The Jews in America Trilogy (42 page)

Emanie Sachs wrote a novel of German Jewish society in New York as it existed around the turn of the century. It was called “Red Damask,” and depicted a closed and cloistered social order, strikingly consistent in its attitudes, a world governed by obedience and traditions where, if one had diligence and character, one “didn't need religion”; where behavior was a matter of “having high standards and living up to them”; where “Right was right, and wrong was wrong; in doubt, your conscience would tell you what to do.” It was a world whose figures moved with the mechanical precision of Venetian clock figures, where life was scheduled for the proper thing at the proper moment, and where a woman “did not do bead-work when embroidery was fashionable.”

In a world the novel's heroine sees as rigid and prisonlike, she longs for escape, to break out of the pattern, to “pioneer” in some new city where she is unknown and where her family name stands for nothing. At a crucial point in the story, the heroine cries:

“Good heavens! What's life for? … Our crowd here. They cover their walls with the same silks. Why, there isn't a house we go to, including Sherry's, that hasn't a damask wall! They go to the same dentist and the same grocer and the same concerts. They think alike and act alike and they're scared to death not to talk alike. The men go to jobs their fathers or grandfathers created, and all they do is sit at desks and let the organizations work … they go in for art collections with an expert to help. They wouldn't risk a penny on their own tastes. They wouldn't risk anything.”

The place this rebellious spirit wants to go is El Paso. But, in the end, she goes nowhere. The silken web is too strong. She is trapped like a figure in a crystal paperweight, “where even the snowstorms seem private,” and where “engagements, scheduled weeks ahead, were changed only for serious illness, or death, or steamer sailings.”

Though men like Solomon Loeb and Jacob Schiff had been rebels
and runaways and gamblers (immigration itself had been a gamble), they found it difficult to understand such impulses in their children. They expected, instead, an attitude of
Pflicht und Arbeit
.

A child in this gilded ghetto was not supposed to have a life of his own.

33

ELBERON, AND POINTS NORTH AND SOUTH

The incredible “Gilded Age” of the 1880's and 1890's was also an age of list-making, and, as each new list appeared, a new delineation between first- and second-rate Americans was established. In 1887 the
Social Register
was copyrighted, and its first volume appeared for New York City the following spring. There were less than two thousand families in this “record of society, comprising an accurate and careful list of its members, with their addresses, many of the maiden names of the married women, the club addresses of the men, officers of the leading clubs and social organizations, opera box holders, and other useful social information.” With the birth of the
Social Register
, New York society felt that it had at last organized itself into an aristocracy. In his
Saga of American Society
, Dixon Wecter wrote: “Here at last, unencumbered with advertisements of dressmakers and wine merchants, enhanced by large, clear type and a pleasant binding of orange and black—which if anything suggested the colors of America's most elegant university—was a convenient listing of one's friends and potential friends. It was an immediate triumph.” The
Social Register
,
of course, rather conspicuously included no Jewish names, but it was such a success that Ward McAllister suggested that “our good Jews might wish to put out a little book of their own, called something else, of course.”

McAllister himself—who was called “Mr. Make-a-Lister”—was the author of an even more abbreviated list of names of New York's “best”—his Four Hundred for Mrs. William Waldorf Astor. Since Mrs. Astor's ballroom only held four hundred, McAllister started saying in 1888, soon after the
Social Register
appeared, that there were really only about that number in society, the
Register's
two thousand families notwithstanding. “If you go outside four hundred,” McAllister said, “you strike people who are either not at ease in a ballroom or else make other people not at ease.” Whether McAllister intended to include August Belmont, owner of one of New York's first ballrooms, among those comfortable in ballrooms has never been clear. Mrs. Belmont and Mrs. Astor had become social rivals, and McAllister was on Mrs. Astor's side. Though McAllister began talking “four hundred” in 1888, he did not publish his official list (which ran to slightly more than three hundred people) until 1892, two years after August Belmont had died and been buried with full Christian ceremony. McAllister's published list (printed in the
New York Times
, which is an indication of the attention paid to such matters in those days) included several widows, but it did not include Caroline Belmont. Both Belmonts, however, made the earliest editions of the
Social Register
.

