1913 Page 21
In New York, David falls in love with a Russian Orthodox immigrant, Vera (meaning ‘truth’ in Russian). Later, he discovers that she is familiar with Kishineff. Still later, he discovers that the Russian military officer in charge of the district during the pogrom – whose face is etched into David’s nightmares – is Vera’s estranged father, Baron Revendal. With the help of an unscrupulous American Christian, Quincy Davenport, Revendal travels to New York in an attempt to win back his daughter, and to dissuade her from marrying a Jew. ‘Don’t you lynch and roast your niggers?’ Revendal enquires of Davenport by way of explaining his attitude towards the Jewish problem in Russia. But even the arrival of David’s tormentor cannot keep him apart from Vera.
The final scene of the play takes part on 4 July, Independence Day. David and Vera declare their intention to marry – and David declares his love for America:
Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross – how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!28
At the 1908 opening of the play in Washington Theodore Roosevelt exclaimed, ‘That’s a great play, Mr Zangwill’. Not everyone agreed. In the Jewish press, some accused it of condoning effective ‘race suicide’ by intermarriage.29 The New York Herald ran a front-page debate between Zangwill and American industrialist Daniel Guggenheim under the banner ‘Should Jews marry Christians?’ New York’s different communities were not quite so willing to be tossed into a single crucible as David Quixano might have hoped.
Nor was the rest of America quite as welcoming. ‘God is making the American’ in New York, Quixano exclaims in The Melting Pot.30 But many existing Americans felt God had already done His work. In 1911, a congressional commission chaired by Senator William P. Dillingham of Vermont produced a forty-one-volume report into the changing patterns of migration into the United States. The report suggested a number of possible measures to restrict immigration, as a means to ensuring its appropriate ‘quantity and quality’. One suggested approach was to limit immigration to some fraction of existing ethnic communities, thus acting as a brake on newer flows of migration. Another was to institute a test for reading and writing. The overall message was clear: unrestricted migration could not continue.
Others felt that it had already gone too far. One of America’s most famous medical doctors, Henry Smith Williams, reported that while only one in a hundred Scandinavian or English migrants were illiterate, forty out of every hundred Russian immigrants, half of Italian and two-thirds of Portuguese immigrants could not read.31 Nearly half of the inmates of New York State’s hospitals for the criminally insane were foreign born. Charles B. Davenport, director of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Springs Harbor, NY, was quoted as arguing that:
A new plague that rendered 4 per cent of our population, chiefly at the most productive age, not merely incompetent, but a burden costing $100,000,000 a year to support would instantly attract universal attention. But we have become so used to crime, disease and degeneracy that we take them as necessary evils.
Williams went further. The consequences of this latest wave of immigration – ‘the incubus of this alien horde’ – threatened the survival of the country’s values, even its democracy, he argued. The ghettoisation of migrant communities sustained the politics of ‘bossism’ of the kind which had become so prominent in New York City. ‘Cosmopolitanism’ was compared unfavourably to ‘Americanism’. Williams warned of the decline in the nation’s average intelligence, and thus its economic prospects. It would be no bad thing, he said, for the population of America to fall by a quarter if this were to result in a corresponding increase in average quality.
Edward Alsworth Ross, a prominent sociologist and former chair of the American Economic Association, painted a still more dramatic picture of America’s future under conditions of unrestricted migration, symbolised by the cosmopolitanism of New York. The immigration of southern Europeans, he argued, was only the start of a slippery slope:
Already America has ceased to allure, as of yore, the British, the Germans, and the Scandinavians; but it strongly attracts the Italians, Greeks, and Slavs. By 1930, perhaps, the opportunities left will have ceased to interest them; but no doubt the Khivans, the Bokhariots, the Persians and the Afghans will regard this as the Promised Land. By 1950, even they will scorn the chances here; but then, perhaps, the coolies from overpopulated India will be glad to take an American wage. By the last quarter of this century there will remain, possibly, no people in the world that will care for the chances left in America. Then, when immigration has ceased of itself, when the dogma of the sacred right of immigration has wrought its perfect work, and when the blood of the old pioneering breed has faded out of the motley, polyglot, polychrome, caste-riven population that will crowd this continent to a Chinese density, let there be reared a commemorative monument bearing these words: ‘TO THE AMERICAN PIONEERING BREED, THE VICTIM OF TOO MUCH HUMANITARIANISM AND TOO LITTLE COMMON SENSE’.32
In this reading of multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious New York, the city was not America’s noble vanguard, it was rather a warning of things to come.
