The Jews in America Trilogy (14 page)

That this plan—which, today, seems to have been conceived in
wonderful innocence—should have failed is no surprise. Still, in January, 1865, we find Mayer Lehman writing a polite letter to the Commander of the Union Armies, General Grant, requesting safe conduct through the battle lines and saying: “We well know what a gallant soldier must feel for those brave men, who by the fortunes of war are held prisoners exposed to the rigors of climate to which they are not accustomed, the severities of which are augmented by the privations necessarily attendant upon their condition.” The letter could not have been more diplomatic. But Grant must have thought the whole scheme utterly dotty—or perhaps fishy. Why should Mayer Lehman, one of the South's leading cotton merchants, be concerned with shivering prisoners and Northern weather? As far as Grant could see, all Lehman wanted to do was sell his cotton in the Northern market. In any case, Grant did not answer Mayer's letter. Two weeks later, Mayer wrote again, enclosing a copy of the original communication. This was not answered, either.

Washington in the meantime, which Mayer had no way of knowing, had embarked upon a tough policy of attrition against the South, designed to wear the rebels down and end the war quickly. In April came Lee's surrender, and before the Federal troops moved into Montgomery over 88,000 bales of cotton were set to the torch, including the entire inventory of the Alabama Warehouse Company.

Emanuel Lehman in the North, after the initial blow of Lincoln's blockade, was able to carry on his business through the war, in a limited way. He sold what cotton made its way through the blockade from Mayer, and agented shipments that came by way of England, which he visited several times. In London he found an atmosphere more cordial to his Southern sympathies than in New York. Mayer wrote to him there suggesting that, through connections with men like Watts and Herbert, Emanuel might like to be an agent for the sale of Confederate bonds. Emanuel found the European market for Southern securities—during the early stages of the war, at least—considerably better than for Northern ones.

In London, Emanuel Lehman and Joseph Seligman encountered one another, each with his supply of bonds, two salesmen for two warring powers. Their manner toward each other was cool, reserved. Though both men were loyal to their respective causes in the “unholy rebellion,” as it was called, they were not really in the business of fighting a war. They were in the business of making money.

Up to the outbreak of the war, August Belmont had been financial adviser to the President of the United States. During the war's first months, Lincoln leaned on Belmont for Rothschild money as heavily as Gitterman and the Quartermaster Corps leaned on the Seligmans for uniforms. This placed Belmont in an awkward position. Reflecting the general frame of mind in Europe, the Rothschilds had grave doubts about the North's chances of winning, and gave Belmont and the United States Treasury only lukewarm and hesitant support. Lincoln's fund-raisers were forced to look for new sources of supply, and found them in the bond-selling efforts of such men as Joseph Seligman. As the war progressed, affection for Belmont in Washington declined and esteem for Seligman grew. By the war's end, though he may not have actually “won the war,” Joseph Seligman was very dear to Washington's heart.

Obviously, this was the moment for Joseph to put his great plan to work. Within hours of Lee's surrender, Joseph had summoned his brothers together to organize the international banking House of Seligman. The house would span the American continent and sweep across the face of Europe. Each brother would be given an assignment suitable to his temperament and talents. William Seligman, who had bought the portentous clothing factory and who loved good food and wine, would be placed in charge of Paris. Henry, who had remained in Germany longest of all the brothers, was given Frankfurt. Isaac, the first Seligman to meet a President, was assigned to London and told to do everything possible to meet the Rothschilds. Joseph, James, and Jesse—whose old friend Grant was the American hero of the day—would remain in New York. Abraham and Leopold, whom Joseph by now knew to be the least competent of his brothers, were assigned to San Francisco, a city, now that the great gold wave was subsiding, that had become of less importance. The House of Seligman was a frank copy of the House of Rothschild, and Joseph admitted it. After all, what other models were there?

J. & W. Seligman & Company, World Bankers, was officially born. But an even more meaningful moment occurred a few days later when Joseph was walking down Nassau Street. Coming from the opposite direction, with the patrician limp from the old dueling wound that had become his trademark, was none other than the great man himself, August Belmont. As Belmont approached, he looked at Joseph, smiled slightly, touched his silk hat, said, “Hullo, Seligman,” and limped on. Joseph knew that he had arrived.

