Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty

Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty

by Andrew Meier
Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty

Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty

by Andrew Meier

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Overview

A “magisterial” (The Wall Street Journal) portrait of four generations of the Morgenthau family, a dynasty of power brokers and public officials with an outsize—and previously unmapped—influence extending from daily life in New York City to the shaping of the American Century

A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice • A New Yorker Book of the Year

“Exhaustively researched, vividly written, and a welcome reminder that even the most noxious evils can be vanquished when capable and committed citizens do their best.”—David M. Kennedy, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Freedom from Fear

After coming to America from Germany in 1866, the Morgenthaus made history in international diplomacy, in domestic politics, and in America’s criminal justice system. With unprecedented, exclusive access to family archives, award-winning journalist and biographer Andrew Meier vividly chronicles how the Morgenthaus amassed a fortune in Manhattan real estate, advised presidents, advanced the New Deal, exposed the Armenian genocide, rescued victims of the Holocaust, waged war in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and, from a foundation of private wealth, built a dynasty of public service. In the words of former mayor Ed Koch, they were “the closest we’ve got to royalty in New York City.” 

Lazarus Morgenthau arrived in America dreaming of rebuilding the fortune he had lost in his homeland. He ultimately died destitute, but the family would rise again with the ascendance of Henry, who became a wealthy and powerful real estate baron. From there, the Morgenthaus went on to influence the most consequential presidency of the twentieth century, as Henry’s son Henry Jr. became FDR’s longest-serving aide, his Treasury secretary during the war, and his confidant of thirty years. Finally, there was Robert Morgenthau, a decorated World War II hero who would become the longest-tenured district attorney in the history of New York City. Known as the “DA for life,” he oversaw the most consequential and controversial prosecutions in New York of the last fifty years, from the war on the Mafia to the infamous Central Park Jogger case. 

The saga of the Morgenthaus has lain half hidden in the shadows for too long. At heart a family history, Morgenthau is also an American epic, as sprawling and surprising as the country itself.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780812981049
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 11/21/2023
Pages: 1072
Sales rank: 242,369
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Andrew Meier is the author of Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall and The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service. A former Moscow correspondent for Time, he has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, among numerous other publications, for more than two decades. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their two daughters.

Read an Excerpt

Between Profit and Disaster

1815–1866


America in the first days of June 1866 was still rent by blood. On the morning that the iron ship edged into New York Harbor, the Civil War lived on. In Virginia, Jefferson Davis awaited trial for treason. Elsewhere in the South, the warnings mounted: In Alabama, the cotton forecasts turned apocalyptic and they spoke of famine; in Arkansas, the Freedmen’s Bureau reported ramifying destitution and a resurgent violence. Yet in the island-city that lay at the voyage’s end, the ebbing of the war had brought an uncertain limbo: Everyone, it seemed, both those who had witnessed the horror and those who had not, wished only to forget the fields of dead.

The SS Hermann, the 318-foot steamship, twin masts shimmering and black hull streaked salt-white, had left the port of Bremen in May. Not all of its 734 passengers would complete the crossing. Eleven children perished en route, the youngest an infant girl who died hours before landfall. For the 64 people in first class, though, the crossing had been most pleasant. A distinguished crowd had filled the heated suites of luxury. Most were German gentlemen, men of trade and industry, who had come to America in search of commerce and brought their families in hopes of starting anew.

On the final day at sea they rose early, huddling at the great glass windows to catch sight of a city cloaked in gray. Amid the predawn murk, an unlikely traveler who had sported a white silk tie on each day of the crossing, no matter the weather, stood apart. At fifty, he had already revealed a gift for self-invention—turning from tailor to tradesman to entrepreneur. Married for more than two decades, he had fathered thirteen children. He had left Mannheim with his family, but forfeited all else: a string of factories, a thousand employees, a mansion on the town square.

In short, he had left behind all that he had ever built, owned, or known.



Lazarus Morgenthau was not an imposing man. He was of average height and slight of build. Yet whenever he entered a room, no matter how crowded, people took note. It was a talent that he had discovered as a boy: He commanded attention. Although the bright blond hair and beard of his youth had turned a silvery gray, it remained rakishly long, and his eyes, set deep beneath a broad forehead, still flashed electric blue. He took pains to lavish care on his appearance. The daily toilette was an orchestration: a concerto of minerals and elixirs, lotions and oils. Each morning, he trimmed his walrus mustache with precision. He wore the stiff wool suits of a Baden aristocrat (his Prince Albert, a knee-length, double-breasted frock coat, was his signature) and, no matter the season, a cravat. The necktie, always silk and pearl white, served as a talisman of his preposterous ascent.

