The Jews in America Trilogy (30 page)

Those tracks were permitting Jacob Schiff to be one of the first in the German Jewish crowd to maintain not one but two summer homes—at Sea Bright, on the Jersey shore, and in Bar Harbor, Maine. (For all his devoutly religious views, Jacob always liked to step boldly into gentile areas where other Jews chose not to tread.) There was an unvarying schedule for opening and closing these houses. June and July were spent at Sea Bright. Then, on the last Thursday of July, the family had
an early supper and boarded their private car—usually one of E. H. Harriman's cars of the Union Pacific—parents, children, nurses, governess, maids, and at least sixty pieces of luggage, many of them trunks. The car was presided over by Madison, the Schiffs' chef, and a helper. Sometimes a second private car was needed. The family would travel overnight to Ellsworth, Maine, then disembark and board a boat to Bar Harbor. The horses, meanwhile, were traveling, along with grooms, tack, and equipment, by boat from New Jersey. Once in Bar Harbor, everyone rested, and no wonder.

They stayed in Bar Harbor exactly a month. Then, in September, the whole process reversed itself, and everyone went back to Sea Bright again for another month. In October it was back to the city for the winter. If this schedule sounds arduous, it is well to remember that this was before regular visits to Florida were added to the Schiffs' yearly itinerary. Alternate summers, of course, were spent in Europe. If the first generation of Seligmans had taught the crowd how to do it, Schiff as the leader of his generation was teaching them how to do it better.

Considering the hugeness of the scale on which Jacob Schiff lived, while financing E. H. Harriman's railroads was making him steadily richer, it was strange that during these years his penuriousness was becoming more pronounced. He was miserly about the use of the telephone in his house and kept a little notebook on the stand beside it where each person was required to enter calls. “Telephone calls cost money!” he kept reminding them, and at the end of each month he carefully compared the calls in the notebook with those on the bill.

He was financial adviser to, and on the board of, the Western Union Company, and this gave him a franking privilege allowing him to send wires free. Naturally he preferred sending telegrams to telephoning. Each evening, during their summer months at Sea Bright, the two children were expected to dress up—with white cotton gloves and sailor hats secured by elastics under the chin—to meet their august parent when he arrived on the ferry
Asbury Park
. If, however, Schiff changed his mind and decided to take the train, he would send a telegram. These wires always arrived long after the family had departed for the ferry dock, and Schiff would be left waiting, unmet, at the station—furious.

Frieda and Morti were given their first spending allowances as children during one of their biennial summers in Germany. They were allowed fifty pfennig a week. When they returned to New York that fall, their father explained that this was computed at twelve and a half cents in U.S. currency, and that the children would therefore have to keep track of which was the twelve-cent week and which was the
thirteen-cent week. At the end of the month he went over their accounts looking for discrepancies. (By the time she was engaged to be married, Frieda's allowance had been gradually increased until she was receiving a dollar a week, out of which her father required that she set one-tenth aside for the Fresh Air Fund.)

Mr. Schiff was a great maker of conditions. It was his tactic in both business and human relations: he seldom offered anything outright. There was always some sort of proviso attached. Sometimes his conditions were too stiff to be acceptable. But at other times they revealed an odd sort of logic. There was, for instance, the strange case of young Morti Schiff's long struggle to receive the kind of education he wanted.

Morti was an excellent scholar. He was first in his class at Dr. Sachs's school nearly all the time, but this did not delight his father. What Jacob Schiff considered most important was that Morti receive a grade of “excellent” in that marking category called “deportment.” Like any boy, Morti did not always deport himself to perfection, and, regardless of his other grades, whenever his little gray report book showed a lapse in this respect, Morti and his father had another “seance” in the bathroom at 932 Fifth. After the spanking, Jacob Schiff would declare, “My son doesn't have to lead in his studies. But that
my son
shouldn't know how to behave—that's unpardonable!”

