The Jews in America Trilogy (24 page)

After working at untangling the nation's finances through most of the spring, Joseph decided to take a vacation at Saratoga, and to stay at the Grand Union Hotel, which Judge Hilton now managed, where Joseph and his family had often stayed in the past.

Saratoga was then the queen of American resorts, outshining even Newport. Here, each summer, the cream of Eastern society arrived ritually to take the waters of its famous spa, to promenade in parasoled elegance down its wide main avenue, through the spacious public rooms of its large hotels, to perch with top hat and cane on the famous verandas, and to change clothes. A trip to “season” at Saratoga was not to be undertaken lightly, and the capacious Saratoga trunk was invented to accommodate the wardrobes these holidays required. John “Bet-a-Million” Gates once bet a famous dude of the period, Evander Berry Wall, that he could not change his clothes as many as fifty times between breakfast and dinner at Saratoga, and won. Mr. Wall made it through only forty complete changes of costume.

No one traveled to Saratoga without at least one valet, one personal maid, and a laundress, and to arrive with one's own chef was not uncommon. By far the grandest hotel in Saratoga was the Grand Union. In its day it was the world's largest hostelry, covering seven acres of ground with 834 rooms, 1,891 windows, 12 miles of red carpeting and a solid square mile of marble tiling. The edifice and its furnishings were said to weigh seventeen million tons, though how this figure was arrived at is unclear.

Still, there is evidence that by 1877 the Grand Union had begun to lose business, and Stewart—and his successor, Judge Hilton—decided that this was because the hotel's Christian guests did not wish to share the hotel with Jews. Joseph Seligman was therefore advised that the hotel had adopted a new policy and did not accept “Israelites.”

In view of the tremendous fuss this decision kicked up, one question has become curiously obscured which, today, seems pivotal. That is, did Joseph and his family actually
go
to Saratoga that summer or were they advised of the hotel's new policy by mail? Accounts vary. One has it that Joseph “applied for accommodations,” and was rebuffed. Another says that he was told, upon arrival, that he could stay at the hotel this time, but would not be welcomed back “in future.” The majority of reports insists that a Seligman party did, physically, appear
at the hotel and was turned away by a clerk at the desk, whereupon Joseph and party stalked out of the lobby and returned to New York.

If Joseph did go to Saratoga, he must have gone by train. When he traveled by train, he was usually supplied with a private car by one of his railroads, and he must have departed for Saratoga with the usual complement of trunks and retinue of servants. Did Joseph undertake this ponderous journey to a famous and popular hotel without a reservation? Or did he in fact go to Saratoga knowing quite well what awaited him at the Grand Union, and was the purpose of his trip to make a test case of the hotel's anti-Semitic policy? His subsequent behavior suggests this, and if that was his intention, he may have acted unwisely.

Joseph reportedly “treated the whole matter of his repulse lightly,” but Joseph was a fighter and was not in a lighthearted frame of mind when he wrote a scathing letter to Judge Hilton which he then released to the newspapers. The letter was a bitter personal attack on Hilton, and it made front-page copy, with headlines running:

A SENSATION AT SARATOGA. NEW RULES FOR THE GRAND UNION. NO JEWS TO BE ADMITTED. MR. SELIGMAN, THE BANKER, AND HIS FAMILY SENT AWAY. HIS LETTER TO MR. HILTON. GATHERING OF MR. SELIGMAN'S FRIENDS. AN INDIGNATION MEETING TO BE HELD.

There followed threats of lawsuits under civil rights laws, charges, countercharges, talk of boycotts and recriminations, ugly name-calling. Judge Hilton did not soothe injured feelings by releasing a letter of his own in which he said: “I know what has been done and am fully prepared to abide by it,” and, “As the law yet permits a man to use his property as he pleases and I propose exercising that blessed privilege, notwithstanding Moses and all his descendants may object.” Fanning the already raging fire, he added: “Personally, I have no particular feeling on the subject, except probably that I don't like this class as a general thing and don't care whether they like me or not. If they do not wish to trade with our house, I will be perfectly satisfied, nay gratified, as I believe we lose much more than we gain by their custom.”

