The Jews in America Trilogy (44 page)

The success of the selling trust led Adolph to the next step—the formation of a smelting trust. Including again the Rockefeller-Rogers group, this was a far more ambitious project with a capitalization of over $100 million. It was called the American Smelting & Refining Company, and it represented a merger of twenty-three different smelting concerns. Clearly, this was a trust designed to dominate the American mining scene—to give Rockefeller interests virtual control of everything under American soil, with Adolph and Leonard Lewisohn riding along as very important hitchhikers. There was only one difficulty. The Guggenheim interests, when asked to join the American Smelting & Refining Company, politely declined. It was one of old Meyer's strictest rules: Guggenheim smelters must not be allowed out of the family. Perhaps Adolph Lewisohn felt, at this point, that he had already made as much money as he “needed,” and was ready to stop. In any case, he seems not to have grasped the importance of the Guggenheims' refusal to become part of his merger, and to have been satisfied with their assurances that they would act “in harmony.”

With the formation of their Guggenheim Exploration Company, the family had entered upon its most ambitious era. Its aim was to corner the best mines in North America in a great sweep from South to North, starting in Mexico and moving across the hemisphere through the United States, Canada, and Alaska. At the head of this vast plan was the most ambitious of Meyer's sons, Daniel, the second-eldest. In the partners' room at Guggenheim Brothers in New York, the various Guggenheim men are immortalized on canvas and, according to a
persistent rumor, the square footage of each man's portrait bears a direct relationship to the size of his contribution to the family fortune. Certainly the portrait of “Mr. Dan,” as he was called, is rather larger than the others. He was seven years younger than Adolph Lewisohn and in 1899 was still in his peppy mid-forties. He was a little man, like his father, but, according to Bernard Baruch, Daniel Guggenheim was “one of the three small men I've known—the others were Sam Gompers and Henry Davidson—who sat taller than most men stand. I see Dan … a little fellow sitting in a big chair and dominating the entire room from it.” His most arresting features were his greenish-blue eyes, which (it seems to have been a prerequisite for turn-of-the-century tycoons) have always been described as “piercing.” Daniel Guggenheim had also decided that he wished to dominate the American mining scene. His companies were earning a million dollars a year, but with the formation of the American Smelting & Refining Company he was on the defensive for the first time. He was less interested in “harmony” than in victory.

At this point, one begins to get the impression of Adolph Lewisohn fiddling while Rome burns. Busy with his parties, he seems to have assumed that the sheer size of his American Smelting & Refining Company, and of his associates, Rockefeller and Rogers, would win the day. Rogers, too, seems to have been under this misapprehension, while Rockefeller, as he often did, was leaving everything to Rogers. Daniel Guggenheim, meanwhile, made several bold moves. He gathered on his team a speculator named William C. Whitney, who had married the sister of Oliver H. Payne, a large Standard Oil stockholder. Whitney had speculative capital to spend. Next, Guggenheim had a stroke of luck. A strike crippled a number of the American Smelting & Refining Company's properties, making the trust temporarily vulnerable. Dan Guggenheim took advantage of this by heaping lead on the market and forcing the trust to sell below cost. Dan began buying up A S & R shares. In December, 1900, the trust made Dan Guggenheim another offer to buy him out, but this time the trust was leading from weakness. Guggenheim knew it, and made the most of it. He would sell, he announced—for $45.2 million. And for this price the trust would receive all the Guggenheim properties except the best ones—the Colorado and Mexican mines and the Exploration Company. With the remaining properties came, as well, the Guggenheims. And so, all at once, the American Smelting & Refining Company
was
the Guggenheims. Daniel Guggenheim was president, and four other
Guggenheims were on the board of directors. It all happened so fast that it seemed like sleight of hand.

Dazed, Rogers and the Lewisohns realized that the “impossible” had happened. Buying out the Guggenheims, they had, simultaneously, put the Guggenheims in control. The Seligmans were this time delighted; they led the syndicate that put the A S & R's first issue on the market—an offering at par of $40 million worth of preferred stock, which sold with great ease.

