American Addresses of Dr. Chaim Weizmann, Including Address Delivered By Dr. Weizmann on the Occasion of the Laying of the Corner-Stone of the Hebrew University on the Mount of Olives, July 24, 1918
(Chaim Azriel Weizmann D.Sc, Sc.D, LL.D (1874 -1952) was a...)
Chaim Azriel Weizmann D.Sc, Sc.D, LL.D (1874 -1952) was a Zionist leader and Israeli statesman who served as President of the Zionist Organization and later as the first President of Israel. The speeches in this book are from 1918 (during World War I) and 1923 (when Palestine was under control of the British Mandate) -- all long before the rise of Hitler. It is a time when the yearning of return to Palestine was taking hold. On these pages you can see how Weitzman brought the idealism of the "chalutz", the pioneer to the United States, restoring the soil and making the desert bloom once again. It is a spare book, but Weitzman's words bring the time alive better than any lengthy commentary.
Samuel Untermyer was a prominent American lawyer. He was a partner in the law firm of Guggenheimer, Untermyer & Marshall.
Background
Samuel Untermyer was born at Lynchburg, Va. , of German Jewish parents, the second son and third of five children of Isadore and Therese (Landauer) Guggenheimer Untermyer. He had an older half-brother, Randolph Guggenheimer, the son of his mother's previous marriage. Untermyer's father, who had come from Bavaria, became a prosperous tobacco planter and served in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He died shortly after the war, and Untermyer's mother removed with her children to New York City and opened a boarding house, in the fashionable section of the city, to support herself and them.
Education
Young Untermyer was educated at the 13th Street public school and, for a year (1872 - 73), at the College of the City of New York, where he reportedly specialized in languages preparatory to studying, in accordance with his mother's wishes, to become a rabbi. Later he enrolled in the Columbia Law School to study under Theodore W. Dwight. In 1878 he was graduated with the LL. B. degree.
Career
After school hours Untermyer worked as a messenger boy, and after 1873 as a part-time clerk in a law office. In 1879 he was admitted to the bar and, together with his half-brother, Randolph Guggenheimer, and his brother Isaac, formed the partnership of Guggenheimer & Untermyer. The firm was to have a long career. From 1894 to 1929, while Louis Marshall was a member, it was known as Guggenheimer, Untermyer & Marshall; thereafter it resumed the earlier name. Even before his admission to the bar, Untermyer had begun to try cases in the old Justice's Court on 57th Street.
Before he was twenty-four he was reputed to be trying more cases a year than any other lawyer in New York. Primarily a trial lawyer throughout his career, he was retained in a series of important suits, ranging from divorce and will cases to business and public contests. He was counsel, for example, for James Hazen Hyde in his struggle with James W. Alexander for control of the Equitable Life Assurance Society. Untermyer's questions in the trial spotlighted loose financial practices in the life insurance business and thus helped to bring about the comprehensive state investigation of 1905 conducted by Charles Evans Hughes.
Later, Untermyer served as counsel for H. Clay Pierce of the Waters-Pierce Oil Company in a successful suit to prevent the company's domination by the Standard Oil Company after the Supreme Court had ordered (1911) the dissolution of the Standard Oil "trust. "
Meanwhile Untermyer had also become active as a financial adviser. In later life he used to say that a young lawyer, to ensure his independence, ought to have a nest-egg of about $5, 000, 000 before beginning practice. By mergers, promotions, and real estate operations he himself had amassed that amount by the time he reached his early thirties.
Untermyer represented the financial group led by William Rockefeller and Henry H. Rogers in their contest with F. Augustus Heinze for control of the Montana copper mines. In 1910 he carried through the financial operation by which the Utah Copper Company took control of the Boston Consolidated and Nevada Consolidated companies. For bringing about this important combination, his fee as attorney was $775, 000. Even more profitable to him was a prudent investment in the reorganized Bethlehem Steel Corporation in 1905, based on the evaluation of its properties and of the executive ability of Charles M. Schwab which he had made in the course of the two years of litigation that preceded.
During World War I the newspapers guessed that wartime munitions business had increased the value of Untermyer's holdings by $2, 000, 000. Meanwhile, however, Untermyer had begun to have doubts about the corporate combinations he had helped to create. As counsel for the bondholders in their suit against the United States Shipbuilding Company in 1903 (a prelude to his own financial interest in the Bethlehem Steel Corporation) he had first gained a public reputation as a foe of large corporate abuses, a reputation strengthened by his subsequent leadership of a stockholders' fight against the New York Life Insurance Company.
In 1911, a year when agitation over the trust problem was running high, Untermyer delivered a series of addresses in which he called for government action to break up or regulate the trusts. One of his addresses achieved particular renown. Speaking before the Finance forum of New York City on December 27, 1911, he asserted that eighteen financial institutions in New York, Boston, and Chicago, a "money trust", controlled the economy of the nation through interlocking directorships.
