Читать книгу All in a Life-time - Henry Morgenthau Morgenthau - Страница 5

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WHEN I left City College, my father wanted me to become a civil engineer, but a brief experience in an engineer’s office convinced me that I lacked the requisite mathematical foundation, so I gave it up and accepted a position as assistant bookkeeper and errand boy at $6 a week in the uptown branch of the Phœnix Fire Insurance Company.

In September, 1871, I improved myself by securing a $10 position with Bloomingdale & Company, who were then in the wholesale “corset and fancy-goods” business on Grand Street near Broadway. I kept the books and also helped to pack hoop-skirts, bustles, and corsets until the firm’s financial difficulties gave me an excuse for turning my ambition again to the law. I returned to Kurzman’s office, January 16, 1872.

Though Kurzman’s perspicacity could pierce directly through the intricacies of any tangled case, his accounts were shamefully neglected. His check book was his only book of entry—he trusted his memory to keep track of what his clients owed him—so I voluntarily and without informing him arranged a regular system of accounts, and shall never forget his surprise and appreciation when, at the end of the year, I showed him what he had earned and the sources and also the amounts still due him.

The most important branch of his practice was the searching of titles, and this gave me my early taste for real estate. This department was under the able management of Alfred McIntire, who graciously initiated me into the intricacies of his work.

We were then in the midst of a real-estate boom mostly participated in by the recently created middle class. Houses were dealt in almost as freely as merchandise, the only hindrance being the delay occasioned by the searching of titles, which was still confined to the lawyers, as there were no title insurance companies. Contracts would frequently be assigned twice and sometimes thrice, before the great event, “the closing of the title.” Then the various couples involved—the seller, the assignors of the contract, and the final purchaser—would all troop into our offices. The women invariably were the bankers and pulled out their roll of bills and sometimes Savings Bank Books, rarely checks, to consummate the transaction. The moneys invested were seldom taken out of the business, but were mostly the savings of the thrifty housewives. When everything was completed, all adjourned to a neighbouring wine cellar, to be treated to a bottle or two of Rhine wine by the vendor, and frequently I had to go along to represent Kurzman, and as the youngest listen attentively to the real estate stories told with all kinds of embellishments.

Kurzman at that time took as his partner George H. Yeaman, who had been a member of Congress from Kentucky and, more recently, American Minister to Denmark, and subsequently became a lecturer at the Columbia Law School. His native Southern chivalry had been polished by his experience at the Danish court; he was a man of splendid education and wide culture. I was fortunate in being chosen to take his dictation. I was amused in 1916 when, as Ambassador, I visited Dr. Maurice Francis Egan at our Legation in Copenhagen, and looked through the records made by Yeaman in 1865 while he was the head of that Legation.

My private life I continued to order along the lines that I had laid down for myself. I would get up at 6 A. M. and go to Central Park. Then if I had not exercised at home, I would take a long walk; otherwise I would sit under the trees and read. The hour that the horse car consumed in wending its way from the Park to Duane Street I would devote to my books, and I was so thrifty that I did not even buy a newspaper. I kept myself so busy that I did not even see one, until, going home for the night, I unfolded and read such as had been left in Kurzman’s office during the day.

Thrift was, indeed, a necessary virtue. I had left commerce for the law at something of a sacrifice: in 1872, my accounts, which I kept scrupulously all this while, bear evidence of how careful I had to be of my scanty income. “Carfare, 10 cts.; Dinner, 15 cts.; Sundries, 2 cts.” That is a typical day’s expenditure.

No man that lived through the Panic of ’73 can ever forget it and on me it made an indelible impression. At the root of the trouble was railway over-expansion. The successful completion of the Union Pacific in 1869 caused the projection of many other roads. Jay Cooke launched the Northern Pacific; Fisk and Hatch, the Chesapeake & Ohio; Kenyon, Cox & Co., the Canadian Southern. The eminent New York banking concerns floated the bonds; the large rate of interest promised—N. P. paid 8½ per cent.—attracted buyers, largely clergymen, school-teachers and small professional men—and prices advanced until optimism bordered on hysteria. Issue followed issue. Then, in the May of ’73, a panic on the Vienna Bourse stopped European consumption and threw back on the New York financiers obligations that strained their credit. Early in September, after one unfortunate bank-statement followed on the heels of another, call-money was at 7⅙ and commercial paper at from nine to twelve per cent.

