The Jews in America Trilogy (41 page)

Jeff had some charming social theories. Once, in a newspaper interview, he came out strongly against the practice of shaking hands, saying that this custom sped the transmission of germs. Instead of handshaking, he recommended kissing. He also suggested that the New York Street Cleaning Department should not sprinkle streets their entire length, but leave little dry gaps every block or so, so that old ladies could cross without getting their feet wet.

Jeff Seligman had the health and welfare of the whole human race at heart. He had been made a partner in J. & W. Seligman & Company, but he was never really interested in banking, and there is no evidence that he did any work, executed a single order, or participated in a single decision. But instead, as Geoffrey Hellman has written, “Somewhere along the line he got off on a novel tack. He began to establish himself as the fruit-and-ginger Seligman.” He had a theory that plenty of fruit and ginger was good for the body and good for the brains, and he arrived at the office each morning with his basket of fruit and his box of ginger. Starting in the partners' room, where the brains of the company were supposedly concentrated, he distributed his goods to his cousins and uncles. “On even the busiest days, the partners would accept the fruit and ginger Jeff offered,” a former Seligman employee told Hellman. “He would then distribute the remainder to the lower echelons. One day, when I was talking to one of the partners in the partners' room, Jeff gave me a banana. I went back to my desk in another room, and a little while later Jeff showed up and started to hand me an orange. He peered at me, and withdrew the orange. ‘You've already had your fruit,' he said.”

J. & W. Seligman eventually established a dining room on the top floor of their Wall Street building, and, having checked to make sure that the kitchen contained plenty of fresh fruit, Jeff was able to
discontinue his fruit line, but he continued to serve ginger. Jeff Seligman was Peggy Guggenheim's favorite uncle. She called him “a gentleman of the old school.”

Peggy's mother, Florette, was not without her little quirks. She had a strange nervous habit of repeating phrases three times. Once, when stopped by a policeman for driving the wrong way down a one-way street, Florette replied, with some logic, “But I was only going one way, one way, one way.” Another family story insists that Florette once told a clerk in a department store, “I want a hat with a feather, a feather, a feather,” and was sold a hat with three feathers.

Peggy Guggenheim has referred to her mother's and grandmother's circle of friends as “the most boring ladies of the haute Jewish bourgeoisie.” But Peggy was a rebel, and the bore is in the eye of the beholder. Certainly these ladies did not bore each other. They gathered in their uptown drawing rooms over their silver tea services, on their regular afternoons, and discussed the topics of the day, one of which, by 1888, was “What shall we do about the Guggenheims?” The others were children, clothes, health. Mrs. Semon Bache advised that children under three years old should be fed fruit sparingly. Bananas were especially dangerous. “After a baby is one year old, he may be fed a teaspoonful of orange juice occasionally,” she commented. “But only if he's in perfect health.” Mrs. Lazarus Hallgarten was concerned about “promiscuous bathing,” for not only were women appearing on the beaches in snug-fitting bathing skirts and blouses but, of all things, stockings that exposed the
toes
. Mrs. Mayer Lehman commented that “The laced shoe is rapidly gaining followers,” and wondered how the others in the group felt about this development. Mrs. Solomon Loeb had heard of a new cure for whooping cough: “A handful of dried chestnut leaves boiled in a pint of water—a wineglassful once an hour.” And so it went.

In the evenings the families entertained each other at dinners large and small. The women were particularly concerned about what was “fashionable,” and why shouldn't they have been? Many of them had been born poor and in another country, and now they found themselves stepping out of a cocoon and into a new and lovely light. They felt like prima donnas, and, now that their husbands were becoming men of such influence and substance, they wanted to be guilty of no false steps in their new land. They wanted desperately to be a part of their period, and as much as said so. Beadwork was fashionable. One had to do it. It was the era of the “Turkish corner,” and the
ladies sewed scratchy little beaded covers for toss pillows. At one dinner party, while the ladies were discussing what was fashionable and what was not, Marcus Goldman rose a little stiffly from the table, folded his heavy damask napkin beside his plate, and said, “Money is
always
fashionable,” and stalked out of the room.

*
By 1880 the Goldman topper transported as much as $30 million worth of paper a year.

