But the most important appeal of Emanu-El and the Reform movement was that they represented a step in the assimilation process, part of the Russians’ drive to adapt to the prevailing mode and environment. Reform was more “modern,” more “enlightened,” more “American.” While many of the first-generation immigrants liked to keep a toehold in the Old World—out of habit, out of fear, out of nostalgia—through their Orthodoxy, the second generation wanted to blend in, to move with the times. “My parents were Orthodox, but I’m Reform,” became the phrase. Reform meant up-to-date. Everyone knew, for example, that the Jewish dietary laws had become, by the twentieth century, anachronisms and, in the United States, a nuisance. Reform Jews had come right out and said so, and by the 1940s, any Jew who still kept a kosher household was, in the eyes of Reform, either a sentimentalist or a zealot. The reaction of a Midwest housewife is typical: “I used to cook kosher meals when my in-laws came to dinner, but after they died I stopped.” To be able to serve what one liked and eat in restaurants where one wished was part of entering the American mainstream.
Meanwhile, signs that the Russian Jews had become Temple Emanu-El’s dominant group were apparent at the temple itself. Some changes were cosmetic. In the old days of German-Jewish leadership, for example, the temple’s board of trustees had dressed in black tie for their meetings in the paneled, portrait-hung boardroom. This practice was abandoned by the Russians as stuffy and old hat. The Russians also proposed that the facade of the building be floodlit at night. The German minority cringed at this notion, considering it “too showy.” But, the Russians countered, bathing the Fifth Avenue face of the building with floodlights would result in a lovely light being cast through the stained-glass rose window for evening services. In the end, the building’s architecture defeated this project. The designer of the rose window, it seemed, had made it of the heaviest glass to withstand the rays of the afternoon sun. Only a floodlight with the intensity of the sun would penetrate the glass at night.
Other changes were liturgical. The new Eastern European leadership decided that it would also be a nice idea to broadcast the temple’s Friday evening services over New York’s WQXR radio station every week. Once more, the Germans were opposed, calling the idea “publicity-seeking,” and “evangelizing through the media.” But the proposal was passed, and the Russians could boast of their new, much larger, “radio congregation.” (When the radio congregation began sending in checks to the temple, the Germans’ mutterings diminished somewhat.) In 1872, the then all-German temple had abandoned the practice of conducting bar mitzvahs as “barbaric.” But the Russians, it seemed, liked bar mitzvahs, and so the practice was resumed under the new leadership.
Faced with such changes, some old German families withdrew their support from Temple Emanu-El. Alas, that didn’t seem to matter much. Their support was no longer needed. Others merely carped and complained, calling the Russian newcomers “the Emanu-Elbowers—they’ve elbowed their way in.” True or not, they were in to stay.
Bastions of German-Jewish supremacy were falling on all sides by the 1940s. Down on Wall Street, the staid old investment banking firm of Goldman, Sachs was feeling it. (The interrelated Goldman and Sachs families were among America’s pioneering German Jews.) For years, all the partners in the firm had been either Goldmans or Sachses, but then, fresh out of P.S. 13 in Brooklyn, came a bright youngster named Sidney Weinberg. The Russian-born lad had spent some time looking across the harbor at the towering financial district of lower Manhattan, and decided that that was where the money was. He had gone, by his own account, “to the top of the tallest building” in the district, and started working his way down, floor by floor, asking for jobs at each elevator stop. He had made it all the way down to the second floor before he found Goldman, Sachs, where he was hired as an office boy. By 1947, Sidney Weinberg was the firm’s senior partner, and was the principal architect of a high-financial plan by which the heirs of Henry Ford, Sr., were saved hundreds of millions of dollars in inheritance taxes. In Weinberg’s design, Ford’s heirs were left in control of the Ford Motor Company, while the bulk of the $625,000,000 estate was placed tax-free in the Ford Foundation, making it the richest philanthropic organization in the history of the world. The Ford heirs’ federal tax bill amounted to only $21,000,000 on a taxable estate of $70,000,000. Sidney Weinberg’s bill for this service? A little over $2,000,000.*
Social barriers against Russian Jews were also tumbling. At the Century Country Club, which considered itself not only the best Jewish club in New York but the best Jewish country club on earth, and where the anti-Russian bias had been all but written into the bylaws for generations, a few Russians were now being cautiously taken in as members, and one of the first of these, in 1948, was the Flatbush-born Dr. Herman Tarnower, the son of Russian immigrants. At the time, the club’s variance from standard practice was explained by the fact that Tarnower was “a nice doctor,” many of whose patients were Century members. But the hard facts were economic—as German Jews died out, or slipped quietly across the border into Christianity, the Century needed new members to support it. The only candidates were Russians.