Minor failures were numerous in the week of September 8th. Kenyon, Cox &. Co. failed on the 13th; the Eclectic Life Insurance Co. on the 17th. On the 18th, the big bolt fell; word ran round that Jay Cooke & Co., in many respects the greatest house of its time, was tottering. This news greatly startled Kurzman, who had been a persistent purchaser of Northern Pacific bonds. “On the floor of the Exchange,” said the Times, “the brokers surged out, tumbling pell-mell over each other in the general confusion, and reached their offices in race-horse time.” Those were not the days of telephones; when the panic-stricken men had got their orders, they ran back to the floor, on which absolute confusion reigned. Men shouted themselves hoarse, contradicted themselves and collapsed. A moment was enough to ruin many a dealer. Any one with money to lend was beset by a mob of lunatics. Almost immediately the effect was felt all the way down the financial line; smaller companies went the way of the big ones and many of the smallest were tottering after the smaller.

That week I took as usual all that I could spare from my scant salary and went, according to my custom, to the German Uptown Savings Bank to deposit it along with the little fund that I was laboriously setting aside. There was a big line of confident depositors bent on similar errands; many were ahead of me, and waiting my turn, as I looked into the teller’s cage, I saw the president of the bank in a very earnest conversation with three other men. Of course, I could not hear what they were saying, but I thought the president seemed worried, and that those with him also showed uneasiness.

I turned my head to find that the shuffling line had brought me before the window that was my goal. The clerk behind it was both a receiving and a paying teller. On a sudden impulse I thrust my dollar bill that I intended to deposit back into my pocket, presented my pass-book, and told the clerk that I wanted to withdraw the entire $80 that was to my credit.

Three days later that bank closed. The other depositors ultimately got about fifty cents on the dollar.

The real estate market had been as badly inflated as the stock market, and foreclosures were the order of the day. Properties like the block bounded by Park and Madison Avenue and Seventy-first and Seventy-second streets went under the hammer. John D. Crimmins and his father had paid $475,000 to James Lenox, who repurchased it for $374,150 at the foreclosure sale under the mortgage. Equities disappeared like the snow in spring-time. Where we had once been almost rushed to death with the drawing of mortgages to consummate the many sales, we were now hard pressed to keep pace with foreclosure proceedings.

I took charge of this work for Kurzman, who gave me 10 per cent. of the net fees; the commission was most acceptable, the experience invaluable, but a more depressing task it has never been my lot to perform. The proud and prosperous men that had been our best clients from 1871 to 1873 now returned to shed their wealth and, with it, their self-reliance. One who had owned eight or ten houses was reduced to borrowing $100 from Kurzman for temporary relief. I made up my mind never to “plunge”; if I had not lived through the Panic of ’73, I should to-day be either many times richer than I am or, what is far more likely, penniless.

The bad light in the Kurzman offices had injured my eyes, and, just after the panic had subsided, my doctor ordered a sea trip. I sailed on the barque Dora for Hamburg—thirty days for $35, and no extra charge for the excitement that was thrown in.

We were undermanned and underprovisioned. The first mate was ill when we set out from Jersey Flats; because of that, two of the crew had deserted, leaving only eight men aboard. There was no doctor among these, and the Captain and I read a thumbed work on medicine that adorned his cabin, studied the remedies that it suggested, and nearly emptied the medicine chest in trying to cure the poor fellow, who lost sixty pounds under our ministrations and, at the voyage’s end, went home with his disease still undiagnosed.

Meanwhile, the crew were dissatisfied on account of the extra work forced on them by the inactivity of the mate and the absence of the deserters, and also with their rations. They won the second mate to their side, and, on a day of storm when they declared themselves too few to handle the sails, he led something like an old-fashioned mutiny. They crowded toward the Captain.

“Run and get a pistol!” he whispered to me.

I obeyed. As I returned and slipped him the weapon, the mutineers were just coming to a pause before him.

The Captain levelled his pistol. He made short work of the difficulty. He offered them cold lead or hot grog. The crew, like sensible men, chose the latter, but they continued to grumble at the food—which was mostly hard-tack and cornmeal—until, on a day when we were becalmed in the North Sea, we caught several dolphins weighing over 150 pounds. I have rarely eaten anything better than that dolphin steak.

