The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  There was almost nothing that Solomon Loeb and Jacob Schiff agreed upon. They did not agree on religion. Solomon was a professed agnostic, and there had been no religious observances at all in the Loeb house on Thirty-eighth Street. All this began to change when Jacob entered the family. He was the most “orthodox” of all the young German Jews of his generation, but with this he mixed a ritualistic liberalism which he had concocted for himself. He disapproved of the Loebs’ amorphous attitudes. He lectured his father-in-law on his shortcomings as a Jew, and, though Solomon grumbled, Betty Loeb urged her husband to unbend a little for the sake of peace in the family. The nonreligious Loeb household became outwardly very pious.

  Nor did Schiff and Loeb see eye to eye on spas, a serious matter for gentlemen of the era, and the arguments about which cure performed the greater service to the liver occasionally became heated. Mr. Loeb preferred the waters at Carlsbad. Schiff preferred Marienbad or Gastein—both, in those days, considered “grander” than Carlsbad. Whenever he mentioned Marienbad or Gastein, he enjoyed turning to his father-in-law to say, “I suppose you’ll be at Carlsbad again—with the bourgeoisie.” Both Solomon and Betty Loeb fretted privately over what seemed to them their son-in-law’s—and now their daughter’s—expanding taste for grandeur. (Once, after one of the young Schiffs’ trips to Europe, which had included a sojourn at Marienbad, Betty Loeb asked Therese if she had bought anything in Paris. Therese replied, “Nur ein einfaches schwarzes SamtKleid”—“Only a simple black velvet dress”—and Betty Loeb was aghast at the thought that her daughter had become so elegant as to use the adjective “simple” in connection with a fabric as rich as velvet.)

  But it was in the Kuhn, Loeb offices that the two men’s differences were most pronounced. It was a battle of banking philosophies, and of generations. Solomon was cautious. Jacob was bold. Solomon was older and contented with his firm’s success. Jacob was young and wanted to bend the firm to his will. Jacob made it a point to get to the office earlier than his father-in-law. There he started each day writing dozens of memoranda in small, meticulous longhand—plans, proposals, suggestions, ideas—and when Solomon Loeb arrived, he found his desk strewn with these notes. Some of Jacob’s notions were too intricate for Solomon to grasp, and he would have Jacob sent in, and the two would try to discuss Jacob’s ideas—Solomon reminding Jacob of the philosophy (“Always say no …”) that had made him successful. When they emerged from their meetings, Jacob Schiff looked angry and Solomon Loeb looked tired.

  Like so many self-made men, Solomon Loeb had prided himself on knowing, at any given time, just what was going on in every corner of his company. After all, he and his first partners had been retailers. As bankers, they had preferred to finance manufacturers and merchants whose operations they understood. Now the firm’s railroad operations had extended Solomon’s empire beyond his reach. As he studied the firm’s figures he found it increasingly necessary to call for Jacob to explain. And Solomon had begun to worry about his health. After a day at the office, he would lie on a velvet sofa with his head in Betty’s ample lap while she bathed his forehead with a handkerchief dipped in cologne. One morning Solomon called for Jacob. The clerk, as usual, hurried to Jacob’s office to say, “Mr. Loeb would like to see you.” But this time, without looking up, Jacob Schiff said, “Tell Mr. Loeb he may see me in my office.”

  The year was 1881. The Age of Seligman was over. While uptown Jewish society in New York might continue to argue about Jews of “the Seligman type” as opposed to those of “the Nathan type,” there was no doubt among financiers in Wall Street that there was a basic difference between the Seligman and the Schiff types. American finance had entered the great Age of Schiff. Today, as a result, when the Kuhn, Loeb partners gather for a formal photograph, they do not assemble in front of the portraits of Abraham Kuhn, who looks wistful, or Solomon Loeb, who looks dismayed, but in front of the huge, mantel-crowning portrait of Jacob H. Schiff, who looks regal.

  Early in the 1880’s, scarcely ten years after Jacob Schiff became a partner in his firm, Solomon Loeb began to do what many in his family still call “a noble thing.” Like all noble things, it was not an easy thing. But it had the blessing of Betty, who had helped him guide the fortune of Kuhn, Loeb from the beginning. He began to draw a distinction between “projects” and “policy.” He would remain interested, he said, in Kuhn, Loeb projects. But policy would become the bailiwick of his son-in-law, Jacob Schiff. In effect, Solomon Loeb had abdicated. Though he continued to come to the office each day, he took the position of a silent partner. Jacob was given what he had always wanted—the reins of a company, a bank of his own.

