From Many Lands E-Book

Louis Adamic

• Herausgeber: Classica Libris
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Winner of Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Nonfiction (1941) as the most important book on ethnic relations in the modern world.

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Leseprobe

Copyright

First published in 1940

Copyright © 2022 Classica Libris

Author’s Note

This publication was made possible by funds granted by Carnegie Corporation of New York. That Corporation is not, however, the author, owner, publisher, or proprietor of this publication, and is not to be understood as approving by virtue of its grant any of the statements made or views expressed therein.

FROM MANY LANDS

From six continents, seven seas, and several archipelagos

From points of land moved to wind and water

Out of where they used to be to where they are,

The people of the earth marched and travelled

To gather on a great plain.

—Carl Sandburg, in The People Yes

Dedication

To

DeWITT (“PASHA”) and ALICE STETTEN

Dear Alice & Pasha:

Twice within the memory of men now living dreams have had a force strong enough to reshape the world. At this moment it is the dream of personal power on the part of “men of destiny” that is dominant, that tumbles the Old World and its culture into ruin and sends men scurrying in fear before it. This dream is a nightmare.

Only yesterday it was another dream, a dream which set in motion the greatest migration in history. Then men did not scurry in fear; they were led by hope. The broad Atlantic became a common highway to the Land of Promise, where people were needed and wanted. And they came from many lands, a little lost, a little frightened, but eager-eyed, possessed of high belief, the belief in the possibility of function, of self-realization, of creativeness, of growth, of human worth.

But somewhere in the roar of our industrialism, somewhere in the tension of our commercialism, that dream was all but lost, or confused well-nigh beyond recognition. While at first the rich soil of the new continent and the wealth beneath it were magic and yielded us a flashy surface growth and an oversupply of material power, we have never yet flowered all-inclusively as a country and a culture. To a large degree we are a rootless, bewildered, uncertain people. Life on a mere economic plane, we have come to realize, has proved as impermanent, shallow, and sterile as the lands of the Dust Bowl, and we fume and blow fruitlessly in the winds of Depression. We have no deep tap roots in a cultural past to give us continuity, stability.

Now here we are, in this fateful year of 1940, still a groping people, splashed by the backwash of events in the Old World, our thoughts and actions touched by hysteria; the strands of our complicated ethnic past not yet interlaced into anything that gives pattern and texture to our life as individuals and as a people. Here and there the stuff in the “Melting Pot” has melted the pot. We eye one another uneasily. We are on the defensive against ourselves. Here is a danger of our own—perhaps unavoidable—making.

In the lands whence we come or stem civilization crashes into ruin, and, watching from our ringside seats, we are appalled. But to be appalled is no answer to anything. Within our American borders are tens of millions of people who carry within them, whether they know it or not, many of the things we bemoan losing—many of the things that were lost in Europe long before the Second World War began—began, in part, because they were lost in Europe.

We need not lose them. They were brought here by the waves of our immigration. They are still here. We need to cease eyeing one another uneasily and take a positive approach to meeting on common ground. We need to take stock of our resources, embark upon self-discovery, self-appraisal and self-criticism, and come into our rich and varied cultural heritage of democracy and the arts, of courageous and co-operative living.

Awareness is the first step in making these firmly our own. We shall need them. Before us is the necessity of a tremendous effort. If we do not exert ourselves now, the old dream that brought us here is apt to be swallowed by the furious nightmare of the Old World.

Is it too late to recapture the magic of that dream? Many people of the second and third and later generations, to whom America is a platitude, have never glimpsed its power. They are the majority of the youth of today. What if we could revive it, lift to bewildered and cynical eyes the vision of new frontiers, rich in culture and spirit, wide and deep as the best in man—an America with a sweep to which a continent’s breadth is narrow—a democracy not only of political inheritance but of the heart and the handclasp?

You and I and some of our friends have talked of this for a number of years, especially since 1938, when I first began the task of which this book is one of the early tangible results. We thought then, in ’38 and ’39, it was not too late. You were always interested in this job of mine, and more helpful with friendliness and encouragement than you are aware. So I want From Many Lands to be your book.

My purpose, as you know, is to begin exploring our American cultural past and to urge the cultivation of its many common fields, not nostalgically, or historically or academically, but imaginatively and creatively, with eyes to the future, until as a people we find and dare to sink our roots into our common American subsoil, rich, sun-warmed and well watered, from which we still may grow and flower. The failure of America to harness the dreams and motives of its past to the processes of its life is one of the greatest wastes of human resources this age has known. For there was power there, power to make miracles commonplace. Into no other country, ever, was so much of the best of human yearning poured.

It is still not too late. On the contrary, this is our moment. Now we can do things. This period is in a way a testing time for us. An opportunity. Now, in crisis and tension, the situation and its problems in which we are interested will be clearer than ever before. Our national weaknesses will become obvious and we will want to remove them. Our awareness will be intensified, our emotional quality heightened. As a people, we will be eager for orientation—for integration and unity under the sway of an affirmative concept of liberty.

We will realize that democracy even as we have it in the United States is far, far from what it should and could be; that the evil that seems to have engulfed Europe is not so much the creation of those who believe in lies and slavery as of those who believing in truth and liberty do not practice their beliefs, either not at all or with insufficient consistency, intelligence, passion and energy. We—many of us—will want to correct this fault in ourselves and others and become geared to the real motives and propulsions of our country—the same motives and propulsions, essentially, that were behind the successive waves of our immigration.

Here in America, if anywhere, man can achieve an all-dimensional quality: strong, rich and secure in his appreciations, sane in his values, intelligent in his knowledge, firm in his morality, just and generous in his freedom, cool and deliberate in combat with the enemies of his ideals and principles, and great in the enduring hunger and the epic reach of his spirit.

These are not the exact words of our talks during the past few years, but they are their substance, which I wanted to put into this book. If we are right, and I believe we are, America is just beginning.

Yours,

Louis

Milford, New Jersey

August 1, 1940

THE MAN IN A QUANDARY

§

It should be our pride to exhibit an example of one nation, at least, destitute of national antipathies, and exercising, not merely the overt acts of hospitality, but those more rare and noble courtesies which spring from liberality of opinion.