This is not to be a record of travel, but one phase of that early journey of mine is well worthy of notice: I saw Germany just as she was entering on the imperialistic career that ended so abruptly when her crestfallen representatives signed the Treaty of Versailles. The Franco-Prussian War had just ended in triumph; the German Empire had been reborn. Its people were not the easygoing people that I remembered from my earlier boyhood in Mannheim. Everywhere there were the beginnings of commercial and military activity; everywhere there was preached the doctrine of world power.

I passed several weeks at Kiel; I lived well on less than a dollar a day. I had some difficulty in becoming friendly with a pensioned wounded army captain because he held me personally responsible that American ammunition had been sold to the French. The same complaint was made to me by the German Ambassador, Baron Wangenheim, in Constantinople, in 1915. I saw the launching of the new Empire’s first battleship, the very beginning of that colossal preparation for war which, at the cost of so many millions in lives and money, was finally to bear its bloody fruit in 1914. A wrinkled old man wearing a small military cap made the speech on that occasion. It was the famous General von Moltke. I listened intently to what he said. His words reached everyone in that crowd, which was attentively listening to the great hero of the Franco-Prussian War; and when I looked into his piercing eyes, I found that they seemed to penetrate right through me, and I could understand the frequently made statement that officers used to quiver in his presence, and that his questions, accompanied by one of his fixed looks, always elicited the exact truth.

On my return to America, I entered the law office of Chauncey Shaffer, who was a leader of the New York Bar and had a nation-wide reputation. He had been retained in many important cases, and some romantic. His offices were first on the third floor in an old-fashioned private house at No. 7 Murray Street, and later, he moved into the Bennett Building, one of the city’s first modern office buildings.

In our new, well-lighted quarters, we had some interesting neighbours, and these, along with many another, were constantly dropping in on Shaffer. I still recall with pleasure my acquaintance in those surroundings with Gildersleeve and Purroy, with Butzel and Bourke Cochran.

Henry A. Gildersleeve had been born on a farm in Dutchess County, and in early life was the handiest man with his fists in all that district. In the Civil War he organized a company and was elected a captain. He returned from that to complete his education and become a lawyer, but he became a crack shot, too, at the international rifle matches; and when he first visited Shaffer’s office, it was as an Apollo of a man with romance in every feature of his face and every particle of attire.

He was offered by both parties the nomination as Judge of General Sessions and came to consult Shaffer about it. I was in the room at the time.

The scene is still vivid. Shaffer never forgot his Napoleonic pose when there was anybody present to observe it, and now he moved about with one hand under his coat tails and the other thrust into his breast. The harder he thought, the harder he chewed his tobacco and the more frequent were his expectorations. Finally he stopped short in front of Gildersleeve, who had been waiting patiently for this queer oracle to speak.

“If you have to go down in this fight,” Shaffer said, “go down in good company: take the Fusion nomination.”

Gildersleeve accepted that advice. He remained on the bench until he was seventy years of age. He is in his eighties now and as keen of intellect as in those far-off days when he used to visit Shaffer. He is still one of my favourite golf companions.

On many Saturdays we did little work; the coterie met in Shaffer’s office, and we talked; it would be nearer to the mark to say that one of us talked and entertained the others by his endless flow of good stories and sparkling reminiscences. He was a student under Shaffer, and his name was Bourke Cochran. I never saw him poring over Blackstone or Kent, but on Saturday when freed from his duties as principal of the Public School at Tuckahoe, this exuberant young instructor would either practise his future orations on us or pour out his flood of Cochranisms and anecdotes. Not getting my name at the first meeting, he dubbed me “Mortgagee” and still calls me so. He thrilled us with the account of his early struggles at Dublin University, roused our enthusiasm by his plans to restore oratory to the New York Bar, and evoked our applause by his determination to Patrick Henryize the Assembly at Albany. The Democrats promised him a nomination to the Assembly, but withdrew the promise when they discovered that he was not yet twenty-one.

It was while at Shaffer’s that I began to find out how human great men really are. The names of Benjamin F. Butler—the redoubtable Butler of Massachusetts—and Preston Plumb of Kansas used to move me to awe. One of my employer’s important cases involved some grants of land to the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad and was brought by John Leisenring, of Pennsylvania, whose attorney-of-record, Congressman-at-large Charles P. Albright, of the same state, had, in addition to Shaffer, associated with him in the affair, Butler and Plumb. The latter used to dash into our office without a necktie and then chafe at the former’s unpunctuality and indifference in the matter of keeping appointments.