  One of the first things he did was to move its offices to larger and grander quarters, across the street in the new Mutual Life Insurance Building at 30 Nassau Street.

  *This is as dose as Dr. Adler lets himself come to an adverse comment on Schiff’s character. Otherwise, his book is all praise, and one can see why. Schiff paid him to write it, and, when Schiff died, one of the items in his estate was six dollars in royalties on the book.

  23

  PORTRAIT OF A FATHER

  Therese Loeb Schiff tried to adjust herself to her husband’s new leadership of the Loeb family. She tried to adjust herself also to her husband’s piety. In their house on Fifty-third Street, Jacob paced daily through the rooms, prayer book in hand, reciting his prayers. Once, during this ritual, Therese noticed that he had placed, against the open pages of the prayer book, the daily stock market report. She made the mistake of chiding him about this. He was not amused. Jacob Schiff was not easily amused at anything. Therese learned never to approach her husband in a spirit of levity. She began spending her afternoons with Betty Loeb in the house on Thirty-eighth Street. When Jacob appeared at the end of the day and asked her, “Well, what did you do today?” Therese would reply shyly, “I went home.”

  Jacob’s and Therese’s first child, a girl whom they named Frieda, was born prematurely, scarcely eight months after they were married. This was an embarrassment to Jacob, and he blamed Therese for the untimely birth. Shortly after, Jacob stopped by the Loebs’ house for a duty visit with his in-laws. While there, a friend of the Loebs, attempting to make a joke—though he should have known better—said to Jacob, slyly, “I want to congratulate you on the appropriate name you’ve given your baby—Früh-da” (“early arrival” in German). Furious, Jacob strode out of the house and back to his own, where he demanded that Therese change the baby’s name to something else. Therese wept. She loved the name, had selected it herself, and the initial “F” was in memory of her real mother, Fanny Kuhn Loeb. Jacob finally let her have her way, but he never spoke to the Loebs’ friend again.

  Their second child, a boy born a year after Frieda, whom Jacob and Therese named Mortimer, was even more of a problem to Jacob, though none of the family was ever sure why. Nothing young Morti did seemed to please his father. Jacob Schiff was of the old school when it came to punishments, and Morti was spanked for the slightest infraction of a rule. Spanking-Morti sessions became so commonplace in the Schiff household that the family began delicately referring to them as “seances.” The ladies in the drawing room always tried to talk up more brightly and animatedly whenever they heard Morti’s muffled screams from the seance upstairs. Early in life, Morti developed the tactic of befriending the servants, who sneaked trays of food up to the nursery to him, to replace the meals he had been ordered to bed without. The servants became Morti’s way of finding “home.”

  Jacob Schiff disliked the house at 57 East Fifty-third Street which his father-in-law had given him as a wedding present. He may have been justified, because certain of the Loebs—though not Solomon—seemed to treat the house in an annoyingly proprietary way. In the sitting room, for instance, there hung a tall mirror between two long, damask-draped windows, and from the time that she was able to walk baby Frieda loved to pose and pirouette before her reflection in the glass. Solomon’s son, Frieda’s Uncle Morris, announced t
hat such vanity was unbecoming in a woman, even though the woman was still a toddler, and one day Morris Loeb appeared in his brother-in-law’s house and completely covered the mirror with sheets of newspaper.

  Jacob sold the Fifty-third Street house and bought another, larger house on West Fifty-seventh Street, which the family lived in only briefly. A neighbor built a wing which cut off Jacob’s light, and he sold the Fifty-seventh Street house to Abraham Wolff, a Kuhn, Loeb partner who evidently didn’t mind the gloom. Jacob then advised Therese that he had bought a lot at the corner of Seventy-third Street and Riverside Drive, where he intended to build.

