"The Rest of Us": The Rise of America's Eastern European Jews

Preface

It was not my intention when I decided to write this book to write a book that would merely be about rich people. There are some readers, of course, who will argue that this is what the book has become, since our American society inevitably measures success in dollars. But I was actually thinking of America’s Eastern European Jews in terms of another kind of success—a social success, that of a mass migration of millions of people who have managed to become, within the lifespan of a single generation, an essential part of our social fabric and civic landscape.

The Jewish immigrants who came to America between 1881 and 1915 seemed, at first glance, to be culturally unadaptable: poor, hungry, ill-clothed, often sickly, speaking no English and in some cases illiterate, they were also steeped in a religious tradition that even America’s older-established Jews considered barbaric and bordering upon fanaticism. Politically, they burned with ideas that most Americans had been taught were radical and dangerous. No culture could have seemed more alien to our shores. What could possibly be done with these people, these benighted escapees from a distant, despotic land? How and where would they ever fit in?

And yet, barely a hundred years later, here they are—as people of prominence and influence in every major American city, and in nearly every walk of life. They have survived anti-Semitism from both Christians and fellow Jews. And they have prospered—in a wide-ranging spectrum of businesses from Wall Street to Hollywood, as well as in science, education, politics, the professions, and the arts—and their prosperity has contributed to the prosperity of America at large. Theirs has been a success story in what the sociologists call assimilation.

It would be simplistic to say that this is a story that could have happened only in America. America did not offer the Eastern Europeans much of anything to begin with, beyond a chance to be lucky. But, with the inner resources these Jews were possessed of, that chance was enough. Throughout the world, and throughout history, Jews had been punished and persecuted whenever and wherever they seemed to outstep their bounds and threaten, economically, the Christian majority. In fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal, the Catholic monarchs expelled the Jews simply because they had become too important, too necessary. Similar Christian illogic was behind the czarist pogroms of Russia. For a time, for instance, Russian Jews were permitted to be bartenders and innkeepers, and to work in the liquor trade. But when they proved to be good at it, and prospered at it, allegations arose that the Jews were plotting to take over Russia, using vodka as a weapon to befuddle innocent Russian Christian minds, and a harsh reaction followed. Fears that Jews were usurping more than their rightful share of Europe’s money and power were also behind Hitler’s grisly plan to cleanse Europe of its Jews. But in America, to its credit, as the Russian Jews prospered, this did not happen, though there were plenty of mutterings of too much Jewish power from certain quarters. It didn’t happen, perhaps, because we are a nation of immigrants, a nation of gamblers—what greater gamble is there than immigration itself?—and in our hearts we all believe that everyone deserves that chance to be lucky, and this is what we mean when we talk about freedom.

But when assessing the success of the Eastern European Jews in the United States, it is important to keep matters in perspective, and to remember that for all their financial prosperity no American Jewish families have ever come remotely close to equaling the fortunes of the wealthiest non-Jews. The canard that Jewish money dominates the country is just that. No American Jew has ever amassed a personal fortune equal to that of, say, J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, or Howard Hughes. Among contemporary non-Jewish families, the Mellon and du Pont families are each worth between three and five billion dollars. The Getty and Daniel K. Ludwig families are worth between two and three billion, and the Rockefellers between one and two billion.

By contrast, the richest Jewish family in America is the Pritzker family of Chicago, collectively worth between seven hundred million and one billion dollars. The founding father, Nicholas J. Pritzker, came from Kiev at age nine in 1880, in the first wave of Russian immigrants. The basis of the family fortune is Chicago real estate, which Pritzker began acquiring in the early 1900s when the city was still young and raw. Never sell your land—lease it, was his advice to his sons, and they followed it. Today, the Pritzker real estate holdings are worth, conservatively, half a billion dollars, and other Pritzker investments include Hyatt Hotels, the Cerro-Marmon Corporation, the Hammond Organ Company, the W. F. Hall Printing Company, Continental Airlines, and a number of trucking companies. The Chicago law firm of Pritzker and Pritzker has no clients other than itself, and has not accepted a new client in over forty years because of potential conflicts of interest with the family’s other, far-flung enterprises.

The second-wealthiest Jewish American family is that of the late Samuel Irving Newhouse of New York, who, with his two sons, built a communications empire worth between six and seven hundred million dollars—twenty-one daily newspapers, five magazines, six television stations, and twenty cable-television systems. The patriarch of this family fortune was born in 1895 on New York’s Lower East Side, the eldest of eight children of Russian and Austrian immigrants. Though Newhouse was in the business of pleasing the reading and viewing public, he had no use for personal publicity. Invited many times to be listed in Who’s Who in America, he refused to fill out the necessary forms. He was, however, intensely devoted to the welfare of his relatives, and was one of the most nepotistic of American employers. At one point, some sixty-four Newhouse sons, brothers, cousins, and in-laws were on the Newhouse payroll. His most visible philanthropic gift has been the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at New York’s Lincoln Center, honoring his wife.

