Prologue

O N MAY 4, 1865, Morris and Katherine Myers and their four young children traveled by horse and wagon from Athens, Illinois, to neighboring Springfield. The wagon contained the family's entire worldly goods—their clothing, bedding, furniture, and kitchen utensils. It was a decisive turning point in Morris Myers's odyssey. He was about to go into business for himself. Son of a family of Jewish cattle dealers from Holsdorf, a German town near Frankfurt, he had immigrated to the United States only fourteen years earlier, as a youthful bachelor. The Salzensteins, family friends from the Old Country, had promised him employment in their little general store in Athens. From 1851 onward, Morris Myers had worked for the Salzensteins, first as a sales clerk, then as a “customer-peddler” to surrounding farms. He had done well enough to win the hand of Katherine Hahn, daughter of a Cincinnati Jewish family, and now at last to purchase his own men's-clothing store in Springfield. It was a promising opportunity. Capital of Sangamon County, Springfield not long before also had become the capital of Illinois. Business was certain to be good. In anticipation of the move, Morris Myers already had purchased a small home in one of Springfield's more respectable neighborhoods. And there, this May 4, 1865, the impatient new proprietor directed his team of horses.

Yet no sooner had the family reached the town center, with its looming state capitol rotunda, than they found the way blocked. Tens of thousands of persons crowded the streets. By horse and by foot, alone or in families, they moved in silence behind a full regiment of mounted cavalry. The Myerses then joined the procession. Unknowingly, they had entered Springfield on the day of Abraham Lincoln's burial. The funeral train had spent twelve days carrying the president's body from Washington, stopping periodically for religious ceremonies in selected towns during the 1,700-mile trip. On board too were the remains of the Lincolns' son Willie, who had died in 1862. Once the train reached Springfield, Lincoln's body lay in state throughout the day and night at the capitol building. It was this morning of May 4 that the long funeral procession journeyed at last to Oak Ridge Cemetery. After a final hymn and a rifle volley under lowering skies, the military guard of honor placed Lincoln's casket in the cemetery's public receiving vault next to Willie's. The Myers children witnessed the event. For them and their neighbors and their descendants, Lincoln would never cease to be a brooding presence.

Meanwhile, the family's little clothing store on Washington Street provided a decent livelihood. Possibly it would have flourished, but Morris Myers died suddenly in 1873, leaving a widow and five children. The business was sold. The two eldest sons, Albert and Louis, eventually found employment in another men's-clothing store, owned by Samuel Rosenwald. They would remember Rosenwald with affection. He treated them as family, often inviting them to dinner. By chance, the Rosenwald home was across the street from Lincoln's, and on visits the brothers occasionally caught glimpses of the distraught Mary Todd Lincoln in her black widow's weeds. It was Rosenwald who launched Albert and Louis Myers on their own careers as independent proprietors. In 1886, his son Julius was tendered an opportunity to buy into a Chicago mail-order firm, Sears Roebuck & Co. Less than confident of his son's mercantile acumen, however, the elder Rosenwald decided to join Julius in Chicago to watch over him. His own store he offered to sell to Albert and Louis at a fair price. Grateful, the young men managed to come up with part of the down payment and borrowed the rest from relatives and friends.

The store flourished even more handsomely under their direction than it had under Rosenwald's. In 1900, the brothers moved to a choice downtown location at the corner of Fifth and Washington. Another Myers brother, Julius, soon joined the business. In 1924, when the building was destroyed in a fire, it was promptly rebuilt and vastly enlarged as a department store, the biggest in Springfield. By then, too, reciprocating the help they had received from others, the brothers funded cousins, nephews, and assorted collateral relatives in “branch” stores in other Illinois towns—Jacksonville, Mount Pulaski, Mattoon, Havana, Kewanee, Clinton, Lincoln, Alton—nurturing these family members to solvency and eventually to ownership.

