Before It Was Birmingham?"

...In order to get the backing of the widow of President Barnard of Columbia, Annie offered to name her institution Barnard College...

...He wanted to be an officer...

...it stands today in the Capitol rotunda, where it is the only one of the Presidential statues to have been donated by a private individual...

...Dorothy Lehman Bernhard, a member of New York's august Lehman clan...

...Still, we must admit that he was quite a fellow...

...But something— some special ethnic differentness—is also retained...

...One grows tired of one's yacht and lets it sink, as Mrs...

...He never served a drink in his house until the advent of Prohibition...

...And the only man in inventing and patenting history who surpassed Murray—and he didn't beat him by much—was Thomas Edison...

...It was, meanwhile, a rich combination of tz'dakah and chutzpah that drove a man named Uriah Phillips Levy to do what he did...

...Each morning before they left for school, he lined up his children and inspected them, making sure that each was carrying his or her rosary—the boys in their jacket pockets, the girls in their purses, folded in a clean white handkerchief...

...One of his techniques was "the matching-gift" system...

...It was an uphill battle for these men who had still not completely mastered the English language, and their letters to Congressmen were quaintly convoluted, but full of passion and righteousness...

...When I was researching my book on the Sephardim, I went to Barnard to see what more I could find out about Annie Nathan Meyer...

...The McDonnells were listed in the Social Register, which could never have happened to the Kennedys in Boston...

...Next, they barraged members of the Congress, urging that Congress pass a bill that would provide a pension for presidential widows...

...One begins to underplay one's possessions, and to distance oneself from one's wealth, to cultivate other areas...

...And yet, in the end, Uriah prevailed, and flogging was officially abolished—directly as a result of his singlehanded efforts...

...It was a time-consuming, trans-Atlantic process, but it taught the Seligmans international finance...

...There was Jacob H. Schiff, for example...

...Immediately, Levy made arrangements to buy Monticello, and set about restoring it to its original condition...

...It was not right, and Uriah Levy set out to do something to correct it...

...The Panama Canal would not be where it is if it had not been for the Seligmans, and many engineers believe it was put in the wrong place...

...Showiness, conspicuous spending, has always been with us— whether it was the late Mrs...

...I'm reminded of a New Yorker cartoon a while back which showed a grizzled wildcat Texas oil prospector who has just struck a gusher in his backyard...

...It's going to be all right...

...And yet, as in the case of the Jews, I also found unsung heroes among the American Irish...

...It is even more important, it seems to me, as a part of American Jewish history...

...At this point I should address more fully the question of why, in recent years, I have been writing books about different ethnic groups, and why I shall probably go on doing so...

...She had painted a white strip across the tread of this step, and had also installed tiny lights at the corner of the riser so that people would notice the irregular step, and not stumble on it...

...Bernhard poured, and we chatted pleasantly about her family...

...Once, when his father cut off his spending allowance, Bob Cuddihy sued his father for non-support...

...It was never the other way around...

...The old Herald-Tribune described the Levy as one of "the swift and deadly sub-killers"—a fitting tribute to this feisty little sailor...

...Instead of a national consciousness, we are developing an ethnic consciousness...

...He completed his officer training course with flying colors only to find that the officer corps in the Navy in those days—as it managed to remain for many years to come—was regarded as an exclusive little club to which no Jews needed to apply...

...It was no wonder that her ambition was to have "real lace" curtains on her windows and, though she might never have these things, she was determined that her children would...

...On the issue of bigotry within the Navy's officer corps, Levy decided to go to war with the Navy and, in the process, was convicted of minor offenses in no less than six different courts martial—though all of his convictions were eventually reversed...

...In any process of assimilation or Americanization, something is probably lost...

...In America, social class has always been defined by money more than anything else...

...He used this to dabble in Manhattan real estate and, within a few years, had become a reasonably rich man...

...Of course every schoolboy knows who Edison was...

...When all was done, he moved to Monticello to become its personal caretaker, and to guide visitors through the house and grounds...

...One grows tired of one's yacht and lets it sink, as Mrs...

...Next came a small retail store cum warehouse, then a string of such tiny establishments...

...But not the Seligman brothers...

...Dodge did, into the mud of Lake St...

...One woman whom she called on, a Mrs...

...The lively Virginia, needless to say, enjoyed the all-male naval world and, later on, wrote a girlishly enthusiastic account of her adventures in which she pondered, repeatedly, on what might be the secret of her allure and attractiveness to men...

...Schiff not only gave, but was adroit at getting others to give...

...Typically, this letter reads, "Your book made me wish I had listened more closely to the stories my great-grandmother used to teil us____" about her girlhood in Poland, or Albania, or Ireland, or Italy, or Spain, or Czechoslovakia, or Scandinavia, or on an Indian reservation in the West...

...His great idol in American history was Thomas Jefferson, and he commissioned a statue of Jefferson which he presented to the United States Government...

...Naval officers were never permitted to bring their wives with them on command posts at sea...

...Naturally, as a proper Philadelphian and something of a snob, Uriah Levy had no intention of joining the Navy as an ordinary seaman...

...Clair...

...she asked...

...The answer, of course, is yes— some people were upset...

...Dodge did, into the mud of Lake St...

...It seems to me to put to bed the old America-as-melting-pot notion...

...As an officer, he was immediately subjected to a variety of insults and indignities—and this, he quickly determined, was not right...

