in the Northern Hemisphere. On the ground were bears and mountain lions and rattlesnakes; in the treetops, an astonishing array of squirrels; and beneath the soil, one thick seam after another of coal.
Harlan County was founded in 1819 by eight immigrant families from the northern regions of the British Isles. They had come to Virginia in the eighteenth century and then moved west into the Appalachians in search of land. The county was never wealthy. For its first one hundred years, it was thinly populated, rarely numbering more than ten thousand people. The first settlers kept pigs and herded sheep on the hillsides, scratching out a living on small farms in the valleys. They made whiskey in backyard stills and felled trees, floating them down the Cumberland River in the spring, when the water was high. Until well into the twentieth century, getting to the nearest train station was a two-day wagon trip. The only way out of town was up Pine Mountain, which was nine steep miles on a road that turned on occasion into no more than a muddy, rocky trail. Harlan was a remote and strange place, unknown by the larger society around it, and it might well have remained so but for the fact that two of the town’s founding families—the Howards and the Turners—did not get along.
The patriarch of the Howard clan was Samuel Howard. He built the town courthouse and the jail. His counterpart was William Turner, who owned a tavern and two general stores. Once a storm blew down the fence to the Turner property, and a neighbor’s cow wandered onto their land. William Turner’s grandson, “Devil Jim,” shot the cow dead. The neighbor was too terrified to press charges and fled the county. Another time, a man tried to open a competitor to the Turners’ general store. The Turners had a word with him. He closed the store and moved to Indiana. These were not pleasant people.
One night Wix Howard and “Little Bob” Turner—the grandsons of Samuel and William, respectively—played against each other in a game of poker. Each accused the other of cheating. They fought. The following day they met in the street, and after a flurry of gunshots, Little Bob Turner lay dead with a shotgun blast to the chest. A group of Turners went to the Howards’ general store and spoke roughly to Mrs. Howard. She was insulted and told her son Wilse Howard, and the following week he exchanged gunfire with another of Turner’s grandsons, young Will Turner, on the road to Hagan, Virginia. That night one of the Turners and a friend attacked the Howard home. The two families then clashed outside the Harlan courthouse. In the gunfire, Will Turner was shot and killed. A contingent of Howards then went to see Mrs. Turner, the mother of Will Turner and Little Bob, to ask for a truce. She declined: “You can’t wipe out that blood,” she said, pointing to the dirt where her son had died.
Things quickly went from bad to worse. Wilse Howard ran into “Little George” Turner near Sulphur Springs and shot him dead. The Howards ambushed three friends of the Turners—the Cawoods—killing all of them. A posse was sent out in search of the Howards. In the resulting gunfight, six more were killed or wounded. Wilse Howard heard the Turners were after him, and he and a friend rode into Harlan and attacked the Turner home. Riding back, the Howards were ambushed. In the fighting, another person died. Wilse Howard rode to Little George Turner’s house and fired at him but missed and killed another man. A posse surrounded the Howard home. There was another gunfight. More dead. The county was in an uproar. I think you get the picture. There were places in nineteenth-century America where people lived in harmony. Harlan, Kentucky, was not one of them.
“Stop that!” Will Turner’s mother snapped at him when he staggered home, howling in pain after being shot in the courthouse gun battle with the Howards. “Die like a man, like your brother did!” She belonged to a world so well acquainted with fatal gunshots that she had certain expectations about how they ought to be endured. Will shut his mouth, and he died.
2.
Suppose you were sent to Harlan in the late nineteenth century to investigate the causes of the Howard-Turner feud. You lined up every surviving participant and interviewed them as carefully as you could. You subpoenaed documents and took depositions and pored over court records until you had put to
gether a detailed and precise accounting of each stage in the deadly quarrel.
How much would you know? The answer is, not much. You’d learn that there were two families in Harlan who didn’t much like each other, and you’d confirm that Wilse Howard, who was responsible for an awful lot of the violence, probably belonged behind bars. What happened in Harlan wouldn’t become clear until you looked at the violence from a much broader perspective.
The first critical fact about Harlan is that at the same time that the Howards and the Turners were killing one another, there were almost identical clashes in other small towns up and down the Appalachians. In the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud on the West Virginia–Kentucky border not far from Harlan, several dozen people were killed in a cycle of violence that stretched over twenty years. In the French-Eversole feud in Perry County, Kentucky, twelve died, six of them killed by “Bad Tom” Smith (a man, John Ed Pearce writes in Days of Darkness, who was “just dumb enough to be fearless, just bright enough to be dangerous, and a dead shot”). The Martin-Tolliver feud, in Rowan County, Kentucky, in the mid-1880s featured three gunfights, three ambushes, and two house attacks, and ended in a two-hour gun battle involving one hundred armed men. The Baker-Howard feud in Clay County, Kentucky, began in 1806, with an elk-hunting party gone bad, and didn’t end until the 1930s, when a couple of Howards killed three Bakers in an ambush.
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