(Public Policy to Relieve Unemployment, Insurance against ...)
Public Policy to Relieve Unemployment, Insurance against Unemployment, Facts of Unemployment, Costs of Unemployment, New Attitude toward Unemployment. An interesting examination of this economic scourge written a few years before the Great Crash and the subsequent Depression.
Sam Adolph Lewisohn was an American financier, penologist, philanthropist, lawyer and art collector.
Background
Sam Adolph Lewisohn was born on March 21, 1884 in New York City, New York, United States, the son of Adolph and Emma M. Cahn Lewisohn. His father, who had emigrated from Hamburg in 1867, owned mining properties and other metallurgical enterprises both in the United States and in Latin America. He was also devoted to humanitarian and cultural affairs and founded the Lewisohn Stadium Concerts. Lewisohn grew up under his father's forceful example of dual allegiance to business and culture.
Education
Lewisohn attended New York's Columbia Grammar School and in 1900 entered Princeton University, where he enjoyed a variety of extracurricular activities, including acting in Triangle Club productions. After graduating in 1904 he entered Columbia University Law School and earned an LL. B degree in 1907.
Career
While at Law School Lewisohn served as an editor and business manager of the Columbia Law Review. In 1907 he joined the law firm of Simpson, Thacher, and Bartlett; he practiced law until 1910, when he joined his father's mining and banking firm, Adolph Lewisohn and Sons.
In his subsequent activities, Lewisohn evidenced the impact of a conversation held in 1903, during his undergraduate years at Princeton. The occasion was a White House luncheon, which Lewisohn attended with his father; the speaker was President Theodore Roosevelt. Young Lewisohn was asked whether he intended to pursue his father's work. "Do you mean the mining industry?" he inquired. "No, " the president replied, "I mean philanthropy. " Thus counseled, Lewisohn embarked upon a commercial and cultural career that surpassed even his father's enviable accomplishments. Prison reforms and the betterment of employee relationships became his dominant concerns. Lewisohn was member of various boards and commissions including President Franklin D. Roosevelt's National Advisory Council.
In addition to Lewisohn's association with commercial and social welfare organizations, his connections with the art world were numerous and of enormous personal significance. His parents, he said, "brought him up with the Muses. " At nineteen, he made his first art purchase, a Seurat drawing. The Armory Show of 1913, the guidance of the dealer Stephen Bourgeois, and a move to expansive quarters on Fifth Avenue were factors that influenced the extent and direction of the Lewisohn family acquisitions, which were eventually to form one of America's foremost collections of modern art. As well as purchasing Impressionist masterworks, Lewisohn patronized living American artists whose paintings "gave him a kick. " Canvases were selected not only for their intrinsic aesthetic merit but also as plastic embodiments of an artist's personality. Lewisohn was fond of equating a fine painting with a well-rounded individual, an argument developed at length in his book Painters and Personality, and he spent hours in front of each acquisition, surveying every detail and jotting down his reactions in an omnipresent notebook. Those canvases judged to represent immature personalities (including all abstract and surrealist compositions) were rejected; the survivors became members of the family, defended and discussed almost as living, breathing entities. Lewisohn's enthusiasm was so contagious that his art-filled home became a pilgrimage site for more than 3, 000 visitors a year.
While vacationing in Santa Barbara, California, in 1951, Lewisohn's "hunger for pictures" stimulated a visit to the collection of his friend, the actor Edward G. Robinson. There he admired Cézanne's Black Clock, Renoir's Bather, and above all, Rouault's Clown. After long reflection he concluded, "I think this is the greatest picture of the twentieth century. It has all the tragedy of our time plus a religious quality. It should be renamed Everyman. " The day after formulating this judgment, Lewisohn died suddenly of a heart attack.
Achievements
His main work was the book entitled "The New Leadership in Industry", published in 1926. Lewisohn contributed to the President's Conference on Unemployment in 1921 and helped to frame the Social Security Act. He successfully encouraged a broad redirection of the New York State prison program, emphasizing individual rehabilitation and education as an alternative to strictly punitive measures. He was also influential in securing the congressional passage of the Hawes-Cooper Bill of 1929, which banned exploitation of the labor of prisoners for private gain.
Lewisohn was an early advocate of unemployment insurance.
Connections
Lewisohn married Margaret Seligman Lewisohn on February 2, 1918. A product of a remarkably similar German-Jewish heritage, she was the daughter of Isaac Newton Seligman, an international banker, rare book collector, music patron, and public servant. Margaret Lewisohn, who had known Sam since childhood, where he served as an editor and business manager of the Columbia Law Review was an accomplished musician with an enduring interest in education and was one of the founders of Bennington College. The Lewisohns had four daughters.