“Our good Jews” did not put together a
Social Register
of their own, perhaps because those who composed Jewish society knew too well who belonged and who did not, and did not need to refer to a list. “In the years following the Seligman-Hilton affair,” one member of the crowd said, “the German Jewish elite became … well, not
non
assimilationist, exactly, but less
actively
assimilationist.” Referring to the Mrs. Astor group as “the butterflies,” Jews watched the activities of the Four Hundred from a distance and with a certain cool disdain.

Though Jacob Schiff remained on Fifth Avenue, there began to be a general German Jewish migration to the West Side of Manhattan, and the blocks between Seventieth and Eightieth streets, Central Park West and Columbus Avenue, became the first recognizably German Jewish upper-class neighborhood. In this period there was talk of Central Park West becoming “the Jewish Fifth Avenue.” The area south of Seventieth Street was still a shantytown, with herds of goats grazing among the rocks at the edge of the park, but north of Seventieth, in handsome four- and five-story brownstones, many of which stand today as
rooming houses, several families of the crowd arranged themselves. Marcus Goldman and his son-in-law, Sam Sachs, purchased adjoining houses in West Seventieth Street. On West Seventy-first lived the Cullmans; on Seventy-second the Meyers. Harry Sachs, Sam's brother, bought a large house on West Seventy-fourth Street, and Marcus Goldman's son Henry bought an even larger one on West Seventy-sixth.

The second generation was continuing to be just as intramural when it came to marriage as the first. The last decades of the nineteenth century were a period of consolidation, of gathering in. Mayer Lehman's son Sigmund married his first cousin, Emanuel's daughter Harriet. Just as Joseph Seligman and his wife had been first cousins, now Joseph's sister's son, Eugene Stettheimer, married Joseph's brother Henry's daughter, Grace. William Seligman's daughter Leonore married Max Wassermann, and William's son David married Max's sister, Sophie, while Jesse Seligman's daughter, Emma, married another Wassermann brother, Edward. In 1878 young Adolph Lewisohn married into the crowd. His bride was Emma Cahn, who was related to the Cahns of J. S. Bache & Company, who were related by marriage to the Baches.

Along a wide stretch of New Jersey shore—in Elberon and such adjacent resort towns to the north and south as Long Branch, Deal Beach, Sea Bright, Allenhurst, and West End—a German Jewish summer colony was developing: “The Jewish Newport.” Peggy Guggenheim described Elberon as “a sort of ghetto,” and so it was—but then so was Newport. The space of Atlantic Ocean that separated the two places became, like the width of Central Park between Central Park West and Fifth Avenue, symbolic of the social separation of the two communities, each of which had begun to look inward, upon its own problems and satisfactions, rather than outward upon the world.

Life at Elberon was remarkable for its sense of isolation and tranquility, as well as for the amenities it contained, the feelings of conviction and complacency that seemed to surround each day's scheduled activity. Of course there were some who found Elberon stifling in its addiction to Victorian conformity. Emanie Sachs described the residents of the colony as “padded with red damask, built of a pattern in a piece, dancing round and round in a golden trap, getting nowhere.” But much the same could have been said of Elberon's gentile counterpart on the Rhode Island shore.

Peggy Guggenheim called Elberon “the ugliest place in the world. Not one tree or bush grew on this barren coast. The only flowers I remember were rambler roses, nasturtiums and hydrangeas, and since
then I have not been able to endure them. My grandfather had a family mansion in West End … a hideous Victorian house.” Nearby lived several of her Guggenheim uncles, one in “an exact copy of the Petit Trianon at Versailles,” and another in an “Italian villa with marble Pompeiian inner courts and beautiful grottoes and sunken gardens. Compared to these, my grandfather Seligman's house was a modest affair.” The Guggenheims were still considered
nouveau riche
.

Sam Sachs also chose a European theme for his Elberon house—“a kind of an adaptation of an Italian palazzo” of white stucco, with a red-tiled roof and fountains and formal gardens “adapted from Versailles.” Both Solomon Loeb and Jacob Schiff had houses on this shore, the latter's predictably grander than the former's. Jacob Schiff was the first man of the crowd to rent his own private stateroom for the season on the ferryboat,
Asbury Park
, on which he commuted from Manhattan. He used the stateroom as an office, and he spent the trip (it took just over an hour) sitting in a wicker chair writing tense little memoranda on scraps of paper.