  At the news of this plan, Therese sat down and cried. Tears were her only defense against her husband. Poor shy Therese had very few friends—all first-generation Americans, all German Jewish, all wives of men in the little “banking crowd.” The women’s outlook was European and middle-class, their manners stiff and studiedly correct; they conversed in German, calling each other “Frau,” and never used first names. They paid calls and had teas; each woman had her regular day at home. (Therese Schiff’s had become Tuesday.) They discussed their steamer crossings and their servants, and whether their deliveries had been “hard” or “easy.” It was provincial and inbred, but too formal and self-conscious to be really intimate, yet these were Therese’s friends. They lived in the East Forties to the Seventies, between Park Avenue and Fifth, and saw each other daily on their ritual rounds of shopping, visiting, and card-leaving. To Therese, being sent west to the edge of the Hudson meant that she would never see her friends again. If they visited her, they would have to come by carriage, and Therese was sure that none of them would bother. Besides, how far away it was from “home”!

  Jacob relented and sold the Riverside lot, which later became the site of the Schwab mansion. He had eyed Fifth Avenue before, unquestionably the best address in New York for men of stature. In 1880, while the rest of the crowd mourned the death of Joe Seligman, Jacob Schiff decided to make the great social leap, to 932 Fifth Avenue at Seventy-fourth Street.

  A move the size of this one clearly indicated some sort of celebration, and Jacob went busily to work planning an elaborate housewarming party. It must be given, he said, “At once!”—as soon as 932 was finished. Jacob was Belmontian in his approach to entertaining. He planned the menu, picked the guests, chose the wines, selected the flowers, and diagrammed the dinner table for the placement of cards. Therese, quite unsure of herself socially, was happy to let him, and was even grateful when a gown from Worth’s arrived that he had picked out for her to wear. All New York’s German Jewish elite were invited with notes that Jacob dictated to Therese.

  Then tragedy struck. On the day the Schiffs moved to their new house, little Morti—displeasing his father again—came down with whooping cough. A large and thoroughly undignified sign was nailed to the front door of 932 Fifth Avenue. It read: “CONTAGION. KEEP OUT.” The party was canceled.

  Frieda Schiff later wrote that 932 was “a house full of horrors,” heavily damasked, heavily marbled, even more cluttered with late Victorian furniture and objets d’art than the Solomon Loebs’, whose decor Jacob seemed quite consciously to be trying to outdo and bring to its knees. Sir Ernest Cassel had not yet become Jacob Schiff’s decorating mentor. Jacob had started collecting paintings, but he was not yet an experienced collector. Frieda wrote: “Father used to cough or give signals at the wrong time” when he went to auctions, and ended up with a great many things he hadn’t planned to buy. He was required to find house room, for instance, for two enormous Chinese vases he hadn’t wanted; they went into the dining room. (In the dark bowels of these urns, little Frieda and Morti sometimes hid from their father.) There was also a bronze bas-relief of the Schiff children by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, memorable to Frieda and Morti chiefly because they had to pose for it through an entire Christmas holiday.

  At 932 Fifth Avenue the Schiff family life congealed into an unvarying pattern. The day began with the master of the house being helped into his overcoat by Joseph, the Schiff major-domo. “Do I need an umbrella today, Joseph?” Mr. Schiff would inquire. If Joseph replied, “Yes, I think so, sir,” Jacob would answer, “Then I shan’t take one.” It was a rule of Jacob’s: Joseph was invariably wrong about the weather. (Joseph, meanwhile, dabbled in the stock market quite successfully, and used to point out that he never took Mr. Schiff’s advice, either; he liked to remind the Schiff children that he was rich enough to employ his own butler—and might, if he wasn’t treated properly.)

  While the exchange with Joseph was going on, the children were ushered by nurses into the front hall to say good-bye to their father. Jacob then inspected them, paying particular attention to the cleanliness of noses and fingernails, and, if satisfied, presented his bearded cheek to be kissed. Nurses then pressed a clean white hanky into the hand of each child. From the front door, waving their handkerchiefs and crying, “Good-bye, Pa! Good-bye, Pa!” the children watched Jacob Schiff descend the brownstone steps. A believer in walking, Jacob often walked as far downtown as Fourteenth Street before taking a cab.

