The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  But when assessing the success of the Eastern European Jews in the United States, it is important to keep matters in perspective, and to remember that for all their financial prosperity no American Jewish families have ever come remotely close to equaling the fortunes of the wealthiest non-Jews. The canard that Jewish money dominates the country is just that. No American Jew has ever amassed a personal fortune equal to that of, say, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, or Howard Hughes. Among contemporary non-Jewish families, the Mellon and du Pont families are each worth between three and five billion dollars. The Getty and Daniel K. Ludwig families are worth between two and three billion, and the Rockefellers between one and two billion.

  By contrast, the richest Jewish family in America is the Pritzker family of Chicago, collectively worth between seven hundred million and one billion dollars. The founding father, Nicholas J. Pritzker, came from Kiev at age nine in 1880, in the first wave of Russian immigrants. The basis of the family fortune is Chicago real estate, which Pritzker began acquiring in the early 1900s when the city was still young and raw. “Never sell your land—lease it,” was his advice to his sons, and they followed it. Today, the Pritzker real estate holdings are worth, conservatively, half a billion dollars, and other Pritzker investments include Hyatt Hotels, the Cerro-Marmon Corporation, the Hammond Organ Company, the W. F. Hall Printing Company, Continental Airlines, and a number of trucking companies. The Chicago law firm of Pritzker and Pritzker has no clients other than itself, and has not accepted a new client in over forty years because of potential conflicts of interest with the family’s other, far-flung enterprises.

  The second-wealthiest Jewish American family is that of the late Samuel Irving Newhouse of New York, who, with his two sons, built a communications empire worth between six and seven hundred million dollars—twenty-one daily newspapers, five magazines, six television stations, and twenty cable-television systems. The patriarch of this family fortune was born in 1895 on New York’s Lower East Side, the eldest of eight children of Russian and Austrian immigrants. Though Newhouse was in the business of pleasing the reading and viewing public, he had no use for personal publicity. Invited many times to be listed in Who’s Who in America, he refused to fill out the necessary forms. He was, however, intensely devoted to the welfare of his relatives, and was one of the most nepotistic of American employers. At one point, some sixty-four Newhouse sons, brothers, cousins, and in-laws were on the Newhouse payroll. His most visible philanthropic gift has been the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at New York’s Lincoln Center, honoring his wife.

  Next in line in the roster of Eastern European fortunes in America is that of Walter Annenberg and his seven sisters. Since the stock of Triangle Publications—the parent corporation that publishes TV Guide, Seventeen, the Philadelphia Daily News, and the Daily Racing Form, and that owns six television and nine radio stations, plus twenty-seven cable-TV franchises—has long been family held, the size of the Annenberg fortune has long been a matter of guesswork, but is probably in the three- to four-hundred-million-dollar range. To make sure that his private golf course at Sunny lands, his four-hundred-acre estate outside Palm Springs, would always have water, Walter Annenberg bought the local water company. Though Annenberg and his wife are solidly respectable citizens—he a former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, she a former U.S. chief of protocol, and both friends of Presidents Nixon and Reagan—the family fortune is clouded by its founder, Walter’s father, the late Moses L. Annenberg, who made his money from a telegraphic news service for bookie joints that carried information between racetracks across the country. In 1939, the senior Annenberg was convicted of income tax evasion, fined eight million dollars, and sentenced to three years in prison.

  Less well known, perhaps, but on an equal financial footing with the Annenbergs is the Blaustein family of Baltimore. The founding father, Louis Blaustein, was born in Lithuania in 1869, and came to America in his teens. He started out as a kerosene peddler, and devised a then-novel way of transporting fuel—in a steel drum, mounted on wheels, with a spigot at the bottom, the forerunner of the tank truck. Next, he opened America’s first drive-in gas station. Up to then, gasoline had been sold at curbside, a clumsy operation. At the time, motorists had to take a station attendant’s word as to how much gasoline it took to fill their tanks, and more often than not, a station proprietor added a few gallons to the sale for good measure. At Blaustein’s station, this sharp practice was eliminated, and a ten-gallon jar was affixed to the top of each pump with the gallonage marked off on its side, so the motorist could see how much he was getting. It was the forerunner of today’s metered pumps.

  But his most sophisticated innovation was his development of the first special antiknock motor fuel, which revolutionized the gasoline and automobile industry, and made possible the use of the high-compression engine. Blaustein’s gasoline was called then, as it is now, Amoco. Louis Blaustein died in 1937, and his company was taken over by his son, Jacob. In 1954, Jacob Blaustein negotiated the sale of Amoco to Standard Oil of Indiana for stock that made the Blaustein family the largest shareholders in that company. Today, the Blausteins own some 5,250,000 shares of Indiana Standard, worth on a good Wall Street day between $315,000,000 and $400,000,000.

