When Money Was In Fashion by June Breton Fisher & Goldman Sachs

Author:June Breton Fisher & Goldman Sachs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 2010-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Babette in 1935

greatest courtesy and respect.” Luther’s speech focused on Hitler’s peaceful intentions. Three years later, in 1936, Butler sent a delegate to Nazi Germany to participate in the 550th anniversary celebration of the University of Heidelberg, in spite of the fact that it had already been purged of Jewish faculty members and had instituted a Nazi curriculum and hosted a burning of books by Jewish authors.31

Dartmouth College introduced a quota system limiting the number of Jews it would admit. Harvard was no less lily white. In May 1934, the university’s administration also played host to Ambassador Luther. He visited Harvard’s Germanic Museum, which had been founded some thirty years earlier by Henry and six of his peers, and the Widener Library. The following month, Harvard president James Conant rolled out the red carpet for Hitler’s foreign press chief when he attended his twenty-fifth class reunion. Ernst Hanfstaengl, class of 1909, had been close to Hitler since the early 1920s and was professionally responsible for spreading Nazi propaganda abroad. Surprisingly, even Harvard’s student newspaper was supportive of the university administration’s warm welcome and urged President Conant to award him an honorary degree. Another ceremony, hosted by the Boston consul-general in the university chapel, honored graduates from the area who had died while fighting in the German army in World War I. The consul’s memorial wreath bore a huge swastika.

Even as the stories of Jewish persecution continued to mount and multiply, some American corporations chose to continue “business as usual” in Germany. The outspokenly anti-Semitic Ford Motor Company, which produced half of the domestic cars and most of the military ambulances in Germany, ignored the seizure of Jewish property rights and confiscation of the Jews’ personal belongings. Even as “Jew-baiting” became official state policy, Standard Oil continued to pump gas in the twenty thousand filling stations it owned throughout the country, adding substantially to the nation’s tax income. And a number of manufacturing interests snapped up lucrative contracts offered by Nazi concerns, heedless of the newly adopted Nuremberg Laws officially disenfranchising Jews and classifying them as noncitizens.

It must have been difficult for a didactic elder statesman of the financial world to whom so many had turned for counsel and advice for almost half a century to abandon his lifelong convictions and loyalties. But Henry harbored no regrets for his support of Germany before the World War, nor did he consider offering an olive branch to the Sachs dynasty in an attempt to patch up the differences between the two families. However, the events of the 1930s called into question the importance of the fortune he had amassed and the future relevance of the world of investment banking he had created.

Some three years later, at his second inauguration, President Roosevelt addressed a rapt crowd in Philadelphia. “To some generations much is given,” he told them. “Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” Henry could only wonder: Had his personal rendezvous occurred twenty years earlier,

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