Morti finished school with honors when he was barely sixteen, but his father maintained that he was “not ready” for college. There then began a curious correspondence with the Reverend Doctor Endicott Peabody, headmaster of Groton. He would very much like, Jacob Schiff wrote Peabody, to enroll his son at the school for one year—but on one condition. He pointed out that Morti had been brought up “a conscious Jew,” and therefore would have to be excused from all religious and chapel activities. There followed what the family described as “an exchange of dignified and amiable letters,” which ended up with “mutual agreement” that Groton was not the school for Morti.

Now, why Jacob Schiff would even for a moment have suspected that Groton
might
have been the school for Morti is, at first glance, unfathomable. The year was 1893, and Groton was only ten years old. It had been founded by Peabody on the theory that the traditions and tenets of the Episcopal Church, combined with those of the English public school, would be most likely to produce ideal “Christian gentlemen” in the United States. The words “Christian,” “Protestant Episcopal,” and “Church of England” reappeared dozens of times throughout the school's prospectus; its first board of trustees included two bishops of the state of Massachusetts and a distinguished assortment of
other gentile Easterners, including J. Pierpont Morgan. Schiff must have known these things.

It had been sixteen years before, in the summer of 1877 (the very month, coincidentally, of Morti's birth), when the episode of Joseph Seligman at the Grand Union had created such a storm in the press and among the clergy. Did Schiff have a notion of making a test case of his own over prep school admission policies? Schiff definitely felt that he had inherited Joseph Seligman's mantle as New York's leading Jew. If a test case was to be made, who better than Schiff to make it?

At the height of the Seligman-Hilton affair, there were unpleasant hints that wishes for business revenge were as much behind the affair as anti-Semitism. In the Schiff-Peabody exchange Wall Street rivalries may also have been involved. Peabody had close connections on the Street; he had worked in Wall Street himself for a while, and his father had been a partner in Morgan's London office. Morgan himself was a cornerstone of the school. Jacob Schiff may have thought that Kuhn, Loeb could gain if its gentile rival—Morgan—could be discredited and embarrassed over an issue such as Groton.

Perhaps, if Schiff did briefly consider creating a Seligman-like affair, he remembered that the Seligman affair had ended in a thoroughly undignified and unamiable way. Schiff cared a great deal about deportment. Or perhaps he was not quite ready to do battle with the great Morgan.

Morti had never wanted to go to Groton; all he wanted to do was to go to Harvard. And so, to Morti's distress, as soon as his father abandoned the Groton idea, he announced that he wanted Morti to go to Amherst.

Schiff's opposition to Harvard is even harder to fathom than his flirtation with Groton. Harvard had already become something of a tradition in the family (Solomon Loeb's boys had gone there). Charles W. Eliot, Harvard's president, was a close personal friend of Schiff's, who admired Eliot enormously, quoted him endlessly (the heavily accented Schiff was fond of saying, “As President Eliot said to me in that peculiar New England accent of his …”), and the two men were frequent summer hiking companions in the hills around Bar Harbor. Yet he was adamant. Harvard, he said, was “too large,” and “too many wealthy boys” attended it, both of which assertions showed a strange lack of understanding of what Harvard really offered in those days. Desperately, Morti wrote to President Eliot and asked him to intercede with his father, and Eliot tactfully mentioned to Jacob that he hoped
Morti would “give a thought to Harvard.” Huffily, Jacob replied that it was out of the question.

Jacob said that Morti was showing signs of being “too extravagant,” and that Harvard would make Morti
more
extravagant. But Morti protested against Amherst so strongly that his father relented—part way. He offered a condition. If Morti would spend a year at Amherst, and could prove while there that he was not being extravagant, he could transfer to Harvard the following year. Morti agreed, and set off for Amherst where he installed himself in a boardinghouse for $3.50 a week; even students on full scholarships had better accommodations than his. The boardinghouse was a fair distance from the campus, and Morti wrote to his father asking if he could buy a bicycle. Jacob said yes, and Morti bought himself a shiny two-wheeler.

When Morti came home in June, he reminded his father of his promise: next year could be spent at Harvard. But Jacob shook his head sadly, and said, “No, my son—you proved just what I feared. You were extravagant at Amherst.” Almost in tears, Morti demanded to know
how
he had been extravagant. “You bought a new bicycle,” Jacob said. “You could have bought a secondhand one.”

