Morgenthau, Morgenthau, Morgenthau, and Morgenthau
Reviewed By David Huyssen
Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of An American Dynasty
By Andrew Meier
Random House
October 2022, 1072 pp.
Morgenthau is a work of dogged journalism. It draws on countless interviews conducted over more than a decade and engages a volume of documentary records that would daunt even the most devoted archive hound. A century and a half of dynastic history unfolds in elegant prose: life in a nineteenth-century German Grand Duchy, Gilded Age New York real estate development, twentieth-century U.S. Presidential politics, war, the criminal justice system, and more. Andrew Meier, a former Russia correspondent for Time magazine and author of evocative books on Soviet and post-Soviet intrigues, tackles it all with aplomb. The result is monumental, both in scope and in kindness to its subjects.
The book’s four interwoven arcs — one apiece for Lazarus, Henry, Henry Jr., and Bob — reproduce a Horatio Alger-style pattern. Every Morgenthau faces down, then overcomes challenges on a self-fashioned path to affluence, respectability, or state power.
Born in 1815 to humble Bavarian Jews, Lazarus Morgenthau blazed three strategic trails for the family to follow: assimilating to non-Jewish society, marrying well, and leveraging family money. After apprenticing himself to a Christian tailor, Lazarus realized he could shed his kippah, “pass for a Gentile,” and sell his stylish cravats beyond the market streets designated for Jews in German towns (7). Profit and a modicum of respectability followed. He married Babette Guggenheim, daughter of a regionally prominent rabbi, and moved to Baden, where he achieved his real breakthrough. His brother, Max, who had emigrated and prospered in California, drew Lazarus into a joint venture: manufacturing luxury cigars for the U.S. market.
Hitching his panache for publicity to Max’s idea and capital, Lazarus established multiple factories in Mannheim. He became a wealthy industrialist, installing his family in a local castle and burnishing his regional reputation by showering gifts on Catholics and Protestants. He probably would have died happy in Baden if Abraham Lincoln hadn’t ruined everything. Taxes on foreign goods that Lincoln signed into law in 1862 decimated the Morgenthau brothers’ cigar empire. Lazarus sold his German assets and crossed the Atlantic in 1866, twisting the classic New York immigrant tale: he was not enticed to the Golden Door by possibilities of enterprise in America, but driven to it by American interference with his enterprise.
Yet Lazarus was no Ragged Dick, his wife and children no huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Their months in Brooklyn Heights were a step down, but a few of Meier’s details sit uneasily with his descriptions of Lazarus as “nearly broke,” debarking “at the head of a sodden throng,” and settling the family on a “derelict block” rife with cholera (11-15). The Morgenthaus arrived not in steerage, but first-class. They carried $30,000 dollars from the sale of their castle, a sum roughly equivalent to a lifetime’s earnings for a New York laborer at the time. Lazarus set up multiple businesses within weeks and transplanted the family to Manhattan before a year was out. As time passed his ventures failed and he grew increasingly erratic, but he stayed ahead of his creditors and maintained a respectable name for long enough to see his children, including Henry, reasonably educated and well married.
Henry wasn’t grateful. He hired Pinkerton agents to keep Lazarus away from his wedding. A talented, volcanically ambitious middle son, Henry had been nursing an Oedipal grudge for years. Lazarus had forced him to drop out of City College at fourteen to go to work, and the sting of this betrayal overshadowed the fact that it had also prompted a vital step on Henry’s journey to riches and repute: a job in a law firm run by one of Lazarus’s acquaintances, who initiated him into the world of property management.
Henry rejected his father but embraced his methods. He self-identified as American first, cultivating non-Jewish business connections and evading, rather than confronting, the rising antisemitism of New York Society. He plotted his marriage to Josephine Sykes, partial heiress to a garment fortune, with military precision. And, like Lazarus, he made his real mark in business courtesy of extended family capital, borrowing heavily from an affable brother-in-law to start his signature business model, the real estate investment syndicate. Morgenthau soon became a New York real estate legend, consolidating, breaking up, and developing properties all over the map, including Times Square.
Henry Morgenthau, Sr., a portrait of HM on a 2015 Armenian stamp recognizing the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide.
