JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II ---- Episode 7

           A LITTLE ABOUT ROBERT OPPENHEIMER'S 
       PARENTS AND THE CUSHY LIFE INTO WHICH
      ROBERT WAS BORN ON APRIL 22, 1904 

   That Felix Adler officiated at Julius's wedding was extremely apt, since in the years that followed Julius was to become one of Adler's leading and most devoted disciples, his rise to prominence in his uncles' company running parallel with his rise within the Ethical Culture movement. At the time of his wedding, as the Rothfeld brothers were entering their sixties and approaching retirement age, Julius Oppenheimer was preparing to take over the running of the company. It was an opportune time to seize the reins. The advent of readyto-wear suits, which cut overheads, lowered prices and increased demand dramatically, had given the entire tailoring industry an enormous boost, and business was extremely good. The Rothfeld brothers did not live to see the best years f their company. Longevity was never a family trait and both brothers died before they reached seventy, Solomon in 1904 and Sigmund three years later. Upon Sigmund's death, in December 1907, Julius became president of Rothfeld, Stearn & Co. , which now had offices in that most prestigious of all New York addresses : FIFTH AVENUE. At thirty--six years old, Julius Oppenheimer was a man of means and substance. 
  Julius and Ella Oppenheimer, though never ostentatious, certainly led what many would consider a luxurious life. Son after they were married they moved into an apartment at 250 West 94th Street, just down the road from Ella's mother. It was a fairly large apartment in a fairly smart neighborhood, but nothing very out of the ordinary. Where, however, they went way beyond what most people would regard as being essential  to a civilized life was in the furnishing and decorating of the apartment, particularly with regard to paintings that adorned its walls. It was in those days customary among wealthy German Jewish New York families to have a private art collection. In this respect, as in so many others, the members of "OUR CROWD" tended to veer on the side of conservatism, caution and conformity. Abby, the central character in Emanie Sachs's Red Damask, sneers that they "haven't enough physical courage to go in for sports like the rich Gentiles, and a little too much brains. So they go in for art collection with an expert to help. They wouldn't risk a penny on their own tastes." 

   Left to his own devices, Julius might have fallen into the kind of conservatism mocked by Sachs, but in Ella he had his own expert, one who, having studied Impressionism in Paris, was certainly not afraid to risk money on her own taste. The result was an 

extraordinary private art collection that was the to be the pride of the family for generations. It included a Rembrandt etching, paintings by Vuillard, Derain and Renoir, no fewere than three Van Goghs --- Enclosed Field with Rising Sun, First Steps [ After Millet] and Portrait ofAdeline Ravoux and a "blue period" Picasso, Mother and Child. 
   The private contemplation of fine works of art might be seen as the very opposite of the way of life promoted by the Ethical Cuture Society, a society that emphasized social responsibility and the importance of the deed , of doing something practical to help those less well off than oneself. This was a society that set up educational programs for the working class ; that put forward practical suggestions for improving the health, the working conditions and the housing of New York ; that involved itself in trade-union disputes ; and that helped set up a number of nationally important campaigning groups --- the National Child Labor Committee, the Civil Liberties Unions, the Ladies's Garment Workers' Union, the Society for the Advancement of ColoredPeople, and so on. Spending large sums of money [even though JuliusandElla were"early buyers" of Van Gogh and Picasso, the cost of these paintings was still considerable] on works that would be seen only by one's immediate family and one's closest friends scarcely looks consistent with the ethics that inspired the movement and its many social and political initiatives. 

 And yet, when looked at in another way, it was not only consistent with Adler's vision, but a fulfillment of it. Despite the practical nature of much of the work of the Ethical CultureSociety, and despite its repudiation of theology, Adler's vision was first and foremost a spiritual one. His central motivation was to find a way of preserving the spiritual guidance that religions had provided, even after all faith in religious beliefs had been abandoned. He thought he had found what he was looking for in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with its emphasis on what Kant called the "Moral Law," which Kant thought all of us would find in our hearts. In a famous passage that Adler quotes in his discourses , CREED AND DEED, Kant writes : "Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence : the star-lit heavens above me, and the moral law within me." According to Kant, the moral law is the same for all people at all times and at all places, and according to Adler : "The moral law is the common ground upon which all religious and in fact all true men may meet. It is the one basis of union that remains to us amid the clashing antagonisms of the sects. . . all that is best and grandest in religious dogma is due to the inspiration of the moral law in man." 
   What, then, is the moral law ?" In Kant's formulation, it is this : "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law." This means something like : do as you will be done by ; or : do to others what you would be happy to have done to you. Adler's formulation, however, is rather different :"The rule reads, 'Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other." 
   One brings out the "spiritual personality" by awakening in other people the sense of the sublime, of the infinite. Art is able to do this, Adler emphasizes, since it is a "high endeavor" and "Truly disinterestedness is the mark of every high endeavor." Thus : "The pursuit of the artist is unselfish, the beauty he creates is his reward." The goal of life is to pursue "the Ideal," which "is a void of form and its name unutterable." We can find the Ideal within ourselves --- in fact, we can only find it within ourselves ---through the discovery and appreciation of the moral law ; and the "high endeavors," of art, science, and public service, can help us find it. So the acquisition of fine works of art does not, after all, constitute "luxurious living,"but rather a means of fulfilling the "MORAL LAW." 
  It was in an environment governed by this idiosyncratic version of the moral law that a concerted effort would be made to "bring out the spiritual personality" of J. Robert Oppenheimer. 

JEWS IN AERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II---Episode 6

GERMAN JEWS IN NEW YORK CITY AS WE ENTERED 1900

   The economic recession of 1893-1895 hit the clothing industry harder than any other and resulted in mass unemployment, although Rothfeld, Stern & Co. seemed to ride out the recession better than most clothing firms in New York. It moved its office to cheaper accommodations on Bleecker Street, but other than that there was no sign that it suffered very much. In 1895, Julius's younger brother Emil came to New York, by which time Julius, now twenty-four years old, was beginning to make his mark in the firm. In 1900, the company took the decision to specialize in in the importation of cloak linings, something on which Julius Oppenheimer quickly became an expert, and from that point he seems to have become the company's leading figure. In 1903, this was recognized when he was made a partner, a move that seems to have persuaded him that the time was right to marry and settle down. 
   His chosen bride was Ella Friedman, who, though a member of the same German ajewish, Upper West Side community as the Rothfelds and Oppenheimers, was seen as significantly less German, less Jewish and more "American" than Julius. For one thing, Ella was not a migrant; she had been born in America and English was her first language. According to her son, she did not speak German very well --- something that seemed, if anything, to be a source of pride rather than of embarrassment. Her father, Louis Friedman, was indisputably a German Jew, but, having migrated to Baltimore rather than to New York, in the 1840s, he had been in the U.S. a good deal longer than the Rothfelds or the Oppenheimers. Ella's mother, Cecilia Eger, had herself been born in America and, though from a Germanic background [her father was German, her mother Austrian], was, so it was said in the family anyway, not a German Jew, since she was non-Jewish. The claim is precarious to say the least. Cecilia's mother, Clara Binswanger, was --- about as Jewish as it is possible to be : both her maternal and paternal grandfathers were rabbis. Cecilia's father, David Eger, was a prominent member of the Philadelphia Jewish community, mentioned several times in the 1894 publication The Jews of Philadelphia. If J. Robert Oppenheimer inherited his striking blue eyes from his grandmother Cecilia, as was widely believed in the family, it was not because she was, from a genetic point of view, any less Jewish than his paternal grandparents. 

