The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The men did not take to him quite so much as the ladies did. Still, they knew it was wise to listen to him, and so he went everywhere and met everyone. He announced himself to be an epicure, and was perhaps the first person in New York to make the serving of good food fashionable. His own dinner invitations to Delmonico’s assumed priority over all others. In the early days, to be sure, no one quite knew where he lived. (Some said he slept in his office.) And men who had accepted his hospitality and eaten his food began to say to their wives afterward, “For God’s sake, don’t introduce that man Belmont to our daughters!”

  But it would be to no avail. For the next fifty years New York society would dance to whatever tune August Belmont chose to play.

  * There were probably less than one thousand Jews in America by the end of the eighteenth century.

  * An animator for the Disney studios in California told the author that he had modeled the character of the evil coachman in Pinocchio on a portrait of August Belmont.

  4

  ON THE ROAD

  There was no society in Mauch Chunk to distract Joseph Seligman, even if he had been able to afford its pleasures. Mauch Chunk isn’t much of a town today, and it was less in 1837, when Joseph arrived.* But Joseph took to the town, and his work with Asa Packer, with gusto. Packer, a dozen years older than Joseph, became Joseph’s tutor and protector.

  The Yankee Packer’s affection for Joseph was understandable. Jewish immigrants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had found themselves treated with special friendliness by people from New England. New England Puritanism, with its literal interpretation of the Old Testament, was a sort of neo-Judaism—a Judaism translated into Anglo-Saxon terms. The Puritans coming to America had identified themselves with the Israelites in search of the Promised Land, and King George III was equated with the Pharaoh. They called the new land Canaan and frequently referred to the Covenant they had made with God. Early in New England the Hebrew language became a major subject taught in colleges, and even secondary schools. To refer to a fellow New Englander as “a good Jew” was to pay him the highest compliment; it meant that he was pious and industrious; it had nothing to do with his blood or his religion. New England parents gave their children Old Testament names—Moses, Joshua, Abraham, and so on. New England Protestantism was considered an outgrowth, or extension, of Judaism, and New England preachers spoke continually of Zion and Jerusalem, of “the God of Israel” and “the God of Jacob.”

  The Puritans were also convinced that the second coming and final judgment were at hand, and knew, as an article of faith, that the conversion of the Jews would precede these cataclysmic events. It had become a New England tradition to cherish the people who would play such an important role in Puritan salvation, and to encourage their conversion. This lingering belief that Jews were worthy of special respect and honor would stand them in good stead when they began to enter the financial community of Wall Street, a world whose dominant figures were men whose roots extended back to Puritan New England.

  At the end of the first year Packer wanted to raise Joseph’s salary to $500 a year, but Joseph, who had managed to save $200, was anxious to go out on his own. Reluctantly, Packer let him go.

  During his stay in Mauch Chunk Joseph had noticed that men and women from outlying farms made occasional, and laborious, wagon trips to market in the town. He had also made note of the things people bought. His theory was that for the convenience of having goods brought to their doors farm families would be willing to pay a bit more than the prices charged in town, miles away. With his savings, he bought some merchandise—small jewelry, some watches, rings, and knives—and, with a pack, set off on foot, peddling his wares through rural Pennsylvania. Within six months he had put aside $500, enough to send passage to his two next oldest brothers, William and James, who, back in Baiersdorf, itched to join him.

  They were a strange-looking lot, the three Seligman brothers and peddlers like them—bearded, shaggy-headed, their faces dusty from the road, in long ill-fitting coats and baggy trousers, walking in mud-caked shoes, with a shuffling gait, stooped under their packs—but how they looked didn’t matter to them. They carried sticks to ward off dogs, and they had to endure children who came running out after them crying, “Jew! Sheeny! Christ-killer!” Boys pelted them with handfuls of gravel, sticks, and green apples, and leaped at them to pull their beards or knock off their hats. They shuffled on with their dreams bottled inside them, driven by a furious singleness of purpose—to make money. At night they slept in open fields, under their coats, with a pack for a lumpy pillow. In return for a few chores a farmer might let a peddler sleep in his barn. A true bed was a luxury and baths were rare. Keeping the dietary laws was an impossibility. Yet the Seligman boys always assured old David, in their letters home, that the laws were being faithfully kept.