The summer of 1877 was a lean one for news and, in the days that followed, the press—in San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Baltimore, and in tiny towns across the country—leaped on the Hilton-Seligman story, featured it and editorialized about it, printing letters pro and con. In the middle of a performance of a New York play, a gentleman from the audience ran up on the stage and started to make
an anti-Seligman speech while ladies in the boxes pelted him with their handbags. Both Joseph and Hilton received scurrilous and threatening letters. When Hilton ran a letter in the
New York Times
, dropping the unpleasant hint that the Seligmans were little respected by their fellow bankers in Wall Street, officials of Drexel, Morgan & Company, Morton Bliss & Company, the First National Bank, and even August Belmont & Company, stepped forward in a paid announcement to say: “Judge Hilton is under a misapprehension as to the relations of the Messrs. Seligman and their associates, which always have been, and are, of the most satisfactory character.”

Judge Hilton then added confusion to the chaos by announcing that if Joseph had “taken the trouble” to apply to him, Hilton, “personally,” the hotel would have taken him in.

The furor grew more vicious, more barbed, with insinuations that the incident had actually nothing to do with anti-Semitism but was merely a business feud—that Joseph was miffed at having lost the Stewart account, and that Hilton was trying to ruin the Seligmans because of Joseph's role in the anti-Tweed group. It did begin to seem like a money battle when, led by a group of Joseph's friends, a massive boycott was undertaken against A. T. Stewart's store, which Hilton also managed.

Suddenly frightened, Judge Hilton pledged $1,000 to Jewish charities. A Seligman might have his price, but it was more than $1,000.
Puck
, the comic weekly, ran a two-page cartoon in its Christmas issue of that year, mocking Hilton and, in an accompanying editorial, praised Jews for refusing to be bribed:

Alas! Poor Hilton.

It is to be regretted that Mr. Hilton is as unsuccessful as a drygoods man and a hotel-keeper as he notoriously was as a jurist. But the fact remains. He took it upon himself to insult a portion of our people, whose noses had more of a curvilinear form of beauty than his own pug, and he rode his high-hobby horse of purse-proud self-sufficiency until he woke up one day to find that the drygoods business was waning.… Then Mr. Hilton arouses himself. He turns his great mind from thoughts of the wandering bones of Stewart; he brings the power of his gigantic brain to bear upon the great question, “How shall I revive trade?” He has remembered that he has insulted the Jews. Aha! we'll conciliate them. So out of the coffers that A. T. Stewart filled he gropes among the millions and orders the trustees of a few Hebrew charities to bend the pregnant hinges of their knees at his door and receive a few hundred dollars.

But in this country the Jew is not ostracized. He stands equal before the law and before society with all his fellow-citizens, of whatever creed or nationality. And the Jew has stood up like a Man and refused to condone the gross and uncalled for insults of this haphazard millionaire, merely because he flings the offer of a thousand dollars in their faces. All honor to the Jews for their manly stand in this instance.

At the height of the rancor, Henry Ward Beecher, the most noted clergyman of the day, made the Saratoga incident the subject of one of his most celebrated sermons. Titled “Gentile and Jew,” Dr. Beecher declared from the pulpit:

I have had the pleasure of the acquaintance of the gentleman whose name has been the occasion of so much excitement—Mr. Seligman. I have summered with his family for many years … and I have learned to love and respect them.… When I heard of the unnecessary offense that has been cast upon Mr. Seligman, I felt that no other person could have been singled out that would have brought home to me the injustice more sensibly than he.

But had Joseph been “singled out,” or had he singled himself out? What had he wanted? Had he, knowing of the hotel's policy, appeared in Saratoga prepared to be excluded and hoping to create a
cause célèbre
in which he would emerge a hero, a champion of reason, in both the Jewish and the gentile communities? Or had he, knowing that the Grand Union barred Jews generally, simply not believed that it would bar him, a man of his position and distinction? Men like Beecher and the editors of
Puck
might hail him as a hero, but the Jewish community of New York was not sure that it had really required a champion of reason for resort hotels. As his old friend Wolf Goodhart said to him privately, “For God's sake, Joe, didn't you
know
that some hotels don't want Jews? The Grand Union isn't the only one!”

Months passed, and the affair continued to dominate the news as other clergymen, following Beecher's example, had their say and as all figures of importance in New York felt called upon to take a stand. As plans for the “mass protest meeting” in Union Square against Judge Hilton progressed, and as ill feeling continued to mount, with friends turned against each other over the matter, amid ugly cries of “Jew-hater!” and “Jew-lover!” and with anti-Semitic graffiti scrawled on walls, Joseph Seligman, now nearly sixty, grew increasingly aghast at the hornet's nest of hatred he had stirred up. Privately, he began to beg that the matter be forgotten. At last he approached William Cullen Bryant, who, saying that the incident had already been commented
upon “from the mouths of everybody in public places,” sensibly urged that the protest meeting be canceled. It was.