            EMPHASIS IS SWITCHING TO J. ROBERT
            OPPENHIEMER , BUT THEN WE' LL COMPARE
           THE WEALTHY OPPENHEIMERS TO THE DIRT 
           POOR FAMILY OF ANOTHER SCIENTIFIC GENIUS,
           I. I. RABI WHO WAS ALSO RAISED IN NEW YORK 
           CITY DURING THE EARLY 1900s 

Not only was Ella seen as more "American" than the family she was marrying into, but she was also was seen as more "refined." During the years that Julius spent working his way up the family textile business, Ella was studying art, first in her native Baltimore and then in Paris, where she made a particular study of the Impressionists. [ She may have met Mary Cassett.] On her return to America she taught at Barnard College, a liberal arts college for women in New York, which had opened in 1889 as an "annex" of Columbia University and from 1897 was housed in a building next to Columbia in Morningside Heights on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. By the time she met Julius, Ella was an established and accomplished painter, with private students and her own rooftop studio. Her father had died in the early 1890s and she lived with her mother, Cecilia, in an apartment at 148 West 94th Street. Two years older than Julius, she would have been in her mid-thirties when they met, described by a family friend as "a gentle, exquisite, slim, tallish, blue-eyed woman, terribly sensitive, and extremely polite." She was born with an unformed right hand. To hide this --- and the artificial thumb and finger that she used to compensate for it ---- she always wore gloves, and her deformity was never once mentioned or even alluded to by the family. When a girlfriend of Robert's once asked him about it, she was met with stony silence. 
   It is not entirely clear how Julius and Ella met. It may have been that Ella's father was in the textile trade and knew the Rothfeld brothers, or it may have been that they had mutual friends in the Ethical Culture Society. Both suggestions have been made, although neither seems very likely. Her father had been dead for many years before she and Julius met, and it is not likely that her mother moved in the same circles as the Rothfelds. Nor is there any indication that Ella or anybody else in her family was a member of, or in any way interested in, Adler's Ethical Culture Society. 
   It seems more likely that it was their common interest in art that brought them together.  By 1903, Julius, as a partner in a thriving company, was a wealthy man and could afford to indulge his growing passion for the visual arts. It is reported that he "spent his free hours on weekends roaming New York's numerous art galleries." If so, given the way that wealth and enthusiasm attract invitations and introductions, it is not difficult to imagine that someone in the New York art world --- an artist, an agent, a gallery owner--- brought Julius and Ella together. 
   The cultural refinement that Ella represented was by this time something Julius craved. Though he had left school as a teenager, and had arrived in America speaking little English, he was determined to develop into a "proper gentleman" that his employees later described him as being. He dressed impeccably, acquired the social graces of the upper middle class and read widely, particularly in American and European history. Discovering that a German accent was a barrier to acceptance as a gentleman in the New York of the early twentieth century, Julius took drastic steps to remove all traces of his mother tongue, taking English lessons from an Oxford tutor, from whom he acquired the gentlemanly tones of the British educated elite. 
   Ella and Julius were married on March 23, 1903, their wedding being the occasion of a very public statement that they did not consider themselves Jewish. The service was performed not by a rabbi, but by Felix Adler himself, and not in accordance with any Jewish tradition, but rather as an illustration of the New Ideal" preached by the Ethical Culture Society. In his series of discourses,  Creed and Deed, published in 1886, Adler had written, in connection with his notion of what the "Priests of the New Ideal" might be be like : "there are special occasions in these passing years of ours, when the ideal bearings of life come home to us with particular force and when we require the priest to be their proper interpreter. Marriage is one of them." And so Ella and Julius were, in a way, married by a priest, but not in a way that implied commitment to any religious creed. 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 5

                             THE ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY 

    Among that select group who gained membership right from its inception were Solomon and Sigfeld. With regard to the Rothfeld brothers' time in New York is a little sketchy. Little is known of their first five years in America, except that they set up some kind of business in the tailoring trade, which must have done fairly well. In 1874-75 they are listed in the New York City Directory as "importers of dry goods," with offices in Worth Street, Lower Manhattan. More significant as a measure of their social and financial success, however, is the fact that in the following year they appear as founding members of the Ethical Culture Society, along with Joseph Seligman, Jacob Schiff and Henry Morgenthau. Within seven years of being in America, then, the Rothfeld brothers had joined :Our Crowd," the elite of Manhattan German Jewish society. 
   In 1880, that society (including, no doubt, the Rothfeld brothers) was united in mourning the death of Joseph Seligman, known since the Saratoga incident as "America's leading Jew." Shortly before his death, Seligman hd asked that his funeral service should be directed by the Ethical Cultural Society. DEspite this request, the Seligman family and Gustav Gottheil, the rabbi at Temple Emanu-El, conspired to give him a "proper Jewish funeral" at the synagogue. In addition, a funeral srvice conducted by felix Adler ws held in Seligman's house, an event that served to cement and increase the acceptance of Adler's society among New York's German Jewish elite. 
   It was, however, increasingly becoming a separate elite. In 1887, the nature of New York's high society was spelled out when the first volume of the Social Register for New york appeared, listing 2,000 or so families that were considered the creme de lacreme of Manhattan.  NOT ONE OF THEM WAS JEWISH, It author,  Ward McAllister, suggested : "our good Jews might wish to put out a little book of their own." In the face of such painful reminders that they were not accepted by New York high society, many prominent members of the German Jewish community migrated from the Upper East Side of Manhattan [ where, along Fifth Avenue, the likes of the Astors had their grand "brownstones" ] to form what has been described as "the first recognizably German Jewish upper-class neighborhood " on the Upper West Side. It was to this neighborhood that Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld moved in 1887, after they had joined with their cousin, J.H. Stern, to form Rothfeld, Stern & Co., a company that specialized in importing tailoring materials. Their names would never appear in the Social Register, but among their immediate neighbors now were Goldmans, Sachses and Guggenheims. 

   Meanwhile the "THIRD MIGRATION" of Jews to America was gaining momentum and, as the German Jewish community had feared, arousing a new and intensified form of anti-Semitism. In the same year that the Social Register was published and the Rothfeld brothers moved to the Upper West Side, an article appeared in Forum magazine entitled "Race Prejudice at Summer Resorts," which identified anti-Semitism as "a new feature in the New World." "Only within the present decade," the article stated, "has there been an anti-Jewish sentiment openly displayed in the United States." The blame for this ws laid by Alice Rhine, the author of the article, firmly on Judge Hilton, whose exclusion of Jews from his hotel in Saratoga had set an example that other hotel and boardinghouse proprietors had followed. "In seeking reasons for this sweeping ostracism, " she wrote, "it is found that the Gentiles charge the Hebrews with 'being too numerous' ; 'they swarm everywhere.' " It was also said, she recorded, that Jews lacked refinement ; they dressed badly, had bad manners and showed disrespect for the Christian Sabbath. 
   The kind of anti-Semitism discussed by Rhine was extremely mild, however, compared to the sort that was unleashed at around the same time in The American Jew, described as "the book that inaugurated racial anti-Semitism in America." Its author was Telemachus Timayenis, a Greek immigrant. Whereas Rhine described a prejudice against Jews as identified by their culture, their language and their perceived lack of social graces, Timayenis's target was the Jew as a RACIAL type. identified by  "their hooked noses, restless eyes, elongated ears, square nails, flat feet, round knees, and soft hands." The Jews that he describes with venomous hatred wear "long coats dripping with filth, while their faces and beards look suety with sluttishness" ; they arrive in the United States penniless, and soon ---- suspiciously soon, according to Timayentis --- become prominent bankers, and leaders of American industry. But despite his unease at the wealth of the German Jews, it is the wretched poverty of the eastern Jewson the Lower East Side that most exercises Timayenis, who is also inclined to despise Jews because they are refugees from prejudice. "Let the Jews of this country understand," he writes, "that the American people do not want, and will not receive, the dregs of a race which has won only scorn and contempt from the people of Europe." The message of The American Jew, repeated several times throughout the book, is : "The Jew must go! " 
   Timaayenis, of course, did not speak for the whole American population, the majority of whom would have identified far more readily with the famous sentiments expressed by Emma Lazarus in the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, which was dedicated by President Cleveland in 1886, sentiments that indeed were inspired by the piteous sight of the arrival to New York of the very Jews that had aroused the venom of The American Jew : 

     Give me your tired, your poor ;
     Your buddled masses yearning to breathe free, 
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

   The Statue of Liberty would have been the first thing that Julius Oppenheimer saw when he came to the United States in 1888 to join his prosperous and well-connected uncles and take his place among "Our Crowd." He was at that time a slim, good-looking, but shy seventeen-year-old who spoke little English. However, he clearly lost no time in joining the cultural, spiritual and [perhaps most importantly] social world of his uncles. In the yer of his arrival in New York, he is listed as a member of Adler's Ethical Culture Society. Though he was, of course, immediately given a position in Rothfeld, Sterm & Co., he could not yet afford to live on the Upper West Side and, for the first few years before his inexorable rise through the company's hierarchy, lived in rented accommodation in Lower Manhattan, the same part of town in which the company had its office. 
   In many ways Julius Oppenheimer was arriving in Americaat a bad time. The so-called "Gilded Age," when unimaginably large fortunes were amassed by the Robber Barons [Carnegie in steel, Rockefeller in oil, Vanderbilt in railroads and Astor in real estate], and smaller but still significant fortunes were made by Jewish bankers and traders, was coming to an end, as the country headed toward recession. No doubt related to the darkening economic scene was the growth of racial anti-Semitism, which , while rarely as virulent as that expressed in The American Jew, could still shock many of those German Jewish migrants who had believed in America as a land free from the "old strife." 