What have we to do with national prejudices? They are the inveterate diseases of old countries, contracted in rude and ignorant ages, when nations knew but little of each other, and looked beyond their own boundaries with distrust and hostility. We, on the contrary, have sprung into national existence in an enlightened and philosophical age, when the different parts of the habitable world, and the various branches of the human family, have been indefatigably studied and made known to each other; and we forego the advantages of our birth if we do not shake off the national prejudices as we would the local superstitions of the old world.

—Washington Irving, in Sketch Book

Our debt to the foreign born and their sons and grandsons will never be paid by any patronizing kind of mere sufferance. Why should a man pat himself on the back simply because he says, “I have nothing against the Germans, or the Irish, or the Italians”? Why should he have anything against any of them? What have they done to him? The point is, “What has he got for them?”

If we would take the time to understand the various peoples of the world we would come to realize that every nation has made great contributions to the sum of truth, beauty, and happiness. The America which we know and for which we are prepared to live and die simply would not exist if it were not for the immigrant. The roads beneath our feet, the tower over head are part of their handiwork. You cannot build a city of brick, mortar, and lime. It requires the sweat and the soul and the dream of a multitude.

The aspirations of the men and women from the far corners of the earth have given the breath of life to America. Of course, we should have nothing against them. But let us go much further. Let us be alert to realize that whoever raises the knife of prejudice against any group whatsoever stabs with his dagger the flesh and honor and, indeed, the heart of America.

—Heywood Broun, in The New York World Telegram

Doctor Eliot Steinberger

I

In the spring of 1938 a bad case of poison ivy—contracted in the course of an overambitious campaign to liquidate the objectionable shrub along the roadside and fields’ edges of the little farm I had acquired in the Delaware Valley—compelled me to seek the services of a dermatologist. Desperate for relief, I asked my friend Dr. DeWitt Stetten, in New York, to send me to a good one who could see me immediately… and so I found myself in the office of Dr. Eliot Steinberger, who regarded my affliction as the least alarming of all matters. Not appearing to hurry, he disposed of me in five or six minutes, suggesting I return in a week, when I saw him as briefly as on the first occasion.

Doctor Steinberger was then forty-three but seemed younger in spite of his baldness; a lean man of medium height, with good posture and easy movements. Although far from handsome in the more conventional sense, he impressed one as being very attractive. His white smock and calm, matter-of-fact manner had an immediate cooling effect upon the inflamed surface of my body, and something about his mien suggested he was immensely competent not only in his profession but in nearly anything he might essay. His personality, though finely restrained, was independent, vivid, open, capable of varied expression. But there was a subtlety in its independence and openness, as there is in strong, clear colors. Between the rather prominent ears, his clean-shaven, small face, with its lively brown eyes, held firmly a delicate balance between sardonic amusement and an uncertain, palpitating sadness, apt to merge at any moment with amusement or turn into near-despair.

The Stettens were close personal friends of Eliot Steinberger and his wife, Peggy, but their replies to my questions about him were only meagerly informative. He was “very interesting… one of the Steinbergers”—implying I ought to know who the Steinbergers were; I did not, although I had heard and seen the name here and there. In a remarkably short time, I was told, he had developed into a leader in his field of medicine. Two or three of his books and many of his papers on skin diseases in the American and European medical journals were distinct contributions and had helped to win him international recognition. The influence of Hitler’s race ideas on contemporary thought caused my informants to add that Mrs. Steinberger was Gentile; and Alice Stetten said both Peggy and Eliot were “simply tops.”

During the next two and a half years I met the Steinbergers socially, mostly at the Stettens’. Tall, slim, good-looking, some years younger than her husband, Peggy Steinberger was, like her husband, direct, unpretentious, a good talker, always pleasant company; but also very different from him. His easy manner, quick intelligence and humor, great fund of information, objectivity, deep and continual concern over developments in America and Europe, and far-ranging sensitiveness appeared to find full release and scope among congenial friends in the sitting-room and at the dinner table.

Eliot Steinberger continued to interest me, as a man and successful physician, and as a figure in the American maze; but also because I was trying to dig into the Jewish Question, so called, which, largely as a backwash of events in Europe, had lifted sharply to the surface in the United States during the late 1930’s. Like many Jews, he did not “look Jewish”; indeed, his physiognomy could have been attributed to any of a dozen or more elements included in the American population. He was not Jewish in religion; and I discovered that I was familiar with items of Jewish history and lore he did not know, and that he was a Jew—intensely, self-consciously, with a peculiar interlacement of pride and discomfort—for the same reasons most other Jews I knew were Jews.

One evening, curious what he would say, I asked him, “Why are you a Jew?”

He looked at me quizzically for a moment without replying.

“I mean: what makes you a Jew?”

“Well,” he smiled, “I know I am a Jew, I just am; and—to put it awkwardly—I know that, because I just am and because, therefore, in one way or another, nearly every non-Jew draws a superficially or deeply cut line between himself and me, which underscores the fact that I am a Jew.” He told me that when he entered a room in which there were Gentiles he knew with a basic, inevitable awareness that everybody there thought or soon would think of him as a Jew, and that—somehow—was important.

He and I had occasional discussions about this, and related questions. At such times, listening, he seemed to be standing on his toes even when he sat in a comfortable divan. I told him that, although by origin I was a Slovenian and my parents had made attempts to raise me as a Catholic, when I entered a room I did not care if anyone present thought of me as a man whose original nationality was Slovenian or as a Catholic; or, rather, that I did not think of myself as this or that, or of what the other fellow was thinking of me in terms of national origin or religion.

“You’re not a Jew!” said Eliot Steinberger with an uncertain smile.

II

Then, after dinner at the Stettens’ one evening, the whole company (there were about a half-dozen of us) suddenly turned attentive to Eliot Steinberger, who—on an impulse he could not explain later—began to talk about his father, the rest of his family, and himself. Perhaps the impulse had something to do with his being a Jew in the late 1930’s and was linked to the widespread contemporary tendency of many Americans, especially those of recent-immigrant strains, to examine their backgrounds. Puzzled at himself for having started the narration, and a little self-conscious, he tried to stop or cut it short at several points, but our urging—almost to the point of insistence—that he continue held him to the story for several hours.

