The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Meanwhile, south of the border, the advocates of Prohibition were gathering their forces. Everywhere the Carrie Nations of America were taking to the lecture platform, proclaiming that alcohol was undermining American industry, the home, the family, the teachings of Jesus, the will of God. The Anti-Saloon League of New York even claimed that drink had been behind the Russian revolution. “Bolshevism flourishes in wet soil,” one of its leaflets warned. “Failure to enforce Prohibition in Russia was followed by Bolshevism. Failure to enforce Prohibition here will encourage disrespect for [the] law and invite Industrial Disaster. Radical and Bolshevist outbreaks are practically unknown in states where Prohibition has been in effect for years. BOLSHEVISM LIVES ON BOOZE.”

  From such rumblings in the United States, and the fact that the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment began to seem assured, it occurred to Sam Bronfman that this might well be the moment to move from bartending and liquor retailing into manufacturing. Yet another middleman would be eliminated.

  “Distilling” would be too polite a word to use for Sam’s initial efforts. It was more like simple mixology. From the United States, he was able to buy several hundred thousand gallons of raw, overproof alcohol at bargain prices in the panicky pre-Prohibition sell-offs. This he simply thinned with an equal amount of water, added about half as much again real whiskey, and tossed in a bit of caramel for color, plus a dash of sulfuric acid. The purpose of the sulfuric acid was to speed the aging process. While real Scotch whiskey might be aged for two to twelve years, Bronfman Scotch could be aged in about two days. To be sure, there were some mishaps in the beginning. One batch of “Scotch” came out of the vat an alarming purple color. But with more thinning with real Scotch, and some more caramel, the right color was finally achieved and the batch was thereby saved. Next, all Sam had to do was bottle the results and slap on labels. A printer was found who promised that he could produce convincing counterfeits. To be sure, some of his work was either amateurish or deliberately misleading. Johnnie Walker came out as Johnny Walker, Glenlivet was Glen Levitt, and Haig and Haig was Hague and Hague. But few of the customers seemed to notice.

  What no one noticed, either—not even Sam Bronfman himself—was that with this haphazard mixing of alcohol, real whiskey, and other ingredients, Bronfman was in the process of inventing a whole new category of alcoholic beverage: blended whiskey. Could he have possibly known, as early as 1920, that one day the most popular and largest-selling whiskeys on the North American continent would be blends? Or that he himself would one day elevate blending to an art form with the declaration, “Distilling is a science; blending is an art”? But what Sam Bronfman surely noticed—as came to light in 1922, when the Canadian government began wondering why none of the Bronfmans had filed any income tax returns—was that a mixture that cost only $5.25 a gallon to produce could be bottled and sold for $25 a gallon. And that, when the distillery was running well, it could process five thousand gallons a week, which put sales figures at half a million dollars a month, or an annual profit of more than $4,500,000.

  With Prohibition in effect, Meyer Lansky, who was now very much aware of Sam Bronfman’s operation, at first dismissed him as an amateur; his product simply was not good enough for the kind of customers Lansky wanted to serve. But Sam, putting his brother Harry in charge of the distilling operations, had been busily running about the countryside and dashing off to Britain to line up Canadian and Scottish distillers and persuading them to let him be their distributor. He had also, with his profit sheets, been able to make a convincing case for himself with Canadian banks, and to obtain loans, which gave him added capital with which to perfect his blending process—so that every bottle of whiskey produced under the same label would taste the same as every other. And once the Saint Pierre-Miquelon connection had been established, with Sam able to import bona fide brands, Lansky became interested. Sam Bronfman came down from Canada and wooed Lansky with lavish dinners. Lansky responded by getting Bronfman tickets to the heavyweight “prizefight of the century,” between lack Dempsey and Luis Angel Firpo in 1923. A deal was struck, and the two men became partners, a relationship that lasted through Repeal and after.

