Americas
![Andrew Meier - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_andrew_meier.jpg)
Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty
An "epic and intimate" (David M. Kennedy) 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
"Magisterial . . . a vivid retelling of critical domestic and world events over two centuries."-Dr. Fiona Hill
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.
"Magisterial . . . a vivid retelling of critical domestic and world events over two centuries."-Dr. Fiona Hill
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.
Editorial Reviews
"Andrew Meier has constructed an epic of vast scope and bravura research, drawing on more than a decade of digging to provide a window into one of the twentieth century's most influential families, and what its sprawling history can teach us about power and politics in America."-Ronan Farrow
"Morgenthau is the rare writerly accomplishment that manages to tell a tale that is both epic and intimate. It is 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
"Morgenthau is a magisterial book, cinematic in scope and dramatic in its pacing, a vivid retelling of critical domestic and world events over two centuries that is both gripping and illuminating."-Fiona Hill, PhD
"This is the story of one of the great American dynasties. Andrew Meier tells it with zest, sensitivity, and an eye for both historical significance and revealing personal detail. Morgenthau is a lasting achievement."-Adam Hochschild
"Andrew Meier's engrossing history of the Morgenthau dynasty is about both a remarkable family and, as important, the rise of the United States to world power."-Margaret MacMillan
"Morgenthau is an epic, utterly absorbing portrait of an American family that has left an indelible imprint on the city of New York-and our country. Confidence men, diplomats, cabinet secretaries, New Dealers, developers of New York City, crime fighters, war heroes, Mob busters, power brokers, and advisers to presidents: You can't tell the story of the last two centuries without also telling the story of the Morgenthau family. Thankfully, Andrew Meier has done exactly that, in remarkable, compelling prose."-Gay Talese
"A gripping, deeply researched, and intimate saga of an American dynasty that is also a history of the United States, New York, and Jewish-American life though 150 years of the remarkable Morgenthau family."-Simon Sebag Montefiore
"Morgenthau has everything. It's the intensely human story of four generations of an American family whose achievements, at home and overseas, have largely been forgotten until now, with a huge supporting cast that includes everyone from Wood...
"Morgenthau is the rare writerly accomplishment that manages to tell a tale that is both epic and intimate. It is 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
"Morgenthau is a magisterial book, cinematic in scope and dramatic in its pacing, a vivid retelling of critical domestic and world events over two centuries that is both gripping and illuminating."-Fiona Hill, PhD
"This is the story of one of the great American dynasties. Andrew Meier tells it with zest, sensitivity, and an eye for both historical significance and revealing personal detail. Morgenthau is a lasting achievement."-Adam Hochschild
"Andrew Meier's engrossing history of the Morgenthau dynasty is about both a remarkable family and, as important, the rise of the United States to world power."-Margaret MacMillan
"Morgenthau is an epic, utterly absorbing portrait of an American family that has left an indelible imprint on the city of New York-and our country. Confidence men, diplomats, cabinet secretaries, New Dealers, developers of New York City, crime fighters, war heroes, Mob busters, power brokers, and advisers to presidents: You can't tell the story of the last two centuries without also telling the story of the Morgenthau family. Thankfully, Andrew Meier has done exactly that, in remarkable, compelling prose."-Gay Talese
"A gripping, deeply researched, and intimate saga of an American dynasty that is also a history of the United States, New York, and Jewish-American life though 150 years of the remarkable Morgenthau family."-Simon Sebag Montefiore
"Morgenthau has everything. It's the intensely human story of four generations of an American family whose achievements, at home and overseas, have largely been forgotten until now, with a huge supporting cast that includes everyone from Wood...
Short Excerpt Teaser
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.
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.
