Читать книгу Der Lotos Club - Michael Scheufele - Страница 9

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art recently acquired a well-executed altar panel, The Visitation, by the German Renaissance artist Hans Schäufelein (ca. 1480 - ca. 1540). Schäufelein was one of the most gifted pupils of Albrecht Dürer, painter and printmaker generally regarded as the greatest German artist of his time. Hans was also one of the first Schieffelin ancestors (the spellings differed a bit in earlier times) about whom concrete knowledge exists. He lived and worked in the Bavarian town of Nördlingen.

Two hundred years after Schäufelein’s painting was finished, his direct descendant, Jacob Schieffelin (the first of three early Jacobs), still lived in Nördlingen. Jacob I traveled to the New World to seek his fortune but returned to Germany. His son Jacob II sailed to Philadelphia and stayed. His son, the third Jacob Schieffelin, was born in Philadelphia in 1757 and remained permanently in North America until his death in 1835. He lived a long and productive life as one of the early Republic’s leading business entrepreneurs. Jacob III became in effect the Schieffelin family’s American founding father.

Jacob III’s work and name, passed down through generations of the drug business he helped found in 1794, created a strong sense of family identity and continuity. “Schieffelin” came to mean not merely a name on a genealogy chart but a proud family institution—tangible bricks, people, products, innovation, reputation and public service sustained across time. Like Schäufelein’s art, the company named Schieffelin was concrete, visible and pathbreaking. Its centennial history published in 1894 celebrated a hundred years “always under the name of Schieffelin and always with members descended in a direct line from the founder.” By the twentieth century it was among the very oldest companies in the United States.

Jacob Schieffelin III’s career demonstrated how an energetic and creative entrepreneur could achieve business success in post-Revolutionary New York City. Jacob had fought conspicuously on the Loyalist side, helping to fund provisions for British troops in Canada. He had been captured and imprisoned by the Americans. But Jacob was hardly an ideological supporter of British rule. His German heritage gave him a certain freedom of political and geographical movement; he easily switched sides according to where business opportunities seemed most promising. After he escaped from American captivity in 1780, he returned to British New York where he was billeted in the home of the Quaker merchant John Lawrence. The Lawrence clan was pacifist but leaned toward the American cause.

Jacob promptly fell in love with Lawrence’s daughter, Hannah, described at the time as a “noted beauty and popular poetess.” Hannah was no pacifist but strongly pro-American. Her incendiary anti-royalist verse might have gotten her hanged if she had ever been caught. Their 1780 marriage made New Yorkers forget Jacob’s former British sympathies. It also supplied him with useful business connections to various Lawrences, especially his brother-in-law John. With John he created in 1794 the wholesale drug-importing and shipping firm that soon would bear his name alone, Schieffelin & Company. The firm endured for seven generations until the late 20th century.

Although the drug business is Jacob’s best-known legacy, he initiated many other major projects, including a real estate venture to develop the neighborhood of Manhattanville in New York City as a planned community. He also sold land for Alexander Hamilton to build his family home. Jacob died in 1835, a prosperous and respected member of the New York business community. Over the decades, the Schieffelin company grew and relocated, but always remained physically near the warehouses and docks of lower Manhattan.

Meanwhile the entrepreneurial bug bit many of Jacob III’s children and their descendants. A son, also named Jacob, for example, moved to Pennsylvania on land his father had bought as an investment and forged a successful international business career. Jacob IV’s colorful grandson “Ed” Schieffelin (1847-1897) spent a lifetime wandering the American West as a prospector, miner and “character.” His silver discoveries at what he named Tombstone, Arizona, made him rich and famous in the 1870s. After his somewhat mysterious death at age 49, he was buried just outside Tombstone in miner’s clothing alongside his pick and canteen. The town and his tombstone remain tourist attractions today.

Eugene Schieffelin (1827-1906), the son of Jacob IV’s brother Henry Hamilton Schieffelin, was equally colorful. He rivaled Ed in fame and surpassed him in eccentricity. Driven by the curious desire to introduce into America all species of birds mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays, Eugene in 1890 released a flock of imported starlings in New York’s Central Park, with enormous consequences for much of the North American continent. The starlings multiplied rapidly to become what is generally regarded as an invasive pest that tends to displace some indigenous, useful birds.