Whatever young Henry’s aggrieved perspective, Meier’s description of him as having started his career ladder “on the bottom rung” strains credulity (38). Henry benefited from an uninterrupted primary education (many did not), early access to well-placed jobs, considerably less daily adversity than the people whose doors he haunted as a teenage rent collector, and family funds to underwrite his acumen. People who start their careers on the bottom rung do not generally, by age sixteen, have extended audiences with the President of the United States.
As a fundraiser for Woodrow Wilson’s winning 1912 presidential campaign, Henry undeniably extended the family’s respectability and influence far beyond his father’s wildest dreams. Yet victory came with a bitter pill. Following antisemitic logic and advice, Wilson denied Henry the cabinet position he craved, Secretary of the Treasury, offering him the “Jewish” ambassadorship to the Ottoman Empire instead. Henry was furious, but made peace with the post, and as Meier relates in fascinating detail, reveled in the diplomatic pomp of Constantinople. If he occasionally became a cat’s paw in inter-imperial rivalries, he also made efforts to impede the genocide of the Armenians, recording the crime for posterity.
All the while Henry imposed a heavy weight of paternal expectation on his only son. A dour, awkward boy who became a dour, awkward man, Henry Jr. hoped to escape his father’s sphere by declaring an interest in farming. Senior treated Junior’s new passion like an investment property requiring development. He pushed his son into agricultural coursework at Cornell. When that didn’t take, he did what any loving father would: he arranged an internship with the Secretary of the Interior.
Almost in spite of himself, Henry Jr. achieved greater heights than his father or grandfather had. He even improved on their method, marrying richer, benefitting earlier from family financing, and achieving greater influence through assimilation. Henry Jr. wed a proper heiress, Elinor Lehman Fatman, of Fatman garment manufacturing and Lehman banking-cum-New-York politico-judicial fame. The title he possessed since childhood to revenue-generating properties in the Bronx funded his purchase of a Dutchess County apple farm. Lo and behold, his new upstate neighbor was a gregarious goy with a golden pedigree who drew him into the loftiest precincts of U.S. politics. Henry Jr. became F.D.R.’s pal, foil, confidante, loyal retainer, and occasional fall guy. Roosevelt called him “Henry the Morgue.”
Henry Morgenthau, Jr., a portrait of him with F.D.R. and W. Forbes Morgan in Warm Springs, Georgia in 1932. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum.
Through accidents of birth and geography, Henry Jr. claimed his father’s prize, becoming Secretary of the Treasury. Among other accomplishments in the role, he facilitated the 1944 Bretton Woods summit that formalized U.S. dollar dominance over post-war economic life, helping to cement New York’s status as the capital of global finance. And, after months of handwringing about risking association with sectarian “Jewish” interests, he also pushed F.D.R. to create the War Refugee Board, which saved hundreds of thousands from being murdered by Nazis in the war’s final year. Meier calls it “the supreme moment of his life” (354).
Scholars of twentieth-century U.S. history know a different Henry Jr. than the one presented here. They point out his instrumental role in one of the New Deal’s most sexist and racist policy choices, the exclusion of domestic and agricultural workers from the provisions of the Social Security Act.[1] They note how his fixation on cutting expenditures to balance budgets in service of “business confidence” helped stall the New Deal and drive the country back into the Depression on the cusp of World War II.[2] His own son, Henry III, writes, “Through the 1930s my father, along with the president’s other ‘court Jews,’ misinterpreted news of the Nazi scourge.”[3]
None of these critiques darken Morgenthau’s pages. Henry Jr. appears here as he did to his most devoted subordinates: a principled opponent of bigotry, brilliant bureaucratic operator, seer regarding war mobilization, and brave truth-teller to his powerful patron.
This assessment bespeaks an almost filial fidelity, which is appropriate given the book’s true animating spirit and central character (measured by page count), who now comes into focus. Meier conducted “hundreds of hours” of interviews between 2008 and 2019 with Robert Morris Morgenthau, Henry Jr.’s second son, and hundreds more with friends, family, and mostly admiring associates (894). The resulting account follows “Bob” through his school days, narrow brushes with death during Navy service in the Mediterranean and Pacific, ups (crusading U.S. Attorney, happy marriages) and downs (failed and abortive gubernatorial candidacies, lifelong institutionalization of his developmentally disabled daughter, and the early death of his first wife from cancer). He emerges, and ends, as “the Boss” of the Manhattan D.A.’s office.
