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I T WAS NOT without a certain poignant symbolism, too, that Horatio Alger, serving as tutor to Joseph Seligman's sons, should have used his employer as inspiration for his subsequent rags-to-riches stories. In a society that respected self-made wealth as much as Europeans venerated aristocratic birth, Seligman and his fellow Jews had mastered the American challenge on its own terms. Isidor Straus of the Macy department-store family served as vice president of the New York Chamber of Commerce and as United States congressman, and was offered, but refused, the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York in 1901 and 1909. No private citizen was more respected. His death on the Titanic in 1912 was in character; both he and his wife declined places in a lifeboat in favor of younger passengers. Another Straus brother, Oscar, a lawyer, achieved distinction for his grasp of complex banking and railroad issues. His expert reformist testimony before numerous regulatory commissions and legislative committees gave him important political connections among liberals in both political parties (see this page ). In 1887, when Straus was thirty-six, President Cleveland appointed him United States minister to Constantinople. It was a “safe” billet, for the Ottoman government preferred a Jewish to a Christian emissary. Four Jews eventually would hold this post. Later, when Straus transferred his loyalties to the Republicans, President McKinley gladly reappointed him to Turkey. In 1905, during an interval between diplomatic stints, Straus became the first Jew to sit in a presidential cabinet, serving as Theodore Roosevelt's secretary of commerce and labor.
Other Jews exerted an even wider-ranging impact on the American scene. Arriving from Hungary in 1864, seventeen-year-old Joseph Pulitzer immediately enlisted in the Union Army and underwent a year of combat duty. After the war he was hired as a reporter in St. Louis for Carl Schurz's Westliche Post Saving and borrowing, mastering the journalistic craft, Pulitzer later began buying and profitably selling a number of other German-language newspapers. In 1878 he made his initial foray into English-language journalism when a defunct St. Louis newspaper, the Dispatch , became available at a sheriff's auction. Pulitzer bought the Dispatch for $2,500, merged it with another struggling sheet, and nurtured the Post-Dispatch into a respected quality publication. Its circulation and profits climbed. Yet Pulitzer's career as an innovator of mass-appeal journalism began in earnest only in 1882, when he managed to buy out the nearly bankrupt New York World from Jay Gould and thereafter transformed it into a hard-hitting populist organ. The World's climb to a mass-circulation journal also revealed Pulitzer's imaginative use of the new wire services, new printing technology, new advertising techniques. Systematically enlarging his chain of newspapers, Pulitzer continued to apply his favored innovations, among them extensive illustrations and cartoons, and sports and women's pages. More significantly, he emerged as a national force for political and economic reform. His journals showed no mercy in exposing municipal graft and other public corruption, and in demanding effective antitrust laws. Upon Pulitzer's death in 1911, his bequests made possible the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University, as well as the prizes that bear his name.
Beyond entrepreneurialism, even beyond journalism, Central European Jews exerted a widening impact on American arts and sciences. Oscar Hammerstein departed Berlin at age eighteen, reaching the United States in the midst of the Civil War. After working first as a cigar maker in New York, then as editor of the trade paper Tobacco Journal , he turned to opera, his first love. Without musical talent himself, he was intent at least on becoming an impresario. Thus, at the age of twenty-one, married and a father, Hammerstein plunged his savings into the construction of an opera house in Harlem. The venture failed. Recouping in property investment during the next few years, he tried the arts again. In 1890 he constructed the Columbus Theater and hired vaudeville and other popular amusements for its stage. This enterprise succeeded. Hammerstein's next two decades were hectic. Building seven more theaters, he scoured the world for talent, presenting everyone from opera stars to circus freaks. His name became a byword for the best in vaudeville. New York was rather fond of the eccentric little scrapper, with his high silk hat, Prince Albert coat, and perpetual cigar. In the early twentieth century, he was continually in the public eye. And at long last Hammerstein achieved his life's ambition, erecting the Manhattan Opera House as a rival to the more staid Metropolitan, and booking some of the greatest European conductors and singers. The feud between the two houses, one dominated by Otto Kahn, the other by Hammerstein, took on epic proportions. Never before or since has the city been as opera-conscious. For a while Hammerstein made fabulous profits. But in 1910, heavily mortgaged in other investments, he was obliged to sell out to the Met. If his passion for music and theater remained unrequited, it would be fulfilled years later by his grandson Oscar Hammerstein II.