  What impressed Lansky the most was that what Bronfman was doing was all perfectly legal—in Canada, that is. Bronfman had no trouble with customs or police on the Canadian side of the border. In fact, the Ottawa government actually encouraged the export of liquor to the United States by refunding the nine-dollar-a-gallon tax that it imposed on all liquor sold for consumption within Canada.* What was good for Canadian distillers, Ottawa argued, was good for Canada, and in the first year after the passage of the Volstead Act, export sales shot up to a record twenty-three million dollars—a considerable boost to the Canadian economy. As the Canadian Financial Post editorialized, “Rum running has provided a tidy bit towards Canada’s favourable balance of trade.”

  Sam Bronfman and Meyer Lansky made an odd pair. Like Lansky, Bronfman was short of stature and, at five feet five inches, stood only an inch taller than his American dealer. But whereas Lansky was thin, and never weighed more than 135 pounds at any point in his life, Bronfman tended to plumpness, and his round, pink face often shone with a deceptively cherubic twinkle. Also, whereas Lansky was basically only interested in making money, Sam Bronfman had begun to entertain far greater ambitions. The Canadian social establishment was, and to an extent still is, a tight-knit one of old, Anglo-Saxon, Church of England families, who regarded themselves as a smaller and, if anything, more select aristocracy than the British nobility, on whom they modeled their behavior and attitudes. Their ranks were guarded by such exclusive men’s clubs as Montreal’s Mount Royal and Saint James’s. Sam Bronfman, now in his thirties and a rich man, had begun to court the members of this hidebound Canadian inner circle, with an eye to one day being included in its membership. In the process, he would feign elaborate disinterest in the source of his new wealth, and would bridle at the suggestion that he himself was a “bootlegger.” In his bespoke suits from Savile Row and his hand-benched English shoes from Lobb of London, he affected the appearance of an English country squire in the city for a few days on a bit of business. He even added a few Briticisms to his speech with an occasional “I say!” or “Fancy that!” He professed indifference to the ultimate destination of his whiskey during Prohibition—that was in the hands of men like Meyer Lansky. Never, he insisted, had he ever transported a single drop illegally across the border, nor, he would add with a wink, had he ever counted the empty bottles of his brands on the other side of Lake Erie. Instead, he concentrated on building an imposing turreted mansion at the summit of Westmount, Montreal’s most fashionable suburb, and began filling it with “ancestral” trappings—suits of armor, “family portraits” of no known origin—all with the aim of creating an effect of instant Old Money. The name he gave to the Westmount residence said it all: Belvedere Palace.

  He did, however, contribute a few ideas to Meyer Lansky’s operation, and came up with at least one “invention” that the American bootleggers found useful. One of the things that the revenuers looked for along the lakeshore was the telltale sign of heavy tire-tread marks along the muddy bank, indicating that a truck had backed to the water’s edge to receive a load of liquor from a boat. To eliminate clues like this, Sam Bronfman proposed that a series of sturdy boards be lashed together with wire or rope. One side of this flexible platform would be sodded with grass. When a boat was ready to unload, the grassy side of the contraption could be flipped over to produce a wooden ramp, down which trucks could be backed. When the operation was completed, the ramp was reversed again so that a customs inspector, looking for tire tracks, would see only a pristine grassy sward. It was a device that was as simple as it was cheap to make. Each reversible ramp lasted a week or so, until the grass died. Then it was resodded.

  In 1922, Sam Bronfman was thirty-three and very rich, but a dynast without a dynasty. He had already begun to think of himself as a latter-day Rothschild, but the House of
Bronfman was not yet a House. It was time, he decided, for him to marry and start producing heirs, or Heirs; and, since “Mr. Sam,” as he was now being addressed, was the unquestioned kingpin of his family, he decided that some of his brothers and sisters should marry as well. For his bride, Sam chose a Manitoba girl named Saidye Rosner, whose father, Samuel, had also emigrated to Canada from Bessarabia, and had achieved a certain distinction for having briefly served as mayor of the little town of Plum Coulee. Sam and Saidye were married on June 20, and two days later Sam’s sister Rose married Maxwell Rady, a Winnipeg doctor. Then both newlywed couples boarded a train to Ottawa, where Sam’s brother Allan married Lucy Bilsky on June 28. From mere, Sam and Allan and their respective brides left for Vancouver, where Sam wanted to look over a distillery.