Yet for all Meier’s personal access, his Bob Morgenthau remains terse and sphinxlike. There are plenty of legal cases — details of which occupy the length of an ordinary book — but no lachrymose confessions. The Boss appears so insulated from the standard pressures of public life by his noblesse oblige that he can, and does, become the embodiment of selfless public service. Except for his occasional zealotry in pursuing venal public officials, and a “shortsightedness” that led him to facilitate the career and public legitimacy of Donald J. Trump (“we never expected this” he told Meier during Trump’s presidency), Morgenthau appears here as the picture of dispassionate restraint and quiet principle (875-879).
Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan District Attorney, 1985. Photograph by Bernard Gotfryd. Library of Congress.
Even his most notorious professional failure — the Central Park Jogger case — becomes a redemption narrative for the integrity of his leadership. Using flawed evidence and false, arguably coerced confessions, Morgenthau’s office won the wrongful conviction of five adolescents of color for the 1989 assault, rape, and attempted murder of a white woman. Readers are invited to view the Boss’s decision to reinvestigate the case in light of new exculpatory evidence years later as an act of moral courage rather than requisite atonement; his refusal to issue a public apology as a mark of his devotion to privileging “the law” and its constancy over his transient emotions (836-37). Morgenthau thought the Central Park Jogger case would be “written on my tombstone” (837). Morgenthau aims to ensure that any long-term damage to the marble’s grandeur is cosmetic.
The book’s subtitle does not lie. Morgenthau is a gorgeously written account of how some very rich New Yorkers lived their lives and built a powerful dynasty. It would require greater attention to matters beyond the book’s scope, however, to judge that dynasty’s lasting historical legacies. What might some of those legacies be, today?
The institutional descendants of Henry Sr.’s real estate syndicates are hoovering up and warehousing city property, making New York unaffordable for working-class families.[4] The cost-cutting, budget-balancing dogmas that Henry Jr. preached when they were unfashionable now enjoy a deafening chorus of support, drowning out the more hopeful creeds that built the New Deal. The rate of imprisonment in New York, its standard set by the Boss for decades, is higher than almost any other democracy on earth.[5] No one could credibly argue that the House of Morgenthau bears primary responsibility for predatory private-equity landlordism, the false economic scripture of mainstream politicians, or mass incarceration. Yet these realities emerged from pasts that, as Meier shows, the Morgenthaus helped shape. There may be some instructive connections left for future historians or biographers to consider.
In the meantime, one suspects that the sentiment of the mourners who emerged onto Fifth Avenue from Bob Morgenthau’s funeral a few years ago applies equally to Meier’s Morgenthau: “the Boss would have enjoyed it” (885).
David Huyssen teaches history at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, and is the author of Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920. He was previously Senior Lecturer at the University of York (UK), and is currently completing a biography of Alfred Winslow Jones, the socialist who created the modern hedge fund.
[1] Blanche Wiesen Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 2, 1933-1938 (New York: Viking, 1999) 247-248.
[2] Alan Brinkley, End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1995) 15-30.
[3] Henry Morgenthau III, Mostly Morgenthaus: A Family History (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991), 322.
[4] Sam Rabiyah, “More than 60,000 Rent-Stabilized Apartments Are Now Vacant — and Tenant Advocates Say Landlords Are Holding Them for ‘Ransom’,” The City, 19 October 2022 (URL: https://www.thecity.nyc/housing/2022/10/19/23411956/60000-rent-stabilized-apartments-vacant-warehousing-nyc-landlords-housing); Rich Bockmann, “Private Equity Firms are Betting Big on New York Apartments,” The Real Deal, 1 September 2022 (URL: https://therealdeal.com/magazine/national-september-2022/apartment-therapy).
[5] A study by the Prison Policy Initiative using 2020 census data showed that “New York has an incarceration rate of 376 per 100,000 people (including prisons, jails, immigration detention, and juvenile justice facilities), meaning that it locks up a higher percentage of its people than almost any democracy on earth” (URL: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/NY.html).