Lazarus Morgenthau was a child of the narrow world of Bavaria’s Jews, an unyielding realm of walls and boundaries, rules and ritual. It, too, was a world apart. In his father’s native Gleusdorf, a hamlet of some three hundred residents, only a few dozen were Jews. Their arrival dated to 1660: six families who settled in a remote corner of Europe. In the two centuries since, their number had scarcely grown. The Jews of Gleusdorf lived crammed together, along a dead-end street on the edge of the village. Lazarus, though, was a born gambler, and intent on escape. He came of age in a world where change was a threat and games of chance a sacrilege, and he had risen by dint of a rare combination of ego, defiance, and ingenuity.

Lazarus’s wife of twenty-three years, Babette, had made the voyage as well. Neither particularly pretty nor, as even the family chroniclers recorded, charming, Babette possessed a singular virtue noted by her descendants: an essential “stoic” bearing. At forty-one, she had not only suffered the mercurial ways of her husband, but borne children for nearly two decades. Eight were onboard: four boys, aged six to thirteen (Mengo, Julius, Heinrich, and Gustave), and four girls, aged eleven to twenty-one (Regine, Ida, Pauline, and Bertha).

Months earlier, Lazarus had dispatched the three he deemed most able, the two eldest sons, Max and Siegfried, aged eighteen and fourteen, and a daughter, Minna, fifteen. He sent them off in midwinter, a teenaged advance party instructed to secure a foothold across the sea. On November 29, 1865, Lazarus bid farewell to Max with characteristic flourish.

“My dear son!” he wrote in a poetic farewell,

You are parting from us today, just for a short time
May you be the first to bring us hope and joy.
Through diligence and righteousness you will succeed
To bring your parents and siblings a bright future.
Travel now with God and my blessings and arrive
In health in New York—this is the wish of your loving father.

Now, as the Hermann neared land, Lazarus and Babette waited among the arrivals, eager for a glimpse of the city. The clouds were dark and low, threatening to draw a curtain across the sky. Lazarus kept his leather cases close. They were filled with ornate scrolls, the promise of elaborate schemes: patents from Germany and England for hygienic devices and household remedies. Since his youth, Lazarus had been a tinkerer. In recent months, though, even before he had been forced, as he saw things, to quit the very business that had made him rich and abandon Germany, the drive to invent had overtaken his life.

Behind every scheme lay two forces: a love of modernity and a fixation on health. The first in Mannheim to install a bathroom in his house, Lazarus pursued one hygienic invention after another. Just months before leaving Bremen, he’d launched the latest venture: In London, Lazarus and his son Max opened a “branch office” at No. 10 Basinghall Street, securing an English patent for a favorite invention: Fichtennadel-Cigarren (“Pine-Balsam Cigars”), as well as Fichtennadel-Brustzucker (“Pine-Balsam Pectoral Sugar”)—bonbons, wrapped in foil and “containing a very little opium,” to alleviate “irritable cough, hoarseness, tightness of the chest, asthma, stubborn lung affections, chronic catarrh, etc.” To market the “wholesome cigars” among the Americans, he published a booklet filled with testimonials. Inside the embossed cover (crowded with the seals of fourteen European states), doctors and clergymen, opera singers and actresses, extolled Lazarus’s wonders. “These cigars are not only enjoyable to smoke,” a priest wrote, “they have truly earned their name, Gesundheits-Cigarren—Cigars for your Health.”

And yet a third force now ruled Lazarus: He was desperate to start over. Years later, his grandchildren would forgive what his own children could not. The patriarch could never have imagined, they understood, all that he did not live long enough to see. Lazarus would never revisit the world he had left, nor regain the fortune that he had lost. And he would never adapt to his new land. Yet the feats of his descendants would surpass even the gambler’s most fantastic dreams. His American-born heirs could forgive him. As Castle Garden came into view, its stone walls looming above the Battery, it would have been as hard to forecast the turns of the century to come as to envision the birth of a dynasty.