That evening Joseph bought his wife a present. It must be
remembered that the 1860's were not a period of great taste. It was the era of the whatnot, the figurine, the antimacassar, the rubber plant, and the piano sweltering beneath a Spanish shawl. Joseph's gift to Babet was considered one of the decorative “musts” of the day—a gold-plated rolling pin, designed to show that its owner “no longer made her own bread, but was financially able to endure the strain of purchasing ready-made loaves at the grocer's.”

The war was over. The boom was on. In the South the cotton market was reviving, and soon the Seligmans opened another office in New Orleans. It was there that Joseph Seligman achieved a remarkable feat of postwar diplomacy. He invited General Ulysses S. Grant, former Commander of the Northern Forces, and Brigadier General Pierre Gustave Beauregard, former Commander of the Southern Army of the Potomac, the man who directed the firing on Fort Sumter, to dinner.

Certainly it is one of the great tragedies in Civil War history that the dinner-table conversation
chez
Seligman was not recorded. But it is known that dinner started with “delicious little prawns from the gulf,” and that the two generals “chatted amiably.” Grant drank rather a lot of Alsatian wine and, at one point, wanted to sing. After dinner the two generals played snooker in the billiard room. Grant lost, then the two old enemies went for a brief stroll, arm in arm, through the starlit garden while Joseph Seligman smiled benignly on.

*
In 1931 Wells, a former Seligman staff member, completed a thousand-page manuscript, “The Story of the House of Seligman.” Never published, it reposes in the New-York Historical Society Library.

PART III

INTO THE MAINSTREAM 1866–1899

11

PEDDLERS IN TOP HATS

James Truslow Adams calls the years following the Civil War “The Age of the Dinosaurs.” In it, fortunes would amass in America on a scale never before imagined. Twenty years earlier there had not been five men in the United States worth as much as five million dollars, and there were less than twenty worth one million. Soon a New York newspaper would report that there were several hundred men in the city of New York alone who were worth at least a million, and some who were worth more than twenty million. The fortunes, furthermore, were being made in ways never before heard of—from steel mills, steam engines, and oil from the Pennsylvania hills. Telegraph lines were stretching across the country, the Cattle Kingdom was opening in the West, railroads were being built furiously and recklessly—parallel to each other and at cross-purposes with each other—to tie the sources of wealth together, and entrepreneurs from all over America were descending on New York to tap the money market.

To Old Guard New York, the situation was alarming. George Templeton Strong, a diarist of the period, bemoaned the “oil-rich shoddyites” from out of town who invaded the city,
*
and wrote:

How New York has fallen off during the last forty years! Its
intellect and culture have been diluted and swamped by a great flood-tide of material wealth … men whose bank accounts are all they rely on for social position and influence. As for their ladies, not a few who were driven in the most sumptuous turnouts, with liveried servants, looked as if they might have been cooks or chambermaids a few years ago.

The ladies in their snappy turnouts and the men with their expanding bank accounts appeared to care nothing about the things that mattered to people like Mr. Strong. They seemed to consider “background” unnecessary. As a character called Mrs. Tiffany in the play
Fashion
, an ex-milliner whose husband had struck oil, commented, “Forget what we
have
been, it is enough to remember that we
are
of the
upper ten thousand.
”

Central Park had been carved out of the middle of Manhattan in 1856; if this move had been delayed for as little as ten years, there probably would have been no park at all; the land would have become too precious. Now the winding roads through the park became avenues where ladies paraded ritually every afternoon for the world to envy and admire. The park's bridle paths made riding fashionable, though a Miss King complained that she received “disapproving glares” from the windows of the Union Club when she drove by, behind her own little pony phaeton. Men such as Theodore Roosevelt and DeLancey Kane used the park to show off their dashing four-in-hand coaches.