Eugene’s father, Henry Hamilton Schieffelin, succeeded Jacob III as head of Schieffelin & Company for 35 years. The father lacked the son’s weirdness but possessed the business acumen which kept the Schieffelin name prominent in New York over the nineteenth century. Another of Henry’s sons, Samuel Bradhurst Schieffelin followed his father as senior partner. Upon Samuel’s retirement in 1865, the family business passed to his only son, William Henry Schieffelin. The latter ran the company until his death in 1895. William Henry was the father of William Jay Schieffelin, my grandfather known as Pop, who took over until the 1920s.

The three decades after 1880 were momentous for both the country and the company. The pharmaceutical industry was not only expanding greatly but being transformed by the rise of scientific chemistry in America. William Henry Schieffelin built a small laboratory in 1882 to manufacture finished drugs for distribution to retailers. This approach was very different from the prior one of owning large warehouses just to store imported chemicals and other products prior to distribution. The oldest son, William Jay Schieffelin, my grandfather, was brought up to believe that the new scientific chemistry held the future of the wholesale drug industry. His father encouraged him to make chemistry his future career.

And at the beginning he did just that. Young Willie Schieffelin studied chemistry as an undergraduate at the Columbia School of Mines, the applied science branch of Columbia University. Like many future scientists and scholars of his generation he then traveled to Germany to learn what the Old World could teach the New about research. He received his chemistry Ph.D. in 1889 at age 23 from the lab of Professor Adolf von Baeyer at the University of Munich. Willie published several chemistry research papers after he joined the family business in 1890. Science would soon transform the pharmaceutical industry, and the Schieffelin company seemed well positioned to be a leader in that transformation.

By the mid-19th century the name Schieffelin had come to represent successful business entrepreneurship in New York City. The family had emerged respected, wealthy, and well-known in commercial circles. William Henry’s branch of the Schieffelin family would now become linked to families far better-known in national social, political and financial circles through two marriages 28 years apart.

In 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, William Henry Schieffelin married Mary Jay (1846–1916). Mary was a great-granddaughter of John Jay, one of the nation’s most prominent Founding Fathers and the first Chief Justice of the United States. John Jay had been dead for 34 years in 1863, but his place among the revolutionary generation of Founding Fathers was secure.

Jay had twice been Governor of New York and had written some of the famous Federalist Papers which provided intellectual background for Constitutional debates. He had drafted the Treaty of Paris which ended the Revolutionary War in 1783, and later the Jay Treaty of 1794 which avoided war with England.

As the years passed, the slavery question grew in prominence. Jay and his descendants became prominent actors in that national drama. Jay was a slaveholder. But he also opposed slavery and freed his own slaves well before he died. He early endorsed a “gradualist” approach toward slavery’s eventual elimination. In 1799 slavery in New York State was abolished by the legislature; but the law took effect only in 1827. The New York decision, however, had the effect of closely associating Jay’s name and later life with the antislavery cause.

His son, Judge William Jay (1789-1858), devoted essentially his entire adult life to the promotion of emancipation. William Jay’s son John Jay II (1817-1894) was the leading activist lawyer defending fugitive slaves in New York during the 1840s and 1850s and also a tireless crusader against racism in the Episcopal church.

John Jay II lived until 1894 as a patriot-statesman whose interest in good government and African-American progress kept the Jay name in the public eye. One of the founders of the Republican Party, John Jay II later served as United States Minister to Austria-Hungary between 1869 and 1875. While in Vienna Mary’s sister, Anna Jay, re-established the family’s German connection by marrying the German diplomat Lothar von Schweinitz. Anna’s grandson from that marriage was Adam von Trott zu Solz (1909-1944), a German Rhodes Scholar, diplomat and aristocrat. Adam’s participation in the ill-fated July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler cost him his life but created a 20th century hero.