32

SONS, DAUGHTERS, REBELS

The eight original Seligman brothers had sired, between them, thirty-six sons, and their sisters and brothers-in-law had been responsible for eight more. It was an impressive total. But out of it, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, it began to seem that there were painfully few boys who had any interest in, much less talent for, banking. Joseph's oldest son, David, accepted a partnership at J. & W. Seligman, but he showed up at the office only once every week or so, usually to check on the state of his own portfolio. Another son, Edwin R. A., taught political economy at Columbia, and another, Alfred Lincoln, was artistic. He and his wife Florine, who were childless, conducted salons.

Still others of the second generation had become gentlemen of leisure, or had succumbed to what the
Morning Advertiser
called “the allurements of fleeting pleasures.” In fact, the only Seligman boy out of the forty-four who appeared to have marked financial ability was Joseph's second son, Isaac Newton, who, upon his Uncle Jesse's death, became head of the firm at the age of thirty-nine.

With the easygoing
nil admirari
attitude they often seemed to affect, the Seligmans never appeared to be unduly concerned about their lack of able and dutiful sons to carry on. Boys were permitted to
drift along whatever paths they chose (Jeff, for example, with his nutritionist theories, had once wanted to be a doctor, and had studied medicine in Germany before settling on a Seligman partnership). Other fathers of Joseph's and Jesse's generation, however, cared desperately about turning their sons into bankers like themselves, and when twigs did not bend naturally in that direction, force was sometimes used.

The Lehmans were lucky. All three of the original brothers had competent sons, and by the 1890's there were five Lehmans in the firm: in addition to Mayer and Emanuel, there were Mayer's son Sigmund, Emanuel's son Philip, and a nephew, Meyer H. Lehman, the son of Henry Lehman who had died in the South. The Lehman firm had been cautiously expanding—investing money in an early automobile company, a rubber manufacturer—but it was still a commodity house, trading in cotton, coffee, and petroleum, and was therefore ranked far below other New York banking houses in prestige and importance.

Solomon Loeb, on the other hand, had founded a banking house that now rivaled the Seligmans'. Forced into the background by his brash son-in-law, Jacob Schiff, Solomon's one hope had been that the Loeb name could be perpetuated in the firm through his two sons, Morris and James, who, by the time they reached their twenties, began to collapse under the weight of their parents' towering ambitions and to wilt from the intensity with which they had been trained as children.

Morris Loeb ran away from home, was found in Philadelphia and returned, and after that point he was carefully watched. He became a shy and nervous young man with quick, frightened gestures and a hunted look in his eyes. He had a terror of mirrors (it was he who had papered the mirror in the Schiffs' sitting room), and an even greater dread of becoming a banker. He began to have a fetish about money, and a fear of spending it. He quarreled frequently with his mother about the lavishness with which she set her dinner table, and he once offered her a prize if she could produce a Sunday dinner so simple that there would be no leftovers. (Needless to say, she never won the prize.) Morris scrimped and saved pennies and squirreled them away. (When the Loeb house was demolished many years later, some of Morris' deposits were discovered behind moldings and beneath floor boards; the wallpaper of one room was interlined with thousand-dollar bills.)

For all the quirks of his personality, Morris was a splendid student at Dr. Sachs's school, and though his father explained to Julius Sachs that
“He is to be trained, of course, as a banker,” Morris' best subject was science. He graduated at sixteen, went on to Harvard into the class of 1883, and, since he was the first of his father's children to go to college, Solomon Loeb said to him, “I have no idea how much an American education costs,” and gave him a blank checkbook. Morris never wrote out a single check, though he got through Harvard with honors.

By the time Morris was graduated, his father had despaired of making him into a banker. Seeing that their son was, whether they liked it or not, a chemist, Solomon and Betty bent all their efforts toward making him the greatest chemist in the world. His parents proceeded to build him his own, fully equipped laboratory, right on the grounds and next door to their summer house at Elberon. Here Morris seemed happy with his burners and test tubes and lixivia, and his young cousins remember a gentle, absent-minded man who, when they tapped on the door of his lab, would sometimes let them in and entertain them by blowing glass in bright, strange shapes for them. Eventually, Morris got a job as Professor of Chemistry at N.Y.U.

