The Guggenheims: A Family History

564 Pages·2006·1.7 MB·English

by  Debi Unger

The
Guggenheims
A Fa mily Histo ry
IRW IN UNGER and DEBI UNGER

To Our Children:
Anthony and Jo, Brooke and Deborah, Elizabeth and Kurt, Miles and Jody,
Paul and Eszter
To Our Grandchildren:
Kalliope, Emily, Gabriel, Layla, Rachel, Rebecca

Contents
Chapter One: Beginnings 1
Chapter Two: Foundation 28
Chapter Three: New York 49
Chapter Four: ASARCO 69
Chapter Five: Malefactors 100
Chapter Six: Profits and Patriotism 127
Chapter Seven: Family Affairs 175
Chapter Eight: Harry Augustus 238
Chapter Nine: “High Priest of the Clan” 283
Chapter Ten: “The Grand Old Man” 351
Chapter Eleven: A Fool for Love 392
Chapter Twelve: Unraveling 452
Notes 499
Acknowledgments 529
Index 531
About the Authors
Praise
Other Books by Irwin Unger and Debi Unger
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
C H A P T E R O N E
Beginnings
B
Y ORIGIN THE GUGGENHEIMS were Jews, and their Jewishness
was an irreducible reality of successive family generations. In our
own tolerant and apathetic era it is easy to underrate this fact. But for the
many thousands of Jewish inhabitants of Christian Europe before our
own time, it was almost as fundamental, as life-defining, as gender.
Nowhere in Europe, from Portugal to the Ural Mountains, from
Scandinavia to the Italian boot, were Jews treated as equals of other men
and women in medieval and early modern times. Everywhere they were
“the other,” the despised outsider. In an age when the afterlife was more
important than the present one, the Jews were irremediably cursed
because they were damned for denying Jesus. Why they were allowed to
live at all requires an explanation. And, of course, at times they were
slaughtered. In the 1090s, as the champions of Christ passed through the
Rhineland to wrest the Holy Land from the infidel Muslims, they mur-
dered Jews as a dress rehearsal. Jews were massacred during the Black
Death, the mysterious pandemic that swept Europe in the mid-
fourteenth century killing millions. Although they were equal victims,
they were often held responsible for the calamity. In 1348 Swiss Jews
were burned at the stake for infecting the wells with plague. Jews, in a
2 T H E G U G G E N H E I M S
word, were the classic scapegoats who were punished when Christian
society knew no other way to relieve fear, anger, and frustration.
Yet they were not exterminated. Christians were, of course, enjoined
from taking innocent life, and at times Christian mercy triumphed over
Christian execration. Moreover, the Jews, in the view of some theolo-
gians, must be preserved as witnesses to the truth of the Christian faith,
and their final conversion was an essential precursor of the Second
Coming and the End of Days. But besides, the Jews were useful. Like the
pariah castes of India, they could perform services that others would not
or could not. Jews were excluded from a wide array of customary occu-
pations. They could not own land and so were kept from farming, prein-
dustrial Europe’s chief fount of income and wealth. Forbidden to take
interest on loans, for centuries Christians relied on Jews to lend money.
Jews were also permitted to engage in various despised trades. They
could be itinerant peddlers of cheap wares; they could run taverns and
distilleries. They were employed by the landed gentry in rural Europe to
collect tenants’ rents. They were tax farmers who collected official levies
for a share of the amount collected. Many of these occupations seem
exquisitely tailored to offend and provoke Christians. The Jews could be
blamed for either corrupting or exploiting their clients and customers.
These restrictions on Jewish occupations and enterprise confined them
to the economic margins and ensured that all but a very privileged few
would remain poor.
And the economic straitjacket was not the only affliction imposed on
this accursed people. They were only marginally part of civil society.
Virtually nowhere in Christian Europe were Jews held to be part of the
body politic. They could not be enfranchised burghers in the cities; they
could not hold public office; they could not bear arms; they often could
not testify in court against Christians. They could not live where they
wished. Many communities excluded them totally. Jews were expelled
from England in 1290; from France in 1306. At the end of the fifteenth
century a reunited Spain forced its Jewish population either to convert to
Christianity or to depart the realm. Many of those who converted were
deemed insincere and as crypto-Jews were condemned by the
Inquisition and burned at the stake. Where Jews were not exiled they