Frankfurt am Main Citizens in the United States
The historical ties that bound Frankfurt and the Americas were numerous and diverse. In 1494 the letters of Christopher Columbus were printed for the first time in an illustrated volume in Basel.
They were distributed at the Frankfurt fairs, which were attended by visitors from all over Europe. Frankfurt publisher Theodor de Bry’s account of conquistador Hernando de Soto’s exploration in 1539 of the region leading up to the Mississippi River also appeared at these fairs. De Bry created an impressive volume that included numerous illustrations and presented it at Frankfurt to a wide European audience. After the American declaration of independence from Great Britain in 1776, Frankfurt also attracted many American traders, who wanted to keep abreast of the latest products as well as purchasing goods that were in demand in America.Texan Independence
But Frankfurt was not only a marketplace for information and a magnet for trade with the New World; there were also Frankfurt citizens who emigrated to the United States. Some of these citizens ended up playing an important role in American society. For example, in the 1830s a group of Frankfurters took part in the Texan war for independence from Mexico. One of them was Gustav Bunsen. Born in Frankfurt in 1804, he was the son of an established family. His father served as director of the Frankfurt mint, and his brother Georg was regarded as a famous educator and man of liberal convictions. His second brother Karl set up a medical practice, and Gustav followed in his footsteps when he started studying medicine at the University of Wurzburg. During his studies, he became enthusiastic about the ideas of the July Revolution in France as well as the idea of Germany’s unification in 1830. Instead of completing his studies in Heidelberg, he traveled to Warsaw and was engaged in the Polish upheaval of that year.
He did not come back to Frankfurt until 1832. Back at home, he immediately joined the democratic Preβ- und Vater- landsverein (Association for Press and Nationality) and, together with Gustav Korner and Franz Garth, took one of the leading positions within it. Facing a ban on their organization, Korner, Garth, and Bunsen initiated a revolution. On the evening of April 3, 1833, during a period of heightened political tensions, a group of Frankfurt students and academic figures attacked Frankfurt’s main police station. Lacking popular support, the attack failed and resulted in repressive measures by the authorities.Gustav Bunsen and Adolph Berchel- mann escaped punishment by emigrating to the United States. Several weeks after their revolt, both friends arrived in St. Clair County in Illinois. There Bunsen met some old acquaintances from Frankfurt, who had succeeded in purchasing fertile land in the Shiloh valley. Life was not easy for these German settlers. Not only did they experience culture shock as well as the difficulties of learning the English language, but also they had to get by with a limited amount of resources and a much lower degree of comfort. In this regard it is easy to see why the simple agrarian life was hard for well-educated academics. For this reason, after a short while, Bunsen left the little German village, although his brother and the sister of his friend Berchelmann arrived in 1834. Berchelmann’s sister was married to Bunsen and both went to Cincinnati, Ohio, which at that time was considered to be the center of German culture in the midwestern states. However, Bunsen’s life as an established physician did not satisfy his political ambitions. He became increasingly interested in the conflict between the English-speaking settlers in Texas, which was then a part of Mexico. In 1835 this conflict escalated. The Texas farmers elected a provisional government led by Sam Houston. As leader of the movement for independence, he asked for the help of the Union and proclaimed that anyone who was willing to fight for their cause would be not only justly but also richly rewarded.
Bunsen joined the rebel army and traveled into the crisis area in November 1835. He took part in the siege of the capital of the province that had been occupied by the Mexican army. After the settlers had successfully conquered San Antonio, Bunsen joined the rather hopeless campaign against Mexico. In spite of the harsh criticism, by members of the rebel army, sixty- four rebels, including Bunsen, voted for this military action, which ended in a fiasco. For the man who several years before managed to attack the German Union with only fifty amateurish revolutionaries, sixty- four well-armed riders seemed sufficient enough to attack the Mexican Republic. Not surprisingly, their expedition failed, and Bunsen lost his life right at the beginning of this battle.
The Forty-Eighters
The immigration of the so-called Latin farmers of the 1830s was only the advance guard of a much larger wave of emigration that followed after the failed revolution of 1848—1849. Numerous radical democrats decided to leave for the United States. One was Gustav Adolph Roesler, the man who had arranged a short ceasefire during the bloody street fights in Frankfurt in September 1848. After his dramatic escape, he reached New York in 1850 and settled together with his family in Milwaukee. There Roesler published a political magazine that supported the Whig Party and agitated against slavery. He later moved to Quincy, Illinois, and established another local newspaper before he fell victim to cholera in 1855.
