SCHOOL DAYS
My family took up their residence at 92 Congress Street, Brooklyn, which
my elder brothers and two sisters, our pioneers, had prepared for us,
and though handicapped as we were by our small knowledge of English, we
younger children began our studies at the De Graw Street Public School
in the September following our arrival. Eight months later, on the first
day of May, 1867, we moved to Manhattan.
It was a very simple New York to which we came. In domestic economy,
portières were unknown, rugs a rarity; ingrain carpets, costing about
sixty cents a yard, were the usual floor coverings; when the walls were
papered, it was with the cheapest material; the only bathtubs were of
zinc, and one to a house was the almost universal rule. Our home was No.
1121 Second Avenue, corner of Fifty-ninth Street--a three-storey,
high-stoop brownstone house, rows of which were then being erected. It
still stands there, the high stoop removed from it; stores are in the
basements; the district has deteriorated to one of cheap tenements and
small retail businesses. But in those days there was an effort to make
Upper Second Avenue one of the chief residential streets of the city.
The householders were mostly well-to-do Germans--people who had
prospered on the Lower East Side and had outgrown their quarters there.
The monotony of the thoroughfare was relieved only by the old-fashioned
horse car that rumbled by every four or five minutes. Like the letter
carriers of that period, neither the drivers nor the conductors wore
uniforms. The line ended at Sixty-fourth Street where the truck-gardens
began. On our way to Sunday School, at Thirty-ninth Street near Seventh
Avenue, we would make a short-cut across the site where the first Grand
Central Station was being erected.
I had my little difficulties in school: I well remember how one of the
boys told me that he deeply sympathized with me, because I would have to
overcome the double handicap of being both a Jew and a German. So I
greatly rejoiced when I saw the steady disappearance of the prejudice
against the Germans after they had succeeded in winning the
Franco-Prussian War in 1871.
About the most picturesque and artistic parade that had ever taken place
in New York was arranged by all the German societies and their
sympathizers, the singing clubs and the _turn vereins_ participating.
Non-Germans lent their carriages. Among the generous people was the
famous Dr. Hemholdt, of patent medicine fame. He owned a rather
fantastic vehicle, which was drawn by five horses decorated with white
cockades and which he lent for the occasion to an uptown club of which
my brother was the secretary. I was permitted to fill in, so that I saw
with my own eyes and was deeply impressed by the crowds that lined the
streets and vociferously and heartily, for the first time, gave their
unstinted approval of the Germans.
We children did not lose a day in our pursuit of education; for on the
very day of our removal to Manhattan, I attended Grammar School No. 18,
in Fifty-first Street near Lexington Avenue. At recess-time we boys used
to play “tag” on the foundations of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the
construction of which had been stopped during the Civil War. I have very
pleasant recollections of my early grammar school teachers, and
especially of one who later was for years Clerk of the Board of
Education, the efficient Lawrence D. Kiernan, who, while at School 18,
was elected to the Assembly as a candidate of the “Young Democrats” and
whose talks to us pupils on civic duty seemed like great orations and
gave me my first impression of independence in politics.
Nevertheless, I laboured under two disadvantages--one was my English;
the difference in structure between my native and my adopted language
gave me considerable trouble; so did the pronunciation of the letters
_w_ and _d_, but my greatest difficulty was the diphthong _th_, and to
overcome it, I compiled and learned lists of words in which it occurred
and for weeks devoted some time, night and morning, to repeating:
“Theophilus Thistle, the great thistle-sifter, sifted one sieve-full of
unsifted thistles through the thick of his thumb.” However, as the
greatest stress was laid on proficiency in arithmetic, and as I had a
natural aptitude for that study, my proficiency there balanced these
deficiencies and took me into the highest class at the age of eleven.