At first the frankness with which he spoke about his family and himself was a bit startling; by-and-by, however, as I listened to him, it began to appear perfectly natural. The calm, objective recounting simply documented his being the sort of individual he was.

That evening I came to like him very much. The expression of his face fascinated me. It was like a sensitive instrument throbbing to a deep urgency over and above the humor, grace, and factual totality of his words. It summed him up. Also, to slip into a seeming contradiction of terms, it was a neat diagram of a deep incongruity in the man, of which I became more and more clearly aware; of a quandary, which—personal, but also more than personal; Jewish, but also more than Jewish—underlay his life.

Later I went a few times to the Steinbergers’ apartment, the living-room of which struck me as a setting peculiarly fitting for the lovely white-marble piece of Rodin sculpture, The Convalescent Girl, placed on a pedestal in a carefully lighted corner… and I gradually learned the whole Steinberger[1] saga, which Eliot had barely sketched at the Stettens’.

The Family and the Company

I

The Steinbergers are a numerous and impressive family in the United States. Their European background can be traced to the early seventeenth century in the Bavarian Palatinate. The name derives from the town of Steinberg, where the clan apparently gained its initial foothold in Germany. In the eighteenth  century the Steinbergers were prominent in many towns in Baden; in the middle nineteenth century they started to emigrate to America, and in the last eighty or ninety years produced interesting and outstanding individuals in New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, and elsewhere. Even a partial list of them would require pages; they range from a scholarly and pious character in Philadelphia in the 1850’s to one of the most important contemporary publishers. The family is divided into a half-dozen or so branches which had their origin with the early emigrants.

Of the latter probably the most noteworthy was Eliot Steinberger’s father, Heinrich (or Henry) Steinberger. A son of a small merchant in a little town near Karlsruhe, he was born in 1843. His education in the old country was the equivalent of two years in high school. While not lacking in charm and other compensations, life in Baden was even then set and channelized and marked by special restrictions for the Jews; so at twenty, in 1863, Henry—who, as he soon amply demonstrated, had within him the makings of an empire builder—left for America.

He immediately found employment in a kosher butcher shop located near the present site of the Woolworth Building in New York, owned by Isaac Silbermann, also an emigrant from Germany and then the leading Jewish butcher in Manhattan. Ambitious, capable, and very energetic, the young man performed three jobs: slaughtering, selling, and delivering. He worked sixteen hours a day, receiving at first two dollars a week, out of which he saved seventy-five cents. Every third day he bought a foot-and-a-half-long loaf of bread and marked it off into three parts. Possessing a powerful will which he enjoyed testing, he never ate more than the day’s portion of the loaf. He bought no other food but swallowed an occasional scrap of cured beef or sausage in the shop which would otherwise have been thrown away. Eventually his pay advanced to four dollars, and he put two dollars and a quarter in the bank.

Toward the end of the sixties, impressed by the young man’s ability, stamina, and business imagination, Isaac Silbermann made him a partner and called the firm Silbermann and Steinberger Company; whereupon, as general manager, Henry so developed the business that in a few years they were slaughtering thirty, forty, fifty head of cattle a day—practically big business in the early and middle seventies. The S. & S. meats, now no longer solely kosher, became favorably known not only in Manhattan but beyond both the rivers flowing by it, and before long in Philadelphia and even in Washington, Baltimore and Boston.

A go-getter in the strongest, most exciting American sense of that period, and adhering strictly to good business principles and practices, with emphasis on honesty and quality, Henry Steinberger—now in his early thirties—began to perceive vast potentialities in the butcher business. His Bavarian background with its devotion to Gruendlichkeit, or thoroughness, helped him to see that slaughtering as practiced in the United States was an enormously wasteful process, and that its future was in the advantageous handling and utilizing of by-products, particularly the fats, which had been almost ignored even by such shrewd old-timers in the business as Isaac Silbermann. With this realization, Henry Steinberger set about making his ideas tangible, and took the lead in developing and installing the new machinery and methods which led to the eventually world-famous packed products, including oleo-margarine. Many of them were quickly and profitably copied by other packers, and the butcher trade became the packing industry. Five years after he became a partner, the S. & S. was doing an international business. Its new stockyard and slaughterhouse was near the junction of First Avenue and Forty-fifth Street.

II

In the mid-seventies refrigeration was in its infancy, but Henry Steinberger already seemed to envision the time when the cheap Western beef would be brought to Eastern markets in pieces neatly stacked or hung in sanitary iceboxes on wheels and rails rather than in livestock cars. The latter method of transportation was expensive, the low freight rates notwithstanding, because it involved shipping valueless pounds (viscera, etc.), loss of weight while the animals were enroute, feeding them, and the stockman’s wages.

Early in his career he made his contacts in Chicago and Kansas City. By 1890, when he was forty-seven, with business continually expanding, he foresaw that the S. & S. must extend its organization or risk going under, either via sudden bankruptcy or slow degeneration. There was no standing still. Petty business enterprises of any kind had no strong future in this country. In back of his mind was the epic thought of becoming the greatest butcher in the world, supplying meats and fats to great sections of the human race. So, in 1892, he acquired the Mid-Western Packing Company, which had a small plant in Kansas City, a few distributing branches in the East, and an inadequate refrigerator-car line called the Arctic Transportation Company. He quickly enlarged and thoroughly modernized the slaughtering facilities, and took over direction of improving refrigeration, both at the plants and especially in freight cars. The S. & S. continued in the kosher business, which increased by leaps and bounds with the large influx of Jewish immigration beginning in the nineties; however, the non-kosher business grew so rapidly that the kosher was soon a trifle alongside the total. Branch houses were established the country over, and the export business took a sharp upswing. The S. & S. built an immense plant in Chicago, which caused internal upsets in Swift and Armour; and the Steinberger firm—a veritable empire by 1900—became one of the three most important packing outfits in the world. New plants were started also in New York, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, and Sioux Falls, and distributing agencies all over the East and in Europe.