  Interestingly, those Russian Jews who chose to seek their fortunes in the most unorthodox and riskiest ways wound up, though hardly poor, in financial strata considerably below the Pritzkers, Newhouses, Annenbergs, or Blausteins. From a long, charmed life as a mastermind of organized crime, Meyer Lansky died worth between $100,000,000 and $150,000,000. And the flamboyant movie producers from Hollywood’s golden era did even less well, despite the power they once wielded. Perhaps this was because they moved in a world where excessive spending became almost de rigueur, a kind of overhead that had to be figured into the cost of doing business, and where everyone was expected to die broke in the Old Actors’ Home, which Louis B. Mayer had foresightedly helped endow. But Mayer himself, once the highest-salaried individual in the United States, died worth only $10,000,000.

  From such figures, however, it is clear that the Russian-Jewish immigrants, while they did not create fortunes equal to those of the Christians, did not do badly, either. And whereas before the arrival of the Russians, the Germans had been the dominant Jewish economic group, the Russians quickly eclipsed the Germans in both numbers and sheer buying power, a continuing source of hard feelings between the two groups—the German Jews of “old” money, and the spectacularly arisen Russian nouveaux.

  In some ways, the careers of the Russian-Jewish entrepreneurs I have chosen (rather arbitrarily) to write about, and their twentieth-century success stories, call to mind the sagas of the notorious Christian robber barons of the century before—the first-generation Fricks, Goulds, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Hills, and Rockefellers, all of whom proved that “new money” and “bad manners” did not rule each other out. The newer Jewish barons shared many characteristics with their older Christian counterparts—brashness, energy, vast egotism, a certain rapacity, and an almost touching absence of humor. All viewed “business” as a deadly, fascinating, zero-sum game with only one winner on any field, and a joyful opportunity to outmaneuver the federal government. All were intelligent, even highly so, but few were the least bit intellectual. None seemed to enjoy their money very much when they got it in such huge quantities. Their tastes in pleasure remained simple, fleshly, and inexpensive.

  And so what is different about the twentieth-century American Jewish entrepreneurs from Eastern Europe? Simply put, they were more honest. Almost without exception (and including Meyer Lansky), they believed in giving good weight. They were exceptionally careful about customer opinion. Few Russian Jews have been known to cry, “The public be damned!”—the curse that was uttered by William Henry Vanderbilt. There is Talmudic tradition in this. The Talmud itself enjoins against sharp practice, and cautions against, say, a Jewish cobbler’s placing his shop in too close proximity t
o the shop of another Jewish cobbler. The direct competition is to be given elbow room, and space in which to breathe and flourish. Perhaps these ethical standards explain why, for centuries, the ruling courts of Europe preferred to conduct their most important and sensitive business affairs with Jews. They could be trusted.

  This significant difference also helps explain why, on the whole, Russian-Jewish business success in America has been accepted by the rest of the populace with equanimity and respect, without envy or rancor. The robber barons of old were feared and hated by the public, and vilified by the press. Even today the name of Jay Gould is a household word synonymous with ferocious greed and fiscal skulduggery. But who today has anything ill—or anything at all—to say about the business activities of a Nicholas Pritzker or a Louis Blaustein? Their public image has remained benign, if they have any public image at all.

  The collective success stories—against such seeming odds—of the Russian Jews in America also illustrate a point well made by Emerson in The American Scholar: “If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him.” (Disraeli, a Jew, put it a little differently: “Everything comes if a man will only wait.”) Bringing with them from the Old World so little culture that was usable in the New, that’s what these Jewish men and women had—instincts: instincts that told them to fight and survive.

  Which is not to say that the majority of Eastern European Jews in America were fighters and instinct players. Most had no such ambitions, opportunities, talents, or temptations to conquer. Most made a living, paid their taxes, died, and were buried to the words of the Kaddish. But those who fought, fought well and fairly.

  But, as I have said, this book is not intended to be just about people getting rich. And, impressive as the business successes of such as the Pritzkers, Newhouses, Annenbergs, and Blausteins may be, this is not a book about the rise of these particular families. Rather, it is about the rise of men and women who have intimately affected the way we live and think and view and enjoy ourselves—who have, in the process of their American successes, left their imprint on our culture in terms of the news and entertainment media, the fashion and beauty industries, the arts and music, who have shaped our tastes in our living and even in our drinking habits. The book is inspired, if that is not too pompous a word, by a persistent suggestion. Having written two other books about earlier Jewish migrations to America—the proud Sephardic families who arrived many years before, and whose sons fought in, the American Revolution, and the German-Jewish banking and merchant families who came to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century—I felt it was appropriate to take up the third, and greatest, wave of Jewish immigration, which began in the 1880s and reached flood stage by 1910. “When,” Russian-Jewish friends kept asking me, “are you going to write a book about the rest of us?”

  Here it is, and here they are.

  S.B.

  Part One

  BEGINNINGS: 1880–1919

  1

  UPTOWN FIREBRAND

  In the early summer of 1906, a huge and unruly mob of screaming Jewish women and children suddenly descended on a number of public schools on New York’s Lower East Side and began hurling stones and brickbats at the buildings. The riot extended from Rivington Street to Grand Street, and from the Bowery to the East River, with the greatest violence concentrated in the most easterly sections. Windows and door panels of the schoolhouses were smashed, and certainly many frightened teachers—cowering within their classrooms—would have suffered bodily harm if a police task force, wielding nightsticks, had not quickly appeared and been able to quell the mob. It was not immediately clear, furthermore, what the uprising was all about.

