country, but the greater danger to Jewish survival was disappearance
through rapid assimilation rather than conversion.^21
Schiff’s Jewish loyalties were more pronounced than those of most
wealthy Jews, but he also lived in both a Jewish and a Gentile world. Active
from the very outset of his career in non-Jewish organizations like the
Chamber of Commerce and the American Red Cross, he met non-Jews
from all walks of life—politics and government, business and community
affairs, education and journalism, arts and letters. He corresponded with a
wide range of Gentile acquaintances, and over the years a considerable
number enjoyed his hospitality. Schiff rapidly became a well-known figure.
The short, erect, blue-eyed, thickly accented, and impeccably dressed
banker with a flower in his buttonhole commanded public respect by his
aristocratic bearing alone. Although he did not flaunt his wealth, Schiff
lived well. The number of servants he employed, the homes he owned,^22
the vacations he took, and the privileges his children enjoyed were only a
few indices testifying to practices very much like those of upper-class non-
Jews. The banker did not indulge in the common pastimes of millionaires,
like yachts and racing cars, but he too collected art and appeared often at
the theater and opera. He even agreed to have the artist Augustus Saint-
Gaudens cast a bas-relief of his children, an object that he donated to the
Metropolitan Museum in 1905.^23 Schiff may have consciously aped the
Jewish elite of Frankfurt as well as the Protestant elite in America, but
whatever its origin his lifestyle conformed to that of the wealthy.
Over sixty years ago, Frederick Lewis Allen drew a composite picture of
ten wealthy American business leaders, including Schiff, at the beginning
of the century. Among salient similarities, he found that none had a college
education and that most were self-made men who “knew the merits of fru-
gality.” They were a pious group who blended their Christianity with the
Puritan ethic and a belief in laissez-faire economics. Under the influence of
Progressive historians, Allen also enumerated the businessmen’s faults: a
callousness toward labor and toward human suffering generally, a lack of
public responsibility, and an antagonism toward government regulation.
On the surface the pattern of the frugal and pious self-made man without a
higher education fits Schiff, but Allen’s list of faults did not apply to him.
More accurate was a later study of the “Eastern Establishment,” which as-
cribed to leading lawyers and financiers, including Schiff and his partners,
a belief in the Puritan tradition and the “American dream”—that is, virtu-
ous conduct in a land of opportunity promised economic rewards.
Schooled to the importance of public service, the men of the Establish-
ment lived by a sense of duty and strict morality in their family and busi-
ness lives. They held their firms to “conservative” and “sound” behavior,
and their views on the role of government in the regulation of the econ-
omy were “moderately progressive.”^24 Nevertheless, since neither study
8 Jacob H. Schiff