Albert, the eldest brother, married in 1905, at the age of forty-five. His bride, Jeanette Mayer, came from a prominent Chicago Jewish family. They produced four sons. After Jeanette died at an early age, Albert remarried. His new wife, Florence Freedman, a childless widow, raised Albert's three sons (one had died in childhood). They grew into strapping, outdoor boys. The youngest, Albert junior, was an all-state football star, and later a varsity letterman on the University of Illinois football team. The eldest, Stanley, became a devout golfer. The second son, James, was an avid Boy Scout, Eagle Scout, summertime farmer. He also developed a lifelong passion for Lincolniana. Indeed, James Myers over the years would recount from memory tales plumbed from every nook and cranny of Lincoln fact and legend. Among these were fascinating curiosa that he had occasion to ponder with special interest. Of Lincoln the young circuit lawyer and congressman, and his close Jewish friend Abraham Jonas. Of Lincoln the president assuring Isaac M. Wise, founder of Reform Judaism, that “I am blood of your blood, flesh of your flesh.” Of Lincoln the Civil War leader who protected the rights of ill-treated Southern Jews. Could this man of boundless humanity really have been a descendant of the inhabitants of medieval Lincolnshire, whence his family had taken its name? Of that county of bloodthirsty English yokels who had massacred hapless Jews for the reputed killing of little Hugh of Lincoln? It seemed unlikely.

In later years, as the author of pamphlets and short volumes of Lincolniana, James Myers paid his homage to the great man in ways others had unaccountably overlooked. In 1968, he joined with several friends in buying the antiquated downtown building where Lincoln and William Herndon had practiced law, then restored and furnished the decrepit edifice with impressive accuracy. The law offices on the building's third and top floors are dominated by a huge wood-burning stove. The tables, desks, quills, and inkwells, the bookcases, pitchers, and basins, the portrait of Lincoln's hero Henry Clay—all are authentic to the last detail. So is Lincoln's cot, facing the window (through which is visible, only two blocks away, the aging Myers Brothers Department Store). Repurchased by the State of Illinois in 1987, the Lincoln-Herndon Museum is a favorite stop on guided tours. So is the original state capitol building, now also a museum, restored to its early-nineteenth-century decor. Myers played a role in that project as well. He has served as a trustee of the Illinois State Historical Library and a board member of the Illinois Historical Society, and is the founder of the Lincoln-Herndon Press, publisher of his own extensive series of books on American humor and folklore.

Inevitably, it is Lincoln's tomb that remains the principal attraction for visitors. The graceful stone obelisk, the mighty plinth with its ascending stairways, statuary, and friezes, the mausoleum of bronze and marble and its enclosed catafalque—all evoke a hushed reverence that cannot be surpassed by any other of the nation's historical monuments. Perhaps it was reflective of Lincoln's humility that his wife never considered interring him anywhere but in Oak Ridge, Springfield's public cemetery. If the obelisk towers over other graves, it does so in less than solitary majesty. The tombs of Springfield's private citizens surround Lincoln's on the same lawns and gentle ridges, acre after acre. As in other cemeteries, subdivisions are reserved for congregations and fraternal societies. One of these is Springfield's old Reform Jewish congregation. Here the gravestones long antedate the fallen president's. Eroded by wind and storm, the inscriptions often are barely legible. Yet the two dozen modest oblong slabs of the Myers clan form their own recognizable enclave. They include Morris Myers, Albert Morris Myers, Louis Myers, Julius Myers, Jennie Myers, Katherine Helen Myers, Hannah Myers, Jeanette Mayer Myers, Florence Freedman Myers, Morton Myers, assorted Myers uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces.

They are flanked by scores of other early coreligionists, many from neighboring hamlets without congregations or cemeteries of their own. The names are redolent of Central European Jewry; Salzenstein, Kaufman, Frisch, Hirschheimer, Hexter, Rothschild, Stern, Zeckendorf, Wertheim, Hess, Frank, Brunswick, Bair, Seeberger, Nusbaum, Lange, Hainsfurther. Their descendants still are close at hand. Indeed, in early December 1990, at the home of James and Edith Myers on Springfield's Williams Boulevard, they sipped coffee and shared reminiscences of those early-nineteenth-century pioneers, their forebears who laid down roots in Springfield, Bloomington, Mattoon, Winchester, Ashland, Danville, Farmer City, Gibson City, Mason City, Decatur, Mendota, Pontiac, Athens, Paris, Urbana, Champaign. The Jews in those early-nineteenth-century decades were few enough to know one another, to visit, worship, celebrate, and commiserate together—to marry one another. The bloodlines twine and intertwine. Max Freedman came from Austria as a youth of seventeen, peddled in the Midwest in the post-Civil War years, opened a modest general store in Mendota, married a local Jewish girl, sired four daughters. It was one of them, Florence, widowed early, who made a second marriage with the widower Albert Myers and raised his sons. Another daughter, Bertha, also prematurely widowed, took her children to Kewanee to live with her father. And one of Bertha's children, Edith, came to know her stepcousin James Myers from childhood. Eventually they married. The union was entirely characteristic. Jewish families encouraged them.

