After a year, Joseph turned down the offer of a generous pay-rise and invested the $200 he’d saved in various portable goods. With them he set off on foot, carrying a two-hundred-pound pack, peddling to farms in the region. It was hard and sometimes dangerous work, but Joe was tough and single-minded. He was also a brilliant salesman, and within six months he had made a profit of $500, part of which he sent off to his two next-eldest brothers, Wolf and Jakob, who were longing to join him, as their passage-money.
Wolf and Jakob – renamed William and James on their arrival in America – were not all-rounders like Joseph. William was idle, and liked the good life, which annoyed his older brother. James however, while not particularly good at accountancy, turned out to be the best salesman of all of them. By 1840 the brothers had bought a place to use as their headquarters in Lancaster, fifty miles west of Philadelphia; the following year the next brother, Jesaias (who became Jesse), came over aged fourteen, and quickly proved to be the accountant the enterprise needed. Over the next two years, growing profits enabled Joseph to get the rest of his family, including his father, over to the New World.
James, handsome, confident and intelligent, showed an aptitude for salesmanship which surpassed even his oldest brother’s, and in 1846 he was delegated to open the New York branch of the family’s fast-expanding dry-goods business. At about the same time Jesse and his youngest brother Henry (Hermann) were establishing another branch at Watertown, in upstate New York. There, Jesse made friends with an army lieutenant stationed nearby. This would turn out to be another fortunate relationship, since the lieutenant’s name was Ulysses S. Grant.
The Seligmans continued to live modestly, even after their business expanded to cover most of the country. As a result of the Gold Rush to San Francisco in the 1850s they were able to reap mighty profits, since gold fever led to enormous price hikes. A blanket bought for $5 could sell for $40, and a quart of whiskey went for $25. Profits from California became the mainstay of the Seligman organisation.
But a new dimension soon crept into their interests. Much of the profit from the west coast took the physical form of gold bullion, which the New York branch used not only to buy new stock, but also to trade on the market. Banking in the United States didn’t become formally regulated until after the Civil War, and there was no bar to anyone entering the field. It didn’t take long for the Seligmans to realise that interest never stopped earning. They loaned, bought and sold IOUs, and eventually offered deposit accounts. By 1852 Joseph, aged thirty-three, was a major New York banker and investor. The only mistake the family made, based no doubt on their traditional thinking, was to avoid tying anything up in property: by and large, they rented. Thus at one point they passed up the chance to buy about one-sixth of Manhattan.
The Seligmans were now solidly established. During the Civil War they sold uniforms to the Union Army, and took the risk of being paid in Treasury Bonds. It paid off, and when the war was over, with their old friend Grant a Yankee hero, they were able to cash in on the post-war boom. Although New York high society was riddled with elaborate rules and regulations, which tacitly excluded Jews from its inner sanctum, no one in business could afford to ignore them. By the mid-1860s the Seligman brothers and sisters had produced about eighty children between them. When Grant became president in 1869, he offered Joseph the post of Secretary to the Treasury. For the first time Joseph faltered. He may have been a millionaire at fifty, but at heart he was still an immigrant Jewish kid, and his confidence failed him. On his own turf, however, he remained king, and the linchpin of the clan’s business activities.
Although by no means on a par with the Astors, Morgans, Vanderbilts or Whitneys, the Seligmans continued to expand. They never had as big a break as the Guggenheims had in mining, but like them they diversified into railroads, and, famously, into the Panama Canal venture. After the builder of the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps, failed to achieve the same success in Central America, the Seligmans were able not only to divert interest from a rival canal construction in Nicaragua, but to finance a revolution for Panamanian independence from Colombia in return for the canal contract.
The Guggenheims were always out-of-towners, and were thus less affected by the implicit anti-Semitism of New York society than the Seligmans were. As the Seligmans’ wealth increased, so did their desire to be accepted. Joseph had long since forgotten his father’s injunctions to be strictly observant of his faith, and he and his brothers wanted nothing more than to be accepted by the great and the good. Being Jewish and having a German accent didn’t help, no matter how much money one had, and however much one learned which knives and forks to use when and how to hold them properly, and the correct manner of presenting a calling card. As in the Great Plague of the Middle Ages, so in the temporary financial panic year of 1873, Jews were blamed.
Oddly enough, Sephardic Jews were more likely to be accepted. Moses Lazarus had been one of the founders of New York’s Knickerbocker Club, second in exclusivity only to the Union Club. His daughter Emma even wrote the verse that adorns the Statue of Liberty: ‘Give me your tired, your poor …’ For Ashkenazi Jews, especially those from Germany, it was a different matter. Just as in time they would look down on the Slav and Russian Jewish immigrants, so now they were the newcomers, and their financial acumen meant that they were the victims of envy and its attendant spite.
Still they longed to be accepted. Their synagogue, the Temple Emanu-El on 5th Avenue, was reformed and Americanised. But they also took pride in their old country. They founded their own exclusive clubs: until 1893 the Harmonie Gesellschaft hung a portrait of the Kaiser on its walls. And although the Seligmans had anglicised their first names, they wouldn’t touch their surname (except for dropping the second ‘n’). When William once suggested it, Joseph retorted that if he wanted to, he had better change his to schlemiel. By the late nineteenth century the Ashkenazi Jews of New York comprised a formidable group, including the Contents, the Goldmans, the Kuhns, the Lehmans, the Lewinsohns, the Loebs, the Sachses and the Schiffs. However, when it came to names for their children, Gentile and patriotic American ones were chosen. The thing to do for prominent Jews was to play down their Jewishness. But whatever they did, anti-Semitism remained a core element of society, and Jewish new arrivals found it impossible to avoid or ignore. That it rankled long with Joseph is proven by one dramatic incident.
The Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga had been owned by one Alexander T. Stewart. On his death in 1876 Stewart had left its management to a friend, Harry Hilton, who shared his right-wing views. Stewart had envied Joseph Seligman from the time that Seligman had turned down the Treasury post, which Stewart coveted. It hadn’t helped that Stewart’s subsequent application for the job had been rejected by the Senate.
The hotel had begun to lose money even before Stewart’s death, and Hilton and he believed this was because the Gentile clientele didn’t like the admission of Jews. It wasn’t uncommon for expensive hotels, clubs and even restaurants to refuse admission to Jews in those days, and Saratoga was a major resort for the wealthy. It isn’t clear whether the Seligman family actually went to the hotel in the summer of 1877, or whether they were forewarned: it seems highly unlikely that they would not have booked beforehand. It is possible that Joseph arrived with his family and his baggage in the knowledge that he would provoke a rejection. If so, the humiliation he received must have been half expected. Whatever the truth of the matter, they were rebuffed.
There was a storm in the press, and a furious exchange of letters. Seligman sued Hilton. The liberal elements in society took up Joseph’s cause. But Hilton stuck to his guns: he didn’t like Jews, and they were bad for business. The courts did not find in favour of Seligman, and several other hotels in the Adirondacks, emboldened by Hilton’s move, also introduced a ‘no-Jews’ policy. The only satisfaction Joseph could derive from the affair was the successful boycott of the largest New York department store, also formerly owned