Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [123]
While he was making money, he was constantly troubled and made restless, as shown by his notebook of moral maxims, by the demands of a political idealism and a strong social conscience, which led him to active involvement in municipal reform movements to combat the tenement system, to improve working conditions after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, to association with Lillian Wald in social work, and most particularly to close association and friendship with a man of advanced ideas, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. It is characteristic of Morgenthau that he was drawn to a radical figure twenty years his junior, and that when Wise refused the conditions proposed by the trustees for the pulpit of Temple Emanu-El, Morgenthau financed him in the founding of the libertarian Free Synagogue and served as its first president. The fact that Wise was already the active and outspoken secretary of the American Federation of Zionists obviously presented no dilemma.
In this respect I am struck by the fact that the two men whom I remember from my childhood as representing Jewish affairs to my assimilationist family were, paradoxically, two ardent Zionists, Stephen Wise and Judah Magnes. No doubt this was because they were both men of outstanding mind and character; but I wonder if it was not also because their primary subject—the return to Palestine —exercised a powerful appeal. Magnes’ concept of a bi-national Arab-Jewish state made, I know, a strong impression on my father. I personally do not remember anything very significant about Wise, except that he was rather frightening. He wore an enormous black hat and, I think, a black cloak, and when we met him on the way to school on Central Park West near his synagogue, he used to sweep off the hat with a bow to a child of about eight and say in his booming voice, “Good morning, Miss Wertheem,” a way in which no one else pronounced the name.
Magnes was different; there was a quality about him I cannot describe without sounding sentimental: something beautiful in his face, something that inspired a desire to follow, even to love. Although I had no individual contact with him beyond being allowed to sit at the dinner table and listen to him talk, I remember no one who made a greater impression. He talked about travels through wild areas of Palestine and a dangerous adventure in the desert—could it have been Sinai?—where he was stranded and came close to death. Beatrice Magnes, his wife, seemed to me equally admirable.
In an opposite sense from my grandfather, there was no dilemma for Magnes either, although he and Mrs. Magnes belonged to the “establishment.” It is interesting that of the American Zionist leaders, both Magnes and Brandeis were second-generation Americans and Wise close to it, having come to this country from Budapest at the age of seventeen months.
To return to Morgenthau: At the age of fifty-six, moved by Woodrow Wilson’s appearance on the political scene in 1912, and by a doctor’s warning that a loud heart murmur left him not long to live (a prognosis happily wrong by thirty-five years), he reached the rare decision that he had made enough money and could terminate his business career to enter public service. Wilson’s fight against social exclusiveness in the Princeton eating clubs made a special appeal to a Jew, who saw in him the image of a true democrat dedicated to equal opportunity for all Americans. Morgenthau pledged $5,000 a month for four months to launch Wilson’s presidential campaign, undertook the chairmanship of the Democratic Finance Committee, and, with an additional personal donation of $10,000, became one of the largest individual contributors.
The reward was not, as he had hoped, a Cabinet post as Secretary of the Treasury, but a minor ambassadorship—as it then was—to Turkey, the more disappointing because it was a post set aside for Jews. Given Morgenthau’s passionate desire to prove that a Jew could and would be accepted in America on equal grounds with anyone