The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Blanche took her complaints to her mother, who naturally sympathized with her daughter. Blanche also complained to her brother, who found himself very much in the middle. He was unhappy about his brother-in-law’s presumed philanderings, but there was little he could do about the situation. Sam, after all, was not only the chairman of the board of the company; he was also the major stockholder in it, and in a very real sense, Jesse Lasky was Sam’s employee. The fact that for a number of years Sam, Blanche, Jesse, and Mrs. Lasky had lived under the same roof only made matters stickier.

  At her mother’s suggestion, Blanche Goldfish hired a private detective to monitor her husband’s activities, and the detective’s findings seemed to confirm her suspicions. Confronted with this, Sam flew into a towering rage, and when his wife left their house to consult a lawyer, he had all the locks changed and refused to let her back in. The ensuing divorce proceedings were bitter and acrimonious on all sides, with a great deal of ugly name-calling, and with Sam, among other things, claiming that his small daughter, Ruth, was probably not his own child. One result of the divorce would be that Ruth, custody of whom was given to her mother, would not learn for twenty years who her father really was.

  Inevitably, the domestic upheavals chez Goldfish had an effect on the already uneasy partnership. His problems at home seemed to make Sam even more irascible and autocratic at the office, and during one of Sam’s out-of-town trips Adolph Zukor flatly told his board of directors that he could no longer work with Mr. Goldfish. Either he or Goldfish would have to go. When Sam returned from his travels, he faced a chilly board of directors who asked for his resignation. Huffily, he resigned, uttering, according to legend, his famous ultimatum, “Include me out!” Later, he would disclaim this comment, saying only, “I didn’t think it was a very nice thing for them to do.” But it was not an altogether un-nice thing for Sam Goldfish. To help persuade him to relinquish his chairmanship, he was given an even million dollars’ worth of stock in Famous Players–Lasky.

  Now on his own, like so many others of his competitive and rising generation, Sam Goldfish turned his back on both Zukor and his former brother-in-law, and went scouting for new partners with whom to invest his money. Soon he found them—two brothers named Edgar and Archibald Selwyn, who had been successful producers of legitimate plays on Broadway—and with them formed the Goldwyn Pictures Corporation, a name taken from the first syllable of Sam’s last name and the last syllable of the Selwyns’. Into this new arrangement, Sam brought his million dollars, and the Selwyns brought a healthy clutch of stage plays ready to be turned into movies.

  In 1918 Sam Goldfish petitioned the New York courts to have his name legally changed to Goldwyn. There had been titters among audiences, he had heard, when the words PRODUCED BY SAMUEL GOLDFISH appeared on the screen, and Sam was no longer a man who took titters lightly. Since Sam, for corporate reasons, had taken the precaution of having the name Goldwyn copyrighted, consent was required from the copyright holder. But since the copyright holder was Sam himself, who was also president of the company, this technicality presented no problem. Permission was granted by the court. As Judge Learned Hand put it, “A self-made man may prefer a self-made name.”

  *The charges of Jewish ritual murder of children, and cannibalism, date back to pre-Christian times, along with the bizarre claim that human sacrifice is condoned by the Talmud. The canard has been repeated throughout the centuries, and in the fourteenth century even made its way into Chaucer’s “Prioress’s Tale”: “O yong Hugh of Lincoln, slayn also/ With cursed Jewes, as it is notable/ For it is but a litel whyle ago,/ Preye eek for us.”

  *More than personal vanity may have accounted for the uncertainty about Sam’s real age, and there may have been a more poignant explanation. In Russia, Jewish parents often falsified the ages of their male children, in order to postpone for as long as possible the age of forced conscription into the czarist army. In one community near Kiev, the Jewish congregation actually burned down its own synagogue to destroy birth records. It seemed that more girl children than boys had been born that year, and the congregation feared official reprisals if the shortage in the supply of males was discovered.

  *After whom Dustin Hoffman’s star-struck mother named her son.

  5

  HEROES AND HEROINES

  Leah Sarnoff liked to describe her four sons—David, Lew, Morris, and Irving—in terms of superlatives. One was “the handsomest.” Another was “the smartest.” The third was “the kindest.” But David—“Ah, David,” his mother would say, “David has all the luck.”