Table of Contents

Prologue One Hogan Place xv

Part I Arrival

1 "Between Profit and Disaster" 1815-1866 3

2 At the Edge 1866-1870 14

3 "A Declaration of Independence" 1870-1879 22

4 "True Happiness" 1880-1883 37

5 "43, 42, 41" 1884-1892 52

6 "The Temple of Humanity" 1892-1898 63

Part II Ascent

7 Among the Plutocrats 1898-1900 71

8 "A Modest Man" 1896-1903 76

9 "Let Me Have the Boy" 1903-1911 83

10 Wilson's Call Spring-Winter 1911 101

11 Money Harvest 1912-1913 108

12 "I Want to Be a Farmer" 1912-1914 119

13 "Something Is Brewing" Winter-Spring 1914 131

14 "Guns of August" Spring-Fall 1914 140

15 "You Can See and Feel the Hatred" Winter 1914-Spring 1915 147

16 "A Campaign of Race Extermination" Spring-Fall 1915 154

17 "We Are Through with Them" 1915 163

18 "A Tremendous Asset" 1915 171

Part III War

19 Franklin and Henry 1916-1933 187

20 Henry & Franklin, Elinor & Eleanor 1922-1928 195

21 Albany 1928-1932 206

22 "The Smell of Revolution Was in the Air" Winter-Spring 1933 216

23 "He Could Trust Me Absolutely" Spring-Fall 1933 225

24 "To Swim with the Tide and Not Sink" Winter-Fall 1934 240

25 "We Have Just Begun to Fight" 1932-1934 248

26 "I Went Over Him and Under Him and Around Him" Fall 1936-Spring 1939 262

27 "About the Future of Democracy and the World" Fall 1937-Winter 1940 273

28 Again, at the Brink 1939-1940 282

29 "Not Far from Armageddon" 1940-1941 290

30 At Sea Winter 1942-Winter 1943 310

31 Civilization Fails the Test Summer 1942-Fall 1943 321

32 "War Rumor Inspired by Fear" 1942-1943 331

33 "Courage First" Fall 1943-Winter 1944 341

34 In the Med: April 20 Winter 1944-Spring 1944 359

35 "And I Mean the German People" Spring 1944 376

36 "Unnatural, Unchristian, and Unnecessary" August 1944 388

37 "For 48 Hours, I Was on the Top of the Heap" Fall 1944 411

38 In the Pacific: "Undivided Attention" Summer 1944-Spring 1945 420

39 "Henry, I Am with You 100 Percent" April 1945 435

40 Trouble with Harry Spring 1945 447

41 In the Pacific: "A Quiet Station" Spring-Summer 1945 454

42 Big Man Falling Spring-Summer 1945 460

43 Home Is the Sailor Fall 1945-Winter 1946 470

Part IV The Sovereign District

44 After the Fall 1945-1948 483

45 "No Sense of Proportion" 1946-1949 491

46 "A Little Righteous Indignation" 1948-1952 501

47 "This Thing He Married" 1950-1955 512

48 "To Hell with It" 1959-1961 522

49 "You Should Have Known Me When I Was Somebody" 1952-1967 531

50 Bobby and Bob 1961-1964 539

51 "Our Thing" 1957-1963 545

52 "A Lehman Candidate" 1962 556

53 "White Whale" 1962-1964 573

54 After Dallas 1964 590

55 The Junkman 1966-1968 598

56 "Joe Bananas" 1964-1985 607

57 Amid Darkness, "Sunlight" 1967-1970 617

58 "Sinewy Fingers" 1969 634

Part V The Boss

59 "A Job That I Know" 1970-1974 647

60 Riot 1975-1978 664

61 City on Edge 1977 683

62 "The Color of His Skin" 1978 695

63 "Failure After Failure" 1983-1989 705

64 "To Change an Industry" 1989-1991 724

65 "A New Endgame" 1992-2015 734

66 "The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International" 1992-2019 743

67 "Either … Stupid or Venal" 1989-1992 757

68 "Only Good People" 1992 772

69 The Jogger 1989 782

70 "A Brilliant Job" 1989-2002 795

71 "One Good Tiling" 2002-2003 813

72 "No Guile" 2003-2014 829

73 "The Price of Liberty" 1995-2009 838

74 "'Judas' Morgy" 2009 852

75 "On the Outside" 2011-2018 865

76 "The Good Life" 2019 880

Epilogue East Eighty-sixth Street 887

Acknowledgments 893

Notes 901

Sources 975

Illustration Credits 997

Index 1001

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