To help people from the Frankfurt region in their transatlantic migration, influential Frankfurt citizens founded the Frankfurter Verein zum Schutz der Aus- wanderer (Frankfurt Association for the Protection of Emigrants) as a branch of the Nationalverein fur deutsche Auswan- derung und Ansiedlung (National Association for German Emigration and Settlement) on December 12, 1848. Its purpose was to organize individual as well as group emigration in a safe and modest way, preferably via a German harbor.
Furthermore, the association aimed to help the emigrants in every step of the process toward their final settlement. Some of the more well-known members of the Frankfurt association were the liberal lawyer Wilhelm Stricker, the geographer and publisher Georg Varrentrapp, and the freemason Heinrich Franz Rosalino. In the very first stages of the association they supported the project of Consul Fleischmann for colonization and the creation of a depot for emigrants in “Mitschigan” (Michigan). Fleischmann not only demanded farming settlements but also industrial ones because he believed that in the long run they would require less support in terms of materials and goods. He therefore initiated the emigration of craftspeople under the assumption that their labor would prove beneficial to economic progress in the United States. In his opinion, their contribution would be greatest if organized into small factories or larger associations of handicrafts. Between 1850 and 1870 the association supported the emigration of more than 500 people each year. The majority of them were journeymen.Economic considerations spurred an interest in the United States among Frankfurt bankers, who established business connections and branches in American cities. There were three distinct phases in the process of establishing financial connections between Frankfurt and the United States. The first phase was in the 1820s and 1830s, when the Rothschilds successfully installed representatives of their banking house in New York City. From 1833 onward, August Belmont took over this role. Belmont had learned the banking business under his original name of August Schonberg in the banking house of the Frankfurt Rothschilds. When he went to New York, he changed his name to French to distinguish himself from the crowd of German Jews already living in Manhattan. Belmont established the firm of August Belmont and Company. Backed by the Rothschild family, August Belmont rose to power and influence in the business and social life of New York.
He gave opulent dinners and extravagant feasts, displayed his wealth, drove an elegant coach, invested in racehorses, and was among the founders of the racecourse at Jerome Park. As befitted one of his station, Belmont bought a luxury palace on Fifth Avenue, was accepted as a member of the Union Club, and gained a leading position in the Democratic Party. Moreover, Belmont became an Austrian consul general. But above all, he successfully managed the Rothschild’s investments in cotton, tobacco, Union and state bonds, railways, and a broad spectrum of industrial loans.The second phase came in the 1860s, when Frankfurt banking houses financially supported the Union in the Civil War. This was a major turning point for the Frankfurt bankers. While London banking houses sympathized with the South and took over the majority of the Confederate issues, Frankfurt became the second-largest outlet for U.S. government bonds in Europe. Frankfurt banking houses with strong business ties to New York held nearly 40 percent of the debts incurred by states of the Union, which rose from $90 million to $2.74 billion between 1860 and 1865. Among these banking houses were Selig- mann & Stettheimer, Lazard Speyer- Ellissen, Philipp Nicolaus Schmidt, Karl Pollitz, and M. A. Gruenebaum & Ballin. By the time the Union won the upper hand, its bonds were quoted at an astonishing 73 percent and upon redemption brought “hundreds of millions” in profits to their shareholders, providing the basis for many of the city’s latter-day great fortunes. Among these companies, it was J. and W. Seligman that benefited the most from their American business investments.
Based on the model of the Rothschild family, the Seligmans founded branches of their bank in London, Paris, and New York and led eventually to them being referred to as the “American Rothschilds.”
The third phase of established financial ties between Frankfurt and the United States came after the business in governmental loans.