...he asked her...

...I had only a story to tell— nothing to prove, nothing to sell, no axe to grind...

...In Boston, they were regarded as something slightly worse than a curse, and we are all familiar with the "No Irish need apply" line that flourished in employment ads...

...Twenty years ago, the smart New York career girl giggled with embarrassment when she had to admit that she was from Keokuk...

...Very," said Mary Jane...

...In the less rigid atmosphere of New York, on the other hand, anyone with money could scale the social ladder, and Kennedy had watched with interest the New York career of his friend, James Francis McDonnell—all of whose daughters had made debuts...

...Surely even the more questionable accomplishments of American Jews should be a part of our ethnic consciousness—not as something to be ashamed of, but as some-Continued on page 59 BIRMINGHAM Continued from page 13 thing to marvel at...

...It worked...

...This is already happening in, say, Atlanta, where blacks have prospered for several generations, and where the affluent black suburbs look no different from the suburbs of affluent whites...

...For these—if for no other— reasons, it seems to me that Jacob Schiff deserves a place in every high school textbook of American history where, for too long, J. P. Morgan has been advertised as the "typical" turn-of-the-century Wall Street tycoon...

...Second, Uriah said, he must be allowed to bring his wife on the Macedonian with him...

...The answer to this is yes, there was, a little...

...Soon Murray was on his own, not only inventing but manufacturing his inventions...

...Of the experience, Mary Jane Cuddihy Maguire, the fourth generation of a remarkable Irish American family and herself a devout Catholic, paraphrases St...

...While all this was going on, Uriah Levy was busying himself in still another area...

...She learned to tell good silver from bad, good antiques from reproductions, to recognize and care for fine china and linens...

...When they arrived, they could speak the language, and, coming from a land of poets and orators, they spoke it eloquently and persuasively...

...that we are witnessing an end to our erstwhile missionary zeal to reduce our continent to a boring homogeneity, and that we are seeing a new burst of pride based on ethnicity—Jews prouder to be Jews, Italians prouder of their Italianness, blacks of their blackness and—not to overlook another ethnic group—women of their womanhood...

...Not long ago, one of the New York Nathans was asked whether it was true that the Nathans descended directly from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba...

...Still, little by little, she began to make headway and to gather the support of men of influence—including, of all people, the stuffy clubman Chauncey Depew, who persuaded fellow members of the wealthy Union Club to make donations to Annie Meyer's cause...

...Levy's various cases, meanwhile, had generated vast national publicity...

...Now a problem of considerable dimensions presented itself...

...Since the pools used ocean water, he invented a filtering device that would remove any sand from the water before it entered the pools...

...It was the invention of Jacob H. Schiff...

...But who was Thomas E. Murray...

...As ethnic groups become more identified with themselves, they become more identified— ironically—with the greater community...

...Why was my family left out of Our CrowdV reads a typical letter...

...He never, alas, perfected this device...

...Then came the acquisition of a factory that manufactured clothing...

...I'm reminded of a visit I once had with the late Mrs...

...In other words, it seems to me that we are at the moment marking and observing a profound, important, and refreshing change in our national consciousness...

...This—as small-time merchant-manufacturers—was where the Civil War found them and, as it turned out, they were in a lucky position...

...I remember thinking how very un-Jewish—even un-New York—it all seemed...

...At a time when hundreds of thousands of poor Jewish immigrants were pouring into the country from the pogroms of eastern Europe, it would have been easy for men like Schiff to ignore these masses who were unwashed, had unwelcome Socialist notions in their heads, and who spoke a language—Yiddish—that was alien to Schiff, and even distasteful to him...

...But as a philanthropist and public benefactor he had no equal in his day, and it is not an exaggeration to say that he practically invented philanthropy in New York, and at a time when there were no income taxes from which philanthropies could be deducted...

...Without having received the Last Rites, Bob Cuddihy could not be given a Catholic funeral or be buried in consecrated ground...

...The matching-gift system is widely used in fund-raising today...

...I can remember that when I was growing up and went off to school and college, I used to say that I was from Hartford—it was the nearest "big city...

...Perhaps it will take what I call our growing ethnic consciousness to elevate the man who made a public issue of official anti-Semitism, who brought the United States Navy's penal code out of the Middle Ages, and who saved Monticello from destruction, into the pages of high school history texts or, at least, to the inclusion of his name in standard works of reference such as the Encyclopaedia Bri-tannica...

...Even Jews whose names have been changed, and whose parents became Episcopalians, are returning to a new appreciation of their ethnic heritage...

...By the War's end, they were rich men...

...This article is a selection from The American Pattern, The Frank Nelson Doubleday Lectures, copyright © 1977 by Doubleday & Company, Inc...

...Schiff and thanked him for his large check...

...I went to her town house in East 71st Street, where I was ushered up to her second-floor library...

...Much of the land had been sold off, the gardens had been allowed to go to weeds, the orchards had been cut down...

...The Mother Church, of course, was the single most powerful force in the lives of these Irish families and, though over the years a few of the descendants of men like Murray have fallen away, the Church—and its influence—remain strong with most...

...All of her eight children were lifelong teetotalers...

...He sought out the boy and took him under his wing, promoting him in Edison's various companies, while Tom Murray went on inventing more electrical gadgets and devices...

...His demand was even more unusual— or perhaps not all that unusual— in that though Uriah was then 65, his beautiful wife, whom he had just married, was only 18...