  Within four days of his arrival in New York, David Sarnoff had found a job selling newspapers on Grand Street on the Lower East Side to help support his younger brothers and sisters. He was nine years old, and the secret of his success as a newsboy was not so much luck as speed. When Sarnoff began hawking copies of the Tageblatt in 1900, which happened to be the year Rose Pastor began submitting her wistful romantic verses to the same paper, it was necessary for the newsboy to snatch his bale of papers as it tumbled off the conveyor belt, snap its binding wire with a jackknife, and run with the papers, shouting “Extra! Extra!” through the streets. The papers were not returnable, and if a newsboy did not dispose of his quota quickly, the business would go to his competition. David Sarnoff was a small, wiry, intense boy with large dark eyes, jug ears, and a ski-jump nose. He was also quick on his feet, and soon realized that he could be even quicker and more efficient if he were mobilized. Taking his cue from the pushcart vendors, he fashioned a makeshift cart out of a packing crate and four mismatched bicycle wheels picked up on the street. With this contraption he was able to build up a route along which he sold as many as three hundred Tageblatts a day. His profit was a penny for every two newspapers sold—fifty percent, since the Tageblatt retailed for a penny a copy—and this could add up to earnings of $1.50 a day, or $7.50 a week (the paper did not publish on the Sabbath). He was also able to earn an additional $1.50 a week singing soprano in the synagogue choir. This, it might be pointed out, was a princely income, compared with what older children were being paid for long hours of work in the sweatshops, and David’s working day was seldom more than two hours long. This left him time to go to school.

  It was not long before the enterprising new newsboy in town caught the attention of a group that called itself the Metropolitan News Company. Metropolitan News was a commercial distributor, or jobber, that bought newspapers in bulk and delivered them to newsstands, candy stores, and other retail outlets, using a horse and wagon. As the Tageblatt’s biggest customer, Metropolitan got the first papers off the presses, before anyone else. Sarnoff’s business was street sales and some home delivery, but it looked attractive enough to Metropolitan for them to approach him with an offer to buy his route. At first, their offer was ten dollars, but Metropolitan’s price rose steadily until it reached the staggering figure of twenty-five dollars, which was almost an offer he could not afford to refuse—more than a month’s earnings for one little route. But, instead of accepting, Sarnoff took a gamble and made a counterproposal. Metropolitan could have his route—he could always build up another—for nothing. In return, Sarnoff asked only for the first three hundred copies of the daily press run, enough to give his cart a head start. The deal was accepted. Within weeks, he had built up a new route, and, as he had expected, Metropolitan was soon after him again with an offer to buy that one.

  David Sarnoff could probably have gone on parlaying his paper routes into cash until Metropolitan controlled the entire Lower East Side, which, of course, was what it wanted. But there was danger here. In 1902, a rival Yiddish publication had been founded by an enterprising young Russian immigrant named Abraham Cahan. This was the Jewish Daily Forward, and since it offered a more socialistic, less uptown-establishment editorial point of view, it had quickly become popular with New York Jews who had been forced to leave Russia for reasons more political than anything else. Circulation wars between American dailies had become commonp
lace, and these had been known to be unpleasant, even bloody, with the newsboys of the competing papers most often the victims of the bloodshed. Sarnoff was wise enough to see that he could not go on expecting Metropolitan News to pay him cash for his routes forever; they might easily resort to more forceful methods. Besides, he had another idea.

  He was thirteen now, and had begun to think about owning his own newsstand. With his own stand, he could sell both Tageblatts and Forwards. He would be buying from Metropolitan News, instead of selling to them. Two of his brothers, Lew and Morris, were now old enough to help out, and their mother could fill in while the boys were at school. There was a small stand for sale uptown, at the corner of Forty-sixth Street and Tenth Avenue. It was hardly the best neighborhood in town. It was also enemy territory, in that it was largely Irish Catholic. In fact, that particular section of the West Side was already known as Hell’s Kitchen. Still, the idea of newsstand ownership appealed to him, but the price—two hundred dollars—made it seem out of the question, though he could not help talking about it, and how he would run it, if only two hundred dollars could somehow miraculously be delivered into his hands. It was then that a strange stroke of luck occurred.

  Returning home one evening, David noticed a mysterious stranger standing near the doorway of the Sarnoffs’ tenement house. It was a woman, and she did not seem to be from the neighborhood—she was too well dressed, and her English was too precise—but she engaged him in conversation. Was it true that his father was too ill to work? (Never in good health, Abe Sarnoff had literally starved himself while working at his trade as a painter in order to send for his wife and children, and was now bedridden as a result.) Was it true that the thirteen-year-old David was now supporting his entire family? Was it true that he sang in the synagogue choir, and picked up an extra dollar or two singing at weddings and bar mitzvahs? Was it true that he needed two hundred dollars to buy a newsstand? When he had answered all these questions in the affirmative, the woman handed David Sarnoff an envelope, and then slipped quietly away into the night. In the envelope was exactly two hundred dollars. Was it a miracle, or luck, or a bit of each? David Sarnoff would not know the answer until many years later.

  As the proprietors of their own newsstand, the Sarnoffs moved out of their Monroe Street tenement into slightly larger quarters, closer to their new business, on West Forty-sixth Street. And now that his mother and brothers were set up in business, with David himself making twice-daily rounds with his cart to collect his papers for his stand, he decided that this might be the moment for him to secure a regular salaried job. Schooling for him was over, and in those days there were no working-paper requirements for someone his age to take a full-time job. While peddling newspapers he had learned a great deal about the power of the press, and had even used this knowledge to good advantage at Stuyvesant High School. In an English class, his teacher had been discussing The Merchant of Venice, and had held up the character of Shylock as “typical” of Jewish cruelty and greed. David Sarnoff had protested this interpretation, and had been hauled into the principal’s office for disrupting the classroom. The principal had tried to smooth things out between David and the teacher, but the teacher had been adamant: either David Sarnoff would be banned from his classroom or he, the teacher, would resign. With that, David mentioned that some of the Jewish newspapers, with whom he had connections, might be interested in the fact that New York’s public schools were teaching anti-Semitism. Miraculously, the tables were turned. David was restored to his English class, and the teacher’s resignation was accepted.