“It’s all very well for Butler to behave like this just now,” he would say. “Wait a few more years. Then he will still be a mere Congressman, while I’ll be a United States Senator! We’ll see who’ll kowtow to the other then!”

Although Plumb was elected to the Senate not long after and served there many years, I did not hear of Ben Butler doing any kowtowing.

In the summer of 1875 I felt that obtaining a knowledge of the law in this scrappy, unsystematic fashion was unsatisfactory, and that, therefore, I would leave Shaffer’s employ, attend Columbia Law School to get a thorough grounding of the law, and arrange for future easy access the odd bits of legal knowledge that I had absorbed in the offices. As I needed an income to enable me to do this, I secured a position as night-school teacher at $15 a week in the school on Forty-second Street near Third Avenue.

At that time Forty-third Street had not yet been cut through, and on top of the rocks was a shanty-town occupied by squatters. As I had the adult class, my pupils were from eighteen to forty-five years old, some of them denizens of the rocks, while others were hardworking carpenters, brakemen, butchers, factory workers, a plumber’s assistant, a coachman, and a blacksmith.

I particularly remember the latter three, because the plumber’s assistant came to the school to inveigle some of the other boys to play cards with him in one of the rear seats, and to amuse himself by throwing tobacco quids and beans while I, with my back turned to the class, would be engaged in explaining things on the blackboard. I was nineteen years of age, husky, weighing 180 pounds, and unafraid even of a plumber’s boy. As my weekly stipend of $15 was my sole support and its retention depended upon my being able to maintain discipline and keep up the attendance, I was not going to permit this loafer’s antics to defeat me—and one evening when I caught him playing cards, I forcibly ejected him from the classroom. Thenceforth my tenure of office was assured and continued to the closing day exercises, at which I had the pleasure of rewarding the coachman, Morgan O’Toole, with a prize for the greatest advancement made by any pupil. This man was very anxious to learn fractions. During the first three weeks of the session, every Friday evening I had succeeded in teaching them to him. Every following Monday evening his mind was an absolute blank as to fractions, and the fourth week I asked him to come to my house both Saturday and Sunday, and gave him private lessons. His joy on the next Monday when he found he had retained his knowledge is still a vivid memory in my mind.

The blacksmith, a man named Whitney, had been a fellow pupil of mine in Fifty-first Street School, and had been one of the best penmen. I was surprised to see him come to reacquire that ability, which he had lost through wielding the hammer and pulling the bellows.

One of the carpenters wanted to learn duodecimals. As I knew nothing about them, I told him that I wanted him to brush up on ordinary fractions for two days. In the meantime, I learned duodecimals and then taught him.

It was really a great experience to divide impartially two hours every evening so as to satisfy the twenty-five earnest seekers after knowledge.

I deeply sympathized with these men who, wearied from their day’s labour, preferred to forego needed rest or amusement and devote their evenings to extricate themselves from the ignorance in which they had been compelled, probably through poverty and the early need of self-support, to live the better part of their existence.

It spurred me to still greater efforts to increase my own knowledge and I was no longer content merely to perform my allotted tasks at the Law School, but spent several hours a day at the Astor Library and drew deep drafts from that fine well.

During that period I devoted all the daylight hours to study, principally at the Law School, sitting in the midst of these hundreds of men who had come from all parts of this country and Japan, to imbibe from the lips of this great teacher, Professor Theodore W. Dwight, the basis of the law of the land.

I joined the Columbia Club and was elected one of the team to debate with the Barnard Club, all of whose members were college graduates, while we had not had that advantage. I studied the subject of the debate, “Whether Participation in Profits or Agency Is the Correct Test of Partnership,” more thoroughly than I ever did any case on which I was retained during my practice of law. Professor Dwight, who presided, praised our thorough preparation and fine team work and declared us the winners. When our class graduated, we had the great honour of having that famous leader of the Bar, Charles O’Connor, come out of his retirement to bid us “Godspeed” on our way.

I was formally admitted to the bar on June 1, 1877.

During my second year in Law School I did not teach night school, but supported myself by accepting a position from that fine Southern gentleman, General Roger A. Pryor, who had been Congressman, Minister to Spain, and finally became a Judge of the Supreme Court of the State of New York.