...As a one-tenth share of what he had made in one of his big railroad mergers, he did not regard it as such...

...He stole paintings off his father's walls, and sold them...

...Yes, the Navy agreed...

...Monsignor Furlong brushed at his eyes, rose from his chair, and excused himself...

...He gave to Jewish and non-Jewish causes alike, to temples and synagogues and to the Boy Scouts of America...

...Two of my first non-fiction books, for example, dealt with Jewish themes—the great German-Jewish families of New York, and the elegant Sephardic elite of the Eastern Seaboard...

...Her mother sighed, relieved to know that whatever happened her son would go to heaven...

...As more blacks become haves, and become accustomed to their situation, they, too, will become more reluctant to flaunt what they have got, and probably will take on the more quiet ways one associates with the landed American gentry...

...Her name is Meyer or Mayer," the receptionist told me, "but I have no idea who she was or why her portrait's here...

...He was a man who preferred to hide his philanthropic lights under a bushel of anonymity...

...Horace Dodge, a former school teacher, who bought herself a necklace of pearls the size of pigeons' eggs and a huge yacht, or new-rich Jews who wear diamonds and mink stoles on the beach at Miami, or John H. Johnson of Ebony, who bought the largest apartment in Chicago and upholstered the walls of his closets with fake fur...

...It is interesting, I think, to compare Schiff with his Wall Street contemporary, Mr...

...As money in families ages, it becomes boring...

...And yet the Secretary of the Navy—who was then clearly at a point where he would have given Uriah Levy anything he wanted—agreed that, yes, an exception could be made in Virginia Levy's case...

...Perhaps he had drunk too much, and perhaps he was driving too fast...

...By the time he died in 1928, he had amassed a fortune of $50,000,000, and owned patents to over eleven hundred separate inventions— most of them in the electrical field...

...Jacob Schiff was furious when his maverick son-in-law, Felix Warburg, decided to build a mansion on Fifth Avenue because it would, he said, be "noticeable...

...He bought back as much of the surrounding acreage as he could in order to restore the estate to the scale on which Jefferson had conceived it...

...Personally, of course, he must have been a most difficult man...

...The house itself had been stripped and vandalized and battered by the weather, and was in a s'tate of near-ruin...

...Each day, when she dosed her children with castor oil, she mixed a few drops of whiskey with the medicine—in order that all their lives they might associate whiskey with a vile taste...

...name before it was Birmingham...

...The Beach Club had also adopted a membership policy that excluded all Irish...

...such a bill was passed...

...Jews, for example, used to satisfy themselves with a short list of Jewish achievers— Mendelssohn, Freud, Heinrich Heine, and others...

...Morgan was a snob, and disliked people with foreign accents— which the German-born Jacob Schiff never lost—he respected Schiff and collaborated with him on a number of high-flung financial deals...

...Worst of all, young Bob Cuddihy married two Protestant wives, and divorced them both...

...I suppose, superficially at least, the most striking thing about the new class of wealthy blacks—and, believe me, there are more of them than some people might suppose—is their "style," their gaudiness, their sense of show in clothes, houses, furnishings, automobiles...

...It was a snug, cozy, book-lined room with a coal fire burning on the grate, furnished in quiet, Old World, even dowdy taste...

...He searched for Monticello's original furnishings and wall coverings, bought back what he could, and reproduced what he could not...

...There were few Jewish butlers and valets and cooks and housemaids, but the Irish willingly took up these occupations...

...From peddling on foot, they prospered sufficiently to buy a horse and wagon, then two horses and two wagons from which they purveyed their wares—undershirts, blouses, ribbons, buttons, German silver rings and watches...

...Today, thanks to what I call this blossoming ethnic consciousness, the list has grown considerably...

...This, I think, is more than a mere footnote to American history...

...The Seligmans would have much preferred to have been paid for their goods in cash...

...There were other differences...

...He believed in the Talmudic principle of tz'dakah, a concept much broader than "charity...

...At one point, she happened to mention her maiden name—Cuddihy...

...The blacks are just like me—but different...

...The lady, who was clearly of unstable mind, did a number of embarrassing things: she protested that Lincoln had left her penniless, though he had not, and she sold articles of her clothing and furniture at public auction...

...In the 1880's, Annie Nathan became aware of a disturbing fact...

...While the haves try to get away with their money, the have-nots do just the opposite...

...But today many of the walls of doubt and fear have come toppling down— not all, perhaps, but many of them—and I found that Jews who, a generation ago, might have been quite reticent, were now quite willing, even eager, to talk about their accomplishments and those of their ancestors to a chronicler such as myself...

...It was as I was leaving...

...Immediately her mother wanted to know, "Has he seen a priest...

...The Irish began arriving in this country in large numbers in the middle of the Nineteenth Century, at about the same time as the wave of immigration of Jews from Germany, and were subjected to similar pressures and discrimination from the social community that prevailed...

...I see this happening on every level: people are changing in how they identify themselves...

...I am not a vain woman," she wrote, "but it would be idle and ungrateful for me to pretend that I was unaware of the kindness and attention showered on me...

...Her friends and even her family despaired of her, and confessed that they regarded her obsession and crusade as a form of mental aberration...

...He was 32 years old...

...She loved children, and she would work long, hard hours seven days a week for very little money, asking only for a half an hour off on Sunday to go to Mass...