Henry Steinberger was president and actual directing head of the S. & S. itself, and also president of the Arctic Transportation Company, the West-East Live-Stock Transport Company, and a half-dozen other large enterprises. He was financially interested in several steamship companies which had installed refrigeration systems in their vessels on his urging. In the late 1900’s and early 1910’s, soon after it became known as Steinberger and Sons, the company grossed more than $100,000,000 annually.

III

At the apex of his amazing career—or, say, between 1895 (the year Eliot was born) and 1912, when he was in his fifties and sixties—Henry Steinberger was a heavy-set man of medium height. He had a ponderous head and a round, fleshy face, rather dull-seeming at times, but capable of a diversity of expression, from deep unhappiness to high jollity. He became bald in his twenties and wore a wig which was always very obviously a wig.

He was a man of simple tastes, with not even faintly extravagant personal requirements. The stench of the stockyards was his favorite atmosphere. His general offices in New York were practically in the slaughterhouse, within sound of dying cattle and hogs.

Henry Steinberger had no social ambitions and regarded with disfavor those immigrant and second-generation Jews who, upon acquiring wealth, turned into what he called “climbers.” He had no use for people of pretensions of any sort, Jewish or Gentile.

He spoke simple English with an accent, and copies of his dictated correspondence testify to his imperfect command of the language. He was a citizen of the United States, with a passionate regard for the country of his adoption. Speaking from inner conviction, he often referred to it as “the best place under the sun,” but was not reticent about voicing his disapproval of those phases of American life which went against his grain—notably wastefulness. He frequently declared there was little basis for the American boast of efficiency. It was mostly an illusion, a matter of the fact that Americans had, or thought they had, nearly limitless resources to “play with.” Politically, he was an indifferent Republican, with a blunt contempt for politicians as a class.

His original nationality, he held, was German; and his picture and biography appear in an awkward (now rare) volume printed in New York in 1908 and entitled A History of German Immigration in the United States and Successful German Americans and Their Descendants. At infrequent moments of relaxation he liked to read Goethe and Schiller in the original, and often broke into German speech, especially to quote lines of wisdom from his favorite authors.

Of course he was also a Jew; not a very religious but a very conscious one who made liberal donations to Jewish charities. He was the financial mainstay of a large hospital in New York and of a number of other institutions. Twice widowed, he married three times, each time a girl of German-Jewish stock. Friday evenings candles were lit in his home. On Saturdays he refrained from smoking; this, not only because he was a Jew who wanted to observe the Sabbath, but to test and exercise his will.

The acquisition and accumulation of money, apparently, was not the chief motivating force in Henry Steinberger’s life. He derived his keenest thrill out of creating and running a vast concern. It satisfied his ambition and served as a release of the powerful force that churned within him. It was “something,” he thought, to supply meat to a good part of the world. A responsibility. Money was important, to be sure, but mostly as an element, a necessary means, in his tremendous function. In the late 1900’s and early 1910’s, he was worth tens of millions of dollars, perhaps close to a hundred million, but he never knew, nor cared, just how much. He never thought of his money as intimately his own. All of it was always tied up with the concern, a stormy, ultra-dynamic organism, uncertainly geared to the wild process of the country’s economic and industrial life, the soul of which was cutthroat competition. Business was war.

Scorning the clock, he worked fourteen to eighteen hours a day, and harder than anyone in his employ. But of his immediate assistants he demanded they work hard and long, too, and give themselves totally to their jobs. He was regarded a taskmaster, a “slave driver,” who sometimes gave the impression of manipulating his executive and minor chiefs as though they were push buttons on the control board of his great machine, the S. & S.

At the peak of his career he employed between ten and fifteen thousand men. Occasionally he brooded over the labor question; and on the whole he treated his workers a trifle, but not much, better than did the other big packers, who provoked Upton Sinclair to write The Jungle. By and large, labor, too, was only an element, a necessary means, in his enterprise. He was too far above the workers in the yards and slaughterhouse, and there were too many of them, to feel about them continually as people. He tended to lump them in a mass when away from them, although when he went on his tours through the plants he knew and recognized them as individuals. But he felt a deep responsibility toward the employees who performed their tasks closer to him. He saw himself as their commander-in-chief and protector and thought—like the general of an army corps in relation to his officers—that their welfare and happiness depended upon his ability and “success.”

Financially, he strove always to be an independent, having nothing to do with Wall Street and stock speculation. Therein was at once his great strength and weakness as an industrialist, one continually working against the other.

He knew some of the people in the other big packing concerns were referring to him as “that Jew,” “that Dutchman” and “that foreigner.” These derogations influenced his business mentality, temperament and procedure. A few limes, irritated, he privately exclaimed in German or English, “They think they’re so much better, those goys!” This resentment was part of the force driving him to further conquests, expansions, and successes.

But underneath and above all were Henry Steinberger’s creative-progressive business impulses and instincts, his European passion against waste, his attachment to systematic efficiency, and his American boldness. Even in his sixties, his primary interest was continually to better the mathematical business formulas to which he had reduced the hog, the steer, and the sheep; and to so improve the packing methods that eventually everything in the slaughtered animal might be utilized. In his rare joking moods he confessed to having designs on the hog’s last squeal, the cow’s final low, the sheep’s ultimate bleat.

Henry Steinberger was a schemer; he had to be in his business and was that naturally. His was a suspicious nature. There were few people outside his immediate family whom he consistently trusted. At times he mistrusted even members of his own family, at least in the matter of their ability to stand on their own feet, both as persons and in reference to his company. With all the power and money at his command, his life was shot through with a feeling of insecurity. The Jew in him? Perhaps. Most of the time he seemed to feel threatened. He inclined to expect the worst, and much of his thought and general energy went toward establishing a continuous series of systematic precautions. He traveled a lot and would frequently call his home long-distance from Chicago or Kansas City in the middle of the night to inquire if everything was all right, or to ask his wife to hasten to the basement and make sure nothing had caught fire there. A foreboding of doom gripped him every once in a while.

He was really interested only in his family and his business—which of the two came first would be difficult to say. His entire life revolved around them. He could not endure the idea of being “honored” by anybody. Deep in him he was a humble man, an immigrant; a self-made giant a little scared of himself, of what he had become and of the enormous outfit he had created.

