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DURING all these years of which I have been writing my spirit was in a never-ceasing conflict with itself, a conflict between idealism and materialism. My boyish imagination had been fired with a vision of a life of unselfish devotion to the welfare of others, and in an earlier chapter I have described the influence of religious and ethical teachings upon my character and activities. But the necessity of earning a livelihood had early thrust me into the arena of business. Once there, I became absorbed in money-making. It was a fascinating game. It challenged all my powers of brain and will to hold my own and forge ahead in the fierce competition of my fellows. I lived business, ate business, dreamed business. There came a time when the most interesting lectures, the finest theatrical performances, or even the best staged operas could not hold my entire attention. My schemes constantly intruded themselves upon my consciousness and would absorb the mentality that was required for me to understand and rejoice with what was going on. As usual, as with all other business men, the day’s work had practically absorbed my day’s supply of vitality. I had not the power to shake off this exacting task-master.

But, though business could conquer pleasure, it could not conquer idealism; and idealism resorted to similar tactics as business. It asserted itself during business hours, and again and again demanded opportunities to exercise itself. I shall now try to tell how it successfully resisted complete annihilation.

When, in 1876, Felix Adler returned from his studies as a rabbi in Europe, and Temple Emanu-El—the most important Jewish congregation in the United States—was ready to welcome him to its pulpit, he found that it would not coincide with his views to follow in the footsteps of his father, who had been connected with that synagogue for forty years. The son’s researches had led him to the conclusion that forms, ceremonies, and customs did not make a religion when pursued in new and entirely different surroundings. Dr. Adler hoped that the time had come when the real spiritual essentials of the Jewish religion—its system of ethics—could be developed, appreciated, and enforced, and that the American Jews could adjust themselves to the land in which they were living and drop all that they had had to adhere to in Ghettoized Europe. He came back filled with an enthusiastic desire to remedy the glaring evils, not only of the Jews, but of the entire community: he could diagnose our ills and prescribe a remedy.

This appeal found a wonderful response amongst the flower of the reformed Jews and some Christians of New York, who formed the Society for Ethical Culture, of which the then leading Jew of America, Joseph Seligman, was elected president. All these felt the need of readjustment to fit their new surroundings. Some of those religious habits were imposed upon them while their ancestors were suppressed people. Few, if any, would adopt Christianity, but all were ready to subscribe to the aims of a society which are most clearly stated in their present invitation to members:

Our Society is distinctly a religious body, interpreting the word “religion” to mean fervent devotion to the highest moral ends. But toward religion as a confession of faith in things superhuman, the attitude of our Society is neutral. Neither acceptance nor denial of any theological doctrine disqualifies for membership.

In short, the Jews in America very seriously wanted to complete their Americanization. They were honestly striving for education, for refinement, for community and public service, for devotion to art, music, and culture. Welcome, then, this prophet Adler—this great reformer! His sterling qualities as a thinker; his wonderful resourcefulness; his pure and lofty private life, and his totally uncompromising attitude toward evil, secured him the admiration of all those who had in their own modest way been hopelessly striving to reach this plane. Adler by inheritance and by studying the older prophets had mingled that knowledge with the wisdom of the present day. Here was pure ethics unencumbered by religious form, the way Emerson taught it, the way Garrison and Lincoln practised it—and this man was trying to direct this current, which led away from the old-fashioned religion into a new field tending toward agnosticism and atheism, and bring it, instead, into this new field of ethics. His sincerity could not be doubted. He had voluntarily abandoned an honourable and care-free career that had been offered him by Temple Emanu-El, and like a modern Moses had undertaken the harassing and difficult task of satisfying the unexpressed yearnings of these people, who were discontented with the existing requirements of their religion and had hopelessly sought for moral guidance.

I was among Adler’s earliest adherents. When he organized his United Relief Work, I was one of its directors; I participated in his Cherry Street experiment in model tenements—the first in America, which eventually brought about legislation to do away with the dark rooms of which there were over fifty thousand in New York City alone, and I assisted in the establishment of the first Ethical Culture School, which was started in Fifty-fourth Street, near Sixth Avenue, and was chairman of the Site Committee that secured the present location on Central Park West from Sixty-third to Sixty-fourth streets.