...He found a job as a lamplighter, lighting the gas lamps of the streets of Albany...

...And I am asked how: how was I, as an alleged Christian, able to get the proverbial toe into the doors of the doughty and purse-proud Wall Street Ash-kenazim, and the family-proud Sephardim who, in some cases, trace their family origins back to pre-Christian times...

...Tz'dakah means righteousness, doing the right thing...

...I have had to develop what amounts to a form response to letters like these...

...His nickname was "Robert the Roue...

...At the outset of the War, the Union's chances of winning were deemed slim, and President Lincoln's treasury was in a sorry state...

...The answer, which is simply that these two distinctive, cohesive, and self-identifying groups had never been written about as groups before, does not seem sufficiently exotic to satisfy some people, who seem to feel that I could only have been attempting to explore some aspect of my own ethnic background...

...But the hungry young Seligmans were willing to take the gamble, and began turning out uniforms for Lincoln's soldiers...

...Had my books been attempted in the 1920's or 1930's— when Henry Ford was publishing the spurious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and when Jews in America were refusing to buy Ford automobiles— there would, I suspect, have been great suspicion, great resistance, great resentment...

...Though Schiff was not a Zionist, he gave to Zionist causes too, in the belief that the Zionists deserved their day in court...

...One of James Francis McDonnell's daughters married the young Henry Ford, and a niece married a Vanderbilt...

...I have not meant to stress the importance of Jewish heroes in the past to the exclusion of Jewish heroines...

...It appeared that he was publicly living outside the church, which deeply distressed his mother...

...It has been said that well-to-do blacks, because of social discrimination, have had only limited access to the homes, clubs, and offices of upper class whites, and have therefore had only the models of Hollywood and television to turn to as examples of how the American rich live...

...Still, I am asked why: why, as an alleged Christian, did I decide to write not one but two books about Jews...

...But then, all at once, she became Jewish for me...

...As a young officer, Uriah Levy had been required in line of duty to stand by as an official witness to one of these beatings, and he had been sickened by the experience...

...It was the principle of tz'dakah again...

...Instead of a mess of pottage we are emerging as a delightful tossed mixed salad...

...Poor Uriah...

...Levy was shocked at what he found there...

...In the beginning, taking up the Jews, I expected to find them just like me...

...Like Jacob Schiff, Thomas E. Murray became a patriarchal figure, and was a strict disciplinarian...

...In the black world, for example, it is no longer cool to "pass," as it was a generation ago...

...It is just not chic anymore...

...Though Mary Jane did not know the answer to this question she replied, "Yes...

...For a while, his Jefferson statue stood on the White House lawn...

...At the same time, there is an even more interesting category of letter...

...With his looks and winning ways, he always charmed them back...

...But tz'dakah prevented him from ignoring his Jewish brethren, however different they might seem, and he helped establish and develop the settlement houses on the Lower East Side...

...I always explained that the name has been Birmingham for as far back as the family can trace it into Western Ireland— which, sadly, is not very far— from whence my devoutly Roman Catholic great-grandfather emigrated to New England during the great potato famine...

...The priest then said, "A number of years ago, I took a summer cottage on the Dunes Road at Westhampton Beach...

...Today, I'm proud to say that I'm from South Coventry, population 700...

...No built-in Jewish angst, for one thing...

...I've decided, furthermore, that our ethnic diversity in the United States is already a great strength, and can become an even greater one...

...Today, a snappy Vogue editor boasts that she is from Ogallala...

...I could have been in the parlor of a Boston brahmin on Beacon Hill...

...Monsignor Furlong told her he was sorry, but a Catholic burial was out of the question...

...Even today, few of the staff at Monticello know that Rachel Levy, Uriah's mother, is buried there, not far from what is now the gift shop...

...But I asked him if he was a Catholic, and when he said he was, then—just in case—I administered the Last Rites to him...

...It is interesting that in the long article on the long, nerve-wracking history of the Panama Canal in the Encyclopaedia Bri-tannica, not once is the name Seligman mentioned—though the Seligman brothers put the canal where it flows today...

...After all, there are proportionately as many knaves and fools among the Jews as there are among any ethnic group...

...Then, announcing that no one was going to tell him what to do, he started offering cocktails—though he never drank himself...

...he would pledge $10,000 to a certain cause provided that one of his friends would match it with another $10,000...

...In one of the reception rooms, however, I spotted a portrait hanging on a wall that I recognized immediately...

...Though she might sleep in a cell on the unheated top floor of the family's house, she was exposed, by day, to the ways and manners-of the gentlefolk who employed her...

...Thomas More Church in New York, explained the situation to him, and begged that an exception be made...

...But not much...

...Schiff is usually identified in the New York Times obituaries of his descendants as "the banker and philanthropist," but he was much more than that...

...Like many of her Nathan relatives, she was extremely near-sighted and had to wear glasses with thick corrective lenses...

...She decided to do something about it...

...Though Mr...

...There is the Morgan Library on Thirty-sixth Street, and the Morgan Collection at the Metropolitan Museum—but here we come rather abruptly to the end of the list...

...In a way, this is too bad, because as a corollary to this, blacks will also lose what is currently their special vitality, their brash charm, their distinctiveness—that wonderful raffish-ness—just as the German Jews did when they moved from feisty peddlers and scrappy wheeler-dealers into solid city burghers with top hats and town houses...