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 4

          WHAT THE GERMAN JEWS WHO SETTLED IN 
          NEW YORK CITY WANTED WAS TO BE 
          ACCEPTED ---- doesn't sound unreasonable to me 

   There was an earnest desire among the wealthy Jewish community in New York to "fit in," both with each other and with the wider society. As the names given to the Seligman offspring illustrate, what those prosperous German Jews wanted, perhaps above all, was to be accepted as Americans. 
   The loyalty this generation of German Jewish migrants felt toward the United States had its origin in the contrast between the restrictions they had experienced in Germany and the freedom and opportunities they had found in America. Until the Civil War, America had been for these migrants almost everything that they had been promised it would be. Of course, every Jew in America would, at some time or other, have come across anti-Semitic prejudice , but the state itself was not Hebrews anti-Semitic; there was no institutionalized anti-Semitism enshrined in law, decree or officially sanctioned customs. In the years during and after the Civil War, however, this began to change, partly because of the conspicuous success of the German Jews, and partly because life in the United States for everyone during these years became darker and more troubled. 

           THE ETHICAL CULTURE SOCIETY --- AFFLUENT 
           JEWISH FAMILIES BELONGED TO THIS CLUB TO
           LOSE THEIR JEWISHNESS 

   The leader of the EthicalCulture Society was Felix Adler, a German Jew whose father, Samuel Adler, was, from 1856 to his death in 1873, the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, the spiritual center of "OUR CROWD." When Samuel Adler died, Felix, then just twenty-two years old, was invited to deliver a sermon at the Temple Emanu-El, presumably as a prelude to being invited to take his father's place as rabbi. However, as the sermon he gave, "The Judaism of the Future," effectively ended any possibility there might have been of him succeeding his father. At the same time, however, it inspired in the minds of many who heard it a vision of what Reform Judaism might evolve into. 
   In the sermon Adler spoke of the "ruins" of religion, among which he explicitly included Judaism, and asked the question : what remains when the ruins are removed ? His answer, which would form the basis both for the EthicalCulture Society and for the Weltanschauung in which Oppenheimer was brought up, was : MORALITY. Judaism, Adler proclaimed, was well placed to provide leadership to the religion of the future, since it always had been , essentially, a religion of DEED rather than creed. In this sense, Adler claimed, Judaism as a moral force "was not given to the Jews alone," but rather had a destiny "to embrace in one great moral state the whole family of men."  

   Adler's talk of the "ruins" of Judaism did not go down well among the majority of the congregation of Temple Emanu-El, and he was never asked to address the synagogue again. However, for a small but influential minority his view of the "Judaism of the future" seemed to be the perfect solution to two pressing problems : (1) how to be a Jew if one did not actually believe any elements of the Jewish creed ; and (2) how to combine being a good Jew with being a good American. 

   After a career asa rabbi was denied to him, Adler was offered, and accepted, a professorship in Hebrew at Cornell University. While there, he ran into trouble when he was accused of being an atheist, but, back in New York City, moves were afoot to attract him back as the head of the Judaism of the future--- the vision of which he had outlined in his divisive sermon. And so, in 1876, Adler gave a talk in New York in which he announced the establishment of a new organization, the Ethical Culture Society . This was to be a religion without a religious belief, a "practical religion."  " We propose," Adler announced : 


     to entirely exclude prayer and every form of ritual . . . freely do I own to this purpose of reconciliation and candidly do I confess that it is my dearest object to exalt the present movement above the strife of contending sects and parties, and at once to occupy that common ground where we may all meet, believers and unbelievers, for purposes in themselves, lofty and unquestioned by any . . . freedom of thought is a sacred right of every individual man. . . DIVERSITY IN THE CREED, UNANIMITY IN THE DEED. This is that practical religion from which none dissents. This is that Platform broad enough to receive the worshipper and the infidel. This is that common ground where we may all grasp hands as brothers united in mankind's common cause. 

   "Adler's proposal for a new movement," Howard B. Radest, a historian of the movement has written, "had the virtue of completing an Americanization without betraying what his listeners regarded as the core of the Jewish faith ---its prophetic tradition --- It was, we suggest, no accident that Adler's address echoed the First Amendment to the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, for at Cornell Adler had traced the connection between prophetic and democratic values." 
   The Ethical Culture Society received its certification of incorporation in February 1877. It was not then, nor was it ever, a mass movement. In some ways it was more like an exclusive club : to become a member one needed the sponsorship of another member. "The Sunday Meeting," Radest writes, "was a social occasion, too. Here one greeted old friends, came to see and be seen, came to be entertained." It was not a religion at all, still less a proselytizing one. "Ethical Culture seemed to make it difficult for people to discover it or, having discovered it, to find their way into its ranks. In some circles the impression still exists of a rather select group." 

   
   
   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 Until WORLD WAR II --- Episode 3

     GERMAN JEWS REACT TO ARRIVAL OF JEWS IN NEW 
    YORK CITY FROM RUSSIA AND POLAND 

    The arrival of the Russian and Polish Jews was such an embarrassment to the established  German Jewish community that their first reaction to it was to argue, through editorials in their newspaper, American Hebrew, and direct lobbying from their organization, the United Hebrew Charities of New York, for the introduction of tougher immigration laws. When this came to nothing and the number of Eastern European Jewish immigrants kept rising,the German Jews set up the Education Alliance, which organized Americanization programs in which the new immigrants were instructed in "the privileges and duties of American citizenship." What drove these measures were not only the German Jews' love of America, but also a dread of the anti-Semitism which they feared the Eastern Jews would arouse. The Jewish historian Gerald Sorin points out :"These uptowners were very taken with Israel Zangwill's play 'The Melting Pot'. They saw in it a reinforcement of their own proposed solution for the problems of downtown : the sooner immigrants from eastern Europe gave up their cultural distinctiveness and melted into the homogenized mass, the sooner anti-Semitism would also melt."

   It was a strategy that German Jews had tried unsuccessfully in Germany, but which seemed to be working in the United States. It required, however, constant vigilance with respect to "cultural distinctiveness," a vigilance that could easily slip into the kind of self-denial of which Rabi accused Oppenheimer. One form this vigilance took was an acute sensitivity among German Jews about their names. Sometimes this led to the abandonment of German-sounding surnames, a notable example being Arthur Schonberg, the son of an impoverished Jewish family from the Rhineland, who would become famous as the millionaire New York banker August Belmont. More often, though, it tool the form of changing one's first name and giving toone's children names that sounded reassuringly "American." Joseph Seligman, another millionaire New York banker, brought his brothers, Wolfgang, Jacob, and Isias over from Germany, but on arrival they became William, James, and Jesse. The names of Joseph Seligman's children look like a roll call of American heroes : George Washington Seligman, Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman, and Alfred Lincoln Seligman (evidently "Abraham" was considered too Judaic). 
   Of the American heroes commemorated in these names, the least well known today is undoubtedly Robert Anderson.  He was a major in the U.S army at the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861 and was involved in the opening hostilities, when Ft. Sumter in South Carolina, which was then  under his command, came under fire from the Confederates. For holding his ground and defending the fort for thirty-four hoursMajor Anderson was promoted by Abraham Lincoln to Brigadier General and became a national hero, not just for the duration of the war, but also for many decades afterward. Because of him, the name "Robert" became immensely popular. For anyone wanting to affirm the identity of their offspring, it was the natural choice. Indeed J. Robert Oppenheimer was to like it so much that he ignored the "J" in his name and was known, by the family and friends, simply as "Robert" or "Bob." When he was asked what the "J" stood for, he would reply that it stood for nothing. In fact, as his birth certificate shows, it stands for "Julius," his father's name. For anyone striving to avoid "cultural distinctiveness," the name "Robert Oppenheimer," or even "J. Robert Oppenheimer," had obvious advantages over "Julius Oppenheimer." 