Next in line in the roster of Eastern European fortunes in America is that of Walter Annenberg and his seven sisters. Since the stock of Triangle Publications—the parent corporation that publishes TV Guide, Seventeen, the Philadelphia Daily News, and the Daily Racing Form, and that owns six television and nine radio stations, plus twenty-seven cable-TV franchises—has long been family held, the size of the Annenberg fortune has long been a matter of guesswork, but is probably in the three- to four-hundred-million-dollar range. To make sure that his private golf course at Sunny lands, his four-hundred-acre estate outside Palm Springs, would always have water, Walter Annenberg bought the local water company. Though Annenberg and his wife are solidly respectable citizens—he a former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, she a former U.S. chief of protocol, and both friends of Presidents Nixon and Reagan—the family fortune is clouded by its founder, Walter’s father, the late Moses L. Annenberg, who made his money from a telegraphic news service for bookie joints that carried information between racetracks across the country. In 1939, the senior Annenberg was convicted of income tax evasion, fined eight million dollars, and sentenced to three years in prison.

Less well known, perhaps, but on an equal financial footing with the Annenbergs is the Blaustein family of Baltimore. The founding father, Louis Blaustein, was born in Lithuania in 1869, and came to America in his teens. He started out as a kerosene peddler, and devised a then-novel way of transporting fuel—in a steel drum, mounted on wheels, with a spigot at the bottom, the forerunner of the tank truck. Next, he opened America’s first drive-in gas station. Up to then, gasoline had been sold at curbside, a clumsy operation. At the time, motorists had to take a station attendant’s word as to how much gasoline it took to fill their tanks, and more often than not, a station proprietor added a few gallons to the sale for good measure. At Blaustein’s station, this sharp practice was eliminated, and a ten-gallon jar was affixed to the top of each pump with the gallonage marked off on its side, so the motorist could see how much he was getting. It was the forerunner of today’s metered pumps.

But his most sophisticated innovation was his development of the first special antiknock motor fuel, which revolutionized the gasoline and automobile industry, and made possible the use of the high-compression engine. Blaustein’s gasoline was called then, as it is now, Amoco. Louis Blaustein died in 1937, and his company was taken over by his son, Jacob. In 1954, Jacob Blaustein negotiated the sale of Amoco to Standard Oil of Indiana for stock that made the Blaustein family the largest shareholders in that company. Today, the Blausteins own some 5,250,000 shares of Indiana Standard, worth on a good Wall Street day between $315,000,000 and $400,000,000.

Interestingly, those Russian Jews who chose to seek their fortunes in the most unorthodox and riskiest ways wound up, though hardly poor, in financial strata considerably below the Pritzkers, Newhouses, Annenbergs, or Blausteins. From a long, charmed life as a mastermind of organized crime, Meyer Lansky died worth between $100,000,000 and $150,000,000. And the flamboyant movie producers from Hollywood’s golden era did even less well, despite the power they once wielded. Perhaps this was because they moved in a world where excessive spending became almost de rigueur, a kind of overhead that had to be figured into the cost of doing business, and where everyone was expected to die broke in the Old Actors’ Home, which Louis B. Mayer had foresightedly helped endow. But Mayer himself, once the highest-salaried individual in the United States, died worth only $10,000,000.

From such figures, however, it is clear that the Russian-Jewish immigrants, while they did not create fortunes equal to those of the Christians, did not do badly, either. And whereas before the arrival of the Russians, the Germans had been the dominant Jewish economic group, the Russians quickly eclipsed the Germans in both numbers and sheer buying power, a continuing source of hard feelings between the two groups—the German Jews of old money, and the spectacularly arisen Russian nouveaux.

In some ways, the careers of the Russian-Jewish entrepreneurs I have chosen (rather arbitrarily) to write about, and their twentieth-century success stories, call to mind the sagas of the notorious Christian robber barons of the century before—the first-generation Fricks, Goulds, Carnegies, Vanderbilts, Harrimans, Hills, and Rockefellers, all of whom proved that new money and bad manners did not rule each other out. The newer Jewish barons shared many characteristics with their older Christian counterparts—brashness, energy, vast egotism, a certain rapacity, and an almost touching absence of humor. All viewed business as a deadly, fascinating, zero-sum game with only one winner on any field, and a joyful opportunity to outmaneuver the federal government. All were intelligent, even highly so, but few were the least bit intellectual. None seemed to enjoy their money very much when they got it in such huge quantities. Their tastes in pleasure remained simple, fleshly, and inexpensive.