On 31 March 1913, word reached the city that one of the grandest men of old New York was no more. John Pierpont Morgan, titan of Wall Street, scion of New York’s once-dominant Anglo-Saxon ascendancy, leading figure in the Episcopalian Church, the most powerful economic figure in the New World, had passed away in Rome, capital of the Old World.33
The following days saw a flood of testaments to J. P. Morgan’s greatness. The New York Stock Exchange declared he had done more for America’s economic development of the last half-century than any other man – an exaggeration, but an idea widely shared on Wall Street. With more than a hint of self-interested sycophancy the photographer Edward S. Curtis, whose documentation of Native American culture had been supported by Morgan (and by Theodore Roosevelt), declared him ‘the greatest citizen of the time’.34 Morgan received grand treatment in journals as diverse as The Churchman, Banker’s Magazine and the Nautical Gazette. In the American Review of Reviews he was termed ‘the Napoleon of finance’. Sir William Boyd Carpenter, former chaplain to Queen Victoria, steaming to America aboard the RMS Adriatic, was so moved as to write a poem in Morgan’s honour: ‘Dip flags, the Commodore has come to port!’ Morgan’s son Jack received telegrams from friends, admirers and business colleagues around the world: from Havana, Melbourne, London and Hamburg. The Independent magazine quoted a London-based correspondent as declaring that, to the average Englishman, Morgan was ‘the personification of America’s wealth, energy and financial organization’.35
At his death, Morgan was a wealthy American at a time when America was famed for the wealth of its richest citizens, a fact which Woodrow Wilson’s income tax, levied at only seven per cent for incomes above $500,000, barely dented. The precise extent of Morgan’s wealth was anyone’s guess. It took a full three years after his death for a comprehensive account of his estate to be made. When it was finished it showed him poorer than many expected (and much poorer than oil baron John D. Rockefeller) but in good company alongside Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, or the heirs of Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
But it was Morgan’s generosity, as well as his wealth, which formed the subject of his obituaries in 1913. The Metropolitan Museum applauded the man’s ‘inherent greatness of character’ – a greatness backed up with the dollars needed to add countless artworks to New York City’s finest public collection. On a different scale, Theodore Roosevelt recalled an occasion on which Morgan had privately given a substantial sum to the widow of a prominent senator, to whom he had no connection, on hearing that she had been left without money on his death. Philant
hropy squared red-blooded capitalism with Christianity. To men such as Morgan, grown rich in the moralising world of the late nineteenth century, there was only one thing more American than making money – and that was to give it away to causes or museums of which one approved. One could thus be a gentleman, a good Christian, an American, a capitalist, a man of European culture, a benefactor of the arts, a tycoon, and a servant of the public good rolled into one. This was the paternalistic, imperial model of the leadership of the rich. Characteristically, Morgan was reported to have more respect for bishops than for presidents.