  That Sam and Saidye’s marriage was not a particularly romantic one is clear from the fact that Sam rarely spent more than two or three nights a month at home in Montreal. Keeping track of his growing business kept him dashing back and forth across the face of Canada. Also, since his principal source of revenue was coming from the United States, he was required to be in New York so often that he leased a Pullman compartment on the Montreal–New York Express on a permanent basis so that he didn’t have to bother with reservations. He was spending so much time in New York in fact—living in a series of increasingly opulent hotel suites—that a number of American friends suggested to him that he might consider becoming a citizen of the country to which he owed such an expansive style of living. But at this suggestion he balked. Partly it was out of an innate provincialism; Canada had been lucky for him, and he was unwilling and unready to tamper with that luck in a larger, richer country. Also, in the United States it would be difficult to escape the label “bootlegger,” whereas in Canada, where what he was selling was perfectly legal, there remained a chance that he might one day achieve the thing he wanted most—acceptance by the social establishment—even though it still eluded him.

  There was an even more important reason. The United States did not confer ennobling titles upon its citizens. In Britain, the great distillers had become viscounts, barons, and baronets. There were Lord Dewar, Sir Alexander Walker (of Johnnie Walker), Lord Woolavington, Lord Forteviot, Sir James Charles Calder, and Field Marshal Earl Haig. Canada didn’t often confer knighthoods on its citizens, but it sometimes did. Ottawa had already expressed its gratitude to Sam Bronfman’s industry in various ways. Then why, someday, should there not be a Sir Samuel Bronfman, and a Lady Saidye Bronfman? It did not seem an impossibility. And it would have a nice ironic twist—the family that had fled Russia to escape the persecution of the nobility, elevated to a nobility all its own in a single generation’s time.

  Meanwhile, Sam’s profitable connection with Meyer Lansky and his growing organization continued apace. Sam Bronfman might not consider himself a bootlegger, but Lansky and Company certainly did. As Lansky’s chief confederate, Lucky Luciano, put it, Sam Bronfman “was bootleggin’ enough whiskey across the Canadian border to double the size of Lake Erie.”

  It was no wonder that wags in the liquor trade were beginning to refer to Lake Erie as “the Jewish lake.”

  *This author’s own mother, returning from Europe, made her way safely, if clinking slightly and looking somewhat overweight, with bottles plunged into her girdle and a bottle in each cup of her brassiere.

  *Conspiracy theories of the two Kennedy assassinations have noted the longstanding Kennedy-Lansky feud, suggesting that organized crime was behind both murders. Adding to this is the fact that Jack Ruby was a Jewish barkeep who may, or may not, have had Lansky connections. Many Jewish barkeeps did.

  *For the Bronfmans, an “incentive” bonus of $180,000 a month. Not bad.

  7

  FITTING IN

  Not all Eastern European Jews emigrated to America to escape persecution and pogroms. In White Russia, for example—that section of western Russia known as Byelorussia—the situation was somewhat different. Though anti-Semitism was rife, the notorious pogroms of the 1880s and 1890s did not spread there. The province was, however, easily the most socially and economically backward in the land, and most of the White Russian Jews who, along with many of their Christian neighbors, emigrated in the years before the revolution did so simply to escape grinding poverty, in search of the financial promises that beckoned from the west. Many found what they were seeking, including William Fisher—born Velvil Fisch—who arrived in New York in 1906 and headed westward, working briefly in a mattress factory. Fisher in time laid the groundwork for what today is the Aurora Gasoline Company of Detroit, and his son, Max M. Fisher, adviser on economics to United States Presidents, is known as “the richest Jew in Detroit,” and enjoys giving the following directions to his office: “Take the Fisher Freeway to Fisher Boulevard, to the Fisher Building …”*

  In Hungary, an altogether different set of circumstances prevailed, and in the late nineteenth century the status of the Jews in Hungary was probably higher than in any other European country. After nearly a century of rebellion against the Austrian emperor, the lords of upper Hungary were defeated early in the eighteenth century, and the heads of the Hungarian noble houses fled to Turkey and Poland. Their estates were confiscated by the Austrian Crown, and were parceled out to pro-Austrian adherents—thus creating a whole new Hungarian aristocracy. This instant gentry not only owned large sections of towns, villages, and cities; they also controlled the government, the army, and the universities. On their vast agrarian estates, they controlled the peasant population that toiled for them, and it was here that the Jews had made themselves useful.