   Even so, the surname remained, and it was as "culturally distinctive" as a name can be, identifying its bearers' ancestors both geographically and ethnically. "As appears from his name," one of Oppenheimer's professors once wrote in an academic reference, "Oppenheimer is a Jew." If, ignoring Haskalah, one clung to the notion of Judaism as a defining race, a nation or a tribe, rather than simply a religion, then the professor was correct. After the Napoleonic decree of 1808, which required Jews to take a surname, "Oppenheimer" was the name adopted by those Jews who lived in the area around the small and fairly obscure town of Oppenheim, which lies in the Hesse area of Germany, between Mainz and Worms, not far from Frankfurt. With regard to J. Robert Oppenheimer, what "appears from the name" is that his ancestors were among those Hessian Jews. Could he look upon them and say, "These are my people?" Well, after his political awakening in the 1930s, when his relatives --- like all Jews in Germany --- were facing the horrors of the Nazis, his determination to play a part in defeating Hitler's regime did suggest some feeling of kinship with the victims of the Third Reich. But, until then, his reaction to his German Jewish relatives was to look upon them as if they came from a very distant time and place. When, as a child, he went to Germany on a family visit and met his grandfather, Benjamin Oppenheimer, who still lived just a few miles from Oppenheim, his impression [or so he later recalled] was of "an unsuccessful small businessman, born himself in a hovel, really, in an almost medieval German village." This, one feels, is the impression of a child used to the wealth of the Upper West Side and the modernity of twentieth-century Manhattan ; whether Benjamin would be regarded as "unsuccessful," his birthplace a "hovel" and his home town "medieval" by people with less exalted standards is, I think, doubtful. 

   The "almost medieval village" was presumably Hanau, a town northeast of Oppenheim, where Benjamin Oppenheimer lived and where his son, Julius, was born in 1871. Julius spent just seventeen years in Hanau before, in 188, leaving for America. Whatever the truth about Benjamin Oppenheimer's circumstances, the family clearly had aspirations for a better life than was possible in Hanau and, like many other German Jews, thought they could fulfill those aspirations in America. Julius' younger brother and sister, Emil and Hedwig, joined him a few years after he had set sail, and Julius himself was following the example of his two uncles, Solomon and Sigmund Rothfeld [ "Sol and Sig" as they were known in the family], who had migrated to the United States a generation earlier. 

   The ambition may have come from Benjamin's wife, Babette Rothfeld, since the two uncles in question were her brothers. "Sol and Sig" left for America in 1869, nearly twenty years before Julius Oppenheimer came to join them, but more than thirty years after the "SECOND MIGRATION" had begun. In those thirty years or so, a great deal had happened to the German Jewish community in America. Or, rather, one should say that in those years the American German Jewish community had been created, its development demonstrating both that the United States could indeed realize many of the hopes expressed in Max Lilienthal's letter, and that it could not entirely live up to the promise of being a land in which "old strife" between Jew and Christian had been forgotten. 

   By 1869, the German Jewish migrants who had landed in America thirty or so years earlier had formed a successful social group, among whom were a surprisingly large number of families that had become extremely wealthy. Within a single generation, the Seligmans, the Lehmans, the Guggenheims, the Schiffs, the Goldmans and the Saches had all amassed vast fortunes and beccome founders of some of the best-known, most successful and most powerful financial and commercial institutions in America. They had also created a fairly tight-knit community, known to its members as "OUR CROWD," a Jewish version of the more conspicuously wealthy group of families---the Astors, Vanderbilts, Morgans, Roosevelts, and so on --- that constituted New York's gentile high society during this period. "OUR CROWD" was a self-consciously cohesive community, whose members worshipped together at the Temple Emanu-El [ the Reform Jewish synagogue, whose imposing building on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1868, was a symbol of the success and aspirations of the German Jewish community] , socialized together, took holidays together and chose their wives and husbands from each other's families. 
   
  
   

Jews in America from 1800 until World War II --- Episode 2

        The Mass Migration of Jews To America in the Mid-1800s 

   The mass migration of German Jews to America that occurred in the mid-nineteenth century was intimately bound up with their earlier abandonment of the traditional trappings of Jewish identity. Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, was an essentially German movement, its prophet being the great Prussian Jewish thinker Moses Mendelssohn, which led in turn to that other essentially German movement, Reform Judaism, encouraged Jews to, literally and metaphorically, leave the ghetto in which they had been confined and embrace the modernizing ideas of the wider Western European Enlightenment. This meant using German rather than Hebrew as the language of worship, abandoning traditions and customs that served to isolate Jews from the rest of society, and reforming Jewish education so that it prepared people for the world at large rather than schooling them in a separate culture. The hope that inspired these changes was that, in return for abandoning those aspects of their culture that identified them as radically different from others, the Jews would receive from the gentile world  a lifting of the discriminatory laws that affected almost every aspect of their lives, and a full acceptance as members of society with the same legal, financial, and political rights as other citizens.  Thus fully assimilated, Jews would no longer think of themselves as a separate race or nation, but rather as adherents of a religion. Their nationality would be GERMAN , and they would be not a bit less German for worshipping in a synagogue rather than a church.
   It was the dashing of this hope that persuaded hundreds of thousands of German Jews in the middle decades of the nineteenth century to turn their backs on their home country and look to America to find the freedom and equality they had failed to achieve in Germany. Thus, in the eyes of German Jews, America became not only a refuge from discrimination and prejudice, but also the national embodiment of Enlightenment ideals, the ideals of Haskalah. Many of them therefore ceased trying to become accepted as Germans  and sought to become accepted as Americans.  
 "Amerika, du hast es besser." These famous words of Goethe are contained in the poem "Den Vereingten Staaten" [ "To the United States" ] , written in 1827, when, as an old man, he reflected upon the advantages that youthful America had over the "Old Continent" in having no tradition, no "decaying castles," and being therefore free from the continuous strife that comes from long memories. The image of America that Goethe's poem conjures up is one of a tabula rasa, waiting, so to speak, to have its history written upon it. This was an image perfectly suited to arouse the interest and expectations of the German Jews, a group who longed to start afresh, free from the tensions and prejudices of the past. 
   And so, beginning in the 1820s, the rallying cry "On to America" echoed throughout the Jewish community in Germany. A whole movement grew up dedicated to the encouragement of migration to the United States, publicizing the financial, social and political advantages of the New World, and providing hope and support to those prepared to make what must have been an alarming as well as  an exciting fresh start. In books by Europeans who had been to America, in letters to relatives from those who had migrated, and in village meetings where people gathered to her firsthand accounts of American life from migrants who had returned to visit families, the image of America as "the common man's utopia" was spread, inspiring more and more Jews to set sail for the United States. 
   A typical example of such inspirational firsthand accounts is a letter written in November 1846 by the journalist and academic Max Lilienthal, which was published in the German Jewish weekly newspaper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenbums. Extolling "the beautiful ground of civil equality" that he had discovered in America, Lilienthal announced : "The old Europe with its restrictions lies behind me like a bad dream. . . At last I breathe in liberty . . . Jew or Christian, Christian or Jew --- this old strife is forgotten, and only the man as such is respected and loved." Encouraging others to follow his example, he urged : "Shake off the centuries-old dust of Jew-pressure . . . become a human being like everybody else." And, he promised, in America : "Jewish hearts are open in welcome. Jewish organizations ready to help anyone. Why should you go on carrying the burden of legal exclusion ?" 
   The number of German Jews willing and eager to "shake off the centuries-old dust of Jew-pressure" was so large that it completely transformed the American Jewish community. In 1840, there were just 15,000 Jews in the United States ; by 1880, there were 280,000 , most of whom were of German origin. This influx of German Jews is known to Jewish historians as the "Second Migration" --- the "First Migration" being the arrival in the seventeenth century of a small community of Sephardic Jews. These were descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth century, who, by the nineteenth century, were a well-established part of American life. 
   These self-styled "old American Sephardic families" took pride in the fact that they had been in America for as many generations as the descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers, and tended to treat the new German arrivals with the kind of lofty disdain with which the German Jews would later treat the Russians and Poles. The first German Jews to arrive in America accepted the leadership of the old Sephardic community and even adopted the Sephardic form of worship. When the number of German Jewish migrants began to increase dramatically, however, the balance of power shifted and the German Ashkenazi Jews replaced the Sephardim as the leaders of the Jewish community. 
   The mass influx into America of Russian and Polish Jews, which took place from 1880 to 1920, formed the "Third Migration," and was on an entirely different scale from the previous two, being measured not in the tens of thousands, or in the hundreds of thousands, but in millions. Roughly two and a half million Jews from Eastern Europe arrived in the United States during the Third Migration, bringing with them a very different kind of Jewish culture from that of either the Sephardim or the Germans. 
   

