The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Those tracks were permitting Jacob Schiff to be one of the first in the German Jewish crowd to maintain not one but two summer homes—at Sea Bright, on the Jersey shore, and in Bar Harbor, Maine. (For all his devoutly religious views, Jacob always liked to step boldly into gentile areas where other Jews chose not to tread.) There was an unvarying schedule for opening and closing these houses. June and July were spent at Sea Bright. Then, on the last Thursday of July, the family had an early supper and boarded their private car—usually one of E. H. Harriman’s cars of the Union Pacific—parents, children, nurses, governess, maids, and at least sixty pieces of luggage, many of them trunks. The car was presided over by Madison, the Schiffs’ chef, and a helper. Sometimes a second private car was needed. The family would travel overnight to Ellsworth, Maine, then disembark and board a boat to Bar Harbor. The horses, meanwhile, were traveling, along with grooms, tack, and equipment, by boat from New Jersey. Once in Bar Harbor, everyone rested, and no wonder.

  They stayed in Bar Harbor exactly a month. Then, in September, the whole process reversed itself, and everyone went back to Sea Bright again for another month. In October it was back to the city for the winter. If this schedule sounds arduous, it is well to remember that this was before regular visits to Florida were added to the Schiffs’ yearly itinerary. Alternate summers, of course, were spent in Europe. If the first generation of Seligmans had taught the crowd how to do it, Schiff as the leader of his generation was teaching them how to do it better.

  Considering the hugeness of the scale on which Jacob Schiff lived, while financing E. H. Harriman’s railroads was making him steadily richer, it was strange that during these years his penuriousness was becoming more pronounced. He was miserly about the use of the telephone in his house and kept a little notebook on the stand beside it where each person was required to enter calls. “Telephone calls cost money!” he kept reminding them, and at the end of each month he carefully compared the calls in the notebook with those on the bill.

  He was financial adviser to, and on the board of, the Western Union Company, and this gave him a franking privilege allowing him to send wires free. Naturally he preferred sending telegrams to telephoning. Each evening, during their summer months at Sea Bright, the two children were expected to dress up—with white cotton gloves and sailor hats secured by elastics under the chin—to meet their august parent when he arrived on the ferry Asbury Park. If, however, Schiff changed his mind and decided to take the train, he would send a telegram. These wires always arrived long after the family had departed for the ferry dock, and Schiff would be left waiting, unmet, at the station—furious.

  Frieda and Morti were given their first spending allowances as children during one of their biennial summers in Germany. They were allowed fifty pfennig a week. When they returned to New York that fall, their father explained that this was computed at twelve and a half cents in U.S. currency, and that the children would therefore have to keep track of which was the twelve-cent week and which was the thirteen-cent week. At the end of the month he went over their accounts looking for discrepancies. (By the time she was engaged to be married, Frieda’s allowance had been gradually increased until she was receiving a dollar a week, out of which her father required that she set one-tenth aside for the Fresh Air Fund.)

  Mr. Schiff was a great maker of conditions. It was his tactic in both business and human relations: he seldom offered anything outright. There was always some sort of proviso attached. Sometimes his conditions were too stiff to be acceptable. But at other times they revealed an odd sort of logic. There was, for instance, the strange case of young Morti Schiff’s long struggle to receive the kind of education he wanted.

  Morti was an excellent scholar. He was first in his class at Dr. Sachs’s school nearly all the time, but this did not delight his father. What Jacob Schiff considered most important was that Morti receive a grade of “excellent” in that marking category called “deportment.” Like any boy, Morti did not always deport himself to perfection, and, regardless of his other grades, whenever his little gray report book showed a lapse in this respect, Morti and his father had another “seance” in the bathroom at 932 Fifth. After the spanking, Jacob Schiff would declare, “My son doesn’t have to lead in his studies. But that my son shouldn’t know how to behave—that’s unpardonable!”