...Mary Jane decided to deliver the bad news in stages...

...Uriah was the son of a proud Se-phardic Jewish family of Philadelphia who, in 1806, when he was barely fourteen, announced that he intended to join the United States Navy...

...Arthur Lehman had an emerald necklace...

...In the summer enclave that the Irish established for themselves at Southampton, the Irish built huge houses, surrounded by lawns, gardens, swimming pools, tennis courts, and polo fields...

...And yet, for all his wealth and power, what do we have to show for Mr...

...Murray's father died when young Tom was 10 years old, and he was forced to leave school and go to work to help support his mother and his many brothers and sisters...

...Murray, Edison decided—correctly—must be some kind of natural electrical genius...

...As she talked about Christmas parties in the past, it was hard to believe that she was Jewish...

...Needless to say, these activities did little to further endear him with the Navy officialdom, with whom he was already sparring on the subject of anti-Semitism...

...Augustine and says, "You see...

...They had reached the point of ethnic self-confidence in America where it was not only safe, but fitting and proper, to boast a little, and to tell me the story of how Great-Grandpa Seligman rose from a foot peddler to a banker who did business with the House of Rothschild...

...His running battles with the Navy resulted in long periods of time when he was without a Navy post...

...You've got to be Jewish," he said...

...Watch out for the little step...

...When the Club heard of Murray's invention, a delegation approached the inventor and asked if he would be willing to share it with them...

...One evening, after a party, Bob Cuddihy was driving home along the Dunes Road in the Westhampton Beach...

...To an older-rich WASP, it might all seem a trifle vulgar...

...Those boys, you have to admit, had chutzpah...

...It was an unheard-of request...

...Every Sunday, some 69 Murray children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins lined up to be driven in a fleet of automobiles to the Church of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary for Mass...

...He liked beautiful women, parties, fast cars...

...But, just in case, he was taken to Riverhead Hospital for examination...

...When it was finished, it not only worked—it worked much better than the machine in the bakery nature of her mission...

...The mixing contraption fascinated Murray and, in his spare time, he drew up a design for a mixing machine of his own...

...As the Selig-mans did in the case of Mrs...

...Will you tell me the truth, to what do you attribute this popularity I am fortunate to enjoy...

...The Irish girl made a shop...

...He had trouble holding a job, but that was all right...

...In Real Lace, I undertook a study of Americans of Irish Catholic descent...

...Lincoln, he started out by writing a series of indignant letters to Government officials, describing the bestiality of the practise and the horror of the results...

...In his lifetime, of course, Uriah managed to get a bit of innocent revenge at the slights life had dealt him...

...As Americans of different faiths and origins take looks back at their ethnic pasts, they are able to discover all sorts of unsung or little-sung heroes and heroines whose names, despite what they did, have not exactly been household words...

...He may not have solved the problem of anti-Semitism in the Navy, but he had pin-pointed it and dramatized its existence...

...And so the "lie" she had told her mother had not been a lie at all...

...After President Lincoln's assassination, his widow, who had not endeared herself to Americans during her White House years, was largely ignored by the American public...

...It turned out that I could find very little...

...To every question, the children answered, "Our Daddy did...

...J. P. Morgan...

...Of course not everything the Seligmans did was praiseworthy...

...You look Jewish...

...There, three hours later, he died of internal injuries...

...Clair...

...Morgan was far richer and far more powerful than Schiff...

...The pension it provided was, at first, small...

...Shocking, Annie thought—and it was a matter of tz'dakah again...

...At this recital of what I know of my family tree, many people—Jews, especially— express surprise...

...When the police and ambulance arrived, he seemed fine—laughing and joking as usual...

...I believe that we should develop ethnic diversity in America, and cultivate it as we would cultivate a grove of assorted fruit trees because the irony is that the more it is legitimized to be diverse, the greater the unity as a nation that results...

...There were the Seligman brothers, for instance, eight remarkable men— boys, really, since they came to this country in their teens and even younger—who started as foot peddlers in the rural South in the mid-1800's and who, by the turn of the century, were international financiers...

...She was just 22 years old...

...her mother wanted to know...

...Once money comes, manners and social "polish" follow, as a rule, in time...

...He would do so gladly, Murray replied—provided his family could join the club...

...He was a bit wild, of course...

...Diversities are strengths...

...On his nightly rounds, young Murray regularly passed the window of a bakery shop, where he liked to pause and watch an electrical mixing machine that was stirring up the dough for the next day's bread...

...God always writes straight—but sometimes in crooked lines...

...His fight with the Navy continued, in fact, for years, and it was not until Levy was sixty-five years old that the Navy at last capitulated and, perhaps in a fit of guilt over its shabby treatment of him, offered him the rank of Commodore—then the highest Naval rank that existed— and to place him in command of the Mediterranean fleet...

...I did indeed find many similarities, but I also found important differences...

...During World War II, a destroyer was christened the USS Levy in his honor...

...Still, when I explained all this to Rabbi Edgar Magnin, who had asked me to address his congregation in Los Angeles, he was not impressed...

...With each new patent, he became richer...

...The newly-rich of any color, religion, or ethnic group are always quick to surround themselves with costly possessions, things, the flashy trappings of wealth...

...I turned again, thanked her, and suddenly she winked at me and said, "After all, we can't afford to lose one of our best customers...