JEWS IN AMERICA FROM 1800 UNTIL WORLD WAR II --- Episode 1

             JEWS IN SCIENCE  IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE 
            NINETEENTH & EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURIES 


Isidor Rabi And Robert Oppenheimer : Both Were Physicists ; 
     Both Were From New York ; and Both Were Jewish 

   Isidor Rabi [ Rabi rhymes with "Bobby" ] once remarked that his friend J. Robert Oppenheimer was "a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters," who "never got to be an integrated personality."  What prevented Oppenheimer from being fully integrated, Rabi thought, was his denial of a central part of himself : his Jewishness. As the physicist Felix Bloch, echoing Rabi, once put it , Oppenheimer "tried to act as if he were not a Jew and succeeded well because he was a good actor." And, because he was acting, he lost sight of who he really was. Oppenheimer had an impressive and wide-ranging collection of talents, abilities and personal characteristics, but where the central, united core of his personality ought to have been, Rabi thought, there was a gap and so there was nothing to hold those "bright shining splinters" together. "I understood his problem, " Rabi said, and when asked what that problem was, replied simply : "Identity." 

    
Rabi spoke as someone who, by virtue of his background, intelligence, and education  was well placed to understand Oppenheimer's "problem." He and Oppenheimer had a great deal in common : they were roughly the same age [ Rabi was six years older] , they were both theoretical physicists, were both brought up in New York City and were both descended from European Jewish families. Behind this last similarity, however, lay a fundamental difference. Rabi was proud of his Jewish inheritance and happy to define himself in terms of it. Though he had no religious beliefs, and never prayed, he once said that when he saw Orthodox Jews at prayer, the thought that came into his mind was : "These are my people." 
   No such thought could have entered Oppenheimer's mind, no matter who he was looking at. There was no group to whom he could point and say : "These are my people," and not just because of his ambivalence about his Jewish background. It was also because that background itself, regardless of Oppenheimer's feelings about it, could not have provided him with a sense of belonging and, therefore, the sense of identity that Rabi thought was missing in him. Rabi, despite his lack of religious beliefs, was Jewish in a fairly straightforward and unambiguous way ; the Jews simply were "his people." Theirs was the community to which he belonged. One cannot say the same thing about Oppenheimer. The sense in which he was Jewish, the sense in which he did --- and did not --- come from, and belong to, a Jewish community, is far more complicated and, as Rabi has perceptively noted, crucial in understanding the fragility of his sense of identity. 

   For an understanding of the elusive nature of Oppenheimer's Jewishness, the contrast between his family background and Rabi's is instructive. Despite their many and important similarities, and despite the fact that they grew up within a few miles of each other, Rabi and Oppenheimer were born into and brought up in families that were culturally worlds apart. Rabi was a "Polish Jew." Born in Galicia to a poor, Yiddish-speaking family of Orthodox Jews, he came to New York as an infant and was raised, first in the crowded slums of the Lower East Side and then in a tiny apartment in the Brownsville Section of Brooklyn.   Oppenheimer was born not in Europe, but in New York City, to a WEALTHY FAMILY that had abandoned its Jewish faith and traditions a generation earlier. The bustling and crowded "Jewish Ghetto" of the Lower East Side would have seemed utterly alien to the young Oppenheimer, who was brought up in an enormous luxury apartment in the genteel Upper West Side. The family had never spoken Yiddish, and, though German was his father's first language, it ws never spoken at home. 

   And yet, despite regarding himself neither as German nor Jewish, Oppenheimer was seen, by Jews and non-Jews alike, as a "German Jew." In New York in the early twentieth century the central division among the Jewish community was between, on the one hand, the German Jews and, on the other, the Polish and Russian Jews --- the differences between the two groups accurately mirrored by the differences between Oppenheimer and Rabi. The German Jews, sometimes called "Uptown Jews," were on the whole wealthier, more assimilated and less religious than their Polish and Russian counterparts, to whom they were notoriously condescending. At the time of Oppenheimer's birth in 1904 there were more Polish and Russian Jews in New York than German Jews, but the Germans assumed leadership of the Jewish community and took it upon themselves to help "Americanize"the Russians and Poles, who reacted with resentment at what they saw as a dismissal of their religion and their customs. 
   What Rabi called Oppenheimer's problem---the problem of identity--- was, in fact, a problem for the entire American Jewish community, perhaps its central problem. Certainly it was the issue at the heart of the tension between the two groups of Jews in New York City. For the Russian and Polish Jews, their sense of identity was bound up with their Jewishness : their Orthodox religious beliefs, their Yiddish language and their Jewish culture and traditions. That sense of identity, that culture, however, had been abandoned by the German Jews before they even came to America. 
   
   

A Bit of Honest History of America --- Episode 5

    IMMIGRANTS AND REBELLION AGAINST THE RICH 

   How the immigration of different ethnic groups contributed to the fragmentation of the working class, how conflicts developed among groups facing the same difficult conditions, is shown in an article in a Bohemian newspaper Svornost, of February 27, 1880. A petition of 258 parents and guardians at the Throop School in New York, signed by over half the taxpayers of the school district, said "the petitioners have just as much right to request the teaching of Bohemian as have the German citizens to have German taught in the public schools. . . In opposition to this, Mr. Vocke claims that there is a great deal of difference between Germans and Bohemians, or in other words, they are superior." 
   The Irish, still recalling the hatred against them when they arrived, began to get jobs with the new political machines that wanted their vote. Those who became policemen encountered the new Jewish immigrants. On July 30, 1902, New York's Jewish community held a mass funeral for an important rabbi, and a riot took place, led by Irish who resented Jews coming into their neighborhood. The police force was dominantly Irish, and the official investigation of the riot indicated the police helped the rioters : ". . . it appears that charges of unprovoked and most brutal clubbing have been made against policemen, with the result that they were reprimanded or fined a day's pay  and were yet retained upon the force." 
   There was desperate economic competition among the newcomers. By 1880, Chinese immigrants, brought in by the railroads to do the backbreaking labor at pitiful wages, numbered 75,000 in California, almost one-tenth of the population. They became the objects of continuous violence. The novelist Bret Harte wrote an obituary for a Chinese man named Wan Lee : 

"Dead, my revered friends, dead. Stoned to death in the streets of San Francisco, in the year of grace 1869 by a mob of halfgrown boys and Christian school children."

In Rock Springs, Wyoming, in the summer of 1885, whites attacked five hundred Chinese miners, massacring twenty-eight of them in cold blood. 
   The new immigrants became laborers, housepainters, stonecutters, ditchdiggers. They were often imported en masse by contractors. One Italian man, told he was going to Connecticut to work on the railroad, was taken instead to sulfate mines in the South, where he and his fellows were watched over by armed guards in their barracks and in the mines, given only enough money to pay for their railroad fare and tools, and very little to eat. He and others decided to escape. They were captured at gunpoint, ordered to work or die ; they still refused and were brought before a judge, put in manacles, and, five months after their arrival, finally dismissed. "My comrades took the train for New York. I had only one dollar, and with this, not knowing either the country or the language, I had to walk to New York. After forty-two days I arrived in the city utterly exhausted." 

   Their conditions led sometimes to rebellion. A contemporary observer told how "some Italians who worked in a locality near Deal Lake, New Jersey, failing to receive their wages, captured the contractor and shut him up in the shanty, where he remained a prisoner until the county sheriff came with a posse to his rescue."

   A traffic in immigrant child laborers developed, either by contract with desperate parents in the home country or by kidnapping. The children were then supervised by "padrones" in a form of slavery, sometimes sent out as beggar musicians. Droves of them roamed the streets of New York and Philadelphia. 

   As the immigrants became naturalized citizens, they were brought into the American two-party system, invited to be loyal to oe party or the other, their political energy thus siphoned into elections. An article in L'Italia, in November 1894, called for Italians to support the Republican party : 

     When American citizens of foreign birth refuse to ally themselves with the Republican Party, they make war upon their own welfare. The Republican Party stands for all that the people fight for in the Old World. It is the champion of freedom, progress, order, and the law. It is the steadfast foe of monarchial class rule. 

   There were 5 1/2 million immigrants in the 1880s, 4 million in the 1880s, creating a labor surplus that kept wages down. The immigrants were more controllable, more helpless than native workers ; they were culturally displaced, at odds with one another, therefore useful as strikebreakers. Often their children worked, intensifying the problem of an oversized labor force and joblessness ; in 1880 there were 1,118,000 children under sixteen [ one out of six] at work in the United States.  With everyone working long hours, families often became strangers to one another. 

   Women immigrants became servants, prostitutes, housewives, factory workers, and sometimes rebels. Leonora Barry was born in Ireland and brought to the United States. She got married, and when her husband died she went to work in a hosiery mill in upstate New York to support three young children, earning 65 cents her first week. She joined the Knights of Labor, which had fifty thousand women members in 192 women's assemblies by 1886. She became "master workman" of her assembly of 927 women, and was appointed to work for the Knights as a general investigator, to "go forth and educate her sister workingwomen and the public generally as to their needs and necessities." She described the biggest problem of women workers : "Through long years of endurance they have acquired, as a sort of second nature, the habit of submission and acceptance without question of any terms offered them, with the pessimistic view of life in which they see no hope." Her report for the year 1888 showed : 537 requests to help women organize, 100 cities and towns visited, 1,900 leaflets distributed. 