IV

In a way, Henry Steinberger’s family was as large and complicated as his business. He was the father of three series off children which, in relation to one another and to the entire family, had some of the aspects of three competing corporations within a holding company whose head is equally interested in them all.

He first married in the late 1860’s, immediately on becoming a partner in his former boss’ firm. A native of New York, his wife was the daughter of an immigrant family who were close friends of the Isaac Silbermann’s. In three years she gave birth to as many children, a boy and a pair of female twins. The girls died in early infancy, and their mother soon after them, of sudden illness. The boy, Adolph, was exceptionably endowed and, in part because of that, did not get along with his half brothers and sisters of the subsequent marriages (most of whom also were exceptionally endowed individuals), and in consequence turned into a black sheep of the family. Reaching adulthood, he commenced to roam the world, mostly the Orient. His father supplied him with money. He has never met his second stepmother, six years his junior; nor most of his half brothers and sisters of the second and third series. Now in his seventies, Adolph Steinberger lives in Hawaii.

Henry Steinberger remarried a year after the death of his first wife, and the second Mrs. Steinberger had five sons and three daughters: Henry, Jr., Charles, Max, Ferdinand, Louis, Sylvia, Esther, and Julie. Beginning in the mid-nineties, four sons of the second series went into their father’s business, and three stayed in it till its end. Two of the eight children are dead; the rest—now in their late middle age—are leading unique lives in the United States and various parts of the world. All were educated in private schools and foremost universities in America and Europe: Yale, Harvard, Vassar, Heidelberg, Sorbonne, Vienna.

While he was a student in Germany, Ferdinand Steinberger decided to stay there and eventually became a successful German dramatist, writing under a nom de plume a score of “hits,” two of which were translated into English and presented on Broadway in 1911 and in the late 1920’s. He married a German Gentile woman. In 1936 he and his family fled to Vienna, in 1937 to Prague; as I write this, in June 1940, they are in a little town in Switzerland—refugees.

The most interesting person in this group is Louis, an eccentric now in his late fifties. He is a graduate of Yale and the inventor of a number of gadgets, timesavers, pills, etceteras, the patents on which have brought him about ten million dollars in twenty-five years. One day he asked himself: what do Americans do most? He supplied the answer: chew gum and take laxatives; then invented a combination of chewing gum and laxative which is now sold in every drugstore in the United States and in many other countries. But on seeing him in the streets of New York, where he “batches” in a forty-dollar-a-month two-room flat in an old brownstone house, the generous person might have difficulty in suppressing an impulse to stop him and proffer him a dime. He procures his food in the cheapest stores and from pushcart peddlers, buying partly decayed fifteen-cent melons for a nickel. His fortune, however, is sensibly invested; and if one takes a close look at him, one cannot help recognizing a superior person who has somehow become over individualized. Often he crosses Fifth Avenue holding aloft a white handkerchief, his fierce glare commanding traffic to stop or slow down till he reaches the sidewalk. He is his half brother Eliot’s favorite character. They meet several times a year, and Eliot relishes telling anecdotes about Louis.

The other children of the second marriage, though not rich, are well-to-do. Some live in considerable style, tastefully and with grace. Two or three are very civic-minded, responsible and positive citizens. But nearly all are out-of-the-ordinary, either in talents or in the turns their lives have taken. One paints, another is an unusually gifted musician. One has become a devout Catholic and almost entered the orders; his closest friend now is the priest in a little town in eastern Connecticut. Another is a Christian Scientist… Except for Louis, they are all married; some to Jews, others to Gentiles. For years one of the daughters has been on the verge of Anglicizing her name; she is intensely and miserably anti-Semitic…

V

Their mother died in the early 1890’s. One day about a year later Henry Steinberger, Sr., just fifty and rapidly looming up as one of the best-known Jewish Americans and big industrialists in the country, happened to be in Norfolk, Virginia, and met a young lady, Bella Friedman, who was not yet twenty, the daughter of a local German-Jewish American merchant. The packer had seen her years before as a little girl; now, fully developed, she pleased him, and he asked for her hand. She was not only younger than his son by his first wife but younger than were two children of the second series.

They were married, and he brought her to his large but unpretentious new residence in the Sixties near Fifth Avenue. Then trouble began. Loyal to their late mother, several of the older children objected to the bride and considered ridiculous the suggestion that they accept her as their new mother. There were scenes.

Practical man that he was, Henry Steinberger reorganized the household into two sections. The two upper storeys, fully staffed with servants, were given to the eight children by his second wife, while the two lower floors, with another set of servants, became the home of the new family. For years the only contact between the two households was the old man, who often visited his older children upstairs, but spent most of his non-business moments downstairs.

In six years Bella gave birth to four children: Eliot, Marshall, Ann, and Harold. Marshall fell off a horse at the age of twenty-five and was killed; the other three are as unique and remarkable in their different ways as are the sons and daughters of the second marriage.

The reaction of the older children to his third marriage saddened the big industrialist considerably. As hard as he was on himself and his important employees, he inclined to be all tenderness toward his children and to give them almost anything they desired. He had high ambitions for them, which ran generally toward making them competent, useful, and cultured men and women. He held to the idea that the future would belong to the highly educated (“education is everything”), to those acutely aware of the world and their place in it, and the most highly regarded institutions were not too good for his boys and girls. But, although he tried not to show it, the sons disappointed him one by one. When he began to draw those by his second wife into the packing business, he discovered, to his growing dismay, that sending them to Yale and Harvard and Europe had been a mistake. They were all right for routine administrative work, but seemed unable to develop a passion, a “feel,” for the meat industry; the passion that, in spite of occasional doubts and fears about himself and his function in life, gave a positive, single-minded quality to  everything he himself did in a business way. He found out they—particularly his namesake, Henry, Junior—were interested in S. & S. not so much as a meat-packing industry with worldwide markets, an instrument on which they might practice their talents and abilities, and an opportunity to develop as men, but as a basis and source of their prestige, and as a tremendous, though cumbersome, money-making machine designed to serve them specially in order they might follow their own personal propensities, which were sports, travel, the arts. He felt that eventually, after he died, they might be over disposed to leave the business in the hands of others; this he knew would be dangerous, for his competitors were obviously doing their utmost to rub the S. & S. out of existence.

