The Jews in America Trilogy (25 page)

That winter, looking ill and tired and old, Joseph traveled to Florida, with Babet and their son, George Washington, for a month of rest and sunshine. From there the Seligmans went to New Orleans, where Joseph's oldest daughter Frances and her husband, Theodore Hellman, were living.

March 31 was a hot and humid Sunday, and there was the usual large and heavy family midday meal. Afterward, Joseph said that he would like to take a nap and went upstairs.

A little later there was a cry from the floor above. The family hurried to Joseph's side, and Frances Hellman, writing to her brother Edwin who was then a student at Heidelberg, said:

Our Papa said to me that he had such a strange sensation, just as if he were going to be paralyzed. Of course we laughed at this & told him it was only the effect of the heat and his too heavy slumber. When the doctor arrived, dear Papa brightened visibly … and when dinner time came he insisted upon dear Mama going down stairs, saying he had a good appetite also. We sent his dinner up, he ate it with relish, and all of a sudden called to Mary [the Hellmans' maid] who was standing by his side for brandy. She handed him the glass, he tried to take it with his left hand, but it sank lifeless to his side—his left side had instantaneously become paralyzed. Mary put the brandy to his lips, he drank, and then laid his head back in the chair, closed his eyes quietly, and sank into the deep sleep from which he never woke. Just as his consciousness left him, he raised Mary's hand and gently stroked and patted it several times, evidently thinking that dear Mama stood beside him. So you see even his very last thought was a happy one.

During the final years of his life, Joseph had described himself as “a freethinker.” Nowadays he would doubtless be called an atheist. Under the influence of Felix Adler, Joseph had helped found, and become president of, the Ethical Culture Society. Joseph had directed that his funeral services be conducted by the Society. But, since the Seligman-Hilton affair had labeled Joseph “America's leading Jew,” it was unthinkable to Dr. Gustav Gottheil, chief rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, that the temple should not conduct the rite. Dr. Gottheil was backed by Joseph's brother James, who disapproved of Adler and who was president of the temple's board of trustees. The temple and the Society argued over which should properly hold the services, while
Joseph became, even in death, the center of another religious controversy.

Finally Frances Hellman wrote, again to her brother Edwin in Germany:

After much (and what I consider simply
disgraceful
) resistance on the part of some of our relatives whom I don't need to mention, it has been decided that Felix Adler
only
will conduct the funeral services at the house—Gottheil and Dr. Lilienthal are to speak at the grave. I consider it wrong, and not in conformity with our dear father's life that Gottheil should speak at
all
. But it seems that it could not be prevented.

Frances then added proudly:

Oh, my dear Edwin, if you could but read the papers, see the many letters received from Christian gentlemen, all but with one import, all bearing upon the goodness, the honesty, the nobleness, the talents and charity of our dear father, it would be to you as it is to us, a great consolation, the grandest legacy he could have left to his children.

There were other legacies, some large and some small. Among the items in the papers was the note that the village of Roller's Ridge, Missouri, through which one of Joseph's railroads passed, had voted to change its name and would thereafter be known as Seligman, Missouri, in tribute to the great man's life.

The newspapers also speculated on the size of Joseph's financial legacy, which was assumed to be “in excess of fifty millions.” When his estate was tallied, however, it amounted to slightly more than a million dollars. Out of this, a bequest of $25,000 was divided among sixty different charities, Jewish and non-Jewish, but he had given away far more than that figure in his lifetime. If he had lived longer, he would probably have died wealthier; all his brothers died richer than he.

There was no letter of condolence from Judge Henry Hilton.

And Joe Seligman was gone. To those closest to him, it seemed that something more important than his life had ended. To other German Jewish bankers, who had been waiting in the wings, it seemed as though something were beginning.

*
The plan worked so well that within two years the dollar was quoted at par for the first time since 1861.

*
In 1965 R. Peter Straus, a strategist in Senator Robert F. Kennedy's 1964 campaign, publicly criticized the Senator's brother-in-law, Stephen E. Smith, for staying at the Lake Placid Club, “which is known to discriminate against Jewish people.”