                 MUCH MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED. 

   
   

   

A Bit of Honest History of America --- Episode 4

      Controlling the Working People With False Information 

   Control in modern times requires more than force, more than law. It requires that a population dangerously concentrated in cities and factories, whose lives are filled with cause for rebellion, be taught that all is right as it is. And so, the schools, the churches, the popular literature taught that to be rich was a sign of superiority, to be poor a sign of personal failure, and that the only way upward for a poor person was to climb into the ranks of the rich by extraordinary effort and extraordinary luck. 
   In those years after the Civil War a man named Russell Conwell, a graduate of Yale Law School, a minister, and author of best-selling books, gave the same lecture, "Acres of Diamonds," more than five thousand times to audiences across the country, reaching several million people in all. His message was that anyone could get rich if he tried hard enough, if people looked closely enough, were "acres of diamonds." A sampling : 

     I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your duty to get rich . . . The men who get rich may be the most honest men you find in the community. Let me say here clearly . . . ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men. 
   . . . I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins . . . is to do wrong . . . let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings . . . 

    Conwell was a founder of Temple University. Rockefeller was a donor to colleges all over the country and helped found the University of Chicago. Huntington, of the Central Pacific, gave money to two Negro colleges, Hampton Institute and Tuskegee Institute. Carnegie gave money to colleges and libraries. Johns Hopkins was founded by a millionaire merchant, and millionaires Cornelius Vanderbilt, Ezra Cornell, James Duke, and Leland Stanford created universities in their own names. 
   The rich, giving part of their enormous earnings in this way, became known as philanthropists. These educational institutions did not encourage dissent ; they trained the middlemen in the American system --- the teachers, doctors, lawyers, administrators, engineers, technicians, politicians----those who would be paid to keep the system going, to be loyal buffers against trouble.
   In the meantime, the spread of public school education enabled the learning of reading, writing, and arithmetic for a whole generation of workers skilled and semiskilled, who would be the literate labor force of the new industrial age. It was important that these people learn obedience to authority.  A journalist observer of the schools in the 1890s wrote :"The unkindly spirit of the teacher is strikingly apparent ; the pupils, being completely subjugated to her will, are silent and motionless, the spiritual atmosphere of the classroom is damp and chilly."
   Back in 1859, the desire of mill owners in the town of Lowell that their workers be educated was explained to the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education : 

     The owners of factories are more concerned than other classes and interests in the intelligence of their laborers. When the latter are well-educated and the former are disposed to deal justly, controversies and strikes can never occur, nor can the minds of the masses be prejudiced by demagogues and controlled by temporary and factious considerations.  

     Joel Spring, in his book Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, says : "The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental." 

   This continued into the twentieth century, when William Bagley's Classroom Management became a standard teacher training text, reprinted thirty times. Bagley said :"One who studies the educational theory aright can see in the mechanical routine of the classroom the educative forces that are slowly transforming the child from a little savage into a creature of law and order, fitfor the life of civilized society."
   It was in the middle and late nineteenth century that high schools developed as aids to the industrial system, that history was widely required in the curriculum to foster patriotism. Loyalty oaths, teacher certification, and the requirement of citizenship were introduced to control both the educational and the political quality of teachers. Also, in the latter part ofthe century, school officials --- not teachers --- were given control over textbooks. Laws passed by the states barred certain kinds of textbooks. Idaho and Montana, for instance, forbade textbooks propagating "political" doctrines, and the Dakota territory ruled that school libraries could not have "partisan political pamphlets or books."
   Against this gigantic organization of knowledge and education for orthodoxy and obedience, there arose a literature of dissent and protest, which had to make its way from reader to reader against great obstacles. Henry George, a self-educated workingman from a poor Philadelphia family, who became a newspaperman and an economist, wrote a book that was published in 1879 and sold millions of copies, not only in the United States , but all over the world. His book Progress and Poverty argued that the basis of wealth was land, that this was becoming monopolized, and that a single tax on land, abolishing all others, would bring enough revenue to solve the problems of poverty and equalize wealth in the nation. Readers may not have been persuaded of his solutions, but they could see in their own lives the accuracy of his observations : 


 It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised ; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share . . . This association of poverty with the progress is the great enigma of our times. . . There is a vague but general feeling of disappointment ; an increased bitterness among the working classes ; a widespread feeling of unrest and brooding revolution . . . The civilized world is trembling on the verge of a great movement. Either it must be a leap upward, which will open the way to advances yet undreamed of, or it must be a plunge downward which will carry us back toward barbarism . . . 

   A different kind of challenge to the economic and social system was given by Edward Bellamy, a lawyer and writer from western Massachusetts, who wrote, in simple, intriguing language, a novel called Looking Backward, in which the author falls asleep and wakes up in the year 2000, to find a socialist society in which people work and live cooperatively. Looking Backward, which described socialism vividly, lovingly, sold a million copies in a few years , and over a hundred groups were organized around the country to make the dream come true. 
   It seemed that despite the strenuous efforts of government, business, the church, the schools, to control their thinking, millions of Americans were ready to consider harsh criticism of the existing system, to contemplate other possible ways of living. They were helped in this by the great movements of workers and farmers that swept the country in the 1880s and 1890s. These movements went beyond the scattered strikes and tenants' struggles of the period of 1830--1877. They were nationwide movements,  more threatening than before to the ruling elite, more dangerously suggestive. It was a time when revolutionary organizations existed in major American cities, and revolutionary talk was in the air. 
   In the 1880sand 1890s, immigrants wrer pouring in from Europe at a faster rate than before. They all went through the harrowing ocean voyage of the poor. Now there were not so many Irish and German immigrants as Italians, Russians, Jews, Greeks ----people from Southern and Eastern Europe, even more alien to native-born Anglo-Saxons than the earlier newcomers. 

              TO BE CONTINUED. STAY TUNED. 

   

A Bit of Honest History Of America --- Episode 3

    Classical Legal Thought in 19th & Early 20th Centuries 

   The Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS] , despite its look of somber, black-robed fairness, was doing its bit for the ruling elite. How could it be independent, with its members chosen by the President and ratified by the Senate ? How could it e neutral between rich and poor when its members were often former wealthy lawyers, and almost always came from the upper class ? Early in the nineteenth century the Court laid the legal basis for a nationally regulated economy by establishing federal control over interstate commerce, and the legal basis for corporate capitalism by making the contract sacred.
   In 1895 the Court interpreted the Sherman Act so as to make it harmless. It said a monopoly of sugar refining was a monopoly in manufacturing, not commerce, and so could not be regulated by Congress though the Sherman Act. [ U.S. v. E. C. Knight Co] . The Court also said the Sherman Act could be used against interstate strikes [the railway strike of 1894] because they were in restrain of trade. It also declared unconstitutional a small attempt by Congress to tax high incomes at a higher rate. [Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Company]. In later years it would refuse to break up the Standard Oil and American Tobacco monopolies, saying the Sherman Act barred only "unreasonable" combinations in restraint of trade. 
   A New York banker toasted the SCOTUS in 1895 : "I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States ---guardian of the dollar, defender of private property, enemy of spoliation, sheet anchor of the Republic." 
   Very soon after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, the SCOTUS began to demolish it as a protection for blacks, and to develop it as a protection for corporations. However, in 1877, a SCOTUS decision [ Munn v. Illinois] approved state laws regulating the prices charged to farmers for the use of grain elevators. The grain elevator company argued it was a person being deprived of property, thus violating the Fourteenth Amendment's declaration "nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." SCOTUS disagreed, saying that grain elevators were not simply private property but were invested with a "public interest" and so could be regulated. 
   One year after that decision, the American Bar Association, organized by lawyers accustomed to serving the wealthy, began a national campaign of education to reverse the Court decision. Its presidents said, at different times : "If trusts are a defensive weapon of property interests against the communistic trend, they are desirable." And : "Monopoly is often a necessity and an advantage." 
   
