41845358-Antisemitism

HOMO JUDAICUS ECONOMICUS
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quickly at a little profit, small enough to place inside a pack and light enough to
carry.” 73 The gold rush brought the Seligmans to California, not for prospecting
but to open a store to supply miners. That proved to be very profitable and
opened the way to their becoming bullion dealers conveying gold to New York;
the profits enabled them to become great merchants and then, the first of many
German Jews to make the transition, bankers. Some “stayed behind” in merchandising
and we know their names as department stores—Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s,
Filene’s, Abraham & Strauss, and a great many more—one or several in
practically every American town and city. After the Civil War, during which
J. & W. Seligman & Co. greatly increased its fortune supplying uniforms to the
Union Army, the country caught “the railroad fever,” which afforded bankers
golden opportunities as dealers in railway securities at home and abroad as well
as in transacting the numerous mergers, bankruptcies, and reorganizations. At
one point the Seligmans, “the American Rothschilds” with a branch bank in
Paris, Frankfurt, London, New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans, held investments
in over a hundred railroad companies and sat on the boards of a great
many of them. Other families—in those family enterprises the ties that bound
were those of marriage and kinship; consider the Lehmans, Sachs, Goldmans,
Loebs, Kuhns, Speyers, and Wolffs—followed much the same path from peddlers
beset by ruffians throwing stones at “Christ killers” to bankers in top hats,
except that none was invited to be secretary of the treasury, as Joseph Seligman
was in the Grant administration. Horatio Alger served as tutor to Joseph’s children,
and it was the Seligman saga that inspired his rags-to-riches stories. A
milestone of another kind occurred in 1877, when Joseph and his family arrived
in his private railroad car in Saratoga for their annual vacation, only to be refused
entrance to the Grand Union Hotel by order of its new administrator,
Judge Henry Hilton, a fierce political foe of Joseph. A traumatic affair for him
and American Jewry, it set off a tidal wave of antisemitism and was followed by
the general exclusion of Jews from resorts, clubs, universities, business firms,
and other institutions.
The Guggenheims also “started on foot” when the fourteen-member
family arrived from Switzerland (though haling originally from Germany) in
Philadelphia in 1848. They soon began to make their own wares, initially an
improved stove polish, and eventually built up the greatest American fortune
except perhaps for the Rockefellers. They, too, went west but became copper
traders, a metal that was in great demand, as they anticipated, for telegraph
and telephone wires. They got their first mine in the form of shares given to
their father in lieu of payment of a bad debt. From there they went on not so
much to buy mines to work but to buy or build smelters to smelt and refine