Society still lived well below the park, on lower Fifth Avenue, and Ward McAllister had announced that he really could not bother “to run society” north of Fiftieth Street (the park began at Fifty-ninth). Along lower Fifth, however, the mansions of Astors, Vanderbilts, Webbs, Jays, Roosevelts, Morgans, Morrises, Newbolds, and Rhinelanders were a marvelous fairyland of spired, turreted, gabled, and minareted castles in styles borrowed from every place and period imaginable. It all added up to “New York aesthetic,” and the street dazzled visitors. In New York drawing rooms Eastlake furniture with its cut-out gilt designs was being replaced by Venetian Gothic. Stylish decorative touches included elaborate vases filled with cattails, Japanese fans, and medieval suits of armor. Embroidery was fashionable, and heavy embroidered “throws” were draped languidly across velvet chairs and sofas. In the rich suburbs—Westchester County led in chic—it was the era of the cast-iron lawn animal—the deer, the elk, and the Saint Bernard dog being the beasts most favored.

It was an era when a display of wealth was considered perfectly
proper. A fashion note was the “peek-a-boo” ladies' shirtwaist, which allowed the wealthy lady to display a bit of herself along with her costly clothes. A great deal of formality, even stiffness, characterized all social occasions. Society families dressed for dinner even when dining alone. Food was heavy, plentiful, but unimaginative—August Belmont's meals were an exception—and eight-course family dinners were no surprise. It was an era so well tended that guests, arriving at the Frank Vanderlips for dinner on the wrong evening, were, to spare them embarrassment, not advised of their mistake, and were simply ushered in to a customary eight-courser. The calling-card ritual became so elaborate that only a few people could remember all its rules, and most women had to keep the little manual in their reticules to look up which corner of which the card should be turned down for which occasion and so on. Symbolic of the heaviness of the period was the moment at the ball given for the visiting Prince of Wales in 1860 when the ballroom floor started to collapse from the weight of the gathering and had to be hastily shored up from beneath.

It was a society also that was eager to classify itself, to decide who was who, who “mattered” and who didn't. The personality of Ward McAllister suited this new attitude perfectly—he may even have invented it. McAllister had decided that there were two elements of importance in New York—the “nobs,” as he called them, or the old families who had more position than money, and the “swells,” a newer-rich group who “had to entertain and be smart” in order to hold their own. A Morris or Van Rensselaer, in other words, was a nob. A Vanderbilt was a swell. McAllister decided that a coalition society should be formed out of these two groups, in order to form “a fixed upper class” that would resist the invasions of “profiteers, boorish people, people with only money.” McAllister did not say that this included people like the Seligmans, but the implication was clear.

McAllister's formula was as good as any, and, since society needed formulas to reassure itself of its importance, it was adopted. There were no Jews at all in McAllister's combined group,
*
and the unspoken sentiment began to be felt that, though Jewish bankers would be tolerated in the financial community of Wall Street, they would not be welcomed on Fifth Avenue. New York's patrician Sephardic families quickly noticed that their names were not included in McAllister's collection either. Some Sephardim expressed relief at this. But others
resented it. They blamed the new exclusivity on the behavior of the “loud, aggressive, new-rich Germans.” To the Sephardim, the Germans had become the toplofty, arrogant “Mrs. Tiffanys.”

Society might be able to overlook the German Jews, but the business community no longer could. The Seligmans were a fact of Wall Street life, and now the Lehmans began to emerge. Despite the setbacks of the war, the Lehmans had quickly revived their cotton business. Emanuel re-established himself in Fulton Street, and Mayer—with his Southern partner, Mr. Durr—reassembled Lehman, Durr & Company in Montgomery, and simultaneously opened Lehman, Newgass & Company in New Orleans (with his brother-in-law, Benjamin Newgass), once again around the corner from the Seligmans. Montgomery was the center of the Alabama-Georgia-Piedmont cotton trade, while New Orleans served the rich Mississippi-Louisiana area. In 1866 nearly a third of the cotton shipped from American ports passed through the port of New Orleans, and in the inflationary postwar period cotton soared to the unprecedented price of fifty cents a pound. But New York was still the money capital of cotton, and in 1868 Mayer Lehman decided to join his brother, leaving Newgass and Durr to handle affairs in the South. Lehman Brothers took new offices in Pearl Street, just off Hanover Square, center of the cotton trade.