The Jews in America Trilogy (107 page)

Albert Cardozo's children—there were seven—were all carefully taught to be able to recite, upon command from any of their elders, the words from the prophet Micah: “To do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with thy God.” They were taught to “treat the rich and the poor alike, be kind and civil to those in thy employ.” They were instructed to “avoid not the society of your brethren but be firm in faith. Be good citizens and seek the welfare of the community in which you dwell.” Unfortunately, Judge Albert Cardozo, from his high position on the New York State bench, had difficulty adhering to the letter of these worthy mottoes, particularly the latter.

“Boss” William Tweed and his infamous Ring ruled New York in those days, and Tweed was finding the friendship of prominent judges most useful in his operations. Tweed seemed to find Albert Cardozo—with his distinguished façade, his gift of oratory, his air of complete incorruptibility—a particularly helpful man to have on his side. Tweed was interested in naturalization: not the slower legal kind, but the instant and illegal kind, whereby thousands of new immigrants were daily made into American citizens, who naturally were eager to vote for Boss Tweed. Justice Albert Cardozo was one of a trio of judges—the others were George G. Barnard and John H. McCann—who countenanced this activity.

Another ally of Boss Tweed's was Albert Cardozo's neighbor Jay Gould, the railroad manipulator, for whose machinations—he bought and ruined railroads to the right and left of him—it is said that American railroading has been paying to this day. Jay Gould—for financial support—could be very useful to Boss Tweed, and Boss Tweed—for
political support—could be useful to Jay Gould. Soon it appeared that at another point of the triangle, within the state judiciary, Justice Albert Cardozo was also being helpful. When a railroad went bankrupt, it was up to the courts to appoint a supposedly impartial referee to help it put its affairs in order and settle its debts. Certainly Cardozo was uncommonly partial in his appointments of refereeships whenever Gould-wrecked railroad companies were in need of financial reorganization. Out of almost six hundred refereeships that Cardozo was authorized to bestow, over three hundred were given to one of Boss Tweed's nephews, and more than a hundred went to Boss Tweed's son. Jay Gould's most notorious adventure, of course, was the one by which he enormously inflated, then utterly destroyed, the stock of the Erie Railroad, a feat that made millions for Gould and rocked the American economy for months thereafter. In the financial carnage that followed, it was necessary to appoint a receiver for the railroad. At the suggestion of Boss Tweed, Albert Cardozo appointed another Tweed henchman. This was too much for the New York State Bar Association, which ordered an investigation into Mr. Justice Cardozo and his activities.

In the Sephardic community as well as within the family, it was assumed that Uncle Albert would do the manly thing: stand up to the investigation, lay his cards on the table, and demonstrate that he had been guilty of no wrongdoing. But Uncle Albert failed them utterly. Instead of submitting to the inquiry, he resigned his post on the bench, leaving a distinct impression of guilt behind him, and an odor of malfeasance surrounding the Cardozo name. Had Tweed and Gould paid off their good friend? Uncle Albert always insisted that they had not, but no one quite believed him, since, by resigning, he had sidestepped the inquiry. Also, it had appeared to many people that the Cardozos lived awfully well—far better than would seem possible on a state justice's salary. After stepping down
from the bench, Uncle Albert resumed a quiet practice of law, and the Cardozos lived less well.

All this was in 1873, when Albert's youngest son, Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, was just three years old. (Benjamin had been just a few months old when the uncle after whom he was named had been so brutally murdered.) Six years later, when he was only nine, his mother died, and an even darker atmosphere fell upon the Cardozos' house. Mr. Gould and Boss Tweed were no longer friends of the family. More and more the ostentatious style of life across Fifth Avenue at the Gould mansion was in painful contrast with that at 12 West Forty-seventh. Albert Cardozo used to complain in his twilight years that he was “the victim of politics.” “I was a victim of politics, a victim of politics,” he would insist again and again, and his family, out of loyalty and love, took this sympathetic line. But everywhere the bitter truth was well known: Albert was a weakling.

