The Jews in America Trilogy Page 7

  Joseph’s brother Isaac Guggenheim, meanwhile, was proving himself a more solid and less emotional sort. Isaac was a Lengnau moneylender, and he became quite rich. As an old man he was a patriarchal figure—grave, bearded, in kaftan and skullcap, surrounded by his hovering and attentive family, moving grandly through the streets or sitting in state in his house where he received petitioners for loans. An indication of his stern and frosty manner is the fact that old Isaac became known locally as “Old Icicle.” From him, all the American Guggenheims descend. When “Old Icicle” died in 1807, his estate consisted of an enormous trunk. When this was ceremoniously opened, it was found to contain 830 gold and silver coins, plus all the articles Isaac had accepted, over the years, as collateral on loans: 72 plates, a mortar, a frying pan, two kneading pans, a Sabbath lamp, “a ewer with basin for washing hands,” a brass coffee pot, 4 featherbeds, 19 sheets, 15 towels, 8 nightshirts, and a child’s chamber pot. The valuation of this estate was placed at 25,000 florins, which was quite a nice sum.

  “Old Icicle” Guggenheim had many children; his oldest son was named Meyer, who married and had eight children, four boys and four girls, and soon one of these sons, Samuel, was making a name for himself. The typewritten translation of the following news item, with its erratic spelling and mixed tenses, now hangs in the partners’ room at Guggenheim Brothers in New York:

  Samuel Guggenheim

  On the 25th of July, 1818, fire broke out in Wyle, in the Canton of Zurich. A whole house soon enveloped in flames, and made the hurriedly arrived people shudder. But, oh! two peacefully sleeping children were still within the building. The cries of anguish of the congregated populace of the town and the cracking of the flames and smoke woke the little ones from their sweet slumber, apparently only to die the sleep of death. Who can command the flames? Who can save the little ones? A Hebrew, Samuel Guggenheim of Largan [Lengnau], Canton Aargan [Aargau], Switzerland, a man full of presence of mind and honest courage, rushed into the blazing house, graps [grabs? grasps?] both children and carries them triumphantly through the terrible heat and smoke to safety.

  But, oh! Even more thrilling exploits would the Guggenheims carry out. Equal to their ability to stir up controversy is their love of drama.

  Samuel’s older brother was Simon. By Samuel’s and Simon’s generation, the considerable competence that Old Icicle had left behind him was spent and gone, and the Guggenheims were poor again. Simon was the village tailor, and hardly saw a florin enter his shop from one week to the next. With its maze of restrictions and special taxes, life for the ghetto Jew in Switzerland was onerous anyway, but for the poor man it was hideous. Households in the Lengnau-Endingen townships were limited by decree in 1776 to the then existing figure—108—and Jews were not permitted to enlarge or alter the exteriors of their houses. To escape the tax collector, families hid with other families. Householders received expulsion orders frequently, and the only way to avoid eviction was to renew—for a price—the “Safe-Conduct and Patronage Letter.” As early as 1840 Simon Guggenheim, a small, thin, intense man with a haggard face and brooding eyes, had begun dreaming of escaping to America. But he had a wife and five children—a son, Meyer, and, disappointingly, four girls—and he simply could not afford it. Then his wife died.

  Good fortune now stepped in. In 1846, when Simon was in his fifties, another death in Lengnau created a forty-one-year-old widow, Rachel Meyer. Rachel had seven children—three sons and four daughters—and she also had a little money. Simon married her, and late in 1847 the combined families—fourteen in all—set off for America. Their ship took the customary two months to cross the Atlantic, entered the mouth of the Delaware River in 1848, and deposited them all in Philadelphia. Simon was then fifty-six; his son Meyer was twenty. Father and son set off peddling into the anthracite country, as the Seligman brothers had done a decade before.