The presence of these early inhabitants is recorded in the innumerable struggling shed-and-shanty enterprises that grew into department stores, banks, feed-and-produce companies; in ancestors springing to life in the poems of Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters; in Salzenstein Park of Athens and Sylvan Park of Paris, memorializing sons lost in World War I; of names in battle records from the Civil War to Vietnam. The Myers brothers emerged intact from World War II, Stanley from the Navy as a lieutenant, Albert Jr. and James from the Army Air Force, one as a lieutenant colonel, the other as a major. Remembering them and their relatives and friends, one shares their family odysseys, their cherished ancestral memories: of Addie Cohen's father discussing a land title with young Abraham Lincoln in Urbana; of Jerome Sholem's uncle lying scalped beside Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn; of Stanley Myers clinging to a raft after his supply vessel was torpedoed by Japanese aircraft during the Battle of Guadalcanal in April 1943, surviving with only five other crew members.

For the author, who lived among these Jewish Old Americans in Champaign, Illinois, the chronicle of their fate and fortune transcends the ethnic history of an immigrant minority. It is a palimpsest of the United States itself.

I N PREPARING this volume, I have been favored with the advice and commentary of numerous esteemed colleagues and friends. Their help can be acknowledged here only succinctly:

For the colonial period, Professor Martin Cohen of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. For the colonial period and for religious and cultural developments in later years, Dr. Stanley Chyet, dean of the Magnin Graduate School of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. For the federal and early national periods, Professor Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University. For the early West European and for later East European settlement in New York, Professor Moses Rischin of San Francisco State University. For American Protestantism, Professor Dewey Wallace of George Washington University. For Reform Judaism, Professor Michael Meyer of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. For Conservative Judaism and attendant cultural developments, Professor Abraham Karp of the University of Rochester. For early German Jewish settlement in the Midwest, Ms. Cecile Meiers of Springfield, Illinois, and Ms. Ruth Kuhn Youngerman of Champaign, Illinois.

For intergroup tensions and antisemitism, Professor Leo Ribuffo and Professor James Horton of George Washington University, and Professor Leonard Dinnerstein of the University of Arizona. For the New Deal era, Mr. Robert Nathan of Robert Nathan Associates, Washington, D.C. For later-twentieth-century economic and political developments, Professor Edward Shapiro of Seton Hall University and Mr. Earl Raab of Brandeis University. For the establishment of communal and philanthropic institutions, Professor Marc Raphael of The College of William & Mary, and Mr. Morris Fine and Ms. Selma Hirsh of the American Jewish Committee. For the role of women, Dr. Linda Kuzmack of the United States Holocaust Commission. For the Nazi-Holocaust era, Professor Henry Friedlander of the City University of New York and Dr. Sybil Milton of the United States Holocaust Commission. For Brandeisian progressivism and Zionism, Professor Melvin Urofsky of Virginia Commonwealth University. For the rise of Israel, Professor Michael Cohen of Bar-Ilan University. For later relations with Israel, Consul Moshe Fuchs of the consulate general of Israel, Chicago.

For theater and film, the late Professor A. E. Claeyssens of George Washington University. For immigrant Yiddish literature, Professor Max Ticktin of George Washington University. For postacculturation American literature, Professor Emeritus Milton Hindus of Brandeis University and Professor Judith Plotz of George Washington University. For the music profession, Professor Emeritus George Steiner of George Washington University. For the medical profession, Dr. David Sachar of Mount Sinai Medical School. For the Jonathan Pollard case, Ms. Judith Barnett, attorney, Washington, D.C. For the Soviet Jewry campaign, Mr. Jerry Goodman, former executive director of the National Conference on Soviet Jewry; Mr. Morris Amitay, attorney, Washington, D.C; Minister-Counselor Yirmiyahu Shiran of the Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C.

For bibliographical materials from the Library of Congress, Mr. Michael Bassett; from the American Jewish Historical Society, Dr. Nathan Kaganoff; from the Gellman Library of George Washington University, Dr. Quadir Amiryar and Mr. Frank Clark; from the Montgomery County Libraries, Ms. Beverly Ruser and Ms. Ann Sapp.

For generously helping to underwrite numerous expenses attendant upon preparation of this work, Dr. Henry Solomon and the members of the Faculty Research Committee of George Washington University.

For corrections, suggestions, and guidance that transcended the editorial and approached the threshold of literary collaboration, Ms. Eva Resnikova, Ms. Jane Garrett, and Mr. Melvin Rosenthal of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

Only these individuals, and my wife Eliana, know the full measure of my debt.

Kensington, Maryland March 30, 1991