The same thing was happening at the equally exclusive men’s club, the Harmonie, in Manhattan. Founded by German Jews in 1852, the Harmonie Club’s minutes and records had all been kept in German until America’s entry into the First World War, and a portrait of the German kaiser had hung prominently in the entrance lobby. The lavish club, with such athletic facilities as squash courts and a swimming pool, sat on a costly piece of real estate on East Sixtieth Street, just off Fifth Avenue, and, if anything, was even more expensive than the Century to staff and maintain. An infusion of new blood, and money, was needed. This could be achieved only by taking in Russian members. It would not be long before a member of the Harmonie’s board, addressing a meeting in a heavy Russian accent, would want to know why, if the Harmonie was originally a German-Jewish club, and was now a Russian-Jewish club, the menus in the dining room were printed in French and not in Yiddish that everyone could understand.
In 1937, the Radio Corporation of America had raised its president’s salary to a hundred thousand dollars a year, making David Sarnoff one of a small handful of Americans with a six-figure income in that Depression year. His salary was more than that of the President of the United States. That same year, Sarnoff and his wife, Lizette, had also purchased their first Manhattan town house at 44 East Seventy-first Street, a block from Fifth Avenue and Central Park and a few blocks from Temple Emanu-El, where Sarnoff had also been made a trustee.
The house, in the heart of WASP country, though a few German-Jewish Loebs, Lehmans, Lewisohns, and Warburgs lived nearby, was one of the finest in the city. It contained over thirty rooms on six stories, connected by a private elevator. Its ceilings were high, its scale grand. On the ground floor was a large paneled formal dining room, from which French doors led out into a capacious private city garden landscaped with boxwood, evergreens, and fruit trees. On the second floor was the principal sitting room, which was decorated in an Oriental motif, taking its theme from a series of ancient Chinese murals that had been set into the walls. On this floor, too, there was a screening room, where the Sarnoffs could entertain their guests with previews of the latest RKO films, shipped to him from Hollywood. Adjoining this was David Sarnoff’s “radio center,” powered and equipped so that he could pick up almost any radio station in the world—as well as tune in and monitor the goings-on at his National Broadcasting Company rehearsal studios.
The third floor was the family floor, and contained the Sarnoffs’ bedrooms, dressing rooms, and baths, as well as the bedrooms and baths of their three sons, Bobby, Eddie, and Tommy. The fourth floor, however, was entirely David Sarnoff’s, and was the most extraordinary collection of rooms in the house—his private sheikhdom. It was part office, part library, part club, and part shrine to Sarnoff’s personal achievement. A long central gallery was filled with testimonials and memorabilia—the awards, citat
ions, plaques, medals, and honorary university degrees with which he had been presented, even though he had never earned a high school diploma. Mounted, lighted, displayed on shelves and in illuminated cases, arrayed for inspection, were also the silver and bronze cups, bowls, beakers, and figurines he had been awarded. On shelves, in thick leather covers, lay bound copies of all his speeches, and other leather albums were filled with newspaper clippings chronicling his career. Everywhere, in silver and leather frames, were autographed photographs of David Sarnoff smiling and shaking hands with important people—Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Guglielmo Marconi, Arturo Toscanini, as well as all the NBC radio stars.
Off the museumlike gallery, or “memory room,” as Sarnoff called it, was a clublike lounge, with a fully equipped bar (though Sarnoff was a teetotaler), card tables (though he never played cards), many deep leather chairs and sofas, and a temperature-controlled humidor for the oversize cigars that he puffed on constantly. From this part of the house, it was also possible to get the impression that the unathletic Sarnoff was an outdoorsman and big-game hunter. Heads and tusks and horns of wild beasts adorned the walls—lion, panther, impala, dik-dik, leopard, wild boar. An elephant’s foot had been fashioned into a wastebasket. A giant marlin arched, stuffed and mounted, above the bar, and mummified game birds posed inside bell jars. The taxidermic menagerie in this trophy room was, however, misleading. Sarnoff, if pressed, would admit that he had never pulled a trigger or baited a fishhook in his life, and that all the carnage had been done by others.
The fifth floor contained servants’ rooms, and on the top floor of the house guest bedrooms opened out onto a huge trellis-shaded roof garden, with a spectacular view of the mid-town skyline, including the new RCA Building. And on this level, too, David Sarnoff had given himself a particular indulgence—his private barbershop.
Throughout the house, meanwhile, on every level and in virtually every room, were television sets. Some were concealed behind sliding doors, and others were treated as pieces of furniture. There was never a clear-cut way of counting the sets, since they were changed and rearranged and replaced with such frequency, but there were usually at least three dozen in the Sarnoff house at any given time. To most Americans, of course, television came as a post–World War II phenomenon, but Sarnoff had been trying out various television receivers since the early 1930s, and television had been more than a glimmer in his eye as far back as 1923, when, in a memorandum to his company, he had pondered the future of the medium as he saw it then:
I believe that television, which is the technical name for seeing instead of hearing by radio, will come to pass in due course.
Already, pictures have been sent across the Atlantic by radio. Experimental, of course, but it points the way to future possibilities.…
I also believe that transmission and reception of motion pictures by radio will be worked out in the next decade. This would result in important events or interesting dramatic presentations being literally broadcast by radio and, thereafter, received in individual homes or auditoriums where the original scene will be re-enacted on a screen, with much the appearance of present day motion pictures.…
The problem is technically similar to that of radio telephony though of more complicated nature—but within the range of technical achievement. Therefore it may be that every broadcast receiver for home use in the future will also be equipped with a television adjunct by which the instrument will make it possible to see as well as to hear what is going on in the broadcast station.