In October 1912 a subcommittee of the House Committee on Banking and Currency, headed by Congressman Arsène Pujo, undertook an investigation of these charges, with Untermyer as counsel. Serving without pay, he devoted many months to accumulating evidence and taking the testimony of the leading financiers of the country--particularly J. P. Morgan, with whose financial interests Untermyer had for several years been at odds. The recommendations of the Pujo Committee contributed to certain features of the Federal Reserve Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Clayton Anti-Trust Act (all passed in 1914), each of which Untermyer had some part in developing. In the case of the Federal Reserve Act, working closely with Senator Robert L. Owen, he helped to bring about certain changes in the administration bill as originally drafted by Congressman Carter Glass and Professor H. Parker Willis.
When the war in Europe broke out Untermyer was at first outspokenly pro-German, but when the United States entered the war on the Allied side he became one of the largest buyers of Liberty Bonds and a strenuous patriotic orator. He was a special adviser to the Treasury Department on the interpretation and enforcement of the wartime income tax and excess profits tax laws.
In 1919 and 1920 Untermyer served without pay as counsel to the New York Joint Legislative Committee on Housing (the "Lockwood Committee"), investigating charges that labor leaders in the building trades were conspiring with profiteering manufacturers and dealers to maintain high prices for building materials, and after the inquiry he was retained as special attorney-general to prosecute a series of criminal cases based on the disclosures.
Greatly interested in improving housing conditions, he himself erected in Queens several blocks of modern low-rent houses with playgrounds and gardens, and he suggested and drafted the state law (1922) permitting life insurance companies to build apartment houses. In 1924, when Untermyer was sixty-six years old, the death of his wife and the state of his own health impelled him to retire completely from all business, public and private, and as a first step he set out on a leisurely trip around the world.
When he reached Tokyo, however, he happened to read a series of articles by Senator Carter Glass belittling, as he thought, his share in drafting the Federal Reserve Act. He promptly wrote a reply and at great expense cabled it to New York for publication (Who Is Entitled to the Credit for the Federal Reserve Act? An Answer to Senator Carter Glass, 1927).
By the time he had returned to America he had abandoned all thought of retiring. In 1926 he became special counsel, again without compensation, to the New York Transit Commission, which was endeavoring to work out a plan for unifying the private transit companies that operated the New York City subways and elevated lines under lease from the city. The assignment involved four and a half years of exhausting labors. City transit problems remained one of his principal concerns throughout his later life, and he was frequently called upon to act as counsel, sometimes for public interests, sometimes for individual companies.
He was also a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions from 1904 through 1936. He made speaking tours on behalf of Woodrow Wilson's candidacies in 1912 and 1916; and he was an ardent supporter of the New Deal program of Franklin D. Roosevelt, including, in 1937, the unsuccessful plan for reorganizing the United States Supreme Court. For the most part he had no personal political ambition, though in 1911 he apparently would have been willing to accept election to the United States Senate if Morgan interests had not blocked his candidacy (Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt, I, 1952, p. 111).
Untermyer's ideas, like his actions, sometimes contrasted oddly. Though a Democrat, he favored a protective tariff. A man whose own income was legendary, he was an early advocate of a graduated income tax. He persistently urged public ownership of public utilities, in cluding mines. On Jewish matters, he was a moderate Zionist; he was vice-president of the American Jewish Congress until 1926. Early in 1933 he began a vigorous campaign against the Nazi government of Germany, proposing a worldwide boycott of German-made goods, and he became the first president of the World Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council, formed by representatives of seventeen nations at Amsterdam in July 1934.
In 1900 Untermyer acquired "Greystone, " the former country home of Samuel J. Tilden, on the banks of the Hudson just above Yonkers. He made the 171-acre estate and its greenhouses a famous showplace. He also maintained a penthouse apartment on the roof of a hotel in Atlantic City, in which to rest over weekends, and about 1931 he acquired a winter home, "The Willows, " in the desert at Palm Springs, California.
In person he was a small man, but observers forgot his size because of his large and impressive head. He was meticulous in his attention to the details of his appearance and invariably wore in his buttonhole an orchid from his greenhouses at "Greystone. " He was always of frail health, suffering from chronic bronchial asthma and from insomnia. Nevertheless, his capacity for work was tremendous. Rising at 5:30 in the morning, he worked on to 10 in the evening, day after day, and because of his inability to sleep often kept at it through most of the night. Untermyer died in his eighty-second year at his winter home in California of pneumonia, after an acute illness of about two weeks, and was buried in the family mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery, New York City.
(Chaim Azriel Weizmann D.Sc, Sc.D, LL.D (1874 -1952) was a...)
Politics
Politically, Untermyer was a lifelong Democrat, intimate with the leaders of Tammany Hall.
Personality
Untermyer was a hard taskmaster both to himself and to his assistants. Ordinarily affable and charming in manner, he occasionally developed an irritable streak, brought on by ill-health or overwork. He was a formidable investigator, and the vigor and force of his questioning of witnesses was famous.
Connections
Untermyer had married on August 9, 1880, Minnie Carl of New York City, who predeceased him by sixteen years. They had three children, Alvin, Irwin, and Irene. Both sons became lawyers and members of the firm of Guggenheimer & Untermyer. Irwin later became a justice of the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court.