PART IV

THE AGE OF SCHIFF

19

“A COMPLEX ORIENTAL NATURE”

By the 1870's nearly all the pivotal “Old Guard” names of German Jewish finance—with the exception of the Guggenheims—had migrated to New York City. Familiar on the streets of downtown Manhattan were the two Lehman brothers, prospering as cotton brokers. Marcus Goldman, with bits of commercial paper filling out the lining of his tall silk hat, was still a one-man operation. Two Strauses, Lazarus and son Isidor, who, like the Seligmans and Lehmans, had been peddlers and small shopowners in the prewar South, had moved to New York from Georgia and had opened the glassware and crockery department at R. H. Macy & Company. Solomon Loeb, at his wife's insistence, had come to New York from Cincinnati and, though not on a par with the Seligmans' operations, his Kuhn, Loeb & Company was becoming an important investment banking house.

In Philadelphia the Guggenheims were not doing at all badly. Meyer Guggenheim had sold his stove-polish and lye company for $150,000 and was branching out in other directions—importing herbs and spices, Swiss laces and embroidery. He had also done some speculating in the stock market. He invested $84,000 in the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad, which, he had heard, Jay Gould had his eye on. Guggenheim bought in at $42 a share, and soon had the pleasure of
watching his stock soar to over $200 and then selling his holdings for half a million. His wife was beginning to long for the headier atmosphere of New York, too.

In New York, after their mornings of shopping and errands, while their husbands marched the downtown streets, the ladies gathered in their uptown drawing rooms for their afternoons, in their little circle of friends, their little crowd. The ladies all owned silver tea services, and the tea service was the heart of the brownstone. In their best dresses and hats, with their reticules tucked in the cushions of the seats beside them, they discussed the feminine topics of the day—children, clothes, servants, health (with a heavy emphasis on obstetrics), and marriage—in formal German. (It was beginning to be considered bad form to use Yiddish.) Several women had marriageable daughters. There were a number of still unwed Seligman daughters, and there was Mrs. Solomon Loeb's Therese—a stepdaughter, yes, but as much a daughter as any of her others—who had developed into a beauty. There were eligible Seligman sons and Lehman boys. The ladies enjoyed planning matches for their daughters, asking each other, “
Waere sie nicht passend für …?
” (“Wouldn't she be suitable for …?”) and considering the possible results.

There were also several young men who had recently arrived in New York from Germany. There was one particular bright and handsome boy who, barely out of his teens, had opened his own brokerage house. His name was Jacob Schiff.

Of course there were two schools of thought, among the ladies, as to whether it was wiser for a daughter to marry a German-born or an American-born boy. The German-born might at any moment decide to return to Germany, bearing off the daughter with him, forever. It was risky.

The ladies were not the only ones who were interested in young Jacob Schiff. American industry and government still relied heavily on European financing. New York bankers worked hard to cultivate European contacts, and looked over young banking talent from Europe with particular care. Here, very definitely, was talent of an unusual sort. At the same time, any young man with talent enough to enter the banking business was also expected to be able to enter the family.

Jacob Schiff has been described by one contemporary as “a patient, skillful man, a suave diplomat with a complex Oriental nature.” Complex, yes, but out of the complexity of his character an extraordinary single-mindedness emerges as his most marked trait. From the very beginning, he seems to have known exactly what he wanted.

The Schiffs of Frankfurt-am-Main often compared themselves to the Rothschilds of the same city. (Jacob Schiff was of a younger generation of immigrants than the Seligmans, a generation that was coming not from poor country families but from wealthy city ones as well.) In the eighteenth century the Schiffs and Rothschilds shared a double house in the Frankfurt
Judengasse
where the identifying house signs, “
Zum Schiff
” and “
Zum Roten Schild,
” hung alongside each other until one of the Schiffs, already prosperous enough to move to London, sold the balance of the house to the first rich Rothschild, Meyer Amschel. If pressed, Schiffs usually admitted that, though not so collectively wealthy as the Rothschilds, theirs was the more august family. The Rothschilds were known only as big money-makers. The Schiff family tree contained not only successful bankers but distinguished scholars and members of the rabbinate. There was, for instance, the seventeenth-century Meir ben Jacob Schiff, composer of notable commentaries on the Talmud, and David Tevele Schiff, who in the late eighteenth century became chief rabbi of the Great Synagogue of England. The Schiffs can also demonstrate that they are a much
older
family than the upstart Rothschilds. The Schiff pedigree, carefully worked out in the
Jewish Encyclopedia
, shows the longest continuous record of any Jewish family in existence, with Schiffs in Frankfurt going back to the fourteenth century.

