Читать книгу All in a Life-time - Henry Morgenthau Morgenthau - Страница 3

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I WAS born in 1856, at Mannheim, in the Grand Duchy of Baden. That was the old Germany, very different from the Prussianized empire with which America was to go to war sixty years later, and very different again from the bustling life of the western world to which I was to be introduced so soon and in which I was to play a part unlike anything which my most fanciful dreams ever pictured.

Indeed, those were days of idyllic simplicity in South Germany and especially in that little city on the Rhine. The life of the people was best expressed by a word that was forever on their lips, gemütlich, that almost untranslatable word that implies contentment, ease, and satisfaction, all in one. It was a time of peace and fruitful industry and quiet enjoyment. The highest pleasure of the children was netting butterflies in the sunny fields; the great events of youth were the song festivals and public exhibitions of the “Turners” and walking excursions into the country; the recreation of the elders was at little tables in the public gardens, where, while the band played good music and the youngsters romped from chair to chair, the women plied their knitting needles over endless cups of coffee, and the men smoked their pipes and sipped their beer and talked of art and philosophy—of everything in the world, except world politics and world war.

To us children who had seen no larger city, but had visited many small villages in the neighbourhood, Mannheim seemed quite an important town. It was at the point where the Neckar flows into the Rhine, and as this river flowed through the Odenwald, it constantly brought big loads of lumber and also many bushels of grain to Mannheim, which had become a distributing centre for various cereals and lumber, and was also a great tobacco centre. My father had cigar factories at Mannheim and also in Lorsch and Heppenheim and sometimes employed as many as a thousand hands. Nevertheless, the entire population of Mannheim was scarcely 21,000, and the thoughts of most of its inhabitants were bent on the sober concerns of their every-day struggles and on raising their large families, without ambition for great riches or hope of higher place. None but the nobles dreamed of such grandeur as a carriage and pair; the successful tradesman only occasionally gratified a modest love of display or travel by hiring a barouche for a drive through the hop fields and tobacco patches surrounding the city to one of the near-by villages. Those whose mental powers were of a superior order exercised them in a keen appreciation of poetry, music, and the drama; Schiller and Goethe were their demi-gods, Mozart and Beethoven their companions of the spirit. The Grand Duke’s fatherly devotion to his subjects’ welfare had won him their filial affection; with political matters they concerned themselves almost not at all.

My childhood recollections reflect the quiet colours of this atmosphere. My father was prosperous, and our home was blessed by the comforts and little elegancies that his means made possible; it shared in the artistic interests of the community by virtue both of his interest in the theatre and my mother’s passion for the best in literature and music. I was the ninth of eleven living children, and I recall the visits of the music teachers who gave my sisters lessons on the piano and taught my eldest brother to play the violin. We children learned by heart the poems of Goethe and Schiller and shared the pride of all Mannheimers that the latter poet had once lived in our city and that his play, “The Robbers,” was first produced at our Stadt Theatre.

Those who like to reflect upon the smallness of the world will find it amusing to read that among the various friends of my family were quite a few with whom we are now on the most cordial relations in New York. Our physician was Dr. Gutherz, one of whose daughters married my neighbour, Nathan Straus. Their son and mine are intimate friends, and, in turn, their sons, Nathan 3d and Henry 3d, are now playmates in Central Park.

Among such associations the first ten years of my life were passed. We studied hard, but we played hard, too. Nor were our muscles forgotten: we were given regular exercises, and great was my pride when I passed the “swimming test” one summer’s day, by holding my own for the prescribed half hour against the Rhine current and so winning the right to wear the magic letters R. S.—“Rhine-Swimmer”—on my bathing suit. Life was indeed gemütlich in the Mannheim of that period.

It was not long, however, before the faraway world of America began to knock at our quiet door. A brother of my father had joined the gold rush to the Pacific and settled in San Francisco; he wrote us tales of the wild, free life of California, its adventures and its wealth. Strange gifts came back from him—a cane for the Grand Duke, its head a piece of gold-bearing quartz; for us children queer mementoes of an existence that seemed all romance. From time to time, this “Gold-Uncle,” as we called him, gave American friends touring Europe letters of introduction to my father, and these visitors enhanced the charm of the United States. One such especially filled our minds with narratives of easily won riches; Captain Richardson, a bearded Forty-niner, whose accounts of the land of opportunity were so much more moving than our fairy tales as to affect even my father’s mature fancy.

For my father heard them at a moment when, by an odd coincidence, an act of the American Congress had caused him great damage. In 1862 a tariff had been enacted by the United States which greatly increased the duty on cigars. For many years the largest part of his production had been exported to the United States. Father had a representative in New York, and his brother in San Francisco attended to the distribution on the Pacific Coast—they both had urged him to rush over all the cigars he could and land them before the law should go into effect. Unfortunately, the slow freighter that carried the last and biggest shipment arrived one day too late. Had she docked in time, my life might have been spent differently. That day’s delay meant the difference between profit and disaster to my father; the cigars, which, when duty free, would have yielded him a good return, were a dead loss when to their cost was added the burden of the new tariff charges. These changes in any event would have compelled him to seek a new market, as they closed America forever to goods of the cheap grade of German tobacco. That might have been arranged, but when the necessity to seek new fields was coupled with the crushing loss sustained upon this shipment, his finances were so weakened that he realized he would have to start afresh and on a smaller scale.

This was a heavy blow to the pride of a man who had achieved a great business success and was a leading citizen in his community. The instinct to seek another field for the fresh start was fortified by the stories of opportunity in the land whose laws had just dealt the blow. He resolved to emigrate to America.

I remember vividly the excitement in our household that was provoked by this momentous decision. Whatever may have been the doubts and heartburnings of our parents, to us children all was a joyous vista. We were happy at the thought of travelling to that far land of golden promise and strange people; we had visions only of adventure, and we were the envy of our playmates who were not to share with us the voyage across the Atlantic Ocean or the excitement of life in America.

The two eldest brothers and one of my sisters went ahead of us and established a home in Brooklyn. They wrote back their first impressions of New York; its great buildings and its crowded wharves; its masses of busy people hastening through the maze of streets and the novelty (to us) of horse cars pulled through the streets on railroad tracks. These letters gave us fresh thrills of emotion and new material for our active fancies. Then my father abandoned his now unprofitable business, sold his factories and home, packed our household goods and furniture, and possessed of about thirty thousand dollars in cash—all that remained of his fortune—led his wife and remaining eight children upon the expedition.

I well remember the journey down the Rhine to Cologne, where we visited the beautiful cathedral before we took the train to Bremen; the solemn interview in the latter city at the offices of the North German Lloyd, where the last formalities were disposed of; and finally settling in our cabins of the slow old steamer Hermann as she put forth on her way across the wide Atlantic.

My memories of the eleven-day voyage itself are rather vague. I recall playing around the deck with the other family of children on the ship. The daughter of one of those little playmates is now conducting a private school in New York City which three of my granddaughters attend. I remember, too, that on the stormiest day of our passage, I was proud of being the only child well enough to eat his meals, and that the Captain honoured me with a seat beside him at his table.

Now, the newcomer to America, arriving at New York, stands on the deck of a swift liner and is welcomed by the Statue of Liberty and overwhelmed by the vaulting office-buildings springing high into the blue. I shall tell later how I have contributed to the creation of some of them. But on that June day of my arrival, in 1866, I simply felt that one of the momentous hours in my life had come, when I found myself stepping ashore into a vast garden of unlimited opportunities.