“You didn't
say
it had to be secondhand!” said Morti.

“I thought you understood,” said his father.

In the fall Morti went back to Amherst. He was taken into a Greek-letter fraternity where the boys were trying to raise money for a billiard table. Morti wrote his father, asking if he could make a contribution. Jacob Schiff wrote back in an unusually expansive mood, saying that he would be happy to pay for the entire table—and a billiard table of the very finest make—if, in return, the boys would agree never to play billiards for money. The boys would make no such agreement, they never got their table, and Morti's popularity in the fraternity was somewhat lessened. This sort of thing went on all the time.

When Morti came home for the Christmas holidays that year, he came down with scarlet fever and so had to miss most of the balance of his sophomore year at Amherst. Even so, in June he made one final request. Could he spend his
junior
year at Harvard? “It was then,” wrote Morti's sister Frieda, “that my father decided that Morti was ready for business.”

Schiff asked his friend Hill to send Morti out to Duluth to work on the road gang of the Great Northern Railroad, to learn railroad “from the bottom”—a fitting occupation for a bright young scholar with tendencies toward extravagance. Morti did this for a while. When his father decided Morti had learned enough railroading, Morti was sent
to Europe to learn banking from the same level. He began working as an apprentice in various banking houses Jacob Schiff selected—first for the firm of Samuel Montagu in London (where Sir Ernest Cassel kindly took Morti under his wing) and then to M. M. Warburg & Company in Hamburg—moving further and further away from Cambridge, Massachusetts. When Morti spent his twenty-first birthday in Hamburg with the Warburgs, he realized that he would never get to Harvard.

Periodically, Jacob Schiff traveled to Europe to check on Morti's progress. Once, at a London party, Jacob encountered his son, who was color-blind like his Grandfather Loeb, wearing a lavender-gray suit and a yellow-gray topcoat. In front of two hundred assembled guests, Jacob Schiff told Morti to march right home and change his clothes and not to come back until he was properly attired. Of course Morti did as he was told.

Through all this Morti Schiff seems to have maintained an almost superhuman cheerfulness. Why did he put up with so much? “Morti,” said his sister Frieda, whose experiences with her father were sometimes even more bewildering, “was passionately devoted to our father.”

24

THE MITTELWEG WARBURGS

Frieda Schiff, like her brother Morti, wanted to please her father. It wasn't always easy, for one of Jacob Schiff's specialties was demonstrating the shortcomings of others.

One of his philanthropies was the Young Men's Hebrew Association (Schiff had presented the Y.M.H.A. with its first permanent home at 861 Lexington Avenue, complete with gymnasium, library, clubrooms and classrooms), and this had led to his interest in its feminine counterpart, the Y.W.H.A. When plans were being drawn up for a building, Jacob promised a gift of $25,000 on the condition—again—that $200,000 more be contributed by others by January of the following year. The job of raising this extra sum was given to Frieda as a project, her first fund-raising experience of any importance. She went at it with diligence, but by the first of December she had contacted everyone she knew and she was still $18,000 short of her goal.

She knew that her father was a man of his word, and she was, understandably, “in a terrible state.” She could envision the entire Y.W.H.A. project collapsing because the condition could not be met. To make her state even more terrible, her father went out of his way to remind her of his condition in mid-December. “You know,” he told her, “I have it in writing that I shall not give the $25,000 unless the fund is
completed.” After days on the telephone she began to have sleepless nights.

“On January first,” she wrote, “I was on the verge of despair”—still $18,000 short. Then she received a letter from her father. It was not addressed to her as a daughter, or even as a woman. It was addressed simply to “Chairman of Y.W.H.A. Building Committee.” Writing to her as if she were a stranger, Jacob Schiff advised the Chairman that he had “persuaded Mrs. Schiff to give $18,000 in memory of her brother.” The check was enclosed.

“It was absolutely typical of him,” Frieda wrote later, “a man of his word, but his heart got around his word, and made it all legal.” He was actually ashamed of letting his heart show. Doing it his way, he had provided just a peek of the heart without, as the English say, “letting down the side,” or, as the Germans say, becoming “unbuttoned.”