But the boycott on A. T. Stewart's store continued, and had a good deal to do with the store's eventual failure and sale to John Wanamaker.

Joseph tried to forget it. In the months that followed, he refused to speak of it.

The Seligman-Hilton affair was the first publicized case of anti-Semitism in America. But rather than extinguish anti-Semitic feeling, it kindled it. By pointing it up, Joseph had made it specific. He had solved no problem. He had merely defined one. Now the battle lines were drawn. The Grand Union's policy gave other hotels and clubs a precedent, and anti-Semitism in Adirondack resorts quickly became quite blatant, with hotels boldly advertising, “Hebrews need not apply,” and “Hebrews will knock vainly for admission.” At Lake Placid, Melville L. K. Dewey built the largest club in the area, the Lake Placid Club, whose members, Dewey said, would be “the country's best,” specifically:

No one will be received as member or guest against whom there is physical, moral, social, or race objection, or who would be unwelcome to even a small minority. This excludes absolutely all consumptives, or rather invalids, whose presence might injure health or modify others' freedom or enjoyment. [Dewey himself had come to the mountains for his hay fever, and his wife suffered from “rose cold,” but apparently their sneezing was acceptable.] This invariable rule is rigidly enforced; it is found impracticable to make exceptions to Jews or others excluded, even when of unusual personal qualifications.
*

Other Adirondack resorts, to complete the vicious circle, became exclusively Jewish.

At the height of the Seligman-Hilton affair, the New York Bar Association blackballed a Jew. A year later, the Greek-letter fraternities at City College barred Jewish members—a slight that Bernard Baruch never forgave.

The affair would not end, and the ugly wound it had opened would not heal. Soon Mr. Austin Corbin, president of the Long Island Railroad and of something called the Manhattan Beach Company, which was attempting to develop Coney Island into a fashionable summer
resort along the lines of Newport, followed Judge Hilton's lead—and borrowed some of Hilton's language—with the announcement:

We do not like the Jews as a class. There are some well behaved people among them, but as a rule they make themselves offensive to the kind of people who principally patronize our road and hotel, and I am satisfied we should be better off without than with their custom.

Following generations would have to live with the tensions which the affair created. It was to have a profound psychological effect on German Jewish life in New York, making it more defensive and insular, more proud and aloof and self-contained, more cautious. These were tensions Joseph's children and grandchildren would face. Jews had been snubbed by hotels and clubs before. They had chafed at this treatment but, by overlooking it, had tried to rise above it. Now, however, it was out in the open and a fact of life: certain areas of America were closed to Jews.

The affair killed old Joe Seligman.

In the months that followed, it even seemed to affect his business judgment. His brother Abraham was his West Coast expert, but Abraham's advice was not always to be trusted. (It was Abraham who had got Joseph involved with Mr. S. H. Bohm and the Montana mining fiasco.) In 1878 Abraham urged Joseph to look into the doings of a German immigrant named Adolph Sutro in San Francisco, who had come up with a plan to build a half-mile tunnel beneath the Comstock Lode. Such a tunnel, said Abraham, “at once insures drainage, ventilation, and facilitates the work of getting the gold- and silver-bearing quartz above ground.” All Sutro needed was half a million dollars to dig his hole, which he said would yield as much as six million a year in revenue.

Joseph was indignantly against it, and wrote to Abraham that the Sutro tunnel was “a visionary scheme doomed to failure,” and that “it would injure J. & W. Seligman & Co. as bankers in foreign exchange to be known as investing money in speculations of this kind.” But, because the tunnel plan involved putting railroad tracks through it, Joseph began quickly to warm up to the idea. Soon his firm had purchased 95,000 shares in the Sutro tunnel at approximately a dollar a share, and Joseph congratulated Abraham for his foresight. “I will do Brother Abm the justice that he was the only one who stuck through thick & thin to his scheme,” Joseph wrote proudly. But by the time the tunnel was finished in 1879 it was too late to be of any aid to the diminishing
Comstock Lode. Sutro himself, more farsighted than anybody, sold out his interest in the tunnel at a handsome profit. But the Seligmans hung on, and the stock became worthless.