The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  The Union League was Jesse Seligman’s favorite club. He and his brothers Joseph and William had been virtually founding members. Joseph had been a vice president of the club at the time of his death, and now, in 1893, Jesse also was a vice president. Yet, though perhaps Jesse hadn’t noticed it, or refused to believe it, the Union League Club had already begun to adopt a certain “policy.” Jesse’s son Theodore was a young lawyer, recently out of Harvard, and had come to New York to practice. It seemed natural, to both Jesse and his son, that Theodore should join the Union League, which the Seligmans fondly thought of as part of the family. Theodore’s membership was sponsored by Mr. LeGrand Cannon, a founding member, and he was seconded by General Horace Porter. Many other distinguished members, including Joseph Choate and Elihu Root, were stanchly behind him. Yet, when action was taken on his membership application, Theodore Seligman was rejected. With exemplary lack of tact, the membership committee explained to Jesse that it was “not a personal matter in any way, either as to father or son. The objection is purely racial.”

  Jesse immediately tendered his resignation. Equally quickly, and apparently at a loss as to why Jesse should be in the least bit upset about it, the club’s members voted unanimously not to accept it. Jesse stalked out the front door.

  Being a Seligman and unable to take an insult lying down, Jesse released the story to the newspapers. There were the usual tongue-clicking and head-shaking and what-have-we-come-to editorials, but the fact was that it was a drearily familiar tale. The Mayor of New York, Thomas F. Gilroy, announced himself “shocked” over the club’s treatment of Jesse and, the very next week, revealed that a way had been devised by which the entire City of New York could “pay tribute” to Jesse Seligman, and demonstrate the “great honor” in which he was held by his fellow citizens.

  It was a strange tribute that Mayor Gilroy devised. The Spanish Duke of Veragua was due to arrive in the city on a more or less state visit, and was to be driven down Broadway to City Hall, where he would be presented to the Mayor. The Mayor announced that his tribute would be to borrow Jesse’s coach—not Jesse himself, nor Henriette, nor young Theodore, whose reaction (unbridled embarrassment) to the hubbub the snub was causing was totally overlooked, but just the Seligman landau, horses, coachman, and footmen, to transport the Duke and Duchess. Whether this novel form of bestowing an honor comforted or merely amused Jesse is not known, but it thoroughly annoyed Henriette. The Mayor was commandeering her coach at an hour that coincided with her daily drive through the park.

  The city flocked to cheer and ogle the royal couple, who, at the center of a long procession—including a full military regimental escort, marching bands, and mounted police—moved grandly downtown in the Seligmans’ landau, with the Seligman footmen wearing rosettes of the Spanish colors.

  Though he was still technically a member, Jesse never set foot inside the Union League Club again. His bitterness over the episode probably shortened his life, just as the affair with Judge Hilton shortened his brother’s. Soon after Jesse’s health began to fail. Tired and suffering from Bright’s disease, he and his wife, their three sons and two of their daughters, boarded their private railroad car for California. (Travel, often elaborately undertaken, was considered good for the ailing in those days.) Ostensibly, the trip was for Jesse’s health, but privately he had said that he never wanted to live in New York again. The family arrived at Coronado Beach in April, 1894. There, in the land he had come to as a gold-seeking pioneer half a century before, Jesse Seligman died.

  Now New York undertook a prolonged display of guilt. Collis P. Huntington, a fellow railroad enthusiast and president of the Southern Pacific, ordered a special three-car funeral train to bear Jesse’s body, and his widow and children, back to New York. Huntington commanded that the train be given precedence over all others, and as it made its long journey eastward its progress was followed in daily bulletins by all the New York papers.