  Joseph’s selling theory was a simple one: “Sell anything that can be bought cheaply, sold quickly at a little profit, small enough to place inside a pack and light enough to carry.” The boys sold bolts of woolen and cotton cloth, lace trimmings, velvet ribbons, thread, men’s handkerchiefs and undershirts, women’s shawls, sashes, tablecloths, napkins, pins, needles, bobbins, buttons, thimbles, shoehorns, and cheap spectacles. Their packs weighed from one to two hundred pounds.

  If an item was needed in an area, the boys were willing to walk to a town where it was available, buy it, and bring it back. A local store had run out of tobacco. William Seligman walked twelve miles to another town where he traded a German silver ring, which he had bought for under a dollar, for a hundred penny cigars. He then walked twelve miles back and sold the cigars for four cents apiece. The 300 percent profit made it worth the walk. A peddlers’ grapevine, composed of men like themselves, kept peddlers informed of conditions in surrounding areas.

  Joseph learned that “Newcastle disease” had infected the poultry flocks of a nearby village. He traded two yards of cotton print for a pair of healthy laying hens, and carried them there, clucking and flapping, one under each arm. He sold them at a tidy profit. As he grew to know his territory and customers, Joseph was also able to initiate a practice that made him a popular peddler. He extended a bit of credit here and there, and this was appreciated.

  But the plain fact was that the peddling Seligmans didn’t care how they were treated (which would stand in contrast with their attitude in New York a few years later, when they would care very much). They took rebuffs and abuse on the road willingly because peddling was only a means to an end. By 1840 the three Seligman boys had realized part of this end: they had made enough money to rent a small building in Lancaster, which they used as headquarters for their peddling enterprises. In the front they opened a shop to display their wares. In the back they had beds to sleep in. It gave them their first real business address in America. In 1841 they sent passage home for a fourth brother, fourteen-year-old Jesse, to help them peddle and tend the store.

  * In 1954, hoping to improve its prospects, Mauch Chunk renamed itself Jim Thorpe, after the famous athlete. The improved prospects failed to materialize and, ten years later, Jim Thorpe decided to change its name back to Mauch Chunk. It never considered calling itself Joe Seligman, and the towns which did name themselves Seligman after Joseph and his kin have had no better luck than Mauch Chunk from tying in with a noted personage. Seligman, Missouri, had only 350 residents in 1880 when it stopped being Roller’s Ridge and became Seligman, in honor of Joseph; its population is about 400 today. Seligman, Arizona, northwest of Phoenix, named after Jesse Seligman, is still an arid sheep-raising freight-division point on the Santa Fe, in the neighborhood of which live some 700 souls. A third Seligman, in White Fine County, Nevada, gave up long ago and no longer exists.

  5

  MRS. RANKIN’S GALOSHES

  The store gave the Seligmans a warehouse for their goods. They could expand their line into larger, heavier, and more general merchandise-boots and overshoes, brooms, bustles, hardware, and bags of feed. They were graduati
ng from foot peddlers to small-town merchants.

  Joseph was a perfectionist, a stickler for rectitude, and had no patience with anything that smacked of wasted motion. He had the energy of an ox, and anyone less energetic infuriated him. But, as he became a businessman—with that important commodity, a place of business—a change began to come over him. He began to assume dignity. He acquired presence. He shaved his face smooth, and combed his fine head of silky, light-brown hair back in the slightest wave, revealing a fine, high forehead. He smelled of soap, pomade, and a better brand of cigars. As a ragged peddler, thrusting his goods with eager hands before skeptical farmers’ wives, he had been a compulsive smiler. Now he smiled less, and his expression to the world at large became one of wise, fatherly tolerance. His presence did not inspire intimacy; it was not intended to. It was intended to inspire confidence and command respect.