Many Seligmans—Jesse and his son Henry, Joseph's sons Isaac and David, Joseph's daughter Frances Hellman, and James's son Jefferson (of the fruit and ginger)—had summer homes on the bluffs around Elberon, and theirs were more typical of the style and mood of the place: large Victorian houses, hectic with gingerbread, millwork, and decorative cupolas, surrounded on all sides by wide porches that were covered with high-backed rocking chairs that rocked all day long by themselves in the offshore breezes, where Seligmans and their friends gathered to sit in long rows, and rock, and look at the sea, and smoke their cigars, and talk business. The women, under parasols, took little walks between the nodding blue heads of hydrangeas, and some of them must have asked themselves why, when they had all this ease, anyone would have preferred the Grand Union Hotel at Saratoga?

The salt air made for hearty appetites, and twice a day the families gathered in walnut-paneled dining rooms for enormous dinners that began with tomatoes stuffed with caviar and anchovies, continued through delicious clear soups, to roasts “with the most beautiful spinach,” to fruits and cheeses and red wine. After meals, while the gentlemen lingered over more cigars and business talk, the ladies retired to the drawing room to sit on plush-covered ottomans and discuss what they had just eaten. One encountered many of the same features in most of these rooms—the whatnot in the corner with its collection of Dresden figurines, the gold-fringed lamp supported by a ring-a-rosy of bronze cherubs, the marble-topped table crowded with
photographs, the palm tree in the Sevres pot, and the climax of every such drawing room, the family portraits gazing solemnly from the walls in heavy gilt frames suspended by velvet ropes: the children in their long ringlets, standing stiffly in black velvet dresses, their faces grave above white lace collars, posed with birds, Bibles, or hoops in their hands. The houses might have been “ugly,” but they were ugly to a point of Victorian perfection.

From the drawing room, it would soon be time for the little walk among the hydrangeas again, that walk that was so good for the overtaxed liver, and which gave one an appetite for the next meal. At night one retired early—there were few late parties—between fine linen sheets in a bedroom that smelled of the best French soaps, lavender sachet, and sea air.

The seemliness of Elberon's summer panorama was hardly ever broken by an untoward event, or, indeed, by undue jollity—as once happened when a hotel in Allenhurst which did not accept Jews caught fire and burned to the ground. While it blazed, a number of well-connected German Jewish children stood nearby and cheered.

In Elberon the Seligmans always seemed to manage to have the most distinguished dinner and weekend guests, particularly favoring celebrities from the worlds of politics and government in Washington. At one of the Seligmans' Saturdays, it was never a surprise to find a former U.S. President, a Supreme Court Justice, several Senators and a Congressman or two. The Seligmans' old friend Grant had, at their suggestion, bought a summer home at Long Branch and was a frequent, if somewhat unreliable, guest.
*
President Garfield was another Seligman friend. When Garfield was shot less than three months after his inauguration, he was taken to a cottage in Elberon where Jesse Seligman—“with,” as Postmaster General Thomas Lane later
recalled, “that thoughtful consideration and tenderness which distinguished the man”—opened his house to the official family of the dying President. “The Seligmans,” said another observer at the time, “displayed the closest American equivalent of the European concept of
noblesse oblige
.”

And certainly at some point during these great Elberon years New York's German Jewish financiers and their families had begun to think of themselves as an American aristocracy of a certain sort. With their moral tone and their emphasis on family, they had begun to regard themselves as perhaps just a little bit “better” than “the butterflies” of Newport.

In 1892 the Seligmans had a visit from a true European aristocrat. He was Prince André Poniatowsky, a nephew of King Stanislaus of Poland. He called on the Seligmans in New York to open an account, and he noted that their offices were “very much like those of the bankers in the City of London, of great simplicity, located on the first floor of the Mills Building, in those days the largest building of that type in New York. It was of no special architectural style, but, as the British say ‘substantial.'” Here, the Prince wrote, the Seligmans “received me immediately and with a courtesy that demonstrated to me on what complimentary terms their Paris house had written to them about me.”