Within the tight little world of the Sephardim, Albert's plight was the cause of deep embarrassment. After all, if such disgrace could befall a member of one of the oldest, one of the leading families, what did it say about all the others who considered themselves the “few” elite, buttressed against the ruffian horde that stood outside the gate? This, on top of all the leering publicity the Nathan murder trial had generated, seemed almost too much to bear. What was the point of being able to say (as some of the Gomez descendents liked to say, rather slyly, apropos of the new-rich Germans), “We made
our
money in wampum,” when a member of the family of Albert Cardozo's stature could prove himself to be so easily corruptible? If anything, Albert Cardozo's misfortunes had the effect upon the Sephardim of making them draw together into an even tighter knot of privacy and privilege. Now the Sephardim seemed to want to pull a shell around themselves, a chrysalis that would be impervious to prying from outside.

Within these contours of Sephardic life, Benjamin
Nathan Cardozo grew up. His was a notably unhappy childhood. And yet, if it had not been for the family misfortunes, in particular his father's disgrace, it is quite unlikely that Benjamin Cardozo would have become the man he came to be. Because, from his earliest boyhood, he set out upon a life plan designed to exonerate, or at least vindicate, his father, and bring back honor to the Cardozo name.

His growing up was not particularly helped by his father's choice of tutor for him. Albert Cardozo was a snob—which may have been at the root of many of his troubles—and keeping up with the Joneses was one of his preoccupations. In the 1880's the family to keep up with was, of all people, that of Joseph Seligman, the German Jew who had arrived in New York in the 1830's with one hundred dollars sewn in the seat of his pants, had started off as a foot peddler in Pennsylvania, and had succeeded to the extent that he now headed an international banking house that did business with the Rothschilds. To the older Sephardic group, it seemed that the Seligmans and their ilk had taken on preposterous airs, and they were actually getting into select clubs such as the Union. A few years earlier, Joseph Seligman had startled New York's Jewish community, and the rest of the city as well, by hiring Horatio Alger to tutor his children. Not to be outdone by an upstart immigrant German, Albert Cardozo decided to do the same for his son Ben, and Mr. Alger joined the Cardozo household.

Small and roly-poly, with a round bald head and squinting, nearsighted eyes, Mr. Alger was described by one of the family as “a dear, absurd little man.” He was certainly a far cry from his rags-to-riches newsboy heroes in such then-popular romances as
Ragged Dick
and
Tattered Tom.
He was flutily effeminate, with mincing ways and a fondness for practicing ballet positions in his spare time, crying out such exclamations as “Oh, lawsy me!” or bursting into
wild tears when things went wrong. Yet he once seriously announced his candidacy for President of the United States after a friend, as a joke, told him he could defeat Garfield.

The immense popularity of his books had made Alger a rich man, but he always considered his true forte to be poetry, which he wrote very badly. He once wrote a poem—of which the kindest critical word was “interminable”—explaining American life. And because he had created boy folk heroes, he saw himself as a kind of missionary to youth. This was why he accepted tutoring posts, and why he gave so generously to causes for the betterment of orphaned boys, shoeshine boys, hoboes, and derelicts on the Bowery. As a teacher he was hopelessly ineffective in both the Seligman and the Cardozo households, where healthy growing boys kept him perpetually cowed. They locked him in closets and tied him to chairs, and played all manner of cruel tricks on their tiny tutor. Benjamin Cardozo once said, in a remarkable example of understatement, “He did not do as successful a job for me as he did with the careers of his newsboy heroes.” And yet one thing may have rubbed off on young Ben Cardozo: Alger's love of poetry. All his life, Benjamin Cardozo was an avid reader of poems—he occasionally tried his hand at poetry himself—and had a fascination, and tremendous respect, for the English language.

At the same time, there was no doubt that, despite any deficiencies in his education, young Ben possessed a brilliant mind—a mind that would carry him into Columbia as a freshman at the age of fifteen (he graduated at nineteen) and, with what he described as “an almost ecstatic consecration to the law,” into a career that has hardly been equaled in the history of American jurisprudence. With only two years of law school, instead of the usual three, and without even an LLB degree, he became a member of the bar, moved on to become chief judge of the court of
appeals of New York State, and at last achieved the highest judicial post in the country, justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. But was it his brilliant mind alone that pushed him to these accomplishments? A great deal is known and has been written about Benjamin N. Cardozo, the great jurist, humanitarian, and towering public figure. Somewhat less is understood of the man, who was lonely, tortured, obsessed.