Investors who had immigrated to the United States from Frankfurt changed their strategy and invested heavily in American railroad construction. The huge rail network of 300,000 kilometers stretched across the American capital market, and it soon became clear that the input of European capital was a necessity. Once again Frankfurt’s banking houses and their branches in the United States led by emigrants played an important role in this part of finance business. One such success story is that of Charles Hallgarten, who began his career in financing railroads and then returned to Frankfurt as a wealthy banker. There he initiated numerous philanthropic projects. He founded, for example, the Ak- tiengesellschaft zum Bau kleiner Wohnun- gen (Joint Shareholder Association for the Construction of Small Tenement Housing). Another Frankfurt American was Wilhelm Bonn. At the age of twenty he was sent to New York to familiarize himself with the American finance market and to sell U.S. war bonds on the German market. He speedily built up his career in New York, ending up as director of the banking house of Speyer and Company, which was a subsidary branch of Lazard Speyer- Ellissen. Later on he founded his own banking firm, Ruette and Bonn, which successfully financed the transcontinental railway lines. Like Hallgarten he returned to Frankfurt at the age of forty-two and settled in a luxury villa in the Frankfurter Westend, located in the same neighborhood as Hallgarten.The most important Frankfurt banker in New York was Jacob Schiff, who gained a leading position in the investment banking house Kuhn, Loeb, and Company. Coming from an old Jewish Frankfurt family, he went to school at the Jewish Reform school “Philanthropin” and afterward to the Orthodox Realschule (secondary modern school) of the Israelitischen Religions- gesellschaft (Jewish Religious Association). He completed his courses in business and trade and then emigrated to the United States in 1865. There he became an employee of the New York banking firm Frank and Gans. But Schiff was ambitious, obstinate, and a tough opponent in his business dealings. Two years later, together with Henry Budge, he founded the banking firm Budge, Schiff, and Company. But his real career began when he entered the banking house of Salomon Loeb. In the beginning he served as speaker of the company and recognized the tremendous importance of transportation for the industrial development of the United States. He gained entry into the railroad business in his own unique way. He becme an expert not only in railroad financing but also in the daily business and technical matters of railroads. When he had reached the point where he could fully grasp all the details of running a railroad company, he felt the time had come to begin competing with John Pierpont Morgan, who was the top banker in the U.S. banking hierarchy at that time. Schiff succeeded in gathering together the necessary capital for the speedy industrialization of the United States by making use of his strong ties to Europe and Germany. After a while he controlled the Great Northern, Union Pacific, Pennsylvania, Illinois Central, Chicago, and Milwaukee railroad companies. Under the leadership of Schiff, Kuhn and Loeb developed into the second-largest investment banking house in the United States behind the Morgan trust.
Schiff’s life was characterized by a deep religiosity, modesty, impatience, punctuality, and respect for hierarchy. In the realm of politics he voted for the Republican Party. More important than his political leanings in the United States were his ties to his German Jewish heritage. Like many of the migrants from Frankfurt, including Seligmann, Speyer, and Hallgarten, Schiff regarded himself as a German Jew, a “Yahudim.” They sent their children to German universities and employed German tutors and German doctors. They married German, and they went, with the help of the Hamburg-Amerikanische- Paketfahrt-Aktien-Gesellschaft (HAPAG) (Hamburg-American Parcel Shipping Joint Stock Company), to Germany every year and met each other in the German spas of Baden-Baden, Karlsbad, and Marienbad.
Although Jacob Henry Schiff remained a Frankfurt citizen at heart, he stayed in the United States for the rest of his life and committed himself to working for American Jews as well as for American culture. Schiff spent no less than $100 million on philanthropic and political reform, making large donations to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Natural History Museum in New York, and the Bronx Zoo. He financed professorships at Harvard, Cornell, and Columbia universities, enabled the Public Library of New York to establish a Judaica collection, and initiated
both the creation of the Judische Gesellschaft fur Geschichte (Jewish Society for History) and the Judische Publikations Gesellschaft (Jewish Publication Society) in 1892. In addition, he also founded the Hebrew Union College and Talmud-Thora schools on New York’s east side and in downtown New York. At the end of his life, he donated a professorship for German culture at Cornell University. Jacob H. Schiff’s career was a symbol of the growing importance of American Jewry in American society.
Ralf Roth
See also American Civil War, Financial Support of Frankfurt Bankers for; German Jewish Migration to the United States; Koerner, Gustave Philipp; Milwaukee; New York City; Schiff, Jacob Henry
References and Further Reading
Arnsberg, Paul. Jacob H. Schiff: Von der Judengasse zur Wallstreet. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1969.
Hale, Douglas. “Ein Frankfurter Revolutions im texanischen Unabhangigkeitskrieg.” Archiv fur Frankfurts Geschichte und Kunst 57 (1980): 151-166.
Heyn, Udo. Private Banking and Industrialization: The Case of Frankfurt am Main, 1825—1875. New York: Arno Press, 1981.
Katz, Irving. August Belmont: A Political Biography. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968.
Kirchholtes, Hans-Dieter. Judische Privatbanken in Frankfurt am Main. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1969.
Lustiger, Arno. Charles Hallgarten: Leben und Wirken des Frankfurter Sozialreformers und Philantropen. Frankfurt am Main: Societats Verlagsanstalt, 2003.
Roth, Ralf. Stadt und Burgertum in Frankfurt am Main: Ein besonderer Wg von der standischen zur modernen Burgergesellschaft 1760 bis 1914. Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996.