If that description of television sounds a little loose and imprecise, Sarnoff had a better grasp on the idea a year later when he told an audience at the University of Missouri in 1924: “Think of your family, sitting down of an evening in the comfort of your own home, not only listening to the dialogue but seeing the action of a play given on a stage hundreds of miles away; not only listening to a sermon but watching every play of emotion on the preacher’s face as he exhorts the congregation to the path of religion.” And, by 1927, he had expanded the idea even farther and said, “If we let our imagination plunge ahead, we may also dream of television in faithful colors.”
David Sarnoff was neither a scientist nor an inventor, and so it is not possible to say that either he or the scientists and engineers who worked for RCA actually invented television. As early as 1880, Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, had taken out patents for television devices, and in the mid-1920s both General Electric and the American Telephone Company had succeeded in beaming moving pictures across considerable distances. Sarnoff’s genius lay, not in inventing things, but in seeing the commercial possibilities of other people’s inventions. Like so many other Eastern European entrepreneurs, he was a skillful adapter of the ideas of others. As such, he made his company the first to put serious time and money into the development of television broadcasting, and Sarnoff himself became the country’s most ardent spokesman for the new medium. RCA scientists and technicians worked on perfecting television transmission and reception throughout the 1930s, and, with typical showmanship, Sarnoff was able to unveil the company’s device at the RCA Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
The RCA Pavilion became one of the fair’s biggest attractions, and long lines of people formed to watch the astonishing new gadgets called television sets. (Cameras had been arranged so that fair visitors could actually see themselves passing across the tiny screens.) As a result of the pavilion’s popularity, several hundred people purchased the rather costly RCA sets—for about six hundred dollars apiece—and so, though further development of commercial television was halted by the war, a few Americans were able to watch a very limited program schedule during the war years.
There were problems to be faced, of course. NBC’s rival network, the Columbia Broadcasting System, did not manufacture television sets. Sarnoff’s company, on the other hand, did, and once the war was over, planned to manufacture and market them in a big way. Thus, as the two networks lined up to do battle over television programming, wartime viewers were treated daily to this curious announcement from CBS television stations:
Good evening. We hope you will enjoy our programs. The Columbia Broadcasting System, however, is not engaged in the manufacture of television receiving sets and does not want you to consider these broadcasts as inducements to purchase television sets at this time. Because of a number of conditions which are not within our control, we cannot foresee how long this television broadcasting schedule will continue.
Viewers might not have had any idea what CBS was trying to say, but to RCA it was gallingly clear—don’t buy television sets, mere are many bugs to be worked out still, and we are not at all sure that television is here to stay. Sarnoff, of course, was stumping the country with the opposite message, trying to whip up Americans into a frenzy of excitement and anticipation for the Age of Television that would dawn as soon as the war was over. At the same time, RCA and Sarnoff could see competition building from other electronics manufacturers—General Electric (which was no longer associated with RCA), Philco, Dumont, and a number of smaller companies. Sarnoff, however, was determined to make RCA synonymous with television. He almost succeeded.
One of the biggest hurdles that the whole television industry would have to surmount, meanwhile, was the vociferous opposition of privately owned American radio stations. Most station owners did not agree with Sarnoff’s views that television and radio could share the airwaves and coexist compatibly. Most were convinced that television would destroy the radio industry. In radio editorials across the country, David Sarnoff was denounced as a “televisionary,” and listeners were confidently told that television would never work. In at least one national advertisement by an association of radio broadcasters, David Sarnoff was caricatured as King Kong crushing poor little radio beneath his simian heel. Unfazed by these outcries, Sarnoff and RCA marched on with the development of television.
In 1
944, the Television Broadcasters Association bestowed another of the long series of awards and honors on Sarnoff, and it was perhaps the one that would please him the most. At the association’s annual dinner, Sarnoff was named “Father of American Television.” The award went straight to the wall of his fourth-floor gallery on East Seventy-first Street.
By the late 1940s, he had been proved right about radio as well. Radio and television could coexist, and RCA’s new sets contained radio dials as well as television screens. To be sure, television would change radio programming drastically; there would be a period of readjustment as the radio soap operas and big comedy shows flew off to the television screen, and radio settled down to music, news, and talk. And now that television had finally come of age, Sarnoff did not mind at all that much of the general public—remembering the thrill of seeing it for the first time at the RCA Pavilion—assumed that television was an RCA invention, nor did he protest being labeled the “father” of it. His contribution had been, if anything, more important. He had learned about television just as he had learned about radio, had had a hunch that it could be made to work somehow or other, and had kept his company persistently at it until it did.
Throughout all those years, Hollywood—mysteriously—had been much less foresighted. In the late 1930s, Sam Goldwyn had said, “I don’t think this television thing is going to work. But what the hell—if it turns out that it does, we’ll just buy it.”
The Jews in America Trilogy Page 123