  A large delegation of mourners met the train at the station, and a throng of more than two thousand people appeared at Temple Emanu-El for the funeral, including a sixty-man delegation from the Union League Club who, led by the club’s president, came on foot from the clubhouse to the temple. The mourners’ names read like a Who’s Who in banking, commerce and government of the era, and included Seth Low, Cornelius N. Bliss, Oscar S. Straus, Mayor Gilroy, Emanuel Lehman, John Wanamaker, Carl Schurz, Abraham Wolff, James McCreery, John Crosby Brown, and Bishop Henry C. Potter. A hundred and fifty children “whose rosy cheeks and cheerful looks betokened the care that is taken of them” entered the temple from Jesse’s Hebrew Orphan Asylum. Outside, on Fifth Avenue, the police struggled with mourners who could not get in and, in the only unseemly moment of the day, arrested two of them, Moritz Rodeburg and James Back, who were identified as Nos. 23 and 2018, respectively, in the rogues’ gallery and who had been circulating among the wealthy throng as pickpockets. After the services, a slow procession carried the body to the Seligman mausoleum at Salem Fields, where Victor Herbert, “the violinist,” played at the grave.

  Newspaper eulogies for Jesse continued for days. Several editors drew morals from his career. For example, the Bath, Maine, Times commented with Yankee common sense: “The late Jesse Seligman … came to this country in 1840, and when he landed, inquired for a place where he could board for one dollar a week. He died worth $30,000,000. Young man, if you follow his example, especially about the one dollar a week, you may be able to do the same thing.”

  In New York the Morning Advertiser made Jesse the occasion of tart political comment:

  The conditions under which he flourished would still exist but for some of the unreasonable exactions of Labor Organizations and but for the unwholesome doctrine that has been promulgated by political demagogues that labor has no fair chance and must look to legislation to do for the workingman what Mr. Seligman and thousands of others have done for themselves. These successful men, working with their hands and spending less than their small earnings, did not look for any easy road to success. Industry, thrift, and caution, turning a deaf ear to the allurements of fleeting pleasures and to the harangues of the demagogue, comprise all the secret of their success.

  One point was missed. This was that Jesse’s funeral bore overtones of a deeper, more poignant tragedy. A whole era was over. Joseph, Jesse, and Abraham Seligman were all dead, and so were two of their sisters, Babette and Sarah. The other five brothers were old men now, and losing their effectiveness. (James Seligman, seventy, whose peddling innovation, the horse and wagon, had done so much to improve the Seligmans’ fortunes, now distrusted “that new gadget,” the telephone, and required an underling to place and accept all his calls.) Fanny Seligman’s dream for “the boys, the boys” was being intercepted by the logic of mortality.

  The great era of J. & W. Seligman & Company, as a firm, was also over. It had really ended fourteen years before when Joseph died and was no longer there to tell his brothers what to do. Joseph and his brothers had many children, but who would carry on? The company was beginning its long decline, from a great international banking house with offices in New York, San Francisco, New Orleans, Paris, and London to what it is today—a small, prestigious investment house with but a single office in New York.

  * It was the dawn of national advertising, and the value of having a “big name” endorse a product had been early discovered. An ad of the period depicts none other than President and Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes touting the virtues of an appliance called a “Cold Handle Sad Iron.” Lucy Hayes is saying to the President, “We cannot leave until we visit the Enterprise Mfg. Co. and order some of Mrs. Potts’ Cold Handle Sad Irons like this.” The President replies, “But my dear they are for sale by all Hardware Stores in this country.”

  *Which modern engineering studies have determined would actually have been a better route.

  * He had been a classmate of Colonel Dreyfus at l’Ecole Polytechnique, and, at the time of Dreyfus’ conviction, Buneau-Varilla and hi
s brother had been publishers of Le Matin in Paris. It was the Buneau-Varilla brothers who, in 1896, had startled the world by publishing photographs of two letters—one the incriminating letter Dreyfus had allegedly written to the German attaché, and the other, in a totally different handwriting, a letter Dreyfus had actually written a few years earlier to Philippe Buneau-Varilla. This bit of journalism reopened the case, and led to the whole affair that followed.