  The year 1906 was one of militancy by women. The charismatic Jewish-American anarchist Emma Goldman, then thirty-seven, had just founded her publication, Mother Earth, with her beloved “Sasha,” Alexander Berkman, who had recently been released from prison for attempting to murder the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in the Homestead Strike of 1892. The London Daily Mail had coined the terms “suffragettes” to describe women like Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, who were campaigning for woman suffrage. And the Lower East Side was by then no stranger to scenes of social unrest. The rent strikes of 1904 had been particularly disquieting and that same year, in the so-called Children’s Strike, more than a hundred young women, many in adolescence, most of them Jewish, who had been earning pennies for piecework in a local paper-box factory, marched to protest a pay cut of ten percent. The irony was that their employer was one Mr. Cohen, a Jew.

  Meanwhile, from the trickle of Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe—Russia, Poland, Rumania, Austria-Hungary—that had begun in 1881, there had grown a flood. By 1906, nearly two million Jews—roughly a third of the Jews of Eastern Europe—had left their homes. Over ninety percent of these had come to the United States, and most of them had settled in New York City, where Ellis Island was attempting to process as many as fifteen thousand immigrants a day. The Lower East Side was bursting at its seams. Yet none of these turbulent forces seemed immediately to account for the violent outburst of the women and children against the East Side public schools.

  When the dust had settled, however, it turned out that a rumor had somehow billowed in the ghetto to the effect that doctors were murdering children in the schools by slashing their throats and then burying their bodies in the schoolyards. And blame for the incident—later labeled the Adenoids Riot—was laid at the doorstep of a much beleaguered lady educator named Julia Richman, the district school superintendent, who was herself Jewish.

  In fact, it was a case of a Julia Richman program that had backfired. Among other innovations, Miss Richman had introduced seasonal smallpox vaccinations for East Side children. There had been much resistance to this at first, from immigrant parents who couldn’t understand why their children were being pricked with needles, which resulted in sore arms. But eventually the vaccination program had been accepted. In 1906, however, at one school—P.S. 100 at Broome and Cannon streets—the vaccinating physicians had discovered that a number of children suffered from adenoids, or swollen lymph-node tissue at the back of the throat, which could be removed by simple surgery. The principal of P.S. 100, one Miss A. E. Simpson, had sent home carefully worded notes to the parents of the affected children, explaining that, if possible, parents should have their own doctors perform the operation. If not, Miss Simpson explained, Board of Health physicians would do the work at the schools at no cost, and if they wished this, parents were asked to sign forms and releases, giving the board their permission. Unable to read English, not knowing what they were signing, but doing their best to comply with strange new American customs and procedures, many parents had dutifully signed the forms. Thus it was the routine snipping of adenoids that had led to the throat-slashing stories.

  The Christian press, typically, blamed “excitable, ignorant Jews, fearing Russian massacres here, knowing nothing of American sanitary ideas and the supervision exercised over school children by the Health Board,” for the riots. The New York Tribune, among others, praised the police for their “vigorous application of the slats to the most convenient section of the nearest ‘Yiddisher.’” But for the Lower East Siders it was another case of unwanted interference from Miss Richman.

  Julia Richman was, in the somewhat disparaging phrase of the day, an “uptown do-gooder.” She followed in the noble tradition of women like Lillian Wald, a German-Jewish young woman who had come from a family of comfortable means, had gone into nursing, and, in 1893, had gone to the Lower East Side to devote her life to the healing of the sick and needy. With the financial backing of the German-Jewish philanthropist Jacob H. Schiff, Lillian Wald had established the Henry Street Settlement, where thousands of immigrant Jews were welcomed after their long journey in steerage, where they were fed, housed, and cared for—deloused, dusted off, taught rudimentary English, and otherwise eased through the shock of enterin
g a new culture.

  A number of prominent uptown Christians had also become involved, as volunteers, with settlement house work. Just as it had become fashionable for every New York lady to support a “favorite charity,” a favorite settlement house was adopted—the Henry Street, the University Settlement, and so on. The aim of the settlement houses was to form a bridge between the old and new worlds—to instill within an immigrant population a sense of personal purpose and spiritual fulfillment in American democracy. It was true that the settlement houses tended to concentrate their efforts on children and young people. There was a strong feeling that children were often “held back” in the Americanization process by immigrant parents who were too fixed in their Old World ways to adapt to a different society, or too timid or shy to try. But if children could be persuaded to influence parents, the theory went, the parents too might be persuaded to see the light. There were, however, no overt efforts to Christianize children, but only attempts to make them feel comfortable in a predominantly Christian American world. The settlement houses provided courses and lectures on everything from American politics to American sports, from manners to modes of dress. They were, in other words, trying to supplement and augment what Julia Richman was doing in her schools.

  And in many ways they were successful. But there were still stirrings of unrest and distrust among these incursions by Christians and Jews who were “different” among the Jews of the Lower East Side.