  The new archdukes and barons much preferred their city palaces to their country estates, and the Jews, meanwhile, had for many years handled the trade in grain and cattle between the country demesnes and the cities, as well as in foreign markets. It was convenient, then, for the absentee landlords to lease their estates to Jews, who saw to it that the rents were paid and collected, and delivered to the city lords. With such leases went all the privileges of the country squire, including occupancy of the manor house and keeping a leash on the peasants, who were required to work a number of days each week in payment for their tenant hold. The Jews, then, lived at a level just below that of a landed aristocracy. During the Hungarian revolution of 1848, they had been given full citizenship rights, and thereafter became ardent Magyar patriots. The landed Jews went in for sports, politics, and patronage of the arts. It was not uncommon to see these privileged Jews driving their snappy four-in-hands into town with uniformed hussars seated on top of their boxes. Such Jews, who still considered themselves Jews, had nonetheless abandoned most of the trappings of Orthodoxy and, indeed, by lower-class Jews were scornfully—if enviously—called “pork-eaters.”

  It was from this sort of, though not quite, upper-crust background that a Hungarian-Jewish youngster named Emery Roth grew up in a part of Hungary that is now Slovakia, at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains where they slope to meet the Hungarian plain. His family owned the local hotel, the only two-story structure in town and very much the nerve center, where all important meetings and civic events took place. As an indication of his family’s social status, he was one of the few local children deemed worthy of being invited to play with the children of the local baron and baroness. He was well educated in the local academy, and showed considerable talent as an artist. But then, in his early teens, bad luck struck the family. His father died, his mother was forced to take an older son out of school to help her run the hotel, and Emery was just one mouth too many to feed. His choice: emigration. At the time, he was deeply embarrassed by this, and invented a story, which he told his friends and schoolmates, that he was going to Munich to study art. “I was ashamed to tell them that I was going to America,” he wrote, “because the need to emigrate is a confession of poverty, a disgrace no one—at any rate, any boy, will confess to.” He left home in the winter of 1884, and arrived at Castle Garden five weeks later.

  Outwardly, the circums
tances of his emigration seemed propitious. His principal language was Magyar, which was the language of the Hungarian educated classes, but he was also fluent in Slovene, knew quite a bit of German, and had studied Latin. Surely, he presumed, language would present no problem to him, a linguist, in the United States. He also felt that, for a youth of fifteen, he had had quite a sophisticated upbringing. As a hotelkeeper’s son, he wrote, “I attended balls, theatrical performances, town meetings, saw carousing and fights and heard the careless talk of all sorts of men. Before I was six years old I had a chance to listen and gape at the varied strata of our population, drunk and sober, from the Field Marshal and high officers that stopped at the hotel when the maneuvers were held in the Carpathians, through the gentry which we housed during the autumn week of the hare drive and the winter boar hunts, on down to the travelling salesmen and the easygoing public officials and townspeople and finally to the soldiers and peasants who frequented that portion of the establishment known as the inn. Magyar, Slovak, Pole, German, Jew, rich and poor, all were guests at our house.”

  Then, too, a visiting American from Chicago had promised to take young Roth under his wing during the journey over, and to see that the young immigrant found suitable employment when he arrived. This American, who had returned to Hungary to visit his parents, was Aladar V. Kiss, and it was obvious that Mr. Kiss had become a very rich and important person. His calling card and letterhead said so. They proclaimed him to be a “Real Estate Agent,” which Mlle Clothilde—the baron’s children’s governess—helpfully translated for the Roths. The words, she explained, stood for “Veritable State Administrator,” which certainly sounded imposing. The calling card also proclaimed that Mr. Kiss was involved in “Management, Mortgages and Appraisals.” In addition, it announced that he was a “Notary Public.” In Hungary, a notary was a very high government official.