  Experiences such as this had led Sarnoff to think about a career as a newspaper reporter. A reporter’s life was considered an exciting and glamorous one in those days, when dozens of New York dailies competed fiercely with one another for scoops on the biggest stories, for circulation, and for advertising space. The newspaper reporter had to be quick and resourceful, and often had to involve himself in scrapes and daring adventures, as he kept his finger on the pulse of the big city. And so, one afternoon, Sarnoff took himself down to the offices of James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, in Herald Square. Bennett, the father of sensationalist “yellow” journalism in America, had turned the Herald into one of the most powerful papers in town. Directed to the personnel department, Sarnoff was told that he could be used as a messenger at five dollars a week, plus ten cents an hour overtime, and was handed a uniform and a bicycle. There was only one problem: his new employer was not the New York Herald at all. It was the Commercial Cable Company, whose offices were next door. He had walked into the wrong building. Thus, through luck again or happy accident, the future board chairman of the Radio Corporation of America found himself, not in the newspaper business, but in the fledgling radio and electronics industry—the very industry that, in Sarnoff’s lifetime, would help account for the demise of most of New York’s newspapers, including the Herald.

  As it happened, one of Commercial Cable’s biggest subscribers then was the Herald, and much of Sarnoff’s work involved delivering telegraphed dispatches to and from the newspaper. In order to understand the priority of the messages he was transporting, it behooved him quickly to learn the Morse code. He thus, while barely in his teens, became aware of the increasing importance of radiotelegraphy—“wireless,” as it was called—as a medium for transmitting news. In his spare time, he began reading everything he could find on the new communications method, and during slow periods of the day he was permitted to practice on the telegraph key, and to tap out coded conversations between his Herald Square office and a young counterpart who worked in Commercial Cable’s downtown office on Broad Street.

  Great strides had been made in the field of radio communications since the turn of the century. In 1901, Guglielmo Marconi’s brainchild had demonstrated his global possibilities when a faint signal, beamed across the Atlantic from the Cornish coast of England, was received at Saint John’s, Newfoundland, and it was not long before actual voices and scraps of music were being transmitted, albeit often very indistinctly, across the primitive airwave frequencies in addition to dots and dashes. It did not take much imagination to realize that, as techniques were perfected, the airwaves might be used to transmit entertainment, and not just news, from one part of the world to another, and that this entertainment might have commercial value, much as the movies did.

  The United States Navy had gone so far as to undertake a feasibility study to determine whether or not radio signals might one day be used to replace its flocks of carrier pigeons. But the commercial possibilities of radio had failed to catch the imagination of the general public—perhaps because the technology was so hard to envision. It was easy enough to understand how the human voice, or an electric current, could be made to travel through a wire. Every child, after all, had rigged a telephone of sorts using two paper cups and a string, and the use of business and residential telephone service was expanding rapidly. But that sounds could also travel electronically through the empty ether was a difficult concept to grasp, as was the theory—which was being explored by scientists even then—that one day a system would be devised whereby the air could also be filled with thousands of invisible colored pictures, which could be picked up by millions of home receivers. To the public, radio remained an interesting little gadget, the bailiwick of a few scientists and operators scattered in a handful of stations in remote places, but of no significant social importance. When plans for the British White Star Line’s great flagship, Titanic, were announced, and it was learned that the vessel would be equipped with a radio communications system, most people assumed that this was no more than a promotional gimmick. When David Sarnoff tried to explain radiotelegraphy and radiotelephony to his mother, Leah Sarnoff could not understand it, and so had no idea what her son’s new job entailed. This embarrassed her. When friends asked Leah what young David was up to, she told them he had become a plumber, to which they replied, “That’s nice!”

  Plumbing, however, was about the only enterprise David
Sarnoff was not involved in. Every morning, before reporting to work at Commercial Cable, he spent four hours collecting and delivering papers to the family newsstand. In the evenings, when he was not studying electronics, there was choir practice. In the year 1906, however, when Sarnoff was not quite sixteen, two interconnected events occurred that provided a temporary setback to his career. The Jewish High Holidays, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, were approaching, and Sarnoff asked his employer for these days off, without pay, explaining that he was needed in the choir. He was bluntly told not only that he could have the days off but that, for asking, he was fired. This was a double blow because, simultaneously, his usefulness to the choir as a boy soprano was also coming to an end for natural reasons. His choirmaster had already docked him a nickle off his wages for failing to reach high C.