In the mid-19th century, a number of German-Jewish immigrant families surprised American high society with their rags-to-riches stories, most of them beginning in the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and ending up as wealthy millionaires residing in the elegant mansions on Fifth Avenue.
Among that tribe of German Jews were families such as the Loebs, the Goldmans, the Sachs, the Seligmans, the Guggenheims and — arguably preeminent among them — the Morgenthaus.
“The Morgenthaus were called the Jewish Kennedys and remained, as the former mayor of New York, Ed Koch, once remarked, the closest we’ve got to royalty in New York City,” author Andrew Meier tells The Times of Israel via video call from his home in Brooklyn.
A bulky text at nearly 1,000 pages, the book documents the story of four generations of a powerful political dynasty that spans 150 years of American history. Drawing on more than a decade of research, hundreds of interviews, and exclusive access to archives, the narrative begins with a detailed introduction to the life of Lazarus Morgenthau, who, along with his wife, Babette, arrived in New York from Germany in 1866.
“When the Morgenthaus first arrived to the United States they were the upstarts in [their cohort],” says Meier. “But Lazarus Morgenthau, who had been a cigar baron in Bavaria, Germany, lost his fortune and died in 1897 alone and destitute in a rented room on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, never having realized his dreams.”
Meier, a former Moscow correspondent for Time whose previous books include “The Lost Spy,” “Black Earth” and “Chechnya,” notes how Lazarus Morgenthau’s middle son, Henry — who was born in Mannheim, Germany, in 1856 — was determined not to suffer the same financial fate as his father.
“Henry Morgenthau was driven not to join [the group of prosperous German-Jewish families], but to join the other crowd, who were the more mainstream American tribes,” Meier says.
In 1879, Henry Morgenthau became a senior partner in the law firm Lachman, Morgenthau & Goldsmith. He built up his private fortune by buying properties in New York and quickly reselling them for small profits.
By the turn of the 20th century, the New York lawyer oversaw a swelling property portfolio in Manhattan.
“Henry Morgenthau embodied a new species of businessman, a new kind of New Yorker,” says Meier. “He served as the bridge — between Jew and Gentile, sons of immigrants and heirs of pilgrims — uniting divergent worlds of money.”
By the age of 55, Morgenthau had made his fortune and by the spring of 1912, he became a bundler for the Democratic Party, donating $4,000 a month ($112,000 in today’s money) to Woodrow Wilson’s presidential campaign, which Wilson won that year.
Morgenthau was rewarded for his political loyalty: Under the Wilson administration, he served as the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
“This [political posting] to Constantinople had always been known as ‘the Jewish seat,’” says Meier, adding that this was primarily because American Jews, free of the antagonisms that existed between Muslims and Christians, were believed to possess the required neutrality that would allow them to “maneuver among the Turks with greater ease and more aptly arbitrate disputes.”
But Morgenthau was no average diplomat. Working with several American and Turkish journalists in Constantinople, he helped expose the Armenian genocide when most of the world (including Morgenthau’s superiors back in Washington) chose to ignore it. It’s estimated that up to 1.2 million Christian Armenians were killed by the Young Turk government in the systematic slaughter that occurred from the spring of 1915 through the autumn of 1916.
Meier’s book notes how Morgenthau cabled then-secretary of state Robert Lansing from Constantinople on July 10, 1915. The Turks, the ambassador explained, were subjecting the Armenians to “arbitrary arrests, terrible tortures, wholesale expulsions and deportations from one end of the Empire to the other.” Accompanying the misery were “frequent instances of rape, pillage, and murder turning into massacre,” the ambassador added.
Morgenthau cabled Lansing again in August 1915: “I earnestly beg the [State] Department to give this matter urgent and exhaustive consideration.” The United States, however, did not organize any exodus. In fact, the Turks would never allow the Armenians to leave. Nevertheless, the story, with the help of Morgenthau, did make headlines in The New York Times in October 1915.
“When Henry Morgenthau returned from Constantinople, he was no longer just a New York lawyer and real estate baron,” says Meier. “He suddenly had moral authority and began to speak regularly on the international stage about America’s role as a moral force in the world.”
Like father, like son
From his father, Henry Morgenthau Jr. inherited that same duty to speak truth to power in the realm of public service. Born in New York in 1891, he served for 12 years as US treasury secretary during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.
To critics and rivals, Henry Morgenthau Jr. was known as Roosevelt’s bagman. But Meier says that description severely underestimates his numerous political achievements.
“Henry Morgenthau Jr. could easily be perceived as Roosevelt’s lackey,” Meier says. “In fact, he was essential to Roosevelt’s political career.”
As head of the Farm Credit Administration and acting secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau Jr. played a vital role in diplomatic negotiations that led to the US officially recognizing the Soviet Union in October 1933.
“The United States had no diplomatic ties with the Soviet Union from 1917 until 1933,” Meier says. “Henry Morgenthau Jr. put his neck out for Roosevelt to reach out to the Russians, and he was the first American politician to do so.”
He was also personally responsible for persuading Roosevelt to establish the War Refugee Board in January of 1944.
“By the summer of 1942, the State Department was already aware how [Europe’s] Jews were going to be exterminated as the Final Solution was being implemented,” says Meier. “They had very specific intelligence, through a variety of channels, about Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps.”
The War Refugee Board united spies and smugglers, local officials and diplomats to feed, fund and arm underground networks in the hope of opening doors to freedom for the remaining Jews of Europe who had a chance of fleeing the horrors of the Holocaust. At one point the board entertained ransom negotiations with Nazis. Its head, John Pehle, a Treasury Department lawyer, even tried to promote the idea of an Allied bombing of the rail lines to the largest of the death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland.
“For Henry Morgenthau Jr. the establishment of the War Refugee Board was a triumph and saved as many as 200,000 Jews, although the real figure will never be known,” Meier says. “But he also knew it was a small victory that was too little, too late.”
Meier notes how in the late 1940s Henry Morgenthau Jr. became “a reluctant Zionist.” He did, however, embark on a fundraising tour with future prime minister Golda Meir, raising tens of millions of dollars for Israel.
Source: timesofisrael