It was a general belief that all “Dutchmen” were cowards, and on the
playground this idea was acted upon with considerable spirit. I was made
the target of many a joke that I took in good part, until I realized
that something positive was required of me. Then when a husky lad
taunted me with being a “square-headed Dutchman,” and refused my demand
that he “take it back,” my fighting blood was roused, and I administered
a sound thrashing, the result of sheer, unscientific force. Nothing
evokes the admiration of the gallant Irish so much as a good fight, and
the result of that battle was the liking of my comrades, and especially
one of the leaders among them, John F. Carroll, later familiar to New
Yorkers as a leader in Tammany.
About this time I made up my mind to enter City College and, to prepare
for that, I began looking about for a school which ranked higher than
No. 18. There were a number of these, foremost among which were the
Thirteenth and Twenty-third Street schools. I applied at both, but they
were full. The next in rank was No. 14, in Twenty-seventh Street near
Third Avenue, where they admitted me to the fourth class. I gladly
accepted this comparative demotion, so as to utilize advantageously the
two years remaining before I reached the college-entrance age, began my
studies there in March of ’68, under Miss Rosina Hartman, a fine old
spinster and a good teacher, and finished both her class and the third
class before I was twelve.
I was hardly settled in my seat in the second class when the following
incident took place:
Mr. Abner B. Holley, who taught the first class, came into the room and
complained about the mathematical shortcomings of the boys just promoted
into his care; he explained that in his method of teaching arithmetic,
it was essential to have someone for leader, as a sort of spur for the
pupils. He gave us fifteen examples: speed and accuracy were to be the
tests; and the boy who solved them most quickly and correctly was to be
promoted. I finished first and handed up my slate. Holley carefully
compared my answers with those on his slip and, before any other pupil
was ready to submit his work, rapped for attention, and said:
“As these answers are all correct, there is no need of any other boy
finishing. Morgenthau wins the promotion.”
Being too young to graduate in ’69, I remained under Holley until June,
1870. He was an excellent instructor, and it required no effort on my
part to keep the lead in mathematics. In fact, he took pride in
displaying my efficiency, and whenever any trustee, or other visitor,
came to school, they would have a general assembly of all the pupils
and then he would have me solve promptly some such problem in mental
arithmetic as computing the interest on $350 for three years, six
months, and twelve days at 6 per cent. Thus, as I required little of my
time for what was, to most of the boys, our most exacting study, I
devoted all my spare time to improving my pronunciation and mastering
the spelling of English which is so hard for a boy not born to the
language. I won 100 per cent. perfect marks throughout my second year
and when, with about nine hundred other boys, I took my City College
entrance-examination, I was well up among the three hundred selected for
admission.
I always look back with pleasure on those years in Public School No. 14.
Iron stairways, modern desks, and electric lights have been installed
since my day; the Irish and German pupils have passed, the Italian tide
is ebbing; on the student list Russian, Ukrainian, Greek, and Armenian
names now predominate--there is sometimes even a Chinese name to be
found. At exercises there, attended by three of my classmates and by Dr.
John H. Finley, New York’s Commissioner of Education, I celebrated, in
1920, the fiftieth anniversary of my graduation; I took the 1,900 pupils
to a moving-picture show, and commenced my now regular custom of giving
four watches twice a year to members of the graduating class; but as I
then reviewed the past and looked at the present, I felt that the old
spirit had been well preserved and that, whatever the nationality of the
children who enter the old school, they all leave it American citizens.
When I left there, I had my eyes longingly fixed upon the City College,
but the law was then already my ultimate aim and wages were essential,
so I spent my “vacation” as errand boy and general-utility lad in the
law offices of Ferdinand Kurzman, at $4.00 a week. In those days little
was known of “big business”; there were no vast corporations requiring
continuous legal advice, and so the lawyers clustered within three or
four blocks of the court-house; Kurzman’s quarters were at 306 Broadway,
at the corner of Duane Street.
My early duties were the copying and serving of papers, but the time
soon came when, young though I was, I was sent to the District Court to
answer the calendar and, occasionally, fight for an adjournment.