Despite moments of inadvertent hilarity provided by Horatio Alger, the Cardozo household grew increasingly gloomy during the years of Ben Cardozo's youth, and a pervading air of melancholy and dissent settled upon the place. Though the Cardozo children were bound together by natural ties of love and family, the strongest bond between them seemed to be sadness. There were endless quarrels with relatives, sometimes over money or business matters, but more often over real or imagined social slights. As Ben Cardozo's cousin Annie Nathan wrote:

As a child, I was always trying to tread a path warily through the maze of family feuds. “Was it Aunt Becky or Aunt Rachel,” I would ask myself, “who didn't speak to Uncle John?” “Which aunt was it with whom Mama had quarreled?” These perplexing feuds always had their start in the failure of some relative to “ask after” one of the family. There were fourteen aunts and uncles—almost all with numerous progeny—so some slight, quite unintentional lapse might easily have been pardoned. But not in our family. It was the crime of crimes. It was with us as the laws of the Medes and the Persians that on meeting a relative (particularly an “in-law”) however fortuitously, however pressed for time, one must inquire meticulously into the state of health of each and every member of that particular family. Any deviation, any temporary forgetfulness, was set down as a deliberate slight, to be resented as such.

At times, it must have seemed to young Benjamin Cardozo that a terrible curse hung over his branch of the
Nathan family, rather like that which afflicted the Greek House of Atreus: somehow, before he was finished, each member of the Cardozo family must be made to pay for the father's sins. Not long after his mother's death, an older sister, Grace, died at the age of twenty-five. That same year, Ben's father died. That was the autumn Ben started at Columbia. Next year, Ben's twin sister, Emily—described as “the one high-spirited member of the family”—was married, but in the family this was treated as another tragedy. The man she married, Frank Bent, was a Christian and, though Emily was the only one of the seven Cardozo children to marry, she was thereafter treated as dead. The family actually “cut
kriah”
for her—that is, they held a service for the dead for her. (To cut kriah is to cut a tiny snippet of one's clothing—always in an inconspicuous place, or one easily mended—symbolic of the Biblical practice of mourners rending their garments over the deceased.) This particular family service, Benjamin Cardozo once recalled, “disgusted” him. Emily Cardozo's name was dropped from family conversation, and her portrait, literally, was turned against the wall.

A few years later, Ben's only brother (another had died in childhood), Allie, whom he idolized, died, also at an early age. That left Ben and two older spinster sisters, Ellen and Elizabeth—plain, shy Nell and beautiful, excitable Lizzie. Lizzie wanted to be a painter, and she studied art under Kenneth Hayes Miller, who described her as “the end of a long line of aristocrats. She looked like a feminine edition of Dante. Eyes so dark and intense, the aquiline, aristocratic nose.” For all her beauty and the intensity of her personality, Lizzie Cardozo had very little artistic talent, which few people—including Mr. Miller—could bring themselves to tell her. She painted incessantly nonetheless, and also wrote fervid, morbid poetry full of death and loss and desolation. She suffered from a recurring back
ailment which, by the time she reached maturity, kept her in almost perpetual pain. But it was clear to many that more than this was wrong with Lizzie. She had visions, hallucinatory fantasies which may have been heightened by drugs prescribed for pain, but which certainly sprang from some deeper psychosis, and when Lizzie's “bad periods” became impossible for Nell and Ben to manage, a trained nurse, Kate Tracy, had to be hired to handle her. Miss Tracy remained Lizzie's companion for life, and the two women retired to a little cottage in Connecticut. Was Lizzie Cardozo perhaps too highly bred? She was descended on both sides from people who had married their close relatives. Both sets of grandparents had been marriages of cousins, as had at least two sets of her great-grandparents. Was some weak and fatal strain coming to the surface, threatening to fling apart permanently the closely knit fabric of Spanish Jewish families? Was Lizzie indeed “the end of the line”? Such thoughts must have darkened the mind of Ben Cardozo as he set out with “ecstatic consecration” to be a great lawyer and jurist.