Jacob Schiff actually traced his ancestry even farther back than that—to the tenth century B.C., no less, and to none other than Henriette Seligman's ancestor, King Solomon and, thence, to David and Bathsheba, where he chose to stop tracing. Jacob Schiff took his descent from the King of Israel seriously, and a comparison of the careers of the two men, nearly three thousand years apart, is helpful. Like Jacob Schiff, Solomon was skilled in foreign commerce, importing, on a lavish scale, “gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks.” Solomon, too, sought to make his position more secure by allying himself with his larger, more powerful neighbors and, to cement his relationship with Egypt, married the Pharaoh's daughter.

From the moment he made his appearance in the world, Jacob Schiff was a figure to be reckoned with. He was a restless, unpredictable child—sullen at times, then suddenly sunny, given to quick and violent bursts of anger that would just as quickly pass. He had something known as “the Schiff temper.” As he grew older he grew more rebellious and temperamental. He was short in stature—even as a mature man he stood only five two in his stocking feet (“If,” as an older member of the family says, “you can ever picture Mr. Schiff out of his shoes
and spats”)—and the shortness may have accounted for his somewhat Napoleonic manner. But he was physically well knit and well coordinated, careful about his waistline and a believer in fitness. Even at ten, he was always exercising, walking, cycling. Older, bigger boys thought twice before tangling with young Jacob—as they were to continue to do through his lifetime. He had clear skin, a wide forehead, and large blue eyes that he inherited from his mother, who indulged him and spoiled him. His relationship with his father was less secure.

Moses Schiff was a successful stockbroker on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. There were five Schiff children—a brother, Philip, and a sister, Adelheid, older than Jacob, and two younger brothers. In 1863, at the age of sixteen, Jacob went to work for his father. A year later, Moses Schiff wrote to an American cousin in St. Louis:

At present, all goes well with us. My eldest son, Philip, is of great assistance to me in my business. My daughter is engaged to be married to a very brilliant man, Alfred Geiger, the nephew of the philosopher [Abraham Geiger was then head of the Frankfurt synagogue], very clever and very orthodox. My second son, now 17—Jacob—is quite a problem because he already feels that Frankfurt is too small for his ambition. I would like to hear from you whether, if I gave my permission, perhaps your brother-in-law would take him back with him, and he could continue to live the life of an orthodox Jew, which is of great importance to me.

In due time, the St. Louis cousin replied, saying that Moses was certainly very lucky to have a son like Philip. He was sorry that Moses' other son, Jacob, was a problem. He certainly knew what problems boys like that could be. If Frankfurt was too small for Jacob's ambition, St. Louis would be even smaller.

But Jacob Schiff had plans of his own. At the age of eighteen he left Frankfurt, ostensibly for a few months' visit to England. In England he spent several days writing a series of letters to his mother. He gave these to a friend with instructions that they be posted, at regularly stated intervals, until he could write to her from New York, where he was headed all along, to say that he had safely crossed the Atlantic.

Every detail of his journey had been carefully worked out in advance. He had $500 in savings, and he was met in New York, as arranged, by a fellow Frankfurter named William Bonn, who was with the Frankfurt house of Speyer & Company. Bonn took young Schiff back with him to his boardinghouse and, to Jacob's “delight” (as he wrote home), invited him to move in with him. The Bonns, he
reminded his mother, were “of the higher levels of the social layer cake” in Frankfurt. The two men sat up all night making schedules and plans.

Bonn supplied Jacob with Wall Street introductions, and presently, in 1867, Jacob Schiff was ready to form his own brokerage firm with Henry Budge and Leo Lehmann (no kin to the single-“n” Lehmans), both ex-Frankfurt boys like himself.