Stenographers and typewriters being practically unknown, the lawyer
would dictate and his clerks transcribe in longhand, make the required
number of copies with pen and ink and then compare the results and
correct any errors. It was only when more than twenty copies were
required that printing would be resorted to.
Such was my existence from June 21st until September 16, 1870. All the
while, I tried to further my education. I had joined the Mercantile
Library in the previous February. Within a short time, I was attending
the Cooper Institute classes in elocution and debating, and later
secured instruction in grammar and composition at the Evening High
School in Thirteenth Street. I tried to do as much good reading as I
could, and I find that my list for 1871 ranges from Cooper’s “Spy,”
“David Copperfield,” and “The Vicar of Wakefield” to Hume’s “History of
England,” Mill’s “Logic,” and “The Iliad.”
Of my life at City College I wish that I could write more, because I
wish I had been privileged to graduate with the Class of 1875. There
were 286 of us, and I remember very vividly some of the incidents of my
brief stay. The halo of military distinction that encircled the brow of
the president, General Alexander S. Webb, is still bright for me, and
bright that day when the great Christine Nilsson came to our classroom
and sang for us. Of the faculty, Professor Doremus remains especially
vivid in my memory; electricity for illuminating purposes was at that
time confined to powerful arc-lights; he tried to explain to us the
possibility of some inventor some day subdividing the power in one of
those lamps so that it could be used to illuminate private houses.
Though “stumped” in anatomy and chemistry through my unfamiliarity with
the long words employed, I stood well on the general roll and was No.
11. My college career was rudely ended on March 20, 1871, when my father
withdrew me and put me to work. His difficulty in mastering the English
language and American commercial methods were handicaps too severe for
him. He lost most of his original money, and his unreinforced efforts
could not support us all.
Early in our occupancy of the Second Avenue house, the back parlour had
to be rented as a doctor’s office, and shortly after my mother decided
that it was her duty to take in boarders. I cannot speak of my mother as
she was during these trials without the deepest emotion. There is nobody
to whom I owe so much; there was no debt which so profoundly affected my
entire career. In Mannheim her position had always been one of comfort.
I had seen her there with good friends, good books, good dramas, and
good music; she was the mistress of a commodious house, with a corps of
competent servants, in a city with every custom and tradition of which
she was intimately familiar; respected by the community, the mother of
thirteen children, she was calm, philosophic, considerate of every
domestic call upon her, not only supervising our education, physical and
mental, but also finding time to add continuously to her own broad
culture. Now a complete change had come. She was a stranger in a strange
land; most of her friends were new; the city of her husband’s adoption
was a puzzle, its manners foreign, its language long almost unknown;
there was small time for amusement; there was, on the contrary, the
ever-constant and ever-pressing strain of helping, by her own
endeavours, to make both ends meet.
All of this deeply affected my young and impressionable mind. I feared
lest my mother, who was my idol, and who was so superior in
accomplishments and knowledge to the people that boarded with us, might,
in the course of her duties, be compelled to render quasi-menial
services. Luckily, two things prevented this. On the one hand, her
wonderful poise and tact and her extraordinarily sweet nature won so
prompt a recognition that the least gentle of our lodgers instinctively
became worshippers at her shrine. On the other hand, my sisters,
themselves bred to comfort, rivalled one another in a friendly struggle
to shield her from every possible annoyance. High-spirited girls as they
were, they did not hesitate to assume everything that might in any way
hurt her sensibilities, and their devotion and self-sacrifice are among
my tenderest memories.
Appreciating how things were at home, I became quickly reconciled to
abandoning textbook education, and instead, to plunging into the rough
school of life.