And so what is different about the twentieth-century American Jewish entrepreneurs from Eastern Europe? Simply put, they were more honest. Almost without exception (and including Meyer Lansky), they believed in giving good weight. They were exceptionally careful about customer opinion. Few Russian Jews have been known to cry, The public be damned!—the curse that was uttered by William Henry Vanderbilt. There is Talmudic tradition in this. The Talmud itself enjoins against sharp practice, and cautions against, say, a Jewish cobbler’s placing his shop in too close proximity to the shop of another Jewish cobbler. The direct competition is to be given elbow room, and space in which to breathe and flourish. Perhaps these ethical standards explain why, for centuries, the ruling courts of Europe preferred to conduct their most important and sensitive business affairs with Jews. They could be trusted.

This significant difference also helps explain why, on the whole, Russian-Jewish business success in America has been accepted by the rest of the populace with equanimity and respect, without envy or rancor. The robber barons of old were feared and hated by the public, and vilified by the press. Even today the name of Jay Gould is a household word synonymous with ferocious greed and fiscal skulduggery. But who today has anything ill—or anything at all—to say about the business activities of a Nicholas Pritzker or a Louis Blaustein? Their public image has remained benign, if they have any public image at all.

The collective success stories—against such seeming odds—of the Russian Jews in America also illustrate a point well made by Emerson in The American Scholar: If the single man plant himself indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round to him. (Disraeli, a Jew, put it a little differently: Everything comes if a man will only wait.) Bringing with them from the Old World so little culture that was usable in the New, that’s what these Jewish men and women had—instincts: instincts that told them to fight and survive.

Which is not to say that the majority of Eastern European Jews in America were fighters and instinct players. Most had no such ambitions, opportunities, talents, or temptations to conquer. Most made a living, paid their taxes, died, and were buried to the words of the Kaddish. But those who fought, fought well and fairly.

But, as I have said, this book is not intended to be just about people getting rich. And, impressive as the business successes of such as the Pritzkers, Newhouses, Annenbergs, and Blausteins may be, this is not a book about the rise of these particular families. Rather, it is about the rise of men and women who have intimately affected the way we live and think and view and enjoy ourselves—who have, in the process of their American successes, left their imprint on our culture in terms of the news and entertainment media, the fashion and beauty industries, the arts and music, who have shaped our tastes in our living and even in our drinking habits. The book is inspired, if that is not too pompous a word, by a persistent suggestion. Having written two other books about earlier Jewish migrations to America—the proud Sephardic families who arrived many years before, and whose sons fought in, the American Revolution, and the German-Jewish banking and merchant families who came to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century—I felt it was appropriate to take up the third, and greatest, wave of Jewish immigration, which began in the 1880s and reached flood stage by 1910. When, Russian-Jewish friends kept asking me, are you going to write a book about the rest of us?

Here it is, and here they are.

S.B.

Part One

BEGINNINGS: 1880–1919

1

UPTOWN FIREBRAND

In the early summer of 1906, a huge and unruly mob of screaming Jewish women and children suddenly descended on a number of public schools on New York’s Lower East Side and began hurling stones and brickbats at the buildings. The riot extended from Rivington Street to Grand Street, and from the Bowery to the East River, with the greatest violence concentrated in the most easterly sections. Windows and door panels of the schoolhouses were smashed, and certainly many frightened teachers—cowering within their classrooms—would have suffered bodily harm if a police task force, wielding nightsticks, had not quickly appeared and been able to quell the mob. It was not immediately clear, furthermore, what the uprising was all about.

The year 1906 was one of militancy by women. The charismatic Jewish-American anarchist Emma Goldman, then thirty-seven, had just founded her publication, Mother Earth, with her beloved Sasha, Alexander Berkman, who had recently been released from prison for attempting to murder the steel magnate Henry Clay Frick in the Homestead Strike of 1892. The London Daily Mail had coined the terms suffragettes to describe women like Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, who were campaigning for woman suffrage. And the Lower East Side was by then no stranger to scenes of social unrest. The rent strikes of 1904 had been particularly disquieting and that same year, in the so-called Children’s Strike, more than a hundred young women, many in adolescence, most of them Jewish, who had been earning pennies for piecework in a local paper-box factory, marched to protest a pay cut of ten percent. The irony was that their employer was one Mr. Cohen, a Jew.