Above all, however, I treasure the fond remembrance of having been a member of the “Union for Higher Life”—an organization of a few of Adler’s devotees. He always maintained that, as every man expected purity from his wife, it was his duty to enter the marriage state in the same condition, and the members of this “Union” pledged themselves to celibacy during bachelorhood. We met every week at the Sherwood Studio, where he then lived. We read Lange’s “Arbeiter-Frage,” and studied the Labour question. We discussed the problems of business and professional men. I notice in my diary of April 24, ’82, that we debated the simplicity of dress and the follies of extravagance. Then, as Dr. Adler wanted us to feel that we were doing something definitely altruistic, the members of the Union jointly adopted eight children; some of them were half-orphans, and some had parents who could not support them properly; we employed a matron and hired a flat for her on the corner of Forty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue.

We had considered starting a coöperative community for ourselves, and Adler and I devoted some time looking at various properties. Our intention was to have separate living quarters with a joint kindergarten and a joint kitchen, thereby avoiding duplication of menial labour. This would have enabled our wives to devote more of their time to community work. It was to be an urban Brook Farm. Already having big ideas about real estate, I suggested and investigated the Leake and Watts Orphan Asylum property, now occupied by the Cathedral of St. John the Divine! It could then have been bought for about $3,000 a lot. Adler, however, considered it too inaccessible, as it could only be reached by the Eighth Avenue street car, and so the idea was abandoned.

As many of my close friends were not adherents of Professor Adler, and we wanted to share our intellectual developments and efforts, we organized the Emerson Society; and under the guidance of my brother Julius who had just received his degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Leipzig, we not only read, but thoroughly studied, a number of Emerson’s essays. I was chagrined to find that not only the college-bred men of our group, but also many of the girls were much better English scholars than I, so I determined to secure lessons from the best authority on English at that time. Richard Grant White, the annotator of Shakespeare and the author of “Words and their Uses,” was universally recognized as such, but I was told by people whom I consulted that it was useless to communicate with him as he undoubtedly would feel himself above giving private lessons. Nevertheless I wrote him for an interview, stating my age, vocation, and desire, and he answered:

“It is possible that I may be able to give you the assistance you seek in your praiseworthy plan. I will see you with pleasure.”

The interview was successful. Mr. White undertook to give us lessons in the origin and growth of language, nor shall I ever forget the delight of that instruction. We used to meet in his apartment on Stuyvesant Square, the home of an artist and scholar, and his talks on the development of tongues from the Aryan to our modern English—his readings from the classics in that beautiful, cultivated voice of his with its perfect enunciation—are still fresh in my memory.

Two of my friends had joined me and when I was no longer contented to meet Josephine Sykes merely as a member of the Emerson Club, and therefore persuaded her to start a little club of our own, she joined the class.

Shortly after the death of Maurice Grau in 1902, my wife and I, calling on Mrs. Josephine Bonné, found the Conrieds there, and Conried told us that he was looking for fourteen men whom he could get to join him in subscribing the $150,000 required to secure the lease and management of the Metropolitan Opera House, and as I was one that Mrs. Bonné had suggested, he, with great earnestness, backed up by his fine dramatic talent, pleaded his cause. He told us of his histrionic training in the Burg Theatre at Vienna, and how his youthful ardour for the stage was permanently influenced by the high artistic ideals prevailing there.

“When I came to America,” he said, “I hoped the prosperous Germans and Jews would endow a similar institution here, and so I started the Irving Place Theatre. What has happened? Instead of receiving the support I expected, I have had to resort to all kinds of devices. I have become a play broker, secured the American rights to current European productions, demonstrating their possibilities to the American managers, and selling them when I could, so that the Irving Place Theatre has really become only a laboratory or testing room. It has never paid for itself, and I have had to supplement my brokerage profits by securing Herr Ballin’s help in founding the Ocean Comfort Company which rents steamer chairs to transatlantic travellers! Have I put my small profits in my own pocket? No, I have poured them back into the Irving Place Theatre, still hoping to attract the support which would give me a chance to demonstrate my ideals. Here is a short-cut, here is a chance for me to realize all these ideals without having to risk my own or my friends’ money. At last my opportunity has come, and I ask you to help me secure this lease.”

I doubt if he ever played any rôle more earnestly or with greater sincerity. Nobody could have resisted him, and I gracefully surrendered and asked him:

“What progress have you made? What men have you secured?”