  Morti finished school with honors when he was barely sixteen, but his father maintained that he was “not ready” for college. There then began a curious correspondence with the Reverend Doctor Endicott Peabody, headmaster of Groton. He would very much like, Jacob Schiff wrote Peabody, to enroll his son at the school for one year—but on one condition. He pointed out that Morti had been brought up “a conscious Jew,” and therefore would have to be excused from all religious and chapel activities. There followed what the family described as “an exchange of dignified and amiable letters,” which ended up with “mutual agreement” that Groton was not the school for Morti.

  Now, why Jacob Schiff would even for a moment have suspected that Groton might have been the school for Morti is, at first glance, unfathomable. The year was 1893, and Groton was only ten years old. It had been founded by Peabody on the theory that the traditions and tenets of the Episcopal Church, combined with those of the English public school, would be most likely to produce ideal “Christian gentlemen” in the United States. The words “Christian,” “Protestant Episcopal,” and “Church of England” reappeared dozens of times throughout the school’s prospectus; its first board of trustees included two bishops of the state of Massachusetts and a distinguished assortment of other gentile Easterners, including J. Pierpont Morgan. Schiff must have known these things.

  It had been sixteen years before, in the summer of 1877 (the very month, coincidentally, of Morti’s birth), when the episode of Joseph Seligman at the Grand Union had created such a storm in the press and among the clergy. Did Schiff have a notion of making a test case of his own over prep school admission policies? Schiff definitely felt that he had inherited Joseph Seligman’s mantle as New York’s leading Jew. If a test case was to be made, who better than Schiff to make it?

  At the height of the Seligman-Hilton affair, there were unpleasant hints that wishes for business revenge were as much behind the affair as anti-Semitism. In the Schiff-Peabody exchange Wall Street rivalries may also have been involved. Peabody had close connections on the Street; he had worked in Wall Street himself for a while, and his father had been a partner in Morgan’s London office. Morgan himself was a cornerstone of the school. Jacob Schiff may have thought that Kuhn, Loeb could gain if its gentile rival—Morgan—could be discredited and embarrassed over an issue such as Groton.

  Perhaps, if Schiff did briefly consider creating a Seligman-like affair, he remembered that the Seligman affair had ended in a thoroughly undignified and unamiable way. Schiff cared a great deal about deportment. Or perhaps he was not quite ready to do battle with the great Morgan.

  Morti had never wanted to go to Groton; all he wanted to do was to go to Harvard. And so, to Morti’s distress, as soon as his father abandoned the Groton idea, he announced that he wanted Morti to go to Amherst.

  Schiff’s opposition to Harvard is even harder to fathom than his flirtation with Groton. Harvard had already become something of a tradition in the family (Solomon Loeb’s boys had gone there). Charles W. Eliot, Harvard’s president, was a close personal friend of Schiff’s, who admired Eliot enormously, quoted him endlessly (the heavily accented Schiff was fond of saying, “As President Eliot said to me in that peculiar New England accent of his …”), and the two men were frequent summer hiking companions in the hills around Bar Harbor. Yet he was adamant. Harvard, he said, was “too large,” and “too many wealthy boys” attended it, both of which assertions showed a strange lack of understanding of what Harvard really offered in those days. Desperately, Morti wrote to President Eliot and asked him to intercede with his father, and Eliot tactfully mentioned to Jacob that he hoped Morti would “give a thought
to Harvard.” Huffily, Jacob replied that it was out of the question.

  Jacob said that Morti was showing signs of being “too extravagant,” and that Harvard would make Morti more extravagant. But Morti protested against Amherst so strongly that his father relented—part way. He offered a condition. If Morti would spend a year at Amherst, and could prove while there that he was not being extravagant, he could transfer to Harvard the following year. Morti agreed, and set off for Amherst where he installed himself in a boardinghouse for $3.50 a week; even students on full scholarships had better accommodations than his. The boardinghouse was a fair distance from the campus, and Morti wrote to his father asking if he could buy a bicycle. Jacob said yes, and Morti bought himself a shiny two-wheeler.