An interesting episode that occurred at that time was my representing General Pryor at several meetings of the owners of the Greenwich Street property, who had retained him to seek an injunction to prevent the continued use and extension of the first Elevated road, which was on their street and was propelled by a chain. They claimed that their property would be ruined for private residences, and it was. They did not visualize, however, that this was the first step forward in the solution of the transit problem of New York, which was then totally dependent upon its horse-car system; and that someone had to suffer for the general good.

A very important and valuable after-effect of my connection with Pryor’s office was my becoming acquainted with Mr. Valentine Loewi, for whom I searched the title in a mortgage transaction. Loewi doubted my experience and when Pryor confronted me with this, instead of resenting the criticism, as Loewi expected me to do, I recognized its justice, and satisfied Loewi by having my work checked up by Mr. McIntire. He became my permanent friend and one of my firm’s first clients, and through his recommendations we secured some of the most valuable clients we ever had.

A little later came the uproar consequent upon Tilton’s entering the wrong berth in a sleeping-car. He came to Pryor, and I acted as secretary while these two prepared the Tilton statement for the newspapers. Curiously, both these six-footers had the habit, when thinking intensely, of striding across the room with swinging arms, and were that day doing it in opposite directions. I was constantly on the alert for a collision. Tilton would dictate a phrase. Pryor would stop and suggest another word. Tilton would weigh and test it, and would make still further corrections. Not even my weightiest diplomatic notes from Constantinople received the care and attention that these few lines were given by these two masters of English.

In the summer of ’77, as Mr. Kurzman was going to Europe, he requested me to come back to Kurzman & Yeaman, and as they offered me a well-lighted office, I did so. Still associated with Kurzman was Alfred McIntire to whom I have already referred, and with whom I had kept up the pleasantest of relations during my clerkships with Shaffer and Pryor, both of which positions he had secured for me. McIntire was a New Englander of the very best type, considerably older than Mr. Kurzman, and recognized as one of the best conveyancers of the City of New York.

One Sunday while I was visiting McIntire, we went rowing on the Harlem River, and discussed plans for a prospective partnership. He was about six foot two in height, and weighed fully 250 pounds, and I was to do the rowing. Our skiff had not proceeded fifty yards before I discovered that I could not pull such a load and get anywhere. I took this as an omen, and then and there resolved that when I did select a law partner, he should be of my own age and weight, so that he could do some of the pulling.

During this summer, one of the old clients of the office, Henry Behning, got into very serious differences with his partner Diehl. The matter became greatly complicated, and the more complicated it became, the more excited Behning grew, and the more excited he was, the more incoherent and less comprehensible was his English, so that Mr. Yeaman, who was acting as his counsel in Mr. Kurzman’s absence, despaired of understanding him. A climax was reached one day when Diehl’s attorneys had secured the appointment of a receiver. Behning was accusing the lawyers, and the judge, and everybody else of all kinds of conspiracies, and Yeaman was so bewildered that he called me in to tell Behning that he did not think he could do justice to him because he could not understand his speech, and that he had better secure a German-speaking attorney. Upon my explaining this to Behning, he said: “All right, I’ll take you.” I explained the proposition to Mr. Yeaman, and he said that if Behning would be contented to do all his consulting with me he would be very glad to steer the legal proceedings. I discovered that some of Behning’s fears of conspiracy were justified, and concluded that the only way to counteract them was to throw the firm into bankruptcy. I prepared the necessary papers, and had them signed by the judge of the United States District Court. I then communicated with the pompous ex-judge who represented Diehl, and had the tremendous satisfaction of having completely checkmated him. A prompt settlement resulted. The creditors realized that if they kept on fighting, the lawyers would be dividing the assets, and therefore consented to have Behning and Diehl divide them, and each continue in business for himself, and each assume half the liabilities.

Behning greatly appreciated what I had accomplished. He wanted to give me something to prove it. As he had no spare cash, he offered, and with Yeaman’s consent I accepted, one share of the Celluloid Piano Key Company stock. At that time, Arnold, Cheney & Company had cornered the word’s ivory market, driving up the price of ivory for piano keys to $30.00 a set. The piano manufacturers tried alabaster and other substitutes with small success, when Behning thought of using celluloid and formed the Celluloid Piano Key Company, securing for it the exclusive right for the use of that substance in piano and organ keys.