Morgan’s public spiritedness manifested itself chiefly through his informal role as the nation’s banker, and through his cultural investments. In 1907, in the absence of an American central bank, Morgan had averted a full-scale financial meltdown by gathering Wall Street’s money men in his high-ceilinged study and, under the gaze of the European Renaissance, browbeating them into providing the American market with additional liquidity. Morgan’s appetite as a collector of art was gargantuan. His estate included $2,800,000 of tapestries, rugs, furniture, snuff boxes and decorative pieces. One London house alone was packed with candelabras and commodes, goblets, clocks, faiences, Japanese lacquered boxes, vases, and a collection of 138 watches.36 But, over his life, much else was given away. Morgan sat on the boards of numerous museums. His extraordinary library, his inner sanctum, was turned over to the public in 1924. ‘As he has led America out of financial provincialism’, noted the Union Club of New York, ‘so he has done his utmost to educate his fellow Americans in good pictures and good books’, providing his compatriots with the opportunity to be ‘refined by their beauties’.37
In late 1912 Morgan had faced a congressional grilling on a supposed ‘Money Trust’. The Money Trust, it was alleged, was a system of cross-holdings that allowed a small number of Wall Street bankers to squeeze their investors, control access to credit, and therefore determine the fate of individual businesses over the entire United States. The theme of more democratic access to credit, and Wall Street’s predatory influence over the national economy, had been taken up enthusiastically by Woodrow Wilson in his presidential campaign, with crusading lawyer Louis Dembitz Brandeis at his side. (In 1913, Brandeis wrote a series of articles subsequently published in a book as Other People’s Money – and How the Bankers Use It.) In 1912, under cross-examination, Morgan had acquitted himself well, batting away questions that hinted at conspiracy, and declaring himself an unambiguous advocate of the American free market.38 He received a slew of supportive letters, including one from the Bishop of Albany. Another congratulated him for ‘having floored that shyster’, in reference to his cross-examiner on the congressional committee.39
But Morgan had been tired by the experience. Now, he travelled to cities with more ancient connotations. First to Cairo, city of the pharaohs. Then to Rome, where he stayed in rooms at the Grand Hotel said to be those occupied by crowned heads of Europe when passing through, with a view towards the dome of St Peter’s. He had intended to travel on to Aix-en-Provence. When he did ultimately leave Rome it was in a coffin, on a ship bound for New York owned by a company in which Morgan had a financial interest.
‘He is worthy to lie at the central city of the world [Rome]’, one American journalist wrote after his death, ‘and to have the world quiet, thinking and talking of him’.40 Rome had seen the passing of none so powerful as ‘the man of the New World, accidentally dead in the heart of history’. Asked about Morgan by an American reporter, Italian socialist Leonida Bissolati noted his admiration for his financial genius, while adding that ‘had he directed his splendid talents to the realization of Socialist ideals the world would mourn his loss far more sincerely than is now the case’.41 Historian Guglielmo Ferrero noted the ‘sociological anomaly’ of Morgan’s wealth, and declared that ‘America has a big problem to grapple with in this respect’.42 They, and others, were chided by the director of the American Academy in Rome, Jesse Benedict Carter: ‘No one but ignorant persons ever thought of Mr Morgan as a “rich man”. Those who had come in any way near to him … thought of him as a great man, whose greatness had brought wealth with it’.43 In contrast to the ‘new era’ some proclaimed for America, Carter asserted the virtue of a man ‘steeped in the old tradition’, the tradition of individuality.
On one thing everyone agreed: the death of J. P. Morgan was a larger event than the death of a man. ‘It’s not just a grand financier – the grandest – who has passed’, wrote Le Figaro in Paris, ‘it is a whole regime which has disappeared: the system of financial feudalism’.44 Over the course of the rest of the year 1913, New York, the self-appointed metropolis of American business, the epicentre of freewheeling financial capitalism, had its wings clipped by Washington.