  When Morti came home in June, he reminded his father of his promise: next year could be spent at Harvard. But Jacob shook his head sadly, and said, “No, my son—you proved just what I feared. You were extravagant at Amherst.” Almost in tears, Morti demanded to know how he had been extravagant. “You bought a new bicycle,” Jacob said. “You could have bought a secondhand one.”

  “You didn’t say it had to be secondhand!” said Morti.

  “I thought you understood,” said his father.

  In the fall Morti went back to Amherst. He was taken into a Greek-letter fraternity where the boys were trying to raise money for a billiard table. Morti wrote his father, asking if he could make a contribution. Jacob Schiff wrote back in an unusually expansive mood, saying that he would be happy to pay for the entire table—and a billiard table of the very finest make—if, in return, the boys would agree never to play billiards for money. The boys would make no such agreement, they never got their table, and Morti’s popularity in the fraternity was somewhat lessened. This sort of thing went on all the time.

  When Morti came home for the Christmas holidays that year, he came down with scarlet fever and so had to miss most of the balance of his sophomore year at Amherst. Even so, in June he made one final request. Could he spend his junior year at Harvard? “It was then,” wrote Morti’s sister Frieda, “that my father decided that Morti was ready for business.”

  Schiff asked his friend Hill to send Morti out to Duluth to work on the road gang of the Great Northern Railroad, to learn railroad “from the bottom”—a fitting occupation for a bright young scholar with tendencies toward extravagance. Morti did this for a while. When his father decided Morti had learned enough railroading, Morti was sent to Europe to learn banking from the same level. He began working as an apprentice in various banking houses Jacob Schiff selected—first for the firm of Samuel Montagu in London (where Sir Ernest Cassel kindly took Morti under his wing) and then to M. M. Warburg & Company in Hamburg—moving further and further away from Cambridge, Massachusetts. When Morti spent his twenty-first birthday in Hamburg with the Warburgs, he realized that he would never get to Harvard.

  Periodically, Jacob Schiff traveled to Europe to check on Morti’s progress. Once, at a London party, Jacob encountered his son, who was color-blind like his Grandfather Loeb, wearing a lavender-gray suit and a yellow-gray topcoat. In front of two hundred assembled guests, Jacob Schiff told Morti to march right home and change his clothes and not to come back until he was properly attired. Of course Morti did as he was told.

  Through all this Morti Schiff seems to have maintained an almost superhuman cheerfulness. Why did he put up with so much? “Morti,” said his sister Frieda, whose experiences with her father were sometimes even more bewildering, “was passionately devoted to our father.”

  24

  THE MITTELWEG WARBURGS

  Frieda Schiff, like her brother Morti, wanted to please her father. It wasn’t always easy, for one of Jacob Schiff’s specialties was demonstrating the shortcomings of others.

  One of his philanthropies was the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (Schiff had presented the Y.M.H.A. with its first permanent home at 861 Lexington Avenue, complete with gymnasium, library, clubrooms and classrooms), and this had led to his interest in its feminine counterpart, the Y.W.H.A. When plans were being drawn up for a building, Jacob promised a gift of $25,000 on the condition—again—that $200,000 more be contributed by others by January of the following year. The job of raising this extra sum was given to Frieda as a project, her first fund-raising experience of any importance. She went at it with diligence, but by the first of December she had contacted everyone she knew and she was still $18,000 short of her goal.

  She knew that her father was a man of his word, and she was, understandably, “in a terrible state.” She could envision the entire Y.W.H.A. project collapsing because the condition could not be met. To make her state even more terrible, her father went out of his way to remind her of his condition in mid-December. “You know,” he told her, “I have it in writing that I shall not give the $25,000 unless the fund is completed.” After days on the telephone she began to have sleepless nights.

  “On January first,” she wrote, “I was on the verge of despair”—still $18,000 short. Then she received a letter from her father. It was not addressed to her as a daughter, or even as a woman. It was addressed simply to “Chairman of Y.W.H.A. Building Committee.” Writing to her as if she were a stranger, Jacob Schiff advised the Chairman that he had “persuaded Mrs. Schiff to give $18,000 in memory of her brother.” The check was enclosed.

