Barbara, who had contracted diabetes, died on 20 March 1900. Ben and Will pulled out – and were partly pushed out – of the family firm soon after. The other brothers were only too happy to be rid of the interference of their pampered, college-educated siblings, whose ideas of how to run the business clashed with their own. Furthermore, Will, who fancied himself something of a ladies’ man, had blotted his copybook by making a very ill-advised marriage late in 1900, to a woman of dubious virtue. The older brothers coerced him into divorce, but then had to stump up a hefty $78,000 to satisfy the aggrieved ex-wife, although the whole business dragged on for another thirteen years, and in 1904 even threatened to bring scandal upon Will’s second and only slightly more successful marriage. Ben and Will were left with handsome incomes and some interest in the business, but only as far as it had come by the turn of the century. They were cut off from the vast amounts that would accrue to the Guggenheim companies after 1900.
Meyer, growing old, increasingly left the reins of the business to his son Daniel, dabbling in the stock exchange as a means of recreation. ‘When my grandmother died,’ Peggy wrote, ‘my grandfather was looked after by his cook. She must have been his mistress.’ This is a typical Peggy-ism, and need not necessarily be true – she always loved amorous intrigue. ‘I remember seeing her weep copious tears because my grandfather vomited. My one recollection of this gentleman is of his driving around New York in a sleigh with horses, he was unaccompanied and always wore a coat with a sealskin collar and a cap to match.’ The cook-mistress may be an exaggeration by Peggy, but a woman servant called Hannah McNamara sued Meyer for $25,000 shortly after Barbara’s death, claiming to have been his mistress for the past twenty-five years. Meyer denied the whole thing, and the unfortunate business blew over; but the servant’s allegations are not outside the bounds of possibility, and most of Meyer’s sons had one mistress or more at some stage in their lives.
But if there was someone who consoled him during his final years, Meyer kept her secret. He died in Florida, where he’d gone to recover from a cold, in 1905, nearly five years to the day after Barbara.
When Ben Guggenheim successfully wooed and won Florette Seligman in 1894, his family was already substantially richer than hers. But the Seligmans, though they had only arrived in the States about ten years earlier than the ‘Googs’, formed part of the Jewish élite of New York, and looked down on the family which had made so much money from mining and smelting. A Seligman family telegram to cousins back home in Germany may have been deliberately miswritten to show their contempt: ‘FLORETTE ENGAGED GUGGENHEIM SMELT HER’. However, no objection was raised to the match. No one could fail to respect the Guggenheim wealth, or the speed with which it had been made. Benjamin was a bit of a dandy and a bit of a womaniser; he had a warm personality and a delightful smile. Florette was on the plain side and her temperament was difficult. But from each family’s point of view, the union was advantageous.
Despite the difference in the status of the two families in New York, the story of the Seligman origins is remarkably similar to that of the Guggenheims. The little town of Baiersdorf lies midway between Bamberg and Nuremberg in Franconia, Germany. There was a Jewish community there from at least the mid-fourteenth century, and the last Jews belonging to it were deported to a concentration camp in Poland, where they died, in 1942. A large Jewish cemetery remains, and the town, as so many in Germany do, has its Judengasse – Jews’ Street. The Seligmann family – they would drop the second ‘n’ on arrival in America – arrived in Baiersdorf around 1680. In 1818 David Seligmann, a local weaver, married Fanny Steinhardt. The couple set up house in the Judengasse, and over the next twenty years produced eight sons and three daughters, just as the Guggenheims had done. Today there is a Seligmannstrasse in Baiersdorf, and a David and Fanny Seligman Kindergarten, endowed by the family.
Using some of her dowry, Fanny bought a stock of bed linen, bolts of cloth, lace and ribbons. With them she set up a small shop in the family home, and did so well that David’s none-too-impressive fortunes improved. He called himself a wool merchant, and started a sideline in sealing wax. He had to travel frequently on business, so that the upbringing of the children was left, to his misgiving, to his wife.
Travellers from outside Baiersdorf started to use Fanny’s shop, and by the mid-1820s their oldest son, Josef, had begun a modest currency-exchange business. In those days much of Germany consisted of small principalities, and coinage was not standardised, so Josef did a brisk trade, taking a small profit from each exchange. It was a short step from changing money for the convenience of users of his mother’s dry-goods store to running a regular currency exchange, and by the age of twelve the precocious Josef was even handling the occasional US dollar, among other truly foreign coinage.
Fanny was ambitious for all her children, but Josef was the apple of her eye. However, by the mid-1830s, the German rural economy was declining, as more and more people migrated to the increasingly industrialised cities, and Jews, subject to severe legal restrictions, found it ever harder to make ends meet. Some moved to the cities, but received no welcome there. Others began to look outside their native land. As Jewish migrants moved through the country westwards from oppression farther east, in Poland and Russia, word spread about the opportunities awaiting those who could afford, or who dared, to emigrate to America. In time, so great was the emigration that a duality arose in New York Jewish society not only between the insiders and the outsiders, but between those ‘older’ emigrants with German names, and those who mainly came later, with Russian and Slavonic names – these last being at the bottom of the social heap.
Fanny Seligmann had a strategy. Joseph was now fourteen, and she took the unprecedented step in her family of sending him to university in nearby Erlangen, where for two years he studied German literature, and learned some Latin, Greek, English and French. By the time he had graduated at sixteen he wanted nothing more than to spread his wings and go to the United States. Father David, now forty-six years old, a conservative, dour man, raised objections: emigrants were widely regarded as failures, and besides, there were rumours that Jews in America lost sight of their religion. But Fanny was adamant, and although it took her some time to persuade her husband, Josef was allowed to set off, aged eighteen, in July 1837, in the company of eighteen other men, women and children from the town. Fanny had managed to scrape together the money for his passage, and from somewhere too – possibly relatives in her home town of Sulzbach – she’d obtained $100 in US currency, which she carefully sewed into Josef’s knee-breeches. Then she waved him goodbye. She would never see him again. In 1841, aged only forty-two, Fanny died. She had given birth to her eleventh child, a daughter, two years earlier. It was clear that Fanny had been the backbone of the family. Soon after her death, her widowed husband, with several children still at home to look after, ran into financial difficulties.
The journey from Baiersdorf to Bremen, where Josef’s party was to take ship, took seventeen days, travelling overland in two wagons. The crossing on the schooner Telegraph took a further sixty-six days. Including Josef’s party, there were 142 people crammed on board. Passage cost $40, and included a cup of water and one meal a day – which unfortunately consisted of pork and beans, so Josef quickly had to ignore his father’s parting injunction not to forget the Jewish dietary laws. Even so he lost weight on the journey – no bad thing, as he always had a tendency towards corpulence. On the journey he also fell in love, with the daughter of his group’s leader Johannes Schmidt. But unlike Meyer’s, it was simply a shipboard romance, ending in a tearful parting when the Telegraph docked at New York.
Josef, who immediately anglicised his name – to Joseph Seligman – on arrival in America, as all his brothers who followed would, had more on his mind than regretting the girl. He was a young man driven by ambition, and with a similar motivation to Meyer’s: in money lay security. Soon after his arrival he set off on a hundred-mile hike – he wasn’t going to