...STEPHEN BIRMINGHAM When I first turned from writing fiction to what has been described as "social history," I found myself on a new and, for me, uncertain and uncharted landscape...

...And, when Barnard College received its charter in 1889 to the astonishment of everyone, it turned out that Annie had wasted very little of her life on the project...

...The Panama Canal, for example, would not be where it is if it had not been for the Seligmans, and many engineers believe that it was put in the wrong place...

...His wife comes running out of the house crying, "How late does Nieman-Marcus stay open...

...Though it was unfashionable for a girl of "good family" to want a college education, the fact was that if a New York girl did want one, the nearest college she could go to was Vassar, some distance up the river in Poughkeepsie...

...Phyllis McGinley swears that, as a girl, she saw a sign over a Boston barroom door that said, "No dogs or Irish allowed...

...In Hartford, the city nearest to the town where I grew up, the Irish could not join the Hartford Golf Club...

...As we continue to develop these strengths, I think that we are going to find that our variety, our diversity, our ethnicity, is our greatest natural—and national—resource...

...Jews who used to change then-names and even convert to Christianity, the better to be accepted by the surrounding culture, no longer do so...

...More important from history's standpoint, what they did helped establish the Union's credit abroad...

...A maid in a starched grey uniform and white cap brought in tea and tiny watercress sandwiches...

...With the aid of their prolific wives, they established the dynastic House of Seligman which has now, alas, all but died out...

...Now, it seems to me in 1977 that in all our various ethnic groups ethnic differences are not only being retained—they are being rescued, pulled out of the past, with a new sense of ethnic pride...

...It was being used as a storehouse for grain, and was infested with rats and other vermin...

...And that, in fact, as a non-Jew, I felt that I could approach Jewish history in America with certain advantages...

...Today, a snappy Vogue editor boasts that she is from Ogallala...

...He believed in the principle of tithing, and that at least ten percent of everything he made should be returned, in some form, to the general community...

...Bob Cuddihy was witty, handsome, athletic, the epitome of Irish charm, and the family adored him...

...Overnight several dozen Murrays became members of the Southampton Beach Club...

...The rise of the Se-ligmans was typical of other Jewish immigrants of the era...

...First, the smokestacks on his ship must be painted eggshell blue, his favorite color...

...There was Thomas E. Murray, for example, whose daughter married James Francis McDonnell (the interrelationships between the Irish families are as bewilderingly complex as those of the Jews...

...Nearly twenty years went by and, one evening, Mary Jane Cuddihy Maguire, by then a widow, found herself at a cocktail party in New York, and fell into a conversation with a priest who happened to be there...

...As Tom Murray's descendants like to point out, "Edison invented the spectacular thing—the incandescent bulb...

...So Mary Jane loaded her brother's five small children into a station wagon and drove to New York, where the group presented themselves at Monsignor Furlong's office...

...But, people ask me, weren't some people angered and distressed by some of the material that emerged, as inevitable family skeletons tumbled out of certain mink-filled closets...

...One of Thomas Murray's grandsons, for example, was a young man named Robert Cuddihy...

...In his big house in Brooklyn, he not only had a private chapel but also a special sitting-reception room that was just for Protestants...

...The Irish came from tiny farms (whereas the Jews, for the most part, came from cities) and they worked as manual laborers—digging ditches and subway tunnels, laying ties and track for railroads, and working as household servants...

...When the Union wanted to buy uniforms for its soldiers, it found that older, so-lider New England clothing manufacturers were unwilling to accept government contracts...

...Blacks whose skins are no darker than mine and whose features are as Anglo-Saxon as Gerald Ford's are now confidently identifying themselves as blacks...

...Wasn't there suspicion and distrust of me as an "outsider...

...Oh, yes, the whole family did," she said...

...This seems to me a particularly humane shift away from a dreary conformity to social expectations...

...I have recently finished a book, which will be published later this year, on the emerging upper class blacks in America, and here again I encountered a special breed with, of course, a special history, special problems, and special ways of dealing with them...

...He was rich...

...He danced the nights away at places like the old El Morocco and was, as they called men like him in the 'Forties, a "playboy...

...Immediately, Levy made arrangements to buy Monticello, and set about restoring it to its original condition...

...And yet, it was not until as recently as 1959 that one of Uriah Levy's collateral descendants—he had no direct heirs—succeeded in having a small bronze plaque placed at Monticello, attesting to what he had done...

...He replied, "That wasn't my money...

...He gave buildings to colleges, wings to museums, hospitals, orphanages, homes for the aged...

...The Jews, more reticent, tended to avoid politics, and preferred, when they were offered them, appointive political posts...

...And in the end, they were successful...

...Watch out for the little step," she said, as I started down...

...Coming to the subject with what I hoped was an open mind, I also experienced a certain sense of discovery, learning things that seemed to me exciting and different and extraordinary which, it turned out, my Jewish friends had simply taken for granted...

...The first person notified was his sister, Mary Jane, and her first chore was to break the news—as gently as possible—to their mother, who was recuperating from a heart attack on the Jersey Shore...

...But this seems to me only part of the explanation for the differentness of black "style...

...Jacob Schiff, on the other hand, gave generously and steadily throughout his business life to a long, far-ranging list of causes...

...Then, using odd bits of wire and machinery that he found in junkyards, he proceeded to build the machine from his plan...

...Wendell, the mother of a Harvard professor, "actually wept" when Annie explained the perfect housemaid...