He answered: “Jacob H. Schiff, Ernest Thalman, Daniel Guggenheim, Randolph Guggenheimer, and Henry R. Ickelheimer.” All of these men were of the highest class, thoroughly cultured, and lovers of music, but knowing as I did the management of the Metropolitan Opera House, I jokingly said to Conried:

“If you could only secure a Mr. Hochheimer and a Mr. Niersteiner you would have a complete wine list, but you could never secure the opera house through it.”

He saw the point at once, and asked what I would suggest. I answered him:

“I have conceived a plan while sitting here, but to carry it out I must have an absolutely free hand as to who are to be your associates. I shall see Messrs. A. D. Juilliard and George G. Haven, who have the final say in the matter, on Tuesday, and can tell you that evening whether I can accomplish anything or not.”

Conried assented. I at once proceeded to carry out my plan to interest the younger social leaders and communicated with Mr. James Hazen Hyde. He was most favourably impressed, and suggested that he and I obligate ourselves for $75,000 each, secure the lease, and then select our associates. We did so, obtained the lease, and then invited the following to make up the Board of Directors of the Conried Metropolitan Opera Company: Alfred G. Vanderbilt, Henry Rogers Winthrop, H. P. Whitney, Robert Goelet, R. H. McCurdy, Jacob H. Schiff, Clarence H. Mackay, George J. Gould, Otto H. Kahn, J. Henry Smith, Eliot Gregory, Bainbridge Colby, and William H. McIntyre. Heinrich Conried was elected president and Hyde and myself vice-presidents. Success was assured from the first. Conried took hold of the management with energy and wonderful resourcefulness that promptly won him the admiration of the directors of both companies.

He completely changed the interior of the Opera House, put in a new ceiling, new chandelier, arranged the proper illumination of the boxes, and the most important improvement of all being the discarding of the old-fashioned drop curtain and replacing it with one divided in the centre, making it unnecessary for the popular stars, when answering repeated curtain-calls, to walk all the way across the stage from one side to the other of the proscenium arch. He unsuccessfully fought the demand of the boxholders for the famous horseshoe to be kept illuminated all through the performance, and finally compromised by putting red shades over the lights.

One week-end Mr. and Mrs. Conried spent with us at Elberon. They came heavily laden. Mrs. Conried cautiously carried a circular bundle of discs, and her husband bore what looked like a monster cornucopia, while their son was bending under the weight of a big box. A very few minutes after they had entered the house we were spellbound by “Elisir d’Amore,” sung by the finest tenor voice. We and our children all rushed out to the room from whence the singing came. We waited until it was finished and rivalled each other with our applause. Conried, the impresario, foreseeing in our unlimited applause the success of his future tenor, benignly smiled and explained to us:

“This is the great Caruso—a man that is in Buenos Aires just now. Grau engaged him, and it was these records that induced me to assume the contract.”

Conried startled us once more during that same week-end by confiding to us that he possessed the complete score of “Parsifal.” He said:

“I shall produce it this winter.”

We were amazed at this proposition, particularly my wife, who reminded Conried that when she was at Bayreuth she was informed that both Richard Wagner and his widow had steadfastly withstood all propositions to produce “Parsifal”—the chief attraction of its musical festivals—on any other stage. I feared that many Wagnerians would condemn the production as a sacrilege.

Conried waived aside the objections and said:

“Years ago I told Frau Casimir Wagner that some day I would produce ‘Parsifal’ in America. She ridiculed me. Here’s my chance. I will win the approbation of thousands who have been yearning to hear this opera and who will never get to Bayreuth.”

From that day on, he kept me informed of his progress. We were together in Vienna when he chose the costumes for the “flower-maidens”; I visited with him the studio where the revolving curtain was being painted; in America, my wife and I attended many of the rehearsals.

His real troubles began as he approached the day of production. The composer’s widow tried to enjoin him from making the production; for fear of offending her, Mottl refused to conduct the orchestra; unlimited abuse was showered on the producer through the press; certain clergymen denounced the opera as blasphemous; some singers revolted; and, to cap the climax, there came a warning that the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children would stop the appearance of the boys who were to sing in the choruses.