  * At Yale the leading senior society, Skull and Bones, for years never took in a Jew, though it did take in the Negro football player, Levi Jackson. That led to the observation, “If his name had been the other way around …”

  31

  THE LADIES

  In the glorious, innocent 1880’s and 1890’s Wall Street, when it wasn’t undergoing panics, had been a jolly, happy-go-lucky place. As Harper’s Magazine pointed out, “The nervous force necessarily expended in rapid reasoning and quick decision is often directed into other channels to relieve the overtasked brain.”

  The younger members of “the broker tribe,” as they were called, relieved their overtasked brains with such affairs as an annual regatta in the harbor for their rowing association. Beer flowed plentifully, and the men showed up in jaunty straw boaters. (A star oarsman in these events was Isaac Newton Seligman, Joseph’s son; Ike had rowed on the Columbia crew, and had helped his college defeat both Harvard and Yale on Saratoga Lake.) There were also baseball games against college teams, and “friendly struggles among themselves, in which the ‘Good Boys’ pitted against the ‘Bad Boys.’” Lunchtime wrestling matches on Bowling Green were also popular.

  The biggest party of all took place at Christmas, and all merry hell broke loose on the Street when members of the financial community “luxuriate in the blowing of tin horns and bugles, smashing of broker hats, pelting with blown bladders, wet towels, and surreptitious snowballs, and in the sly insertion of cooling crystals between the collars of unsuspecting brethren. Hot pennies are sometimes used.”

  But for the German Jewish bankers, the horseplay and the fraternity-lodge equality tended to halt at the close of the business day, and the men returned to their houses and womenfolk uptown, and to a social life that was increasingly family-centered and self-contained.

  Each woman had her group of women friends whose husbands were also her husband’s friends, and often these friendships led to tighter business connections, and, in the younger generation, when sons and daughters of friends married each other, friendships were cemented into kinships. The mothers of the crowd studied the marriage market for suitable partners, while fathers studied the upcoming crop of young men as possible business partners. Marcus and Bertha Goldman were particularly good friends of Joseph and Sophia Sachs, the poor tutor and the rich goldsmith’s daughter who had run away to America in 1848. In the United States Joseph had worked as a schoolteacher—and, for a period, as a rabbi—in Baltimore and Boston before settling in New York. It was Joseph’s oldest son, Julius, a scholar like his father, who had established the Sachs Collegiate Institute, and who taught most of the children of the crowd, and Julius married the Goldmans’ daughter, Rosa—a match both Bertha Goldman and Sophia Sachs had promoted. Now, in the 1880’s, another Goldman daughter, Louise, was marriageable, and Bertha and Sophia decided that she would be perfect for Sophia’s second son, Sam. The young people agreed, and Marcus Goldman invited Sam to be his first partner in the commercial-paper business which, up to this point, he still carried on singlehandedly, with the help of his hat.*

  To join his new father-in-law, Sam Sachs was required to liquidate a small dry-goods business which he had been operating, and, to facilitate this, Marcus loaned Sam $15,000. The loan was to be repaid in three promissory notes of $5,000 each, over a three-year period. By the time Sam’s and Louise’s third son was born, Sam had repaid Marcus two of the three notes, and Grandfather Marcus, in his old-fashioned German script, wrote formally to his son-in-law to say that, in recognition of Sam’s “energy and ability” as a partner, and in honor of little Walter’s arrival, he was forgiving Sam the final payment. Louise Goldman Sachs, a sentimental sort, always kept her father’s letter, along with the canceled note, in the little strongbox where she kept, tied in faded bows, her little boys’ silky blond ringlets and, dated and labeled, all their baby teeth.

  “And thus,” Walter Sachs was able to say years later, “it appeared that on the very first day of my entrance into this world, I concluded my first business deal for Goldman, Sachs.”