Mary Jay was John Jay II’s daughter. From early childhood she was exposed to antislavery ideas through her father, grandfather and great grandfather. She was a close blood relation of those Jays most active in the antislavery cause. Frederick Douglass, the prominent escaped slave and public intellectual, wrote in 1859 that “Abolitionism seems hereditary in the family.”

The Civil War had been raging for two and one-half years when Mary Jay married William Henry Schieffelin in October 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued nine months earlier—in effect changing the North’s main war aim from preserving the union to eradicating slavery.

William and Mary’s son was William Jay Schieffelin, my grandfather. Young Willie Schieffelin grew up deeply influenced by this rich heritage. From his Schieffelin ancestors he acquired intense loyalty to the family and the family business. From the Jay line he acquired an urgent sense to fight for large moral causes. Pop was perhaps the first Schieffelin to grow up possessing the two strong family traditions of reform and public service.

Another significant family merger occurred on February 6, 1891 when young William Jay Schieffelin, now equipped with an abolitionist middle name and a science doctorate, married Maria Louisa Shepard, in New York City. Called Granny Lou by her descendants, Maria Louisa was the daughter of Margaret Vanderbilt Shepard, who was the oldest daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt. Margaret Vanderbilt Shepard was called “Grandmama” by the Schieffelins.

William Henry was the son of the famous billionaire Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Commodore. Perhaps the most successful of all the Vanderbilts save the Commodore, he had doubled his father’s fortune through building the New York Central Railroad. He died in 1885, six years before his eldest granddaughter married young Schieffelin.

Pop was 24 when he married. The young Schieffelin was now firmly linked with three prominent American success stories: the business prowess of the Schieffelins that had gone on for over a century; the patriotic and reform endeavors of the Jays from Revolutionary through Civil War times; and now the unparalleled Gilded Age wealth of the Vanderbilts. His life possibilities, impressive at birth, were now greatly magnified. Pop entered the family business in 1890 as its specialist in chemistry. A research lab was created for him later in the 1890s. This work competed for his time with the new opportunities for his interests in political and social reform opened up by his wife’s money and social position. Over the years he sought, without complete success, to balance these pressures. He became president of Schieffelin & Company in 1906. But over the years he clearly derived the greater satisfaction from his good works, which combined a Jay background with Vanderbilt resources, than he did by converting a wholesale drug company into a 20th century scientific enterprise. His grandfather John Jay II had advised him as a young man, “Willie, lend a hand.” That stuck as a kind of life challenge.

Schieffelin & Company survived for a time but drifted some from its core pharmaceutical mission.

In 1962 the firm abandoned its drug business almost entirely, and in 1980 was acquired by a much larger French conglomerate. Renamed LVMH Moët-Hennessy in 1987, that conglomerate styled itself as “the world leader in luxury.” Except for keeping the name Schieffelin on liquor bottles for a few more years, a marketing gambit to emphasize continuity and quality, Schieffelin & Company ceased to exist.

William Jay Schieffelin’s historical significance today rests primarily on the causes he championed and the funds he raised in support of them. He lent his name to many projects, chaired many fundraisers, initiated many initiatives. The central theme in all of them was political and social reform in New York, the nation, and eventually overseas. He was a progressive, moderate Republican of a sort that had nearly vanished from the land by the end of the twentieth century. He remembered well the advice of his Jay grandfather to lend a hand.

In New York he helped found the (still existing) Citizens Union in 1897, one of the first good government member organizations serving as a watchdog for the public interest and a check on the growing Tammany political machine. As its president over many decades he supported investigations to root out corruption in the city. His most famous civic reform triumph was helping in the 1930’s to end the political career of New York’s charming but corrupt Mayor Jimmy Walker. His first battle with City Hall was a successful campaign in 1890 to prevent Central Park from being cut into sections and distributed through franchises. He campaigned for women’s suffrage and against sweat shops. He anticipated the dangers of Hitler before Hitler took power and later gave money to postwar Czechoslovakia when it was surrounded by the Iron Curtain. A lifelong concern over the plight of lepers led him to help found the American Leprosy Mission and the Schieffelin Leprosy Research and Training Center in Karigiri, India.