In the interval, also largely under Jewish leadership, the Metropolitan Opera consolidated its reputation as a serious rival of the great European houses. Leopold Damrosch, a friend of Liszt and (improbably) of Wagner, was brought to America from Germany in 1871 to serve as choral director for New York's Temple Emanu-El, Two years later, Damrosch founded the Oratorio Society and the New York Symphony Society, predecessor of the New York Philharmonic. In 1884 he was appointed principal conductor of the newly opened Met. Upon his sudden death from pneumonia a few months later, he was replaced by his young son Walter (who would become even more famous as a conductor and music educator). Under the Damrosches, father and son, and under its general manager Heinrich Conried, the Met became the leading interpreter of German opera outside of Germany itself. Meanwhile, it was Otto Kahn, president of the Met's board, whose vision and generosity allowed Conried to bring over as general manager Gatti-Casazza and as guest conductor Toscanini, and singers of the caliber of Galli-Curci and Caruso.
Abraham Jacobi, the renowned Viennese forty-eighter, won an even wider reputation as a medical scientist in the United States. Indeed, as the first professor of pediatric medicine at Columbia, Jacobi was subsequently to be enshrined as the “father of pediatrics” in America. His contributions were so highly esteemed that he was elected to the presidency of the American Medical Association and awarded honorary degrees from Harvard, Yale, the University of Michigan, and Columbia. The Posen-born Simon Baruch emigrated to South Carolina in 1855, studied medicine in Charleston and Richmond, and as a Confederate surgeon in the Civil War achieved great distinction for his pioneering techniques and articles on battlefield wounds. Moving to New York in 1880, Baruch gained further eminence for surgical and therapeutic innovations. In a special award, the New York Academy of Medicine declared that “the profession and humanity owe more [to him]... than to any other man for the development of the surgery of appendicitis.” The inscription under his portrait at New York University-Bellevue Medical Center describes him as the “father of physical medicine.” He was assuredly the father of the financier and government adviser Bernard Baruch.
Emile Berliner, reaching the United States in the postbellum era as a teenager, managed without so much as a year of secondary education to invent the microphone, the modern gramophone, and the transformer. Albert Michelson arrived from Poland as a babe in arms in 1852 and was reared in the mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, where his father operated the local store. Completing secondary school, and determined to win admission to the United States Naval Academy, young Michelson borrowed funds to travel to Washington, where he succeeded in buttonholing President Grant one morning outside the White House. Impressed by the youth's spunk, Grant awarded him a presidential appointment at Annapolis. Michelson, in turn, performed brilliantly. Following graduation and a two-year stint of sea duty, he was called back to the Academy as a science instructor. And here, in the laboratory, he set to work on a problem that had long intrigued physicists—the precise speed of light. In 1887, using only the simplest of instruments, Michelson solved it. He was thirty-five years old. Twenty years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize, the first American physicist to receive the honor.
Teaching at the University of Wisconsin, Joseph Jastrow was the first American psychologist to introduce and selectively adopt the theories of the radical Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud. At Columbia, Franz Boas was imaginatively exploiting the disciplines of cultural anthropology to puncture racist myths and nationalist conceits. Entrée for Jews into the humanities, traditionally the privileged terrain of Old Americans, remained somewhat narrower. Yet as early as the 1870s, once the nativist passions of the Civil War had faded, that opportunity seemingly was widening, in law, music, theater, journalism, even academia. For an immigrant minority, the future in America had never appeared brighter.