Conried’s patience and optimism were inexhaustible. He met every rebuff squarely and surmounted every barrier. He won in the courts. The press attacks and the pulpit onslaughts only furnished publicity; he found other singers to take the place of the rebels, and so, as the event proved, in conferring the leadership of the orchestra on Hertz, he opened a brilliant career for an excellent conductor until then little known in America. As for the public response, the demand for seats was unparalleled, even in Metropolitan history: the directors were all besieged by applications, and I alone made over a hundred people happy by securing seats for them.

Nevertheless, on the eve of the first production everything within the Opera House seemed in utter chaos. We were there until two o’clock in the morning and beheld a never-to-be-forgotten sight. The famous Munich stage manager Lautenschlager, imported for this special performance, was then still rehearsing raising and lowering the drops for Kundry’s big scene, and supernumeraries were scurrying about answering the conflicting demands of their directors; weary stage carpenters and “hands” were lying in the wings snatching such minutes of sleep as were possible, while high up in the stage lofts were stowed away the chorus boys to keep them out of the clutches of the S.P.C.C. To the onlooker, professional or amateur—to everybody except the confident Conried—there seemed nothing but disaster ahead. The brilliant success that evolved is too much a matter of operatic history to require recounting here.

Conried had always drawn unsparingly on his reserves of energy and resistance, and there came at last a moment when those reserves were exhausted. An unpleasant episode, involving not himself, but one of his company, enlisted all his efforts. At its conclusion, he was met with a piece of bad news: Dr. Holbrook Curtis told him that he feared that a growth which had just appeared in the throat of Caruso would prevent this, now his particular star, from singing during the coming season and might end his career altogether. Conried went from the doctor’s office to the Opera House to watch an important, long-drawn-out rehearsal. Shortly thereafter he had a breakdown from which he never recovered.

When he died, his widow and son requested me to arrange the funeral, and readily adopted my suggestion that as Heinrich Conried’s greatest success had been won in the Metropolitan Opera House, so his obsequies should be held there as Anton Seidl’s had been ten years before. I knew that Conried had not been connected with any synagogue, but I asked whether he had mentioned a preference.

“None,” said his son.

Being president of the Free Synagogue, I requested Rabbi Wise to officiate. I communicated with the directors of the Conried Opera Company, who consented to the plan, and every branch of the organization from the orchestra to the scene-shifters volunteered to help.

It was an event which none who witnessed it will ever forget. The proscenium arch was hung with black, and the “set” was the mediæval interior used in the third act of “Lucia.” In the centre was the great catafalque, its outlines almost obscured by masses of flowers—lilies, roses, orchids, literally by tens of thousands—flanked by two Hebrew candelabra, surmounted by the bust of the impresario that had been presented to him, during his illness, by the members of the company.

Promptly at eleven the Metropolitan Orchestra began the funeral march from Beethoven’s “Eroica,” and, carried by six skull-capped bearers, the coffin, entirely covered by a pall of violets, was placed upon the stage. Mme. Homer and Riccardo Martin and Robert Blass sang Handel’s “Largo”; the choir-boys from Calvary Church who had appeared in the first American production of “Parsifal” intoned a setting of Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar”; Dr. Wise and Professor William H. Carpenter, of Columbia, spoke of the dead man’s work, and then, with the notes of the Chopin funeral-march sobbing through the Opera House—attended by music-lovers, judges, artists, financiers, leaders in almost every walk of life, there was taken from the scene of his greatest work the body of the weaver-boy of Bielitz.

These memories have taken me somewhat far afield and consumed much of the space that I had intended to devote, in this chapter, to my own activities. I should like to tell of my service as director of the Educational Alliance, the consolidation of a dozen activities for the benefit of children—and particularly the Jewish children—of that Lower East Side neighbourhood; and, too, of my work on the Board of Directors of the Mt. Sinai Hospital, the institution which my father helped so many years before; and of my interest in the Henry Street Settlement so ably developed by my friend Lillian Wald, my connection with which eventually led Mrs. Morgenthau and me to establish the Bronx House. Mrs. Morgenthau once taught in the Louis’ Downtown Sabbath School at 267 Henry Street, and right next door to it Miss Lillian D. Wald and Miss MacDowell, the daughter of General MacDowell of Civil War fame, had started an experiment that was to grow into a vast benefit for the entire community. Up to that time the people of the Lower East Side who were unable to afford regular medical treatment for themselves or their babies went without it until the last minute and then sought the rare dispensaries; for any other sort of help, they turned to the district political bosses, who never failed to require a substantial return for favours and who had few favours to dispense to those who neither voted themselves nor controlled the votes of others. Miss Wald practically originated the idea of the house-to-house, or the tenement-to-tenement, visiting trained nurse, who made friends with the sick and needy in their own homes, cared for the ill, showed their relatives how to care for them, gave practical lessons on the bringing up of children, and demonstrated that household hygiene is the ounce of prevention that is worth a pound of cure. Out of this evolved the now famous Henry Street Settlement.