...I might add that Mr...

...It was before the ambulance came, and the young man seemed all right...

...When, at last, the Navy promoted him to Commodore and offered him a command post aboard the Macedonian in the Mediterranean, Levy accepted but—with marvelous chutzpah—only on two conditions...

...Then she departed for Germany, where she lived in squalor and apparent poverty, and with that the general public in this country chose to forget her...

...Christmas parties...

...He stole paintings off his father's walls, and sold them...

...He published and distributed pamphlets on the subject, and wrote letters to newspaper editors...

...These floggings were as brutal as the sadism of the man behind the whip decreed, and could be sufficiently severe as to destroy a man's back muscles so that he could never work again...

...At a large charity benefit in the early 1900's, a New York society woman came bubbling over to Mr...

...It never came out of the vault...

...The Irish were less interested in, scholarship, culture, and the arts than the Jews were, but more interested in athletics, politics, and in making their way into high society...

...He was famously stubborn...

...A few minutes later he returned and said, "I've just talked to the Chancery, to Cardinal Spellman...

...Mary Jane Cuddihy telephoned Monsignor Furlong of St...

...But all the switches and circuitry that brought the current from the power source to the bulb were invented by Grandpa Murray...

...The Irish, when they became successful, were more joyous and flamboyant about it, and the women put on diamonds and emeralds for lunch...

...In politics—Democratic politics particularly—the Irish went after elective offices...

...Only with extreme reluctance would he permit his name to be attached to a few of his many benefactions, and we will never have a complete tally of all the gifts he gave anonymously...

...Once again, this was not right...

...She was grief-stricken, so she wrote, "thinking of that sweet young girl wasting her life in the impossible attempt to found a women's college connected with Columbia...

...The Canal, they say, could have been dug more cheaply, feasibly, and quickly if it had cut through Nicaragua, where existing lakes would have required that much less digging...

...He was my brother," she said...

...Our Daddy is in heaven," they answered...

...The answer was that he had not...

...One night, there was a terrible crash just outside my door, and I ran out to see what I could do to help...

...But then, as money in families ages, it becomes boring...

...Who took you to Mass every Sunday...

...As part of what I call the rising ethnic consciousness in America, I expect that other Jewish heroes will emerge from near-obscurity and take the place in history books that they deserve...

...There was not a single college for women in New York City...

...Once this deed had been accomplished, a red light was to blink on in Grandpa Murray's bedroom...

...From her fellow women, she received very little support...

...To make sure that none of her children would take to drink, she hit upon a novel method...

...And where is your Daddy now...

...Next, Mary Jane telephoned the hospital to ask whether her brother had,indeed,seen a priest...

...Has he received the Last Rites...

...The news of the young man's invention soon came to the attention of another inventor who was active in the electrical field— Thomas A. Edison...

...How sick...

...Twenty years ago, the smart New York career girl giggled with embarrassment when she had to admit she was from Keokuk...

...If a Protestant came to call at the Murray house, he was taken to the "Protestant room," but no further...

...We were every bit as good as the Lehmans and the Loebs...

...First, the brothers established a spending allowance for her...

...His wife, too, was very conscious of the alleged "Irish curse"—alcohol...

...Thomas Murray was the son of a poor Irish immigrant who had settled in upstate New York...

...McDonnell's origins were just as humble as Kennedy's, and it was clear to Kennedy that New York, socially, was the place to launch his faimtli/ The Irish, when they became successful, were more joyous and flamboyant about it, and the women put on diamonds and emeralds for lunch...

...When I noticed the portrait of this stern-faced, bespectacled woman, I asked the young receptionist if she knew who the woman was...

...In his heyday, Morgan ran what amounted to his own Federal Reserve System, before we had such an institution...

...The Irish, in their determination to get ahead,took jobs that the proud Jews would not—and that even blacks refused...

...In other words, it is thanks to this man's efforts and care that we have Monticello to visit and enjoy as it is today...

...I've replied that I don't see why the situation should be a one-way street...

...In any case, he missed a curve, skidded off the road, his car struck a telephone pole and Cuddihy was thrown fifteen feet from the car...

...Our ethnic groups have not melted into anything at all...

...I found the Irish just like me— but different...

...Furthermore, Schiff believed in the Talmudic doctrine that "Twice blessed is he who gives in secret...

...She telephoned her mother and said, "Bob's very sick...

...Where is he in our textbooks and encyl-clopedias...

...So the Seligmans carried their bonds to the bourses of Paris, London, and Frankfurt, where they sold them for cash, returned with money to turn out more uniforms, which were paid for with more bonds, which were traded again in Europe...

...She lined the children up in front of the prelate and asked them, "Who taught you your catechism...

...At his big summer house in Southampton, Grandpa Murray built not one but two swimming pools—one for the grown-ups, and one for the children...

...something had to be done...

...By his two wives, he had five children—all of whom adored their fun-loving father...

...Her friends and family despaired of her, and confessed that they regarded her obsession and crusade as a form of mental aberration...

...Even today, the Irish are merely tolerated by Old Guard Boston society, and there are few names like O'Malley and McGillicuddy on the membership rosters of the Chilton and Somerset clubs...

...If Bob were not buried a Catholic, her ailing mother would spend the rest of her life believing that her son was in hell, and also knowing that her daughter had lied to her on this most important of all matters...