These thoughts depressed Henry Steinberger, Sr., increasingly as he grew older. They brought on insomnia. He worried, even during the period when all the signs about him should have contributed to his assurance; on his desk in New York were five telephones at the end of as many direct wires connecting him with his interests in Chicago, Kansas City, Oklahoma City, Sioux Falls, and Boston, and he received daily reports. S. & S. was at its height, doing an annual gross business of more than a hundred million. The fact of the matter was that his “goy” competitors maneuvered endlessly to embroil him in difficulties. They conducted intensive sales campaigns in his territories. They called them “invasions.” Some were taking advantage of latent anti-Semitism here and there to take customers away from S. & S.

The size and the far-flung markets of the company involved enormous financial problems, which the least dislocation in production or sales aggravated urgently. This obliged him to keep his personal fortune, or what could have been his personal fortune, constantly tied up; and every now and then, often in consequence of some unfriendly maneuver, he found himself in sudden need of a half-million or a million dollars in cash for a few weeks or months, and he had to borrow from the banks, some of whose officers he more than suspected were “in” with his competitors.

Early in 1913, when he was seventy, the S. & S. had to borrow two million. The old man worried day and night. He had been in ill-health for months before. Now the strain of his years and the financial situation, which he magnified, abruptly brought on a near-collapse. There was more than a touch of heart trouble.

Bella Steinberger had not loved Henry Steinberger when she married him; in the twenty years since then, however, she had perceived his stature and quality, and developed a profound affection for the man. Now, on the advice of the family doctor, she took him off to Europe and put him in a famous sanitarium in Switzerland. He did not improve. He fretted about his business, then about the war, and went slowly from bad to worse… and died in the summer of 1915, with the knowledge that the S. & S., in charge of his sons, was in a bad way, heavily indebted to banks, and doomed.

VI

The National Provisioner wrote: “… The news of his demise brought sorrow to the entire meat-packing trade, for his ability and personality had united to win him the respect and admiration of all who were connected with the trade to which his life was devoted. His death removes the last of that wonderful group of business men who built up the meat-packing trade and made America the leader in meat and meat products. All are gone, but the industry they founded and built still profits by their organizing ability, and ever will.”

These sentiments, while sincerely held by many in the packing field, did not restrain the schemes of those who meant to get hold of the S. & S.

The beginning of the company’s internal crisis came with the World War when its business neared an annual gross of two hundred million dollars. Immediately, in 1914, along with the other big packers, the S. & S. began to ship immense cargoes of meat and other products not only to the Allies, but also to neutral Dutch and Scandinavian ports, whence the greater portion of them were then quickly transshipped to Germany… till the British woke up to this latter fact and took to stopping American and other neutral vessels carrying such supplies, and confiscating them as prize cargoes when the captains could not prove the meat and fats and casings (which could be used not only in sausage-making but also in Zeppelin’s) would not eventually reach their enemy.

In 1915, this caused serious diplomatic complications between the United States and Britain, with Britain getting the better end of the situation. The American packers lost tens of millions of dollars, although the business in which they had engaged was technically within the provisions of international law. The confiscations, however, were hardest on the Steinbergers, amounting to something like twenty millions. The S. & S. joined the other packers in a concerted attempt to fight the British government in the British courts, but when the other packers discovered that the British thought of the Steinbergers not as Americans but as Germans and, as such, special culprits in this trade, they got clear of them and left them to certain and complete defeat. They knew this would further weaken the financial structure of the company, already shaky, and put it into the hands of the banks, giving them a chance to seize its vast resources, plants and markets, and either to destroy or re-form it as an organization. They felt the young Steinbergers did not have it in them to fight and preserve the S. & S. They were correct. And to shorten a long and nasty tale, the company which Henry Steinberger had created ceased to exist under its old name a few years after the Armistice.

Out of the wreckage, the Steinbergers salvaged about three millions. A half-million went to the widow; the rest was divided in quarter million lots among the children.

Eliot’s Early Years

I

Eliot was the oldest of the third group of children. A tiny, unimportant figure in the big Steinberger story, he came to boyhood in the years immediately preceding the peak of his father’s success as an industrialist.

His young mother bore her three other children in the four years immediately after his birth. His two brothers and one sister were all so handsome as youngsters that nearly everyone who visited the house exclaimed over them, while no one ever enthused about him, who was somewhat of an ugly duckling, with a small, puckish face and large, fanlike ears. His half brothers and sisters upstairs referred to him as “that little monkey downstairs.” His mother tried constantly to improve his looks. She dressed him variously, experimenting with collars of different shapes which might set off his face and head to better advantage, and she combed his hair this way and that way… all to scant avail.

His father sometimes looked at him a long while with an uneasy expression on his face and was always gentle toward him on those rare occasions when they came into close personal contact. Sometimes, with an awkward kind of humor, he called him “Starving Cuban,” for the boy was thin, all his ribs showing, like the Cuban children whose pictures were then—during and after the Spanish-American War—current in the newspapers. Absorbed in his business, however, perennially waiting for an “important phone call,” the old man was usually remote and dull-faced, and at about the age of four Eliot became afraid of him.

Eliot was fear-ridden generally. He had frequent feelings of imminent disaster and death. These fears probably crept into him from the strained atmosphere his father created in the home with his telephoning to ask whether or not everything was all right, and with his manner, which seemed to imply that this was a hostile, complicated world.

Also, Eliot learned early that he was a Jew. This was all right in a way, something mysterious and wonderful, in fact, to be proud of at home, but something, too, for which the world unaccountably made you suffer.

Those People Upstairs were simultaneously part of the family and apart from it. They were rather superior persons, to whom, apparently, even his mother was inferior. Eliot resented Them and was awed by and afraid of Them. At the same time he also aspired to go Upstairs some day and see Them in Their rooms, which he assumed must be very elegant.

One day his father absent-mindedly took him by the hand and led him upstairs on one of his periodic calls, and Eliot was, in confusing succession, terrified, thrilled and disappointed. The rooms on the upper storeys were very much like those downstairs, and the boy was interested to note that the people living in them, who were also his father’s children (this seemed very strange), were not superior to the old man. He talked to them much as he talked to his mother and everybody else below. They thereupon ceased to be They with a capital T, and Upstairs became just the floors above.