  William, next to Joseph in age, was a clever but overweight and rather lazy fellow. He loved to eat, and was—to Joseph’s distinct displeasure—fond of wine. He also showed a penchant for young ladies; Joseph still considered women a waste of time and money. William fancied himself a wit, and was forever making jokes which left Joseph not amused. (None of William’s famous “jokes” is recorded, and perhaps that is just as well; one prank, however, was to sneak up behind his brothers in the store and give them a playful kick in the pants.) As a businessman William was somewhat devil-may-care. Joseph examined William’s accounts with more than the usual amount of scrutiny. In years to come this was to prove a wise practice.

  The third brother, James, was not particularly good with figures. Little discrepancies—not through guile, but through oversight—turned up in James’s accounts. But James was handsome, the best-looking of the boys, and affable—and a born salesman. He used to boast that he could sell umbrellas on the Gobi Desert, and though he kept a poor ledger, he loved the feel and jingle of money in his pockets. As a result, his peddling profits often topped the other boys’—even Joseph’s own—which placed James high in Joseph’s esteem. Though still a teen-ager (which Joseph considered too young for such interests), James had lady friends in Lancaster whom he squired around. Joseph scolded William for his interest in women, but forgave it in James.

  Unlike James, Jesse was good with figures. Though barely fourteen, Jesse had the audacity to point out niggling errors in Joseph’s book-keeping. No matter how hard Joseph tried to shape his brothers into an efficient working unit, the four spent a certain amount of time wrangling and shouting at one another. Joseph, the worrier and account-keeper, often accused the other three of not taking the business, or themselves, as seriously as he did.

  Soon after the Lancaster store was opened, young James came to Joseph with a selling idea. Pennsylvania was in danger of becoming overpeddled. James wanted money to buy a horse and wagon which could carry more goods and take him farther afield—to the South where, James had heard along the grapevine, things were considerably better, where people were crying “Cotton is King!” and a slave economy was making men wealthy.

  Joseph, who tended automatically to resist suggestions from the younger boys, reportedly replied, “What do I say? I say chutzpah! Horse and wagon indeed! What are your feet for?”

  James persisted. A horse and wagon, as he put it, would give the Seligmans “a traveling store.”

  Joseph was adamant. James might be a good salesman, but he still needed more experience in selling before embarking on such a venture. While he and Joseph were arguing, James later remembered, a certain Mrs. Rankin, the wife of a local grocer, came into the store. Mrs. Rankin’s entrance was a pivotal event in the Seligmans’ business history.

  It was a warm and lovely summer day. James pulled Joseph aside and whispered, “If I can sell her a pair of winter galoshes, will you let me go?”

  Joseph, who found it hard to refuse a wager, hesitated, then shrugged and nodded. James hurried out to wait on Mrs. Rankin, who was looking for a few yards of cotton print.

  “Pretty bad storm coming, Mrs. Rankin,” James said. “You’ll need a pair of warm galoshes.”

  “Storm?” she asked. “Really, Jim? How can you tell?”

  “I can feel it in my bones, Mrs. Rankin. My bones never lie. A bad storm—snow and sleet. You’ll need galoshes.”

  “Snow and sleet? In June?” She laughed. “Oh, Jim, you’re joking me!”

  He gave her his best smile and said, “But you’ll need some good galoshes when winter comes, won’t you, Mrs. Rankin? Let me sell you a nice pair.”

  “Oh, all right!” she laughed. “Jim Seligman, you are a caution!”

  “Ill have them for you within a week,” he said.

  After Mrs. Rankin left, Joseph was stern. “James,” he said, “I want you to remember never to make misstatements in order to make a sale. What you did was clever and amusing, but don’t go too far. We want to keep our reputation for honest dealings.”

  Years later, however, James Seligman would give this bit of advice to his sons and grandsons: “To sell something you have to someone who wants it—that is not business. But to sell something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it—that is business!”