  Meyer Guggenheim was short and slender, but well-knit and handsome. That a shipboard romance could have blossomed under steerage conditions of filth, suffocation, and darkness seems strange, but it did. Crossing the ocean, Meyer had fallen in love with his stepmother’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Barbara. She has been described in the family as a beauty with “unusually fair skin,” “eyes that were brown in some lights and soft warm gray in others,” and “auburn hair that burned in the sun.” Barbara’s auburn hair burned in young Meyer’s mind as he peddled the dreary mining towns of northeastern Pennsylvania. He married his stepsister in 1852 in Philadelphia.

  But as a peddler Meyer Guggenheim made a discovery which, in the beginning, eluded men like the Seligmans and Lehmans, and which turned his career in a different direction. He realized that for every dollar’s worth of goods sold he was returning sixty to seventy cents to the manufacturer. In other words, he was working two-thirds of each peddling day for manufacturers and only one-third for himself. Meyer began to consider ways in which he could reverse this situation. “Obviously,” says Milton Lomask, a Guggenheim biographer, “he must put something of himself into one of his products. But which one?”

  With considerable wisdom, he decided to concentrate on the one product about which he had received the most complaints. This was a certain brand of stove polish. Housewives had told him that the polish did a fine job on their stoves, but that it also soiled and burned their hands. Meyer took the polish to a chemist friend, asked him to analyze it and, if possible, to isolate the soiling and burning ingredient from the cleaning and polishing agent. The chemist analyzed the polish, suggested a new formula, and presently Guggenheim’s stingless, stainless stove polish was offered to the ladies on Meyer’s route. It was a success. Meyer’s father, Simon, was now in his sixties and getting too old to peddle, and so Meyer took him off the peddling route and assigned him to the house to brew up vats of stove polish. The business ethics of taking an existing product, changing it slightly, and selling it under another label are best left to a patent attorney. There was no Better Business Bureau in those days, anyway. By a similar process, Meyer soon added Guggenheim’s bluing and Guggenheim’s lye to his household-products line.

  The two families who would compose Goldman, Sachs started not only on foot but, romantically enough, as runaways. Young Joseph Sachs was a scholarly son of a poor Bavarian saddlemaker who grew up in a village outside Würzburg. As a lad in his teens he was hired as tutor in the home of a wealthy Würzburg goldsmith named Baer to teach the Baers’ beautiful young daughter, Sophia. In a fairy-tale way, the poor young tutor and the lovely young merchant princess fell in love. Naturally her parents disapproved. So the couple eloped to Rotterdam, were married there in 1848, and that same year boarded a boat for America, landing in Baltimore. Where the money came from that financed the elopement and the schooner crossing is not clear. Very likely Sophia, a practical girl, pocketed some of her father’s gold before departing.

  In that same pivotal year twenty-seven-year-old Marcus Goldman, a more down-to-earth sort, arrived in New York. He was also a Bavarian, born in a small village, Burgpreppach, near Schweinfurt, and he quickly set off for the area that, rightly or wrongly, young German Jewish immigrants had heard was the peddlers’ paradise, the coal hills of Pennsylvania. In 1848 another girl from Bavaria, named Bertha Goldman—of another Goldman family—had arrived in America to join her already migrated relatives in Philadelphia. She was nineteen. In Philadelphia Miss Goldman and Mr. Goldman met, fell in love, and were married. The Goldman-Goldman union was to become remarkable in New York’s German Jewish crowd for the fact that, try as they might through the years, Bertha and Marcus Goldman could never discover a way in which they were even remotely related.

  Before Marcus married her, Bertha Goldman had had—and it was unusual for the 1840’s—a career. She had supported herself quite nicely doing embroidery and fine needlework for Philadelphia society women. None other than Mrs. Wistar Morris wore a Bertha Goldman hat. Soon, with Bertha’s help, Marcus Goldman was able to make the transition from dry-goods and notions peddler to respectable shopke
eper. He set up his own clothing store in Market Street, and rented a comfortable house in Green Street. But Bertha hated Philadelphia. She was urging her husband to take another step forward—to New York, where she had friends.