In place of the private arrangements of private bankers running the finances of the world’s largest industrial economy – the system symbolised by Morgan – the hybrid Federal Reserve System was established, a kind of decentralised central bank. Under this system, power was shunted away from Wall Street by setting up regional Federal Reserves – including one in New York – able to report back on credit conditions on the ground. Public officials were to be appointed to the Federal Reserve board in order to allow the views of Wall Street to be tempered by those of Main Street, and those of Washington. Interest rates, which had tended to fluctuate seasonally in the past, with a major impact on farmers, would now be smoothed over the course of the year. Financial panics would be more easily controlled. Although not necessarily foreseen at the time, the creation of such a system would have still-larger consequences for the long term. The introduction of greater stability into America’s domestic finances would eventually, particularly in the period after 1945, provide the springboard for the increasingly important role of the United States dollar in the global economy, from which it was almost absent in 1913 where the British pound sterling predominated.45 Thus the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 would ultimately form the basis of New York’s emergence not as the nation’s financial capital, but the world’s.
Two weeks after Morgan’s death, his body arrived back in New York, his coffin wrapped in the American flag and topped with Jacquemot roses. More flowers arrived later, as the body lay in state in the Morgan Library: a cluster of palm leaves bound with silk streamers from the German Emperor, a wreath of lilies of the valley from the Italian government, palm leaves from a tree at Mount Vernon reputed to have been planted by George Washington. The funeral was held a few days later in St George’s Episcopal church. As a mark of respect normally reserved only for presidents, the New York Stock Exchange stayed closed. Later, John Pierpont Morgan’s coffin was put on a special train for Hartford, Connecticut, and there his body was committed to the firm New England ground of his birth.
For America, the death of J. P. Morgan represented the end of a particular era of capitalism – born of nineteenth-century precepts of unfettered free markets – which had given rise to the trusts and the tycoons, the tremendous enrichment of the elite, and the cultural affectations of New York’s aristocracy of wealth. Now, in its place, there began to emerge an era where the state would play a more directive role in the national economy and where mass production and mass consumption would become America’s hallmarks, rather than the prosperity of its elites. In 1913 America jolted decisively, from the age of Morgan to the age of Ford.
DETROIT
A Model Future
As Cass Gilbert celebrated the opening of the Woolworth Building in New York, his attention turned to his latest commission in one of America’s fastest-rising cities: a grand public library in Detroit, Michigan. The plot chosen was on Woodward Avenue, a wide road running from the city’s centre up towards its northern fringes. Gilbert envisaged a classical building of white marble, a symbol of learning and culture for Detroit’s burgeoning aspirational classes. A mile or two further up Woodward Avenue stood another building, of brick and glass this time but every bit as grand in its way, and equally symbolic of Detroit�
�s rise: the Highland Park factory of the Ford Motor Company, home of the Model T.
By 1913 Detroit already claimed half a million residents, and the number was rising. ‘Probably no place in the United States has grown so rapidly since the last census’, proclaimed a tourist guide produced a few years later.1 ‘Detroit is Growing Northward’ screamed an advertisement in the Free Press for the North Woodward area, estimating that the city’s population would top one million by 1920, even as notices for chicken farms jostled with those for suburban property.2
Like New York, the city’s population was cosmopolitan, including a large number of recent immigrants in search of work in the city’s factories. ‘Half a dozen cities’ lay within Detroit’s limits.3 A ‘large colony’ of African-Americans from the South had begun to grow up in a nest of downtown streets – Clinton, Macomb, Monroe and Beaubien – though Detroit was still the whitest large city in America. Around West Jefferson Avenue ‘almost all the names on the stores are Hungarian, Romanian and Armenian’. East Canfield was a Polish stronghold. ‘Little Roumania’ had established itself around Highland Park itself, but several thousand more Romanians lived by the wharves of southern Detroit, in an area once dominated by French Canadians. Elsewhere, there were streets of Greeks or Russians, and city blocks of Serbians or Belgians. ‘Although foreigners are adapting themselves to American life generally’, the guidebook noted, ‘different nationalities follow different trades’:
Greeks are florists, waiters, and have monopolized the bootblacking business. Sicilians are fruit dealers. Other Italians are laborers. Syrians are laborers. Belgians are farmers, laborers and many of them are good mechanics. The foreigners are among the best workmen and very valuable in the industrial world.4