41845358-Antisemitism

150 ANTISEMITISM
lead, copper, and silver—the same strategy as John D. Rockefeller, who did
not own an oil well but monopolized the refineries. Adolf Lewisohn, who arrived
in the United States in 1867, did not set out as a peddler since he came
from a wealthy family in Hamburg. He got into copper mining in Montana
and had the railroad extended to carry the ore out from Butte. The struggle
over control of copper and silver production ended up with the Guggenheims
winning out, although the Lewisohns retained a large proportion of shares but
not a controlling interest. By 1914 the Guggenheims’ Smelting & Refining
Co. had a dominant position in the world market; it drew the fire of, among
others, Henry Ford and his antisemitic publications as a pro-German, conspiratorial
monopoly exercised by “the triple copper monarchy of the Baruchs,
the Lewisohns, and the Guggenheims.” 74 Today the Guggenheims are remembered
for their enormous philanthropic contributions and endowments
of labs, university institutes, hospitals, foundations, and museums, most notably
the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the nucleus of which was their
own private art collection.
Jacob Schiff (1847–1920) was the scion of a wealthy family of bankers,
scholars, and rabbis that traced its lineage to the fourteenth century in Frankfurt,
where in the ghetto the family had long made its home in a building
shared, half and half, with the Rothschilds. Arriving in the United States in
1865, Schiff soon joined the banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., married a
partner’s daughter, and became the senior partner by the early 1880s. He took
the firm into railroad investment, financing the Pennsylvania Railroad among
others. His way of investing in railways was to study thoroughly how to run
and finance railroads and gain firsthand knowledge by interviewing track men,
engineers, and station masters, and then to immerse himself minutely in the
details of a particular line. After an initial ferocious rivalry with the railway
magnate Edward H. Harriman, the two men formed a working alliance in
marketing railway shares in Europe and in the purchase, in 1897, of the Union
Pacific line, which Schiff was instrumental in reorganizing and recapitalizing
so that it became efficient, paid its debts, and was immensely profitable to both
parties. The turn of the century saw the “battle of the giants,” which pitted
Harriman and Schiff against James J. Hill and J. P. Morgan for control of the
Great Northern line; the outcome was more or less a draw, but Morgan had
met his match and thereafter could not exercise the control over the nation’s
finances that he sought, and Kuhn, Loeb surpassed Seligmans as the largest
Jewish investment house on Wall Street. In later years Schiff and Morgan
sometimes cooperated in investment ventures at home and abroad, activities
that proved to Ford that Morgan was a Jew.