  The Goldmans and the Sachses, however, were still relatively minor figures, socially, in the crowd. Two ladies had for years contended for social leadership—Mrs. Solomon Loeb and Mrs. Jesse Seligman. Betty Loeb was famous chiefly for her dinners, whereas Henriette Seligman was renowned for the large scale on which she lived and for her grand manner.

  Henriette was a creature of habit. Her carriage always arrived at her door at precisely the same moment each day for her drive through Central Park, and neither the length nor the route of the excursion ever varied. She and Jesse entertained frequently, and, since Henriette believed that punctuality was not only a duty of royalty but a courtesy that royalty deserved, whenever her butler announced dinner, she arose and proceeded into the dining room, regardless of whether or not all her guests had arrived. When she traveled to Europe, as she did at intervals of clocklike regularity, she always engaged the same stateroom on the same steamship and, since her itinerary never varied, the same suites in the same hotels.

  In Paris her hotel was, naturally, the Ritz, and once the old Kaiser Wilhelm was planning a state visit to Paris coincidental with Mrs. Seligman’s. The Ritz, who knew Mrs. Seligman’s preferences only too well, deemed it wise to go through the German ambassador to see if, just possibly, Mrs. Seligman would be willing to relinquish her suite for the Kaiser and accept another. Henriette replied that she was “not ready for a change of suite,” and that, though she was very sorry, nothing could be done. The Kaiser slept elsewhere.

  She had, on the other hand, a true sense of noblesse oblige when it came to the sleeping habits of the working classes. Early one morning in her New York house, Henriette was awakened by a noise belowstairs. Convinced of the presence of a burglar, she rose and, in wrapper and slippers, descended to the parlor floor to find the culprit. She found no one there, and so, though she was extremely nearsighted and had left her glasses upstairs and had only a candle to light her way, she continued to the basement. There, in the darkness ahead of her, she heard the sound of running footsteps as the frightened prowler hurried to an open window and made his way out. Henriette proceeded to the window and cried out imperiously, “Do not return!” to the retreating figure in the street. Then she closed and bolted the window and went upstairs to bed.

  The next day she told her friends and family of this episode at her customary hour for telling things, teatime. Someone asked her why she hadn’t waked her husband. “Mr. Seligman was recovering from an illness,” she replied. “I couldn’t think of disturbing him.”

  “But, Auntie,” said a nephew, “why didn’t you ring for one of the menservants?”

  She gave the young man a disapproving look. “My servants,” she said, “had done their day’s work. It was my duty to put my home in order.”

  The Seligman house stood in Forty-sixth Street near Fifth Avenue, and the Jay Gould mansion was a block to the north. Between these two residences stood a hotel called the Windsor, which burned down with a great loss of life. During the fire Henriette, with her customary considerateness, opened the lower floors of her house for use as a temporary hospital for the wounded and dying, and her daughters and maids served sandwiches and coffee to the firemen. Mrs. Seligman herself could not come down; the fire occurred at that hour of the day which she customarily devoted to her embroidery. It was here, over her needlework in her upstairs sitting room, that she agreed to receive the Fire Commissioner of the City of New York, who said he had come to deliver a message of some urgency, even though it was not the
proper hour for callers. The Commissioner was ushered in, and explained that the shell of the Windsor seemed about to collapse, and that very likely a large portion of it would fall on Mrs. Seligman’s house.

  “Then, Commissioner, I do feel that the lady of the house should be present when that happens,” said Henriette, completing a stitch.

  “Your roof has already caught fire three times,” said the Commissioner and, clearly aware that he was in the presence of a Personage, added, “I have come here to have the honor of escorting you out.”

  “Thank you very much,” said Henriette, “but my menservants—” there were four—“are taking care of the roof.”

  “Exactly. And I want them to continue doing just what they’re doing—putting out the flames on the roof.”

  Henriette gave him another of her stern looks. “Mr. Commissioner,” she said, “are you suggesting that I leave and my servants stay?”