The world in which Eliot lived was strange, and he grew into a rather strange boy. He was intensely conscious of himself and perpetually on his toes, for he never could know when or whence a blow might fall. At night he awakened in the grip of the thought he was about to die. The ceiling would crash on him and sever him from existence. When it didn’t, sometimes he wondered why.

Filled with questions and ever alert, the boy’s mind worked all the time, trying to understand situations, people and things, and partly in consequence of this he developed into something like a prodigy. At five and six, he would say things which indicated penetrating insight, careful thought and precocious objectivity, and caused adults to glance at one another. The long, concernful looks which his father directed at him lengthened. Off and on, when the two of them happened to meet in the hallway or on the staircase, the old man put his hand on the boy’s head or pinched his cheek. These encounters and contacts with his parent filled Eliot with mixed feelings of panic, pain, and bliss.

He liked his governess Hedwig, who was a young blond German girl with a pretty round face, large wide-apart blue eyes, and a lovely voice. She spoke a little English and taught him German and French. She was full of fun, and laughed a lot, especially when she took him out for walks in Central Park. His “fonny” face, as she called it, delighted her, and often she pressed him to herself in spontaneous affection.

When Eliot was six, Hedwig abruptly left the Steinberger employ. The reason was that one of his half brothers upstairs had fallen in love with her, and she, engaged to another man, could not reciprocate. Her departure upset Eliot a great deal, and he turned sullen and rebellious. He hated “the bunch upstairs” and tried to perpetrate bits of mischief that would annoy them, such as ringing their doorbell and running away, calling them on the phone and then hanging up.

He was sent to a private school, where he got into a succession of petty difficulties. But his father never reprimanded him, even when Eliot, uneasy in the old man’s presence, dared verge on being discourteous to him. He just studied him for minutes at a spell, wondering what was the matter, and granted almost his every request and demand.

The elder Steinberger decided in his troubled mind that the boy was unsuited for the packing business, and thinking he might fit into some profession, perhaps law, asked him when he was about thirteen, and then again a year or so later, what college he wanted to enter. Eliot responded that he did not want to go to college: why should he?

The last year in private school he kept mainly to himself, joining no clubs, taking part in no group activities. He wanted to be different, aloof from the disquieting normality of the others. At fifteen, when he discovered his father did not think he belonged in the meat industry, he asked, then demanded, he be allowed to learn “the business from the ground up.” This was in 1910.

Surprised and pleased, Henry Steinberger, Sr.—now in his late sixties—let Eliot come into the plant. After all, he might have been mistaken in thinking the boy unsuitable; he was strange, unpredictable, and might yet be a potential packing genius. Who could say what was stewing behind that abrupt manner? His teachers, whom he frequently exasperated, described him as brilliant. In the days to come there might be a place for that quality in the packing industry.

II

Eliot plunged into learning the packing business with great determination. He was at the huge First Avenue plant every morning at five and quit at five in the afternoon. Slaughtering at first horrified him, while the stench of the place nauseated him; he felt himself fainting and evenings he bathed long and thoroughly. By-and-by, however, he got used to the place, and within a few months, although yet no more than a boy, developed into a most competent worker. As soon as he mastered the various jobs and functions in one department, he was moved on to the next. The superintendents and foremen were delighted with him and sought and made opportunities to tell the Big Boss how well his son was getting along. Eliot sharply resented any effort to favor him because his father was the president of the company.

The boy caught glimpses of his father in his element. The old man’s personality, with its old-country Gruendlichkeit, permeated the place. The men respected him, were geared to his will and plans, and usually knew what he wanted before he told them. He was natural with them; natural and matter-of-fact with the whole process. Almost in spite of himself Eliot developed a profound regard for his father; which, however, he could not show for some time. His heart jumped proudly when he overheard snatches of the men’s conversations about the Big Boss or the Old Boy, as some of them called him.

At sixteen, from the slaughterhouse, Eliot advanced to the office, where he went swiftly through the various departments—stock inventory, sales and orders, bookkeeping and billing, and research. He liked the office much less than the slaughter plant. Here he came into frequent contact and near-conflict with his half brothers, who were heads or assistant heads of departments. They did not like him, and he did not like them.

Eliot finally decided that the scientific end of the business interested him most. He began to spend nearly all of his time in the research department, of which the Old Boy was himself the directing head. The production formulas, to which the slaughtered animals were reduced, fascinated the young man, and, to the Old Boy’s intense delight, he even worked out a few improvements, Gradually, the father and son became good friends. For his birthday in 1911, the elder Steinberger bought the boy a new roadster he had observed him admire.

Meantime, a number of things in Eliot’s life were converging on a common point from which he flew off on a tangent directly opposite to the tendencies he had begun to reveal in the plant and the office. Overdeveloped mentally for his sixteen years, emotionally unstable, and turning gradually into an attractive male despite his lack of what usually passes for good looks, he fell in and out of love a few times, mostly with women twice his age. This brought on sharp ups and downs in mood, and he became acutely dissatisfied with himself; with being a rich man’s son and a Jew (for he bumped into mild forms of anti-Semitism every once in a while); with the packing business; with life at home; with things in general. He took to writing poetry, to contemplating human existence cynically. Despite his stature, the Old Boy began to strike him as a little ridiculous. This importance attached to meat and fats, to refrigeration! This endless worrying and scheming! Whether or not those trainloads of cattle would arrive in time for the morning shift on Tuesday of next week! This fear of what Armour and Swift might do! His half brothers in the office were ridiculous, too. They held their jobs because they were Steinbergers, not because of any real capacity. Crown princes! They really did not belong in the business, knew very little about it, and were afraid of him mostly because of that. He might beat them at the game. What did he care for the business! They could have it and be damned with it!