...I said I would, and then, as I continued down, she repeated, "Remember the little step...

...One reason why Joseph P. Kennedy, a bartender's son, moved his family from Boston to New York was that Kennedy knew that his daughters could never make debuts in Boston...

...The German and Sephardic Jews preferred a more understated style...

...The priest asked, "Are you related to a Robert Cuddihy...

...Nathan replied, "At the time of the Crucifixion, it was said so...

...There were plenty of those, too...

...At the time of his death, he was working on an invention whereby—through a tiny hole in the ceiling—a drop of holy water could be ejected in such a way as to fall on the unsuspecting Protestant's head as he sat in the Protestant room...

...He may not make it...

...Whenever the two men were required to get together, of course, Schiff had to go across the street to Morgan's office...

...To them, it was not right that the widow of a great president be allowed to disintegrate into madness...

...In 1836, Uriah Levy made what he described as a "pilgrimage" to Monticello, to visit the beautiful estate that Jefferson had created for himself in Virginia...

...As one woman said to me, "I can understand a Jew writing a book about Christians, but I can't understand a Christian writing a book about Jews...

...Those subtle but important ethnic differences that one used to try to smother, blur, and even blot out, are being looked at with new respect, and even cultivated, with a refreshing sense of vive la difference...

...On her bicycle—a most unconventional means of transportation in those days—she started peddling up and down Fifth Avenue and around the East Side, ringing the doorbells of the rich and influential and asking for contributions and support for her women's college...

...His latest book, Certain People, will be published in May...

...If an Irish name appears at the end of a string of names on the letterhead of a State Street law firm, it usually looks as though it had been added as an afterthought, and it is assumed to be there only for political reasons...

...Though I felt confident and comfortable with the material on my pages, I discovered that once I ventured outside, into the world of readers, I was asked surprising and in some cases unsettling questions...

...Morgan's existence on this earth today...

...She accompanied me to the head of the stairs to say good-bye and, doing so, warned me of a certain step at the bottom of the flight that was of an uneven height...

...I think my favorite was Annie Nathan Meyer, a young Sephardic Jew from New York, and a member of New York's august Nathan family...

...It horrified him that such an inhuman form of punishment from the Dark Ages should be employed by the "modern" United States Navy in the Nineteenth Century...

...Did you use to spend summers in the Hamptons...

...they could be painted any color he wanted...

...Schiff practically invented philanthropy in New York, and at a time when there were no income taxes from which philanthropy could be deducted...

...Meanwhile, Levy had gone to war with the Navy on still another issue—flogging—which was the standard form of punishment for nearly every infraction, from drunkenness to sleeping on duty...

...But interestingly enough, from the mail I have received, the readers who have complained the loudest are those who felt that they should have been included in the books...

...In fact, as I researched the books, I decided that the time—the late 1960's and early 1970's—was precisely right for me to be allowed an inside view...

...Schiff would not approve of his inclusion in history texts...

...Still, for all his outrageous behavior, the family loved him and always forgave him...

...Old Mrs...

...I shrugged and said that well, perhaps I was—if we go far enough back in history to the time when, I suppose, we were all Jewish...

...Her church had taught her to be clean and honest and virtuous...

...There was little market for these bonds in the North but, the Seligmans learned, there was a different atmosphere in the financial capitals of Europe, where the Union's chances of defeating the Confederacy were considered better...

...He recreated the gardens and fruit orchards from Jefferson's plans...

...And so, with funnels painted eggshell blue, Uriah and his bride sailed forth for the balmy shores of Italy...

...The Southampton Beach Club, meanwhile, had been having problems with its pool, which regularly filled with sand and had to be periodically emptied and cleaned...

...Up until that time, none of the tour guides knew who Uriah Levy was...

...Autocratic and overbearing, he was a tyrant of a husband and a father who overtrained his two children—with piano lessons, violin lessons, tennis lessons, riding lessons, Hebrew lessons, French lessons, Greek lessons, and so on—to the point that they virtually had no time to themselves, and to the point where it seems miraculous that neither grew up to be neurotic...

...The boy had the good sense to take this invention to the United States Patent Office, where he had it patented...

...Like other Irish Catholics of his generation, Tom Murray distrusted Protestants...

...I wish I had kept count of the number of times since Our Crowd and The Grandees were published that I have been taken aside and asked, "Incidentally, what was your Stephen Birmingham is the author of Our Crowd, The Grandees, and Real Lace...

...But, with cash in short supply, they had to settle instead for being paid with Union bonds...

...But it has since been increased, and it is thanks to the efforts of these German-Jewish immigrants that such a pension exists at all...

...In America, the Birminghams were dealt a great blow when one of his grandsons—my father—married a Protestant woman from Boston, my mother...

...The Irish immigrants, however, had one advantage the German Jews did not, and which helped them get ahead somewhat faster...

...Once, when his father cut off his spending allowance, Bob Cuddihy sued for non-support...

...The Seligmans, too, believed in tz'dakah...

...It is part of the new ethnic consciousness I've been speaking of...

...But the Seligmans had railroad interests in Panama and, through intensive lobbying, they succeeded in persuading Washington to carve the canal through Seligman country, where it best suited the Seligman's business...

...Annie Nathan Meyer, for all her energy and persuasiveness, was no beauty...

...And so Bob Cuddihy was buried a Catholic, and Mary Jane went on living with the lie she had told her mother...