Books: Guggles

THE GUGGENHEIMS — Harvey O’Connor — Covici, Friede ($3).

In Germany Thomas Mann traced the rise of a great bourgeois family in Buddenbrooks; in England conscientious John Galsworthy produced the more comprehensive but less artistic Forsyte Saga; and the works are representative of innumerable lesser realistic European novels.

But although U. S. fortunes in general have risen faster, gone higher, dropped further, created more spectacular characters and lurid scandals than other countries can show, U. S. novelists by & large have stood by, left the field to angry muckrakers, uncritical official biographers, or to such able left-wing analysts as Matthew Josephson (The Robber Barons) or Lewis Corey (The House of Morgan).

Last week Harvey O’Connor (Mellon’s Millions) offered The Guggenheims, a well-documented unraveling of the complex history of the Guggenheim mining fortune that made U. S. novelists’ omission seem even more remarkable. Like the Buddenbrooks and Forsytes, the Guggenheim family began with sober business men, many of whose latest descendants forsook business for the arts, involved complicated family relationships, fierce squabbles. But unlike their counterparts in European fiction, the Guggenheims pictured by Harvey O’Connor have operated on a scale calculated to dazzle the most imaginative novelists.

No epic novelist, certainly no apologist for the rich, Harvey O’Connor tells most of the Guggenheim saga in an objective, critically-cool prose. But occasionally readers may detect a slightly flabbergasted note of left-wing awe as he recounts how the seven sons of Jewish immigrant Meyer Guggenheim of Philadelphia made the family the second or third richest in the U. S., comparable in the scope of its clannish money-making only to the Rothschilds. Starting in 1847 as a pack peddler of household knickknacks along the muddy roads outside Philadelphia, vigorous, good-humored Meyer Guggenheim acquired a peddler’s limp that never left him. When he began peddling stove polish of his own manufacture, he made more money, soon owned a tailor shop, a grocery store, became a wholesaler for household goods, made a small fortune speculating in foodstuffs during the Civil War, a larger one importing petticoat lace from Switzerland. Needing little prompting, his sons, assured by their father that they would each make a million dollars, entered the business as soon as they got out of short pants.

The first note of awe in Author O’Connor’s account comes with his description of how the Guggenheims got into the mining business. Preferring to loan money personally rather than trust the banks. Meyer put up $25,000 with a speculating Quaker named Charles Graham, who for $4,000 had bought a water-filled, 70-ft. silver mine in Leadville, Colo. It turned out to be the richest mine in the Rockies. The only Jew in turbulent Leadville, Meyer, now past 50, decided to build his own smelter because he was annoyed with smelter fees. Said a superintendent of the first Guggenheim smelter: “Wherever I turned there was a Guggy in my way. I feel nagged now every time I think of it. If we had ever been able to put all their ideas into practice, you’d have had a smelter that looked like something in the funny papers.” Investors rather than mineralogists, the Guggenheims hired famed mining engineer John Hays Hammond in 1902 at the record salary of $250,000 a year plus a quarter interest in new mines recommended by him. (Doodling statisticians, putting his first year’s pay at $1,250,000, figured it cost the Guggenheims 75¢ every time Hammond said “How do you do?”.)

Although Harvey O’Connor assiduously notes scandals in connection with Guggenheim labor, politics, financing, the general impression communicated by The Guggenheims is that the family comes off better than do the principals of most comparable studies of recent years. What takes the curse off their name seems to be less Guggenheim philanthropy (the $7,000,000 Guggenheim Fund for needy artists, writers and scholars, the $2,500,000 Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, a dozen others) than a general Guggenheim picturesqueness. When Simon was accused of having bought his Senatorship, he answered blandly: “It is done all over the United States today.” Discussing laborers, Sol philosophized: “I believe the wage earner is more extravagant . . . than the millionaire.” As a first step in the direction of improved relations with his radical-minded miners, Dan launched a company union newspaper announcing editorially that “this is greatest era of pap, piffle and poison the world has ever seen.” But solid old Meyer, who used to warn his sons that “roasted pigeons do not fly into one’s mouth, easily set the record for Guggenheim picturesqueness. Sued at age 77, shortly before his death, by 45-year-old Hanna McNamara for breach of promise, the old man climaxed his career a few months later on an operating table when he refused an anesthetic, saying “You can’t sell a Jew anesthetics or life insurance,” had a nurse play a phonograph while he calmly smoked a cigar through the operation.