Eliot did not like any of the “upstairs bunch”… except Louis, who was beginning to tinker with his inventions, and who now was no longer upstairs, but in Chicago, taking charge of some aspects of the Steinberger interests in the Middle West; and to whom the packing business was interesting, but also a bit of a malodorous joke. He had a suite at the Palmer House for business reasons and also a little twenty-dollar-a-month flat in the German-Bohemian section on the east side, where he cooked his own meals, washed his socks and handkerchiefs, and worked on the gadgets and concoctions he had set his mind to invent or perfect. Late in 1911, Louis came on a visit to New York, and he and Eliot had a talk. Eliot told him how he felt about things. Louis said, “Why don’t you quit?”

Reluctant to hurt the Old Boy, however, and thereby upset his mother, Eliot did not know for a while how to go about quitting. He began stepping out with some of the clerks in the office, and drinking. Finally, during an encounter with one of the half brothers he spoke his mind. After that there was no retreating. He was through with the packing business. The Old Boy was on a trip West and knew nothing of what had transpired in the home office till he returned. Meantime, Eliot, not yet seventeen, ran around and drank in earnest; and when he next met his father, he was drunk and bruised. He had engaged in a café brawl with a fellow who had called him “a dirty-rich Jew”; however, he declined now to explain the bruises to his parents.

Eliot’s step was a blow to the Old Boy. But he continued to be gentle to him and tried vainly to understand him.

III

Two or three months in the summer of 1911 Eliot devoted solely to wild doings, some of which brought him into intimate contact with the police. One night, at a police station, he heard an officer describe him to the sergeant at the desk as “just another damn-fool kid, a rich man’s son.” Drunk, Eliot tried to take a swing at the policeman, which made matters more difficult the next morning for the Steinberger lawyer, whose task it was to get him out of the jug.

When sober, Eliot did not seem to understand himself, and felt extremely foolish, his self-respect all the way down. And the only way out of this dilemma seemed to be to get drunk again.

Finally his father succeeded in catching him in a sober moment and asked him to accompany him on a trip to Sioux Falls, where he was going on business. Eliot went along, and the two had a talk. The Old Boy apologized for his older sons’ attitude and behavior toward him and said that as the father of them all he naturally found himself in a difficult position. This remark cut Eliot to the quick, and he blurted in a half-sullen tone he was sorry for his part in the mess, but— He was inarticulate and could not make clear what was in his mind and what he felt. But gradually he brought out that he was very discontented with himself and the whole setup in which he found himself. He disliked being a rich man’s son. He did not want his (the old man’s) position in the world to regulate the course of his own life. He advanced this—probably as an afterthought, but not unrelated to truth—as the real reason for his leaving the packing business.

The elder Steinberger understood and nodded sympathetically, recalling that he himself had come to America, in part, because he did not want his life to become a mere extension of his father’s, hemmed in by the tight rules and customs of European existence.

Eliot said, too, that “this fact of being a Jew” bothered him a great deal. His father did not reply for a long moment, and his face looked very heavy. Then he remarked slowly, as though it pained him to speak, that being a Jew was “a complicated business,” hard to understand and harder to explain, but that maybe things would gradually improve, at least in the United States, with its democracy and attachment to fair play. The only thing Jews could do about it, he said, was to strive toward being the best sort of people, decent and progressive, in whatever field they might develop their activities. Some of the Jews were not trying any too hard, and one could not blame them (the worst of them were no worse than the worst of the Gentiles); however, they did make it hard on Jewry as a whole, for the Jews, as a group and as individuals, were watched by the rest of the human race—the poor conduct of one reflected on them as a group.

“But why are we watched?” demanded Eliot, angrily.

The expression of his father’s face became even heavier. He seemed unable to answer in a way that could satisfy the boy, the intensity of whose gaze cut into him. He said it all seemed a matter of history, tradition, and the ways of the world.

“What makes us Jews?” asked the young man.

“We just are Jews, that’s all,” returned the old man, unsatisfactorily. “I can’t tell you why.”

They fell silent.

“But this is neither here nor there,” the Old Boy said, wanting to change the subject. He asked Eliot what he thought he wanted to do now. Eliot did not know. The old man suggested he go on with his schooling. How about Harvard? Of course they might not take him. Why not? Because Harvard’s requirements were very stiff, especially for Jewish boys; the number of Jews they took in was limited. Involuntarily, the elder Steinberger had returned to the Jewish question, which Eliot promptly took up. Why did Harvard limit the number of Jewish students? The Old Boy replied, “It’s part of the same thing you asked me about awhile ago. I can’t explain it, son; I’m sorry.”

Eliot felt challenged; and by the time they returned from Sioux Falls, they decided—holding one another in mutual respect again—that he would “try” Harvard.

IV

Eliot applied for entrance to a small, exclusive preparatory school in Boston which annually “prepared” for Harvard from ten to a dozen sons of prominent, well-to-do families who lacked the necessary entrance credits. Eliot declared he wanted to enter the college in the fall of 1912. The headmaster exclaimed that, in view of his slender scholastic record, that was practically an impossibility. But Eliot was determined to get into Harvard the following year or abandon the idea of further education.

He gave up drinking, and for a year seldom went out. He studied most of the time. There were no other Jewish boys in the school then. Most of the students were old-stock New Englanders and disposed to be friendly toward Eliot. But he made no close friendships. Something in the atmosphere of the place inhibited his impulses for comradeship.

One day he overheard a couple of boys talk about him. They said they liked him, he was a nice fellow, and all that; but wasn’t it too bad, remarked one, that he was a Jew. Why? asked the other. Because it was difficult, said the first boy, for Jews to get into Harvard; and if Eliot did get in, they would be unable to associate with him on close terms. He would not be “available” for membership in this and that. Why? asked the second boy. Because he was a Jew, said the first; his father was a Jew; his name was Jewish…

This conversation pierced Eliot like a rusty dagger. But after the first overwhelming feeling of anger and pain it acted as a further stimulus for his determination. He became even more aloof and studied still harder. Harvard Yard was a citadel to be taken.

He took it… and enjoyed his victory awhile. Then the thrill wore off, and he decided he did not like Harvard. He could not bring himself to study. His father was giving him a generous allowance, he had a car, and he resumed drinking and carousing. He went out with a small group of students, the majority of them Gentiles, who were regular (or, rather, irregular) fellows and regarded themselves as “bums,” scorning the general social life of the students.