Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [122]
To go back to the assimilationist’s dilemma: We must be careful, as always in the practice of history, not to ascribe meanings and motives as we see them through the lens of intervening events. To a person of my grandfather’s generation and background, the problem was not originally seen as a dilemma. During the first half of his life he was perfectly clear and absolutely convinced about what he wanted and what he believed he could achieve in America.
His Zion was here. What he wanted was what most immigrants wanted at a time when liberty glowed on the Western horizon: Americanization. This meant to him not the rubbing-off of identity, but Americanization as a Jew, with the same opportunity to prove himself, and the same treatment by society, as anyone else.
If he is to represent the problem, he must be fixed in terms of time, place, and circumstance. On an immigrant boy of the 1860s, America’s open door to upward mobility and the nineteenth century’s belief in progress were formative influences equal to, if not greater than, his Jewish heritage. This is a point that non-Jews tend to overlook. They think of a Jew as some kind of immutable entity, instead of as a product of time and place like any other human being.
Morgenthau was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1856, the same year as Louis D. Brandeis and Woodrow Wilson, and twenty years after Andrew Carnegie, the immigrant boy’s greatest success story. Brought up in early childhood in comfortable circumstances, he came to the U.S. with his family in 1865 at the age of nine, as a result of business reverses suffered by his father, Lazarus Morgenthau, a prosperous cigar manufacturer. Lazarus had risen from the German-Jewish equivalent of the American log cabin. As the son of an underpaid cantor with too many children, he had started life as an itinerant tailor, peddling self-made cravats at fairs and gradually enlarging the enterprise to a business employing others. By the time Henry, his ninth child, was born he had achieved success in the cigar business, with three factories and a thousand employees. He could provide a household with servants and the first built-in bathroom in Mannheim, educate his children, indulge the family passion for theater, opera, and concerts, and carry out the traditional philanthropies.
The ruinous effect of the American tariff on cigars plus the persuasions of a brother in America decided Lazarus Morgenthau to emigrate at the age of fifty. In New York he failed to flourish a second time. While his wife had to take in boarders, and the sons had to go out to work, he devoted what remained of his remarkable energy and inventiveness to raising funds for Jewish charities, in the course of which he invented the theater benefit. Persuading producers and theater-owners to donate a performance, he personally went the rounds of prominent Jewish homes to sell tickets at high prices. He had, however, an erratic temperament which, in the family’s reduced circumstances, caused a separation from his high-minded and hardworking wife.
From these genes and environment Henry emerged—Horatio Alger with a Jewish conscience. Speedily learning English, he graduated from public high school at fourteen, entered City College for a career in law but was forced to leave before the end of his first year to help support the family by working as an errand boy at $4 a week. After clerking in a law office for four years while teaching in an adult night school at $15 a week, he put himself through Columbia Law School and was admitted to the bar at the age of twenty-one. With two friends he formed a law firm in 1879 when the average age of the partners was twenty-three.
Strongly affected by the fall in family circumstances, and intensely ambitious, he was determined to make a fortune solid enough to withstand economic caprice, to provide for his mother and assure his children the advantages he had missed. He accomplished his goal in the practice of realty law, by conceiving the corporate form of doing business in real estate and