Morris was married rather late, in 1895 at the age of thirty-two (but it was a Kuhn, Loeb marriage, which pleased his father), to the handsome and statuesque Eda Kuhn, a sort of cousin (Eda's aunt was Solomon Loeb's sister, and another aunt had been Solomon's first wife). If Morris and Eda had had children, the cousinships among the Loebs and Kuhns would have become even more tangled, but theirs was a barren, lonely, and difficult marriage. Sometimes Morris would approach his father and say that he had to get out, away from the world of silk-covered walls and gilt and mirrors; he wanted to run away again—somewhere, anywhere. “But your laboratory is here, Morris,” his father gently reminded him. “Right here on the place. What else could you want?”

Morris began to have an obsession about the cleanliness of his food, and a fear of being poisoned. Driven, haunted, he subjected every morsel he was served to elaborate chemical tests. Ironically, at a chemical convention in Washington, far from his lab, he ate a bad oyster, developed typhoid fever, and died.

Having given up on Morris, Solomon had concentrated on James. Jim Loeb was, at first glance, totally different from Morris—handsome, strong, with a vivid personality full of life and humor. He was a scholar and an esthete and a talented musician, playing the cello as well as the piano and organ. After Dr. Sachs's and Harvard—again near the top of the class—he was offered a chance to study Egyptology in Paris
and London, with a curatorship of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and a teaching post at Harvard to follow. For months Jim Loeb begged his father to let him take this study offer, but Solomon was adamant. One of his seed line had to join the bank, and there was no alternative. Finally, Jim acquiesced and joined Kuhn, Loeb & Company. Jim's brother-in-law, Jacob Schiff, liked assistants and advisers, but not peers. It was not easy for Jim in a line of work he hated and yet from which so much was expected of him. He also soon realized that his young nephew, Morti Schiff, was the more dutiful son, and that Kuhn, Loeb, if Jacob Schiff had anything to say about it, would one day be turned over to Morti. But Jim tried to do as he was told and, in his after-work hours, played the cello, began a collection of early Greek figures, and fell in love.

The name of the girl whom Jim Loeb loved and wanted to marry is one of those which has been written out of family records, but it is known that she was beautiful, loved him very much, and was a gentile. She is said by some to have been the daughter of a prominent New York family who, in fact, were friends of the senior Loebs. But the religious barrier—to Solomon, even though he was a professed agnostic—was insurmountable, and the union was considered out of the question. There was pressure put on Jim Loeb to give up the girl, and it came from Solomon, Betty, from all the Kuhns and Wolffs, from the giant Kuhn, Loeb Company itself, and, most powerfully, from Jacob Schiff. Jim Loeb resisted for a while, and then, as the family has put it, “extreme pressures” were applied.

“Life in New York,” wrote his niece Frieda Schiff tenderly, for she admired her handsome Uncle Jim very much, and they were close in age, “began to press on him, and he went abroad to consult a neurologist.” The neurologist was Dr. Sigmund Freud, and for a while Jim Loeb lived in Freud's house. Then he settled in Germany. A generous sum of money was given him, and he built a large house on a deeply wooded estate at Murnau, near Munich, where he lived as a recluse, filling his hours by building his art collection, a vast collection of rare books, and by sponsoring the now famous Loeb Classical Library. Over the fireplace in his sitting room, Jim Loeb hung a portrait of his father to remind him of what he had left behind. Back home in New York, Jacob Schiff summoned his lawyers and had his will rewritten to stipulate that either of his unmarried children would be disinherited if he or she married a non-Jew.

To add to the sad story of the Loeb children, there was also Solomon
Loeb's “beautiful, temperamental, musical” daughter, Guta, who, in 1883, had married Isaac Newton Seligman—“the first real American,” as the Loebs proudly pointed out, in the conventional, German-speaking Loeb-Schiff household. Ike and Guta had one son, Joseph, but Guta's life was blighted by a series of nervous breakdowns. “Her mother overtrained her,” one of the family said. “She had been so regimented and disciplined that she had no resources of her own.” Most of poor Guta's married years were spent in sanitariums.