This work deeply interested me, and I have been a constant and frequent visitor at the house, and have supported a visiting nurse on Miss Wald’s staff for the past twenty-two years.

Some years ago Miss Wald unfolded to me the needs of a sister settlement house in the Bronx, and urged me to assist in organizing an establishment similar to hers. At a meeting at my house, which was attended by Angelo Patri and his wife, Simon Hirsdansky, and Jacob Shufro—all three of the men being now principals of schools in the Bronx—and Bernard Deutsch, and a few others, my wife and I were persuaded by their statements of the great good that a settlement house could do in the Bronx, and we agreed to finance it for a few years. We combined with it a music school under the supervision of David Mannes and Harriet Seymour who had been active in the Third Street Music School Settlement.

We established it at once at 1,637 Washington Avenue, and, as the people said, “with a golden spoon in its mouth.” The children in the neighbourhood—and there were thousands of them—flocked to it from the very day it was started. There seemed to be an insatiable demand for instruction in music, and it has been a never-ending delight to see the steady strides made by the little orchestra started in the beginning by Mr. Edgar Stowell, up to 1922, when I saw them carry the entire musical programme of the pageant of the joint settlement houses at Hunter College. Several times we have been surprised by having this little orchestra give us a performance at our house, and at other times we have been regaled with the performance of “Alice in Wonderland” by one of the clubs of the Bronx House. When I survey the progress made and the happiness given the scholars of the music schools, and the members of the thirty-odd clubs, I feel that the funds that I have invested in the Bronx House have produced far greater dividends than any of my other investments.

Another of my social activities was my work as a member of the Committee on Congestion of Population in New York City, which really did excellent service in calling attention to the housing conditions of the metropolis. This committee owed a great deal to the inspiration of that beautiful soul, Carola Woerishoefer, granddaughter of Oswald Ottendorfer; Benjamin C. Marsh was its secretary, and it was active for several years. Our social survey discovered that over fifty blocks in New York had each a population of between 3,000 and 4,000 souls, and that the city’s tenements contained some 346,000 dark rooms. We had diagrams and models made, illustrating these conditions, listing the plague-spots where tuberculosis thrived, calling attention to the overcrowding in schools and the shortage of public playgrounds; in 1908 we held an exhibition in the Twenty-second Regiment Armoury and, by this and other means, succeeded in securing considerable remedial legislation. Then in 1911 there was the terrible fire in the Triangle Shirt Factory—an “upstairs” factory—where, owing to the bad conditions, 160 girl employees were killed. That resulted in a public protest against inadequate factory inspection and the creation of a “Committee of Safety” in which I served in company, among others, with Miss Anne Morgan, Miss Mary Dreier, Miss Frances Perkins, George W. Perkins, John A. Kingsbury, Peter Brady, and Amos Pinchot. When Henry L. Stimson relinquished his duties as chairman to become Secretary of War, I succeeded him. We were instrumental in having the legislature appoint a factory investigating committee of which Alfred E. Smith was chairman and Robert Wagner vice-chairman.

These men came to see me, soon after their appointments, in some embarrassment. They seemed sincerely desirous of performing their duties, but said they were badly handicapped.

“Are you folks going to finance this investigation?” they asked. “Because, if you aren’t, we don’t see how it is to be carried on. The legislature appropriated only $10,000, and it will take all that to pay a good attorney to do the necessary legal work.”

“I can get you a first-class lawyer who will not demand any fee,” I said, “and he will be satisfactory to everybody concerned, including Tammany Hall.”

The man I had in mind was Abram I. Elkus. He agreed with me as to the good he could do in this capacity, and the public honour to be won if he would volunteer his services. Within two hours after my interview with Smith & Wagner, Mr. Elkus had assumed the post. The result was thirty-one successful bills constituting what is to my mind the best labour legislation ever passed by a State Legislature.