   By 1886, they succeeded. State legislatures, under the pressure of aroused farmers, had passed laws to regulate the rates charged farmers by the railroads. SCOTUS that year [ Wabash v. Illinois] said states could not do this, that this was an intrusion on federal power. That year alone, SCOTUS did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations. 
    By this time, SCOTUS had accepted the argument that corporations were "persons" and their money was property protected by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Supposedly , the Amendment had been passed to protect Negro rights, but of the Fourteenth Amendment cases brought before SCOTUS between 1890 and 1910, NINETEEN dealt with the Negro, 288 dealt with corporations. 
   The justices of the SCOTUS were not simply interpreters of the Constitution. They were men of certain backgrounds, of certain interests. One of them [ Justice Samuel Miller] had said in 1875 :"It is vain to contend with Judges who have been at the bar the advocates for forty years of railroad companies, and all forms of associated capital . . ." In 1893, SCOTUS Justice David J. Brewer, addressing the New York State Bar Association, said : 

     It is the unvarying law that the wealth of the community will be in the hands of the few . . . The great majority of men are unwilling to endure that long self-denial and saving which makes accumulations possible . . . and hence it always has been, and until human nature is remodeled always will be true, that the wealth of a nation is in the hands of a few, while the many subsist upon the proceeds of their daily toil. 

   This was not just a whim of the 1880s and 1890s---it went back to the Founding Brothers, who had learned their law in the era of Blackstone's Commentaries, which said : "So great is the regard of the law for private property, that it will not authorize the least violation of it ; no, not even for the common good of the whole community." 

        MUCH MORE TO COME. 

A Bit of Honest History of America--- Episode 3

         THE CAPTAINS OF THE INDUSTRIAL EMPIRES 

   Andrew Carnegie was a telegraph clerk at seventeen, then secretary to the head of Pennsylvania Railroad, then broker in Wall Street selling railroad bonds for huge commissions, and was soon a millionaire.  He went toLondon in 1872, saw the Bessemer method of producing steel, and returned to the United States to build a million-dollar steel plant.Foreign competition was kept out by a high tariff conveniently set by Congress, and by1880 Carnegie was producing 10,000 tons of steel a month, making $1.5 million a year in profit. By 1900 he was making $40 million a year, and that year, at a dinner party, he agreed to sell his steel company to J.P. Morgan. He scribbled the price on a note : $492,000,000. 
   Morgan then formed the U.S. Steel Corporation, combining Carnegie's corporation with others. He sold stocks and bonds for $1,300,000,000 [ about 400 million more than the combined worth of the companies] and took a fee of 150 million for arranging the consolidation.  How could dividends be paid to all those stockholders and bondholders ? By making sure Congress passe tariffs keeping out foreign steel ; by closing off competition and maintaining the price at $28 a ton ; AND BY WORKING 200,000 MEN TWELVE HOURS A DAY FOR WAGES THAT BARELY KEPT THEIR FAMILIES ALIVE. 
   And so it went, in industry after industry---shrewd, efficient businessmen building empires, choking out competition, maintaining high prices, keeping wages low, using government subsidies. These industries were the first beneficiaries of the "welfare state." By the turn of the century, American Telephone and Telegraph had a monopoly of the nation's telephone system, International Harvester made 85 percent of all farm machinery, and in every other industry resources became concentrated, controlled. The banks had interests in so many of these monopolies as to create an interlocking network of powerful corporation directors, each of whom sat on the boards of many other corporations. According to a Senate report of the early twentieth century, Morgan at his peak sat on the board of forty-eight corporations, Rockefeller, thirty-seven corporations. 
  Meanwhile, the government of the United States was behaving almost exactly as Karl Marx described a capitalist state : pretending neutrality to maintain order, but serving the interests of the rich. Not that the rich agreed among themselves ; they had disputes over policies.  But the purpose of the state was to settle upper-class disputes peacefully, control lower-class rebellion, and adopt policies that would further the long-range stability of the system. The arrangement between Democrats and Republicans to elect Rutherford Hayes in 1877 set the tone. Whether Democrats or Republicans won, NATIONAL POLICY WOULD NOT CHANGE IN ANY IMPORTANT WAY. 

   When Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, ran for President in 1884, the general impression in the country was that he opposed the power of monopolies and corporations, and that the Republican party, whose candidate was James Blaine, stood for the wealthy. But when Cleveland defeated Blaine, Jay Gould wired him :"I feel . . . that the vast business interests of the country will be entirely safe in your hands." AND HE WAS RIGHT. 
   One of Cleveland's chief advisers was William Whitney, a millionaire and corporation lawyer, who married into the Standard Oil fortune and was appointed Secretary of the Navy by Cleveland. He immediately set about to create a "steel navy," buying the steel at artificially high prices from Carnegie's plants. Cleveland himself assured industrialists that his election should not frighten them. "No harm shall come to any business interest as the result of administrative policy so long as I am President . . . a transfer of executive control from one party to another does not mean any serious disturbance of existing conditions." 
   The presidential election itself had avoided real issues ;  there was no clear understanding of which interests would gain and which would lose if certain policies were adopted. It took the usual form of election campaigns, concealing the basic similarity of the parties by dwelling on personalities, gossip, trivialities. Henry Adams, an astute literary commentator of that era, wrote to a friend about the election : 

   We are here plunged in politics funnier than words can express. Very great issues are involved . . . But the amusing thing is that no one talks about real interests. By common consent they agree to let these alone. We are afraid to discuss them. Instead of this the press is engaged in a most amusing dispute whether Mr. Cleveland had an illegitimate child and did or did not live with more than one mistress. 

   In 1887, with a huge surplus in the treasury, Cleveland vetoed a bill appropriating $100,000 to give relief to Texas farmers to help them buy seed grain during a drought. He said : "Federal aid in such cases . . . encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character." But that same year, Cleveland used his gold surplus to pay off wealthy bondholders at $28 above the $100 value of each bond --- a gift of $45 million. 
   The chief reform of the Cleveland administration gives away the secret of reform legislation in America. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 was supposed to regulate the railroads on behalf of the consumers. But Richard Olney, a lawyer for the Boston and Maine and other railroads, and soon to be Cleveland's attorney general, told railroad officials who complained about the Interstate Commerce Commission that it would not be wise to abolish the Commission "from a railroad point of view." He explained : 

   The Commission . . . is or can be made, of great use tothe railroads. It satisfies the popular clamor for a government supervision of railroads, at the same time that supervision is almost entirely nominal . . . The part of wisdom is not to destroy the Commission, but to utilize it. 

   Cleveland himself, in his 1887 State of the Union message, had made a similar point, adding a warning : "Opportunity for safe, careful, and deliberate reform is now offered ; and none of us should be unmindful of a time when an abused and irritated people . . . may insist upon a radical and sweeping rectification of their wrongs."
   Republican Benjamin Harrison, who succeeded Cleveland as President from 1889 to 1893, was described by Matthew Josephson, in his colorful study of the post--Civil War years, The Politicos : "Benjamin Harrison had the exclusive distinction of having served the railway corporations in the dual capacity of lawyer and soldier. He prosecuted the strikers[of1877] in the federal courts. . . and he also organized and commanded a company of soldiers during the strike. . ." 
  Harrison's term also saw a gesture toward reform. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act, passed in 1890, called itself "An Act to protect trade and commerce against unlawful restraints" and made it illegal to form a " combination or conspiracy" to restrain trade in interstate or foreign commerce. Senator John Sherman, author of the Act, explained the need to conciliate the critics of monopoly : "They had monopolies . . . of old, but never before such giants as in our day. You must heed their appeal or be ready for the socialist, the communist, the nihilist. Society is now disturbed by forces never felt before . . ." 
   When Cleveland was elected President again in 1892, Andrew Carnegie, in Europe, received a letter from the manager of his steel plants, Henry Clay Frick : "I am very sorry for President Harrison, but I cannot see that our interests are going to be affected one way or the other by the change in administration." Cleveland, facing the agitation in the country caused by the panic and depression of 1893, used troops to break up "Coxey's Army," a demonstration of unemployed men who had come to Washington, and again to break up the national strike on the railroads the following year. 

                         MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED. 
  