  In 1849, if anyone had looked over the incoming steerage passengers with an eye to predicting which one seemed least likely to succeed, Solomon Loeb might easily have been selected. He was a thin, sallow, fidgety boy with intense, frightened-looking, blue eyes. His hair had receded prematurely from his forehead, leaving a fluffy mound of curly black hair on either side of his head, creating an effect of furry horns. He had been a sickly child of an even sicklier family—of fifteen Loeb children, only six had lived to maturity—and he had developed an obsession about his health and had a pathological fear of germs which conditions in steerage did little to soothe. He had been violently seasick the entire journey, during which, he later swore, not a mouthful of food had passed his lips. Halfway across the Atlantic—traveling with his only pair of shoes strapped to his back—he had decided that he was going to die, and begged a fellow passenger to throw him overboard. The passenger demurred and wanted to know, “Why don’t you throw yourself over? Why make me do it?” Weeping, Solomon said that he was too weak to lift himself up to the rail. “Just put me up on the rail so I can roll over,” he said.

  Loeb had come from the Rhineland city of Worms, where his father had been a poor wine merchant, as had several generations of Loebs before him. Still, Solomon’s mother, Rosina, laid claim to a certain social standing. She was a contemporary of Kaiser Wilhelm I and liked to talk of “Ich und der Kaiser,” suggesting that she and the Kaiser had actually been friends. She could recall Napoleon and the time when the Rhineland was freed and Jews were first permitted to have surnames of their own. Rosina often left the impression that she herself had had something to do with this. Like Joseph Seligman’s mother, Rosina Loeb had been accused of giving her son “grandiose ideas,” and she had picked Solomon as her first boy to emigrate. She had also selected Cincinnati as Solomon’s destination. The son of some cousins of hers named Kuhn had gone there a few years earlier and was reported to be prospering.

  In the 1830’s and ’40’s, many Germans—Jews and non-Jews—had settled in and around Philadelphia. (Earlier migrations had been attracted by the liberal policies of William Penn. Later, Germans went to Pennsylvania to be with other Germans.) Now the German movement was farther westward, to the bustling Ohio River port which was then the third largest city in the United States. In 1849 boatbuilding, shipping, and meat-packing were Cincinnati’s main industries. As many as three hundred river boats steamed into the harbor a day, and over a quarter of the country’s pork was packed there. The city had such a large German-speaking population that it was virtually bilingual, and German was taught in all public and parochial schools. The section of town north of the canal, where most of the Germans lived, was known as “Over the Rhine.” Jews, of course, were not particularly attracted by the pork-packing industry and were drawn, instead, into the textile trade, which was also booming, and into cloak and suit manufacturing. Abraham Kuhn, who had started as a peddler, had opened a dry-goods shop and now operated a small factory where he made men’s and boys’ pants. He had made enough money to send home to Germany for his brothers and sisters. He was looking for another helper, and he took on Solomon.

  Temperamentally, the two men balanced each other. Abe Kuhn was phlegmatic. Solomon was excitable. Abe had fallen in love with fabrics, their colors and textures. Solomon was color-blind and didn’t know buckram from bombazine. But he understood money and knew how to sell. Abe Kuhn had been thinking of opening another outlet for his goods in New York, and Solomon’s first job was to set this up. Soon he was back in New York and had opened a soft-goods shop at 31 Nassau Street, around the corner from the Seligmans. For several years, while Kuhn minded the shop and factory in Cincinnati, Loeb commuted back and forth between the two cities, carrying the pants from factory to store on the Erie Canal. Soon he was able to send back to Germany for his brothers and sisters, along with his mother and father, and settle them in Cincinnati. All the Kuhns and Loebs, plus some additional cousins named Netter and Wolff, worked in the Cincinnati business, and presently they began to marry one another. Solomon married Abe’s sister Fanny, and Abe married Solomon’s sister. The double brothers-in-law then changed the name of their operation to Kuhn, Loeb & Company, and they all, nine Loebs and four Kuhns, moved into one large house “Over the Rhine.” Fanny bore Solomon his first child in this house, a daughter whom the couple named Therese. This large and happy and prosperous clan might never have left Cincinnati if Fanny had not become pregnant again and, along with her second baby, died in childbirth.