His preeminent passion was promoting civil rights and advancing opportunities for African-Americans. The Jay family’s antislavery tradition ran deep and was a source of great Schieffelin pride. His grandfather had harbored fugitive slaves in violation of federal law. He led a New York organization dedicated to improving the economic circumstances of African-Americans migrating from the South, a forerunner of the National Urban League. Schieffelin also hosted annual New York fund-raising events with black leaders such as Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute president, and Tuskegee scientist George Washington Carver. He served 40 years on the Tuskegee Board, which he chaired for 23 years. He served simultaneously on the board of the Hampton Institute, an all-black agricultural and vocational institution in Hampton, Virginia.

One of Schieffelin’s most courageous and steadfast commitments, which also spoke to his high national standing, was his unflinching service on behalf of the imprisoned Scottsboro boys. In early 1931, nine black teenage boys were arrested on charges of raping two white girls near Scottsboro, Alabama. The case seemed open and shut, at least to Alabama justice. Eight of the nine were quickly convicted and sentenced to death. The ninth, a twelve- year-old, produced a hung jury not because it doubted his guilt but because it disagreed whether the punishment for a minor should be execution or life imprisonment. The trial displayed the full spectrum of racial bigotry: frame-up, all-white jury, angry mob and near-lynching. But the many cracks in the case, especially the incompetence of the defense, galvanized an unprecedented nation-wide protest.

A national committee was created, the Scottsboro Defense Fund, to raise money for appeals, publicity, and anything else that would reopen the case and keep the “Scottsboro Boys” and their cause alive. Pop became the Fund’s long-serving national treasurer. In 1937, after six years, nobody had been acquitted and seven had spent the entire time in jail. The case in its many facets continued into the 1940s and beyond, with money still needed. Throughout, Pop raised monies for the Defense Fund and kept the issue before the public. In the end, not one of the “boys” was executed. The last of the nine Scottsboro Boys died of natural causes in 1989. In 2013 all nine were granted posthumous pardons by the State of Alabama. Over an 80-year period the Scottsboro Boys had become a lasting national symbol of racial injustice, in substantial part because of the money raised to pay lawyers and write appeals on their behalf. This was Schieffelin’s quiet but substantial triumph.

In 1949, celebrating his 83rd birthday and his lifetime of public service, the New York Times editorialized that William Jay Schieffelin had spent a total of 237 years on five major civic boards: the New York Citizens Union, Tuskegee Institute, Hampton Institute, American Bible Society and American Mission to Lepers. The Times wrote: “He glories in a tough battle.”

Pop and Granny Lou had 9 surviving children. The sixth was my father Bayard Schieffelin. He had a deep love of family, both the one he came from and the one he created. He and my mother, Virginia Langdon Loomis, had four children: Edward, Barbara, Olivia and Nancy. From our parents we learned that community did not just happen: you had to work hard to create it and to nurture family values such as loyalty, hard work, tolerance, and social justice. My father served in World War II and then worked for the New York Public Library, raising funds so that the iconic institution could be sustained. My mother tutored African-American children in the inner city. They raised their children with the values they gained from their Langdon-Loomis and Schieffelin forebears: a passion for civil rights, social justice, adventure, as well as an entrepreneurial spirit, curiosity about the world, integrity, and respect for education. We have tried to instill these values in our own three children. Benjamin has founded an organization that supports socially responsible entrepreneurs in Latin America, Alexander helps families and organizations solve vexing legal issues, and Julia, is an artist, just like Hans Schäufelein, more than five centuries ago.

A summer place on the coast of Maine brings together descendants of 7 of the 9 children of William Jay and Maria Louisa Schieffelin, representing the third, fourth, fifth and sixth generations (roughly 250 people and counting). They come from all corners of the world. In addition to boating, sailing, tennis, hiking and swimming, we continue traditions started in my grandparents’ day. These include a treasure hunt, replete with pirates and buried treasure; sings, accompanied now not by the piano but by guitar and banjo; a softball game between the “Lobsters” and the “Clams;” picnics on island sandbars at low tide; and a square dance with a live band. These traditions continue to bind us together as a family. And we are all grateful for Jacob Schieffelin and Hannah Lawrence for starting it all!