The influence of the beautiful spirit of my mother had early given me
good ideals and a love of purity, and the ebb of the family fortunes
developed an irrepressible ambition to accomplish four things: to
restore my mother to the comforts to which she had been accustomed; to
save myself from an old age of financial stress such as my father’s; to
give my own children the chances in life that were all but denied to me,
and to try to attain a standard of thought and conduct consonant with
the fine concepts that characterized my mother’s mind and lips.
My experiences were not unique, nor were my high resolves exceptionally
heroic; they are found in the life history of most men. Nevertheless,
such histories are not often told at first hand, so that what may have
been commonplace in the happening becomes interesting in the narration.
Forsaking the chronological order of my story, let me look backward and
forward in an attempt to present this phase of my mental development.
I was full of energy, and had tremendous hopes as to my future success,
which gave me a certain assurance that was often misconstrued into
conceit, but which was really a conviction of the necessity to collect
religiously a mental, moral, physical, and financial reserve
guaranteeing the realization of my best desires.
Accordingly, I pursued a rather carefully ordered course. At the age of
fourteen I had taken very seriously my confirmation in the Thirty-ninth
Street Temple, and now I formed the habit of visiting churches of many
denominations and making abstracts of the sermons that I heard delivered
by Henry Ward Beecher, Henry W. Bellows, Rabbi Einhorn, Richard S.
Storrs, T. De Witt Talmage, and Dr. Alger, and many others of the famous
pulpit-orators who enriched the intellectual life of New York. It was
the era when Emerson led American thought, and I profited by passing my
impressionable years in that period whose daily press was edited by such
men as Horace Greeley, William Cullen Bryant, Charles A. Dana, Henry T.
Raymond, and Lawrence Godkin.
There lived with us a hunchbacked Quaker doctor, Samuel S. Whitall, a
beautiful character, softened instead of embittered by his affliction,
the physician at the coloured hospital, who gave half his time to
charitable work among the poor. I frequently opened the door for his
patients and ran his errands, and we became friends. I remember his
long, religious talks, and how deeply I was impressed by Penn’s “No
Cross, No Crown,” a copy of which he gave me. Largely because of it I
composed twenty-four rules of action, tabulating virtues that I wished
to acquire and vices that I must avoid. I even made a chart of these
maxims, and every night marked against myself whatever breaches of them
I had been guilty of. Looking over this record for February and March of
1872, I find that I charged myself with dereliction in not heeding my
self-imposed admonitions against indulgence in sweets, departures from
strict veracity, too much talking, extravagance, idleness, and vanity--a
heavy indictment!
The fact is that I had acquired an almost monastic habit of mind and
loved the conquest of my impulses much as the athlete loves the
subjection of his muscles to the demands of his will. In my commonplace
book for 1871 I find transcribed two quotations that governed me. The
one is from Dr. Hall’s “Happy Old Age” and runs:
Stimulants ... are the greatest enemies of mankind; there is no
middle ground which anyone can safely tread, only that of total and
most uncompromising abstinence.
The other is from a sermon of Dr. Channing on “Self-Denial.”
Young man, remember that the only test of goodness is moral
strength, self-decrying energy.... Do you subject to your moral and
religious convictions the love of pleasure, the appetites, the
passions, which form the great trials of youthful virtue? No man
who has made any observation of life but will tell you how often he
has seen the promise of youth blasted ... honorable feeling, kind
affection overpowered and almost extinguished ... through a tame
yielding to pleasure and the passions.
I took these warnings very seriously.
How the state of mind engendered by these forces affected me in a purely
material way, we shall soon see. From the outset of my business career,
when an errand boy in Kurzman’s office, I found myself surrounded by
employees, not perhaps more vicious than most, but certainly sharing the
vices of the majority. They gave, at best, only what they were paid for,
and not an ounce of energy or a minute of time beyond.
I shrank from the possibility of becoming a mere clock clerk and gave
all of my best self and held back nothing. I made mistakes, I had my
failures from the standard that I had set; but my purpose held fast and
I cheerfully pursued the rugged uphill road to success.