   

A BIT of HONEST HISTORY OF AMERICA --- Episode 2

     OUR RAILROADS WERE BUILT MOSTLY ON FRAUD

   The wild fraud on the railroads led to more control of railroad finances by bankers, who wanted more stability ---- profit by law rather than by theft. By the 1890s, most of the country's railway mileage was concentrated in six huge systems. Four of these were completely or partially controlled by the House of Morgan, and two others by the bankers Kuhn, Loeb, and Company. 
   J.P.Morgan had started before the war, as the son of a banker who began selling stocks for the railroads for good commissions. During the Civil War he bought five thousand rifles for $3.50 each from an army arsenal, and sold them to a general in the field for $22 each. The rifles were defective and would shoot off the thumbs of the soldiers using them. A congressional committee noted this in the small print of an obscure report, but a federal judge upheld the deal as the fulfillment of a valid legal contract. 
   Morgan has escaped military service in the Civil War by paying $300 to a substitute. So did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Philip Armour, Jay Gould, and James Mellon. Mellon's father had written to him that "a man may be a patriot without risking his own life or sacrificing his health. There are plenty of lives less valuable." 
   It was the firm of Drexel, Morgan and Company that was given a U.S. government contract to float a bond issue of $260 million. The government could have sold the bonds directly ; it chose to pay the bankers $5 million in commission. 
   On January 2, 1889, as Gustavus Myers reports : 

     . . . a circular marked "Private and Confidential" was issued by the three banking houses of Drexel, Morgan & Company, Brown Brothers & Company, and Kidder, Peabody & Company. The most painstaking care was exercised that this document should not find its way into the press or otherwise become public . . . Why this fear ? Because the circular was an invitation . . . to the great railroad magnates to assemble at Morgan's house, No. 219 Madison Avenue, there to form, in the phrase of the day, an iron-clad combination . . . a compact which would efface competition among certain railroads, and unite those interests in an agreement by which the people of the United States would be bled even more effectively than before. 

   There was a human cost to this exciting story of financial ingenuity. That year, 1889, records of the Interstate Commerce Commission showed that 22,000 railroad workers were killed or injured. 
   In 1895 the gold reserve of the United States was depleted, while twenty-six New York City banks had $129 million in gold in their vaults. A syndicate of bankers headed by J. P. Morgan & Company,  August Belmont & Company, the National City Bank, and others offered to give the government gold in exchange for bonds. President Grover Cleveland agreed. The bankers immediately resold the bonds at higher prices, making $18 million profit. 
   A journalist wrote : "If a man wants to buy beef, he must go to the butcher . . . If Mr. Cleveland wants much gold, he must go to the big banker." 
   While making his fortune, Morgan brought rationality and organization to the national economy. He kept the system stable. He said : "We do not want financial convulsions and have one thing one day and another thing another day." He linked railroads to one another, all of them to banks, banks to insurance companies. By 1900, he controlled 100,000 miles of railroad, half the country's mileage. 
   Three insurance companies dominated by the Morgan group had a billion dollars in assets.  They had $50 million a year to invest --- money given by ordinary people for their insurance policies.  Louis Brandeis, describing in his book Other People's Money [ before he became a Supreme Court justice] , wrote : "They control the people through the people's own money." 
   John D. Rockefeller started as a bookkeeper in Cleveland, became a merchant, accumulated money, and decided that, in the new industry of oil, who controlled the oil refineries controlled the industry. He bought his first oil refinery in1862, and by 1870 set up Standard Oil Company of Ohio, made secret agreements with railroads to ship his oil with them if they gave him rebates --- discounts --- on their prices, and thus drove competitors out of business. 
  One independent refiner said : "If we did not sell out . . . we would be crushed out. . . There was only one buyer on the market and we had to sell at their terms." Memos like this one passed passed among Standard Oil officials : "Wilkerson & Co. received car of oil Monday 13th . . . Please turn another screw." A rival refinery in Buffalo was rocked by a small explosion arranged by Standard Oil officials with the refinery's chief mechanic. 
   The Standard Oil Company, by 1899, was a holding company which controlled the stock of many other companies. The capital was $110 million, the profit was $45 million a year, and John D. Rockefeller's fortune was estimated at $200 million. Before long he wouldmove into iron, copper, coal, shipping, and banking [ Chase Manhattan Bank ] . Profits would be $81 million a year, and the Rockefeller fortune would total two billion dollars. 

   THIS SAD SAGA WILL CONTINUE. STAY TUNED. 

    
   

A bit of honest history of America --- Episode 1

ROBBER BARONS AND HORATIO ALGER BULLSHIT 

  In the year 1877, the signals were given for the rest of the century: the black would be put back ; the strikes of the white workers would not be tolerated ; the industrial and political elites of North and South would take hold of the country and organize the greatest march of economic growth in human history. They would do it with the aid of, and at the expense of, black labor, white labor, Chinese labor, European immigrant labor, female labor, rewarding them differently by race, sex, national origin, and social class, in such a way as to create separate levels of oppression --- a skillful terracing to stabilize the pyramid of wealth. 
   Between the Civil War and 1900, steam and electricity replaced human muscle, iron replaced wood, and steel replaced iron [ before the Bessemer process, iron was hardened into steel at the rate of 3 to 5 tons a day ; now the same amount can be processed in 15 minutes] . Machines could now drive steel tools. Oil could lubricate machines and light homes, streets, factories. People and goods could move by railroad, propelled by steam along steel rails ; by 1900 there were 193,000 miles of railroad. The telephone, the typewriter, and the adding machine speeded up the work of business. 
  Machines changed farming. Before the Civil War it took 61 hours of labor to produce an acre of wheat. By 1900, it took 3 hours, 19 minutes. Manufactured ice enabled the transport of food over long distances, and the industry of meatpacking was born. 
   Steam drove textile mill spindles ; it drove sewing machines. It came from coal.  Pneumatic drills now drilled deeper into the earth for coal. In 1860, 14 million tons of coal were mined ; by 1884 it was 100 million tons. More coal meant more steel, because coal furnaces converted iron into steel ; by 1880 a million tons of steel were being produced ; by 1910, 25 million tons. By now electricity was beginning to replace steam. Electrical wire needed copper, of which 30,000 tons were produced in 1880 ; 500,000 tons by 1910. 
   To accomplish all this required ingenious inventors of new processes and new machines, clever organizers and administrators of the new corporations, a country rich with land and minerals, and a huge supply of human beings to do the back-breaking, unhealthful, and dangerous work.  Immigrants would come from Europe and China, to make the new labor force. Farmers unable to buy the new machinery or pay the new railroad rates would move to the cities. Between 1860 and 1914, New York grew from 850,000 to 4 million, Chicago from 110,000 to 2 million, Philadelphia from 650,000 to 1.5 million. 
   In some cases the inventor himself became the organizer of businesses --- like Thomas Edison, inventor of electrical devices. In other cases, the businessman compiled other people's inventions, like Gustave Swift, a Chicago butcher who put together the ice-cooled railway car with the ice-cooled warehouse to make the first national meatpacking company in 1885. James Duke used a new cigarette-rolling machine that could roll, paste, and cut tubes of tobacco into 100,000 cigarettes a day ; in 1890 he combined the four biggest cigarette producers to form the American Tobacco Company.  
   WHILE SOME MILLIONAIRES STARTED IN POVERTY, MOST DID NOT.  A study of the origins of 303 textile, railroad, and steel executives of the 1870s showed that 90 percent came from middle-or upper-class families. THE HORATIO ALGER STORIES OF "RAGS TO RICHES" WERE TRUE FOR A VERY FEW MEN, BUT MOSTLY A MYTH, AND A USEFUL MYTH FOR CONTROL. 
  Most of the fortune building was done legally, with the collaboration of the government and the courts. Sometimes the collaboration had to be paid for. Thomas Edison promised New Jersey politicians $1,000 each in return for favorable legislation. Daniel Drew and Jay Gould spent $1 million to bribe the New York legislature to legalize their issue of $8 million in "watered stock" [ stock not representing real value] on the Erie Railroad.
   The first transcontinental railroad was built with blood, sweat, politics and thievery, out of the meeting of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads. The Central Pacific started on the West Coast going east ; it spent $200,000 in Washington on bribes to get 9 million acres of free land and $24 million in bonds, and paid $79 million, an overpayment of $36 million, to a construction company which really was its own. The construction was done by three thousand Irish and ten thousand Chinese, over a period of four years, working for one or two dollars a day. 
   The Union Pacific started in Nebraska going west. It had been given 12 million acres of free land and $27 million in government bonds. It created the Credit Mobilier company and gave them $94 million for construction when the actual cost was $44 million. Shares were sold cheaply to Congressmen to prevent investigation. This was at teh suggestion of Massachusetts Congressman Oakes Ames, a shovel manufacturer and director of Credit Mobilier, who said : "There is no difficulty in getting men to look after their own property." The Union Pacific used twenty thousand workers ---war veterans, and Irish immigrants, who laid five miles of track a day and died by the hundreds in the heat, the cold, and the battles with the Indians opposing the invasion of their territory. 
   Both railroads used longer, twisting routes to get subsidies from towns they went through. In 1869, amid music and speeches, the two crooked lines met in Utah. 

              MUCH MORE TO COME. STAY TUNED.