  A family conference was called to decide what was to be done in this unhappy situation. Little Therese, the cousins said, needed a mother. There were no unmarried girls left in the family for Solomon. Obviously, seasick-prone or not, the thing for Solomon to do was to go back to Germany and find a new bride. In fact, the cousins had a candidate in mind—a Mannheim girl named Betty Gallenberg. That no young girl from the existing German Jewish stock in Cincinnati was considered may seem odd. The truth was that clans like the Loebs and Kuhns, to whom the family was the business and the business was the family, knew virtually no one in America outside the family group. A likely German Jewish girl might have lived right next door, but they would not have met her.

  So, gritting his teeth, Solomon set off on his Brautschau. In Mannheim he called on Betty Gallenberg. She was plain as a pudding, plump, motherly, healthy, a good cook and housekeeper, and, since Solomon was considering her qualifications as a child’s nurse more than as a wife, he put his proposition to her. She accepted it, they were married without further ado, and he fetched her back to Cincinnati.

  It now began to be apparent that neither Solomon Loeb nor Abe Kuhn possessed Seligman-sized ambitions. Both had prospered and both were satisfied with the tidy little fortunes they had amassed. Kuhn had always been homesick for Germany and planned to take his wife and family home. Loeb agreed that he was ready to retire also, but he was fond of Cincinnati and would stay there. He explained this to his young wife, who, at that point, took the future of Kuhn, Loeb & Company into her own hands.

  A few years earlier, Charles Dickens had visited Cincinnati; it was one of the few American cities he liked. Not so Betty Gallenberg Loeb. She hated “Porkopolis,” as it had been nicknamed, from the moment she saw it. She considered it a crude, boring, uncivilized outpost. She was also apparently unprepared for the plethora of Loeb in-laws she found waiting to welcome her, and was irked by their tendency to patronize her and treat her like a housemaid. “They treat me as if they had bought me,” she wrote angrily home to Germany. She referred to Cincinnati as “a city of pigs, a monster piggery,” and it is likely that she included some of her husband’s relatives in this category. She found her brothers- and sisters-in-law noisy and boorish, and, though her own background was no more genteel than theirs, she considered them common. One sister-in-law, she pointed out with disgust, had given her a dozen jars of homemade preserves as a wedding present. As for the men, she found “everyone talking about nothing but business, and how to get rich quickly.” That being the case, she decided to find out just how rich her new husband was. She looked over his accounts and discovered that he was worth nearly half a million dollars. That was sufficient, she told him, to move her “out of the pigs” and into New York.

  8

  MATTERS OF STYLE

  New York in the 1840’s was changing—more rapidly, perhaps, than any city in the world has ever changed—from a picturesque seaport “city of masts and spires” into a noisy and competitive commercial capital. Society, too, was becoming more competitive as more rich newcomers strove to get in, and suddenly bookshops and news kiosks bristled with books and articles on how to be accepted, and what was “good form” and what was not. Still, though everyone both in society and out of it talked incessantly about what was “p
roper social usage” and about “etiquette” and “comme il faut,” things seem to have remained in a somewhat primitive state, to judge by some of the social “dos” and “don’ts” published in the period.

  One etiquette writer, for instance, says reproachfully, “What an article is a spittoon as an appendage to a handsomely furnished drawing room!” and another advises guests at a dinner party against “shaking with your feet the chair of a neighbor,” and suggests that “ladies should never dine with their gloves on unless their hands are not fit to be seen.” If a lady should make “an unseemly digestive sound” at dinner or “raise an unmanageable portion to her mouth,” one should “cease all conversation with her and look steadfastly into the opposite part of the room.” While at table, says one writer, “all allusions to dyspepsia, indigestion, or any other disorders of the stomach, are vulgar and disgusting. The word ‘stomach’ should never be uttered at table,” and the same writer cautions that “the fashion of wearing black silk mittens at breakfast is now obsolete.” When traveling alone, ladies should “avoid saying anything to women in showy attire, with painted faces, and white kid gloves … you will derive no pleasure from making acquaintance with females who are evidently coarse and vulgar, even if you know that they are rich.”