The Rogers-Lewisohn group now tried to retaliate. They hired David Lamar, one of several speculators who had earned the title, “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and told him to drive the price of A S & R stock down until the company was ruined. But the Guggenheims had Whitney, who was no less powerful a speculator than Lamar, and who was enjoined to do the opposite. The battle between the two speculative wolves, as a result, ended close to a draw. The stock fell only a meager seven points, and the Guggenheims held fast. Next, Rogers and the Lewisohns took their case to the courts. The law certainly seemed to favor the Rogers group, but, when the Guggenheims agreeably offered to compromise, the result of the compromise seemed to further favor the Guggenheims. When the smoke of the lawsuit disappeared, Daniel Guggenheim was Chairman of the board of the American Smelting & Refining Company, his brother Simon was treasurer, and three other brothers were still on the board.

Winning control of the A S & R was the greatest single moment in the career of the Guggenheims. It marked them as mining kings of the world, and, from then on, with the self-generative power that money often seems to have, the Guggenheim fortune mounted. Adolph Lewisohn, meanwhile, still had his A S & R shares. The fact that he had lost a battle didn't seem to matter. At some crucial point in it, he had simply lost interest. He was not that acquisitive. Besides, he was too busy spending and enjoying his own millions.

Financial historians have described the Guggenheim-Lewisohn struggle for control of the copper industry as “a battle of epic proportions.” But, in terms of the amount of fun both families managed to have afterward with their respective fortunes, it seems to have been all a lark.

In New York the waltz and the two-step were gradually being edged off the dance floor by the ragtime tempo of such dances as the turkey trot, the grizzly bear, the bunny hug and the Latin Maxixe. Soon, women's skirts would begin to climb to the accompaniment of whistles, while stuffed birds appeared on umbrella-sized hats. Even “men of
distinction,” it was said, were showing up in peg-top pants, two-button shoes and spats.

Some
men of distinction, that is. The Guggenheims refused to be fashion leaders and remained conservative, one foot still in the nineteenth century. The last of Mrs. Astor's great balls were taking place-balls the crowd had no part of anyway. But the balls and Mrs. Astor's friends had served their function. If, while gentile society in New York appeared to be growing more factionalized and self-serving, Jewish society could reassure itself that it was becoming more solid and responsible. “Mrs. Astor's sort of society,” wrote one of the crowd, “was quite a different sort of thing from ours. You might say hers was the opposite. Hers was based on publicity, showiness, cruelty, and striving. Ours was based on family, and a quiet enjoyment of the people we loved.” This is a reasonable estimate of it. The exclusiveness was mutual and double-edged. If gentile society chose to be flashy, the Jewish crowd would be inconspicuous.

“Inconspicuous,” in fact, had become a key concept in German Jewish life. It was to be inconspicuous that Meyer and Barbara Guggenheim, and so many others, had abandoned the orthodoxy of their parents and become Reformed (or less noticeably Jewish) Jews, and had joined the German Jewish Temple Emanu-El. To be inconspicuous, many Guggenheims had scattered themselves in large, but anonymous, brownstones on the less fashionable West Side. Inconspicuousness was synonymous with decorum. Whenever Meyer Guggenheim took his sleigh or carriage through the park, he drove alone, managing the reins himself, avoiding the showiness of a coachman and footmen. There was almost a rule of thumb: the richer one was, the more decorous and inconspicuous one endeavored to be.
*

Of course it was a little hard to be inconspicuous with the kind of fortune the Guggenheims were amassing. There was also, in the case of the Guggenheims, that unlucky ability to create scandal. The year 1900 was the dawn, in America, of a new attitude toward love and sex. It was the era of the kept woman, and it was naturally assumed that every man of property had one. (Even those who didn't pretended that they did.) Newspapers devoted yards of chatty print to this or that gentleman of distinguished family who had been “glimpsed looking gay” with this or that “curvaceous miss” or “bit of fluff.” Society, gentile and Jewish alike, buzzed with whispers of “love affairs” and
“mistresses” and lovers. Even very young children seem to have been affected because little Peggy Guggenheim was only a child of seven when she said to her father, Benjamin, “Papa, you must have a mistress as you stay out so many nights”—and was banished from the dinner table.