  As the first mobilized Seligman, James set off on a wide-swinging tour of the American South. In a surprisingly short time he was back, and spread his profits on the table before his brothers’ wondering eyes—$1,000 or, as James remembered later, “more than either of my brothers had earned.” Jesse, however, looking over the figures, noticed that James had forgotten to deduct the cost of the horse and wagon, which made the profit only about $800. Still, it was an imposing sum. As Jesse wrote later, “We concluded to take the advice of this purse-proud Nabob—that we would better our condition by removing to that section of the country.”

  In the fall of 1841 the four boys pulled up stakes in Lancaster and, with $5,000 worth of merchandise which took nearly all their joint capital, set out for New York, where they boarded a schooner for Mobile. The trip took them six weeks and almost cost them their lives. A storm hit the ship and nearly sank it—for several days it was officially reported as lost—but when the boys finally reached Mobile, they were in good enough health to set up an open-air tent to display their wares.

  But soon they were quarreling again. James, pointing to the new profits, took a perhaps understandable attitude of I-told-you-so. Feeling that he had “discovered” the South, he began to argue that he should direct the Seligmans’ Southern operations, which did not sit well with Joseph, who complained that the profits were not what he had expected. Joseph’s little organization seemed on the verge of falling apart.

  Then a letter arrived from Baiersdorf. The redoubtable Fanny had died. Mournfully, old David also said that his woolen business was in such a state that he could no longer afford to keep the seven motherless children in Germany.

  Joseph quickly took charge. They must bring the remaining Seligmans to America. The boys pooled their resources and sent $2,000 to Baiersdorf, and early in 1842 a small band of Seligmans prepared to cross the Atlantic. Led by Babette, who was twenty, and Rosalie, fifteen, were ten-year-old Leopold, eight-year-old Abraham, seven-year-old Isaac, and baby Sarah, who was two. Old David, who had watched with dismay while his oldest sons left one by one, watched these six leave with resignation. He had chosen one last son, thirteen-year-old Henry, to remain as his helper. James headed North to meet his brothers and sisters in New York, to find rooms for them all in Grand Street, and to see that the younger ones were enrolled in school to learn English—a prerequisite for any American enterprise. When news came from Baiersdorf that old David’s woolen business had failed completely, Joseph wrote back assuring his father’s creditors that his debts would eventually be paid. The last Seligmans to arrive on these shores, in 1843, were old David and Henry.

  David Seligman seemed dazed by the New World, confused by what his sons were doing. He tried to follow their far-off wanderings through tiny Alabama towns with queer names—Frisco City, Gosport, Suggsville, Gee
s Bend. It seemed clear to him that they had become hoboes or, even worse, beggars. Though the boys sent money regularly to New York, David could not believe that they were earning it honestly. David died in New York, barely two years after his arrival, certain the Baiersdorf Seligmans had come a long way down in the world.

  Today David’s bones reside in the Seligman mausoleum in the Salem Fields Cemetery of Temple Emanu-El, in Brooklyn. The mausoleum, a vast marble edifice in the Byzantine style, is now the home of over forty Seligmans, whose names occupy places of varying luster in American financial, philanthropic, and social history; and who, though they may have had their differences, now lie united and presumably at peace. Nearby stands the Guggenheim mausoleum, which is larger (some say “showier”), but, as the Seligmans point out, the Seligman mausoleum commands the finer view. And, since these mausoleums are maintained by trusts which control considerable funds, the Seligmans say, “Our mausoleum usually does a little better on the market.”

  6

  ON TO THE CITY

  The arrival of all those additional Seligmans turned out to be providential for the four peddling brothers. The extra mouths to feed not only made them peddle harder; the new arrivals also forced them to settle their differences. They were providers now, and, by remote control, householders. The boys in the South now had a strong emotional tie with New York. They began making frequent trips North—always to buy goods, but also to check on the group in Grand Street. If it had not been for the children, the brothers might have continued the profitable but humble business of wandering through Alabama, peddling, setting up shops by the side of the road, and moving on. The influx of children gave them a new sense of purpose.