  When his children were old enough for school, he insisted that they walk. He disapproved of Mayer Lehman, who drove his children to school in a carriage. Father and children departed the Schiff house together. From Seventy-fourth and Fifth they proceeded to Fifty-ninth and Sixth, where Morti was deposited at Dr. Sachs’s. Then Frieda and her father continued on to Forty-fourth Street, where Brearley was. It was a mile-and-a-half walk for Frieda. After school the children were met by their French governess, who escorted them on the long walk home. The children were required to converse in French all the way. There followed lunch with the governess, and then “afternoon lessons,” which were private. There was riding in the park on Mondays and Thursdays, piano Tuesdays and Fridays, Bible on Wednesdays. Every morning from 7:30 to 8:00, behind the closed shutters of the music room, the children practiced their piano. Because her father thought she was overweight, fencing lessons were prescribed for Frieda. But, because he thought the dashing Spanish fencing instructor had a “devilish gleam” in his eye, Mr. Schiff directed that the French governess sit in on the class. (It was the governess who noticed the gleam and suggested this arrangement, and the fencing master’s eye may have been on her and not little Frieda; the governess and the Spaniard were often seen in animated conversation, and were once discovered stretched out on the downstairs bowling alley where they explained they had “tripped and fallen.”)

  Dinner at 932 was at 6:30 sharp. Anyone arriving at table later than that missed his meal. Jacob insisted that his bowling alley be used. After dinner he asked, “Now, who will bowl with me?” Both children hated bowling, and this question was invariably met with silence. Jacob would then rise and, with a tap on the shoulder, select his bowling companion, and the two would descend to the alley. (The companion, of course, had the job of setting up the pins.)

  Fridays were family nights. The Seligmans were in possession of Saturdays, and Sundays belonged to the Loebs. Once, when invited to a Friday night function elsewhere, Jacob replied, “I have made it a rule to spend Friday evening exclusively with my family, and I can under no circumstances vary from this.”

  Jacob Schiff’s personality seemed to add a new rigidity to New York’s German Jewish social life. On Friday evenings the family gathered in the drawing room in a circle where the patriarch blessed them each. Then he read a short service in German, after which the group descended quietly to dinner. At table Jacob Schiff pronounced a grace which he liked to say he had composed himself, though actually it was a pastiche of Talmudic blessings:

  Our God and Father,

  Thou givest food to every living being.

  Thou has not only given us life,

  Thou also givest our daily bread to sustain it.

  Continue to bless us with Thy mercy

  So that we may be able to share our own plenty

  With those less fortunate than ourselves,

  Blessed be Thy name for
evermore. Amen.

  He always stressed “With those less fortunate than ourselves.”

  E. H. Harriman was an antisocial man who never accepted invitations to dine, but James J. Hill was just the opposite, and was a frequent dinner guest at 932 Fifth Avenue. Hill was never given the nod by polite society, but Jacob Schiff admired him for the way, after the Panic of 1873, he had pulled a railroad out of a $27-million hole. Hill liked to talk, and when he started he was hard to stop. Ten o’clock was Jacob Schiff’s bedtime, and at ten Joseph would bring his master his orange juice on a silver tray and say discreetly, “Mr. Hill, your taxi is waiting.” “Send it away!” Hill would say airily, and launch into another anecdote while Jacob Schiff sat looking pained and discomfited.

  Hill’s breezy manner displeased Jacob on other occasions. Hill habitually carried with him a small bag of uncut stones which he played with nervously as he talked, like a Middle Easterner’s worry-beads. One evening Therese Schiff admired one of the stones which she thought particularly pretty, and Hill gave it to her. She approached her husband and, in her small, soft voice, said, “Look what Mr. Hill gave me.” Jacob looked at it and said, “Only I give jewels to my wife. Give it back.” She did as he told her.

  Everybody did. “Though small in size,” said one of the family, “his presence always seemed to fill the largest doorway when he appeared. You only had to look once into those blue eyes to know he was someone to be reckoned with.”

  Schiff would have very much appreciated having Hill as a banking client. But Hill remained steadfast in his loyalty to Morgan, even though Schiff enjoyed reminding Hill, over their cigars, “I am very nearly as big as he,” and once said, “Morgan may not be as big as he thinks he is.” Certainly Schiff’s alliance with E. H. Harriman was making him rich. In just three years since the reorganization of the Union Pacific, the line had become one of the greatest successes of the age. It had paid back all its debts, with interest, had unencumbered assets of $210 million within its system, and no less than two billion dollars’ worth of outside investments which Schiff had helped place. Morgan at this point clearly regretted having relinquished his interest in the tracks he had called “two streaks of rust.”