  “It was absolutely typical of him,” Frieda wrote later, “a man of his word, but his heart got around his word, and made it all legal.” He was actually ashamed of letting his heart show. Doing it his way, he had provided just a peek of the heart without, as the English say, “letting down the side,” or, as the Germans say, becoming “unbuttoned.”

  Not all episodes had such happy endings for Frieda. In 1894 she was having a particularly trying year. Her father had insisted that she could not make her debut until she was eighteen, and, since her birthday was in February, this meant she would miss the entire winter debutante season. Her best friend, Addie Wolff (the daughter of Abraham Wolff, another Kuhn, Loeb partner), was having her party at Sherry’s, but Jacob Schiff would not let Frieda go. He said, “If you are seen in one place, you’ll have more invitations. We’ll have the same scene each time, and I can’t make exceptions. For your own good, I don’t want you to come out.” So Frieda stayed home.

  He often forbade her to do things “for her own good,” and he had become obsessive about what he called her “innocence.” In his determination that even her mind should remain virginal, he carefully arranged her life so that she would meet neither men nor girls her own age. He kept her busy with volunteer work and fund-raising. Anders Zorn painted Frieda Schiff’s portrait during that lonely winter of her eighteenth year, and her dewy innocence shines from the canvas. She was high-cheekboned, with a thin, patrician nose, clear-eyed, dark-haired, slim-waisted, dressed in pink. She had one advantage to outweigh some of the drawbacks that went with being Jacob Schiff’s daughter: she was beautiful.

  She was permitted to have an eighteenth-birthday party, memorable because a musical teen-ager named Walter Damrosch sang and acted out a parody on Wagner’s Rhine Maidens while standing in a tin tub full of water. But otherwise the year had been unexceptional and unrewarding. She had had no experience with boys whatever, beyond stiff and formal conversations with male partners at her father’s stiff and formal dinner parties, where the young people were always seated “below the salt.” Whenever a boy spoke to her she blushed fiercely.

  That summer Jacob and Therese Schiff took Frieda and Morti on another of their ritual grand tours of Europe. One of the stops was, naturally, Frankfurt, where the Schiffs were invited to dinner at the home of some people named Dreyfus, who were Loeb cousins. “Are there any young men I would like in Frankfurt?” Frieda whispered furtively to a friend.

  “Oh, you must meet Felix Warburg,” said the friend. “He’s the handsomest man in town.”

  A Warburg family genealogy, prepared in 1937 and updated in 1953, fills a volume very nearly the weight of
Webster’s International Dictionary, and the Warburgs take their family with even heavier seriousness. The Warburgs put the lie to the much-repeated claim that “all the best Jews are from Frankfurt” (whence, of course, come Schiffs and Rothschilds). The Warburgs are from Hamburg. The family is said to have originated centuries ago in Italy (many Warburgs have a Latin look), where the name was del Banco, “the bankers,” since Jews were not permitted personal surnames. Recorded history first places them, however, in Warburgum (or Warburg), a small town in central Germany, from where, over three hundred years ago, they migrated north to Hamburg.

  The Warburg claim to being one of the world’s noblest Jewish families (and the Warburgs are far too proud to actually make such a claim; they let it be made for them) is based on many things. A great many Warburgs are wealthy, and have been for several hundred years, but the splendid ring of the Warburg name has more to it than money. The family bank, M. M. Warburg & Company in Hamburg, was an ancient affair, founded in 1798, which lasted well into the Hitler era, when it was forcibly confiscated in 1938 by non-Jews. The Warburgs have also been distinguished in fields other than banking; they are a particularly rounded family. There have been Warburgs prominent in the military, in manufacturing, medicine, politics, book publishing, diplomacy, education, and the arts. There have been Warburg authors, scientists, composers, critics, inventors, and professors.