The Jews in America Trilogy (10 page)

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 “proper 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.”

Men of the era seem to have been even slower to learn the rules of delicacy. One manual of the 1840's says: “The rising generation of young elegants in America are particularly requested to observe that, in polished society, it is not quite
comme il faut
for gentlemen to blow their noses with their fingers, especially when in the street.” The gentlemen's habit of chewing tobacco created no end of special problems. “A lady on the second seat of a box at the theatre,” writes a social critic of the day, “found, when she went home, the back of her pelisse entirely spoilt, by some man behind not having succeeded in trying to spit past her.” And an English visitor was surprised to see John Jacob Astor remove his chewing tobacco from his mouth and absently begin tracing a watery design with it on a windowpane. Other European visitors were startled by what appears to have been a social custom exclusively New York's. On the horse-drawn Fifth Avenue omnibuses it was considered
de rigueur
, when these vehicles became crowded, for seated gentlemen to let ladies perch on their knees.

Though much of the criticism of New York's bad manners came from Europeans, it does appear to have been largely justified. In 1848 the New York
Herald
took New York society to task for “loud talking at table, impertinent staring at strangers, brusqueness of manners among the ladies, laughable attempts at courtly ease and self-possession among the men—the secret of all this vulgarity in Society is that wealth, or the reputation of wealth, constitutes the open sesame to its delectable precincts.”

Very much a precinct leader was August Belmont. His passionate interest in high society was perhaps peculiar for men of his day (editors and cartoonists of the nineteenth century usually depicted social climbing as a woman's occupation), but at least it was consistent. Perhaps his glimpse of Rothschild grandeur had given him his abiding urge to be a social potentate. In any case, three years after his arrival in America, we find him dashingly in Elkton, Maryland, and, “over a subject too trite to be mentioned,” fighting a duel.

Dueling was an established social-climbing technique, and August
Belmont seems to have chosen his opponent more for his publicity value than anything else. It was Edward Heyward, “one of the exquisite sons of Mr. Wm. Heyward,” a member of the ancient and noted Heyward family of Charleston. No one was killed in the duel, but both men were injured, and Belmont, who was shot in the thigh, declared his honor satisfied. And, by having chosen a Heyward as a dueling partner, he established himself with the press and the public as a gentleman of Heyward quality. The duel, in fact, did more than anything else to register the Belmont name in the annals of American society.

What the quarrel, which took place at Niblo's restaurant in New York, was really about is now uncertain. Belmont, naturally, always liked to leave the impression that Heyward had made some ungallant allusion to a lady in Belmont's party. But there is also a story that Heyward had made a veiled reference to Belmont's Jewishness—a particularly touchy subject.

Belmont was always sorry that his dueling scar appeared in such an ignominious spot, and the wound gave him a pronounced limp which would be a permanent affliction. The wound and the limp seemed to increase his bitterness. His rolling gait heightened his threatening appearance as he entered doorways of salons. The duel and the scar seemed to add to his sinister allure, and through New York drawing rooms rumors began to circulate of certain society ladies who, for one reason or another, had been permitted to see that scar.

In the years since his arrival Belmont had been so successful at channeling Rothschild funds into the United States Treasury in return for government securities that he was rewarded, in 1844, by being appointed United States Consul General to Austria—a move designed not only to provide Mr. Belmont with prestige but also to place him close to the Vienna House of Rothschild where he could be of further usefulness. Things, of course, did not always go smoothly. When the state of Pennsylvania defaulted on $35 million worth of state bonds held by British investors, including the Rothschilds, Belmont, in Paris trying to place another U.S. Federal Government loan, was icily told by Baron de Rothschild, “Tell them you have seen the man who is at the head of the finances of Europe, and that he has told you that they cannot borrow a dollar. Not a dollar.” Still, the United States was too good a customer of Europe's—buying such items as railroad ties, which lack of American know-how still made difficult to produce here, in return for American cotton and wheat—for the Rothschilds to remain
angry for long. Also, Belmont was too canny a trader to let such upsets damage his friendships on both sides of the Atlantic.

In New York he was very much a man about town. He had made himself, à la the Rothschilds, a connoisseur of horseflesh and had, with his friend Leonard Jerome, founded Jerome Park Racetrack. But he had never been invited to join the Union Club, considered the best men's club in town. He also seems to have invented a social attitude which was soon being widely copied—the attitude of indifference. When invited for dinner at eight, August Belmont rarely appeared before ten or eleven. Punctuality, he seemed to be saying, was the courtesy of peasants. It seemed very chic and “very European” to arrive at dinner with the finger bowls, and this affectation—which is still to be encountered in New York, to the bafflement of Europeans—may be blamed on August Belmont.

Belmont did not do particularly well when it came to cultivating such old patroon families as the Van Rensselaers, nor was he admired by the Astors, the fur-trading family which, in the 1840's, was probably the richest family in New York. He did, on the other hand, get along nicely with such Old Guard families as the Costers and the Morrises, and he was also a friend of an ex-ferryboat captain, now a millionaire, named “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York society was giving up picnics and skating parties and turning to large formal subscription balls—always given in hotels or restaurants since there were still no private homes big enough to contain them—and it irked August Belmont that he was not invited to every one. There was, for instance, the great City Ball of January, 1841, so called because it was held at the old City Hotel. Eight hundred guests danced in a ballroom lighted with two thousand tapers, but August Belmont was not among them. Soon a series of Assembly balls was organized to be held at Delmonico's, and, to make certain that he was asked, Belmont took decisive action.

In a story told by the Van Rensselaers, Belmont went to the invitation committee and said, “I have been investigating the accounts of you gentlemen on the Street. I can assure you that either I get an invitation to the Assembly this year or else the day after the Assembly each of you will be a ruined man.” It was one of the most telling examples of the kind of power that could be wielded by one man (“a Wall Street banker, not even a native American”) in nineteenth-century New York. Belmont got his invitation, but—according to a story that sounds much more like wishful thinking than the truth—arrived at the Assembly to find himself the only person there.