Meyer Guggenheim's Barbara died in 1900, and, shortly afterward, who should come forward but a woman named Hanna McNamara, age forty-five, to say that she had been Meyer's mistress for twenty-four years, charging breach of promise and asking $100,000 in damages. Meyer denied everything, including her assertion that she had been a domestic in the Guggenheim house. He went so far as to offer $10,000 reward to anyone who had ever seen him in the plaintiff's presence, and the suit was dropped. Still, the episode left the impression that old Meyer, in his seventies, was a rake, and Peggy Guggenheim has said in her autobiography, “When my grandmother died, my grandfather was looked after by his cook. She must have been his mistress.” Peggy based this assertion on having once seen the cook “weep copious tears” when old Meyer Guggenheim was ill.

Peggy's father, meanwhile,
did
indeed have a series of mistresses (several of whom made embarrassing demands on his estate when he died). One of these, technically titled his “masseuse,” lived in his New York house; Benjamin's lady friends were apparently tolerated by his wife Florette. Another was the Marquise de Cerutti, whom he kept in Paris and always referred to as “T.M.” (for The Marquise). Once, taking their regular morning walk in the Bois de Boulogne, Ben and Florette Guggenheim encountered T.M. out walking also. She was wearing an elegant suit made entirely of baby lamb fur, and Florette scolded Ben for being so extravagant. “You are quite right, my dear,” said Benjamin and, to do the proper thing, gave her the money to buy an identical lamb suit of her own. (A practical woman, Florette took the money and used it to add to her portfolio of stocks.) Though the rest of the crowd—particularly Florette's family, the Seligmans—was aghast at Ben Guggenheim's carryings on, he rather enjoyed his reputation as a philanderer. He once told a fourteen-year-old nephew, “Never make love to a woman before breakfast for two reasons. One, it's tiring. Two, you may meet someone else during the day that you like better.”

For all this jaunty talk, Ben was not so tolerant of the activities of his brother William, the last of Meyer's sons, who has been described as “just one Guggenheim too many,” and also as “the handsomest of the boys.” Certainly one of Will's problems was his feeling that he was
a leftover Guggenheim, and also his conviction that he did not
look
Jewish. He began to nourish a fantasy that he was not a Jew, and somewhere along the line invented another identity for himself, whom he named Gatenby Williams. It was hard to say whether Will Guggenheim admired Gatenby Williams more than Gatenby Williams admired Will Guggenheim; they were lifelong fans of each other. In fact, Gatenby wrote an appreciative book about Will, “in collaboration with Charles Monroe Heath,” in which Gatenby said of Will that all the Guggenheim brothers “except Benjamin and himself were dark,” and that anyone seeing Will's “light complexion and the cast of his features … would not have surmised his Semitic ancestry.” Will, says Gatenby, “was a nice-appearing young man.… Well proportioned … he carried himself erect and with dignity. His hands were expressive, the gestures indicating refinement.… He dressed neatly.… His eyes were a grayish-blue; his lips met in an even line, yet they seemed extraordinarily sensitive, belying the arduous activities and responsibilities that had long been his.”

One of Will's activities and responsibilities that Gatenby Williams kindly does not mention was Will's marriage in 1900 to Mrs. Grace Brown Herbert, a divorcee from California. Will brought his bride proudly home to his father and brothers, who immediately recognized her as “the fancy woman of a prominent New Yorker.” The Guggenheims presented Will with an ultimatum: get rid of Grace or be disinherited.

It cost the family $78,000 in cash and a trip to Illinois for Grace's divorce where, it was hoped, the scandal would not reach the New York newspapers (it did), and even that wasn't the end. Will married again, had a child, and Grace reappeared, suing to annul the divorce on the grounds of fraud, saying neither she nor Will had been residents of Illinois at the time. Had Grace won this action, she would have made Will not only a party to fraud but a bigamist, and would have illegitimatized his son. Fortunately, Grace's case was thrown out without further cost to the Guggenheims.

When Gatenby Williams' book,
William Guggenheim: The Story of an Adventurous Career
, was published, a few people noticed that the publisher, the Lone Voice Publishing Company, had the same address, 3 Riverside Drive, as Will Guggenheim. Pride of authorship prevailed when Will prepared his
Who's Who
biography, however, and Will's paragraph read: “Author: William Guggenheim (under pseudonym Gatenby Williams).”