Landed wealth freed some Jewish immigrants from the relentless pursuit of money

Evidence

Their father had been able to send them to America with a little cash in their pockets, so they had never suffered the desperate poverty that had afflicted other German-Jewish immigrants of the 1840’s—the brothers Seligman, Abraham Kuhn, Simon Guggenheim and his son Meyer, for instance—who, without enough capital to open stores, had had to earn it trudging through rural Pennsylvania with heavy packs on their backs and sticks in their hands to ward off dogs, peddling merchandise from farmhouse to farmhouse. Perhaps for this reason, the brothers, Bernhard in particular, never displayed the lifelong preoccupation with wealth that flogged the one-time peddlers along a gyre of financial expansion that eventually made them merchant princes, international bankers and mining tycoons—men whom Cleveland Amory labeled the Jewish Grand Dukes, who were not part of the Four Hundred but rather of their own One Hundred and who created in New York City their own, self-contained society that was known among themselves as “Our Crowd.” By the time he was fifty, Bernhard, security assured, was leaving business affairs largely in Samuel’s hands and taking an interest, unusual among Jewish businessmen in New York in the 1870’s, in civic affairs. Becoming convinced of slum residents’ need for more “breathing space,” he launched a successful campaign to persuade the city fathers, who were not at all sure that they hadn’t already made a gigantic mistake by removing a huge hunk of land from the tax rolls to create Central Park, to set aside other, smaller areas for more parks. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 113

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Early financial security enabled a rare civic turn in a New York Jewish businessman — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 113

Broader Connections

• Early financial security enabled a rare civic turn in a New York Jewish businessman #corroborates (0.80) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 113