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WARNING: LONG POST
The Book of the Week is “Morgenthau, Power, Privilege and the Rise of an American Dynasty” by Andrew Meier, published in 2022.
In this hodgepodge of a volume, the author recounted many of the historical events to which one family tree’s four generations of male Morgenthaus were witness in their lifetimes. Given the tenor of the times, there was probably less documentation on the females, so the author wrote much more about the men.
The story started in the 1860s, when the Morgenthaus began arriving in America. The fifty-five-year-old Lazarus, the family patriarch, along with his forty-one-year-old wife and most of their thirteen children had come from Bavaria. Due to the imposition of tariffs, Lazarus had been forced to close his businesses there.
The family, who considered themselves Jewish but weren’t religious, initially resided in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn. Through the decades, Lazarus sold various products with checkered success. His son Henry became an attorney and a securities-industry businessman. Henry’s survival skills allowed him to emerge from a 1905 white-collar crime-scandal with his reputation unsullied. Corruption hearings resulted in new regulations to prohibit conflicts of interest… until the next financial crisis, no doubt.
Anyway, Henry was an opportunist who preached progressive reform but at the same time, was raking in big bucks for himself. He pressured president Woodrow Wilson to appoint him ambassador to Turkey so he could protect the Jews– who were in the minority– in the then-Ottoman Empire, which included Palestine. In spring 1914, Henry was impressed by the Jews’ industriousness there, but felt that if the Jews were all concentrated in one place, they’d be more vulnerable to genocide all at once at the hands of their enemies.
Russia, Britain and Germany all had their eyes on acquiring the territory of Palestine. A few Jews who had fled crushing oppression in their birthplaces were purchasing land from Arabs around Tel Aviv. But at the start of WWI, importation of food was interrupted and the Jews couldn’t afford to buy food. Wealthy German Jews of New York City rushed financial aid to them so that they wouldn’t starve.
Henry naively believed Turkey could be convinced to stop supporting Germany, and become neutral like the United States. But already, the Turks had committed genocide and atrocities agains the Armenians, Christians and minorities, and had launched attacks in the Black Sea on behalf of the Germans. All Turkish men between the ages of twenty and forty-five were recruited by the military.
Unfortunately, Henry had no control over military leaders and war criminals, or over anyone, for that matter. But Henry enjoyed playing “James Bond” before the fictional spy character was even created. Henry’s son, Henry, Jr., considered himself a farmer, and worked on one in Dutchess County in upstate New York. Conveniently, his neighbor was FDR.
As is well known, geopolitics is a complicated business, and president FDR conducted all kinds of secret dealings in his 1940 and 1944 reelection campaigns.
As an aside, in the 2016 and 2024 elections, voters chose a profiteering, sexist man-child over well-educated, politically experienced women with law degrees.
Described that way, the women sound awfully threatening to men, don’t they?
Women who take charge are perceived as bossy while men who take charge are perceived as strong leaders.
True, Donald Trump inherited the mentoring and all the resources required to continue his father’s lucrative business over the course of decades, during which he skillfully arranged sufficient profiteering and patronage jobs for his cronies, and name-recognition everywhere he needed votes.
Arguably, the women had a few disadvantages other than their gender.
Both women had long political histories– all the more opportunities for smearing by the opposition.
The odds were against Kamala Harris specifically because in the last seventy years, only three out of six vice presidents first became president by winning an election rather than by inheriting the presidency via death or resignation: Richard Nixon (1968), George H. W. Bush (1988), and Joe Biden (2020).
Additionally, Harris’ candidacy was doomed due to its extremely late start. Until mid-summer 2024, incumbent Joe Biden refused to withdraw from the race in order to retaliate against his own party, furious that he didn’t get his full eight years. All three aforementioned vice-presidents did a full eight years as such before running for president.
Americans are now hyper-aware of gender issues, and discrimination against women– given the current political climate.
Anyway, early 1922 found Henry, Jr. running a farming-newspaper and making valuable political contacts for his father and himself.
During WWII, Henry, Jr. served as Treasury Secretary in FDR’s administration. In August 1944, General Eisenhower perceived that the German people were as much to blame as their leaders for attempting world domination through evil means, as they spread the hatred, too; they should be punished with economic hardship when the war was over.
The following month, in Quebec, Churchill met with FDR, who invited Henry, Jr. (even though he was Treasury Secretary) to discuss what to do with postwar Germany. Churchill’s preliminary thought was to simply prevent Germany from re-arming, by shutting down her operations in the Ruhr and the Saar. But he didn’t want her to become too debilitated, as in the future, she might help protect Europe against Russian aggression. Russia, which had helped win the war, was gaining a reputation for military strength, and so would have to be allowed to have a say in world affairs.
Henry, Jr. wanted to completely infantilize Germany by forcing her to feed her people via small farms only, with no importing of resources. Her heavy machinery and factory parts should be distributed to European nations (including Russia) whose infrastructure had been destroyed or damaged by her. In that case, since international trade is largely a zero-sum game, England would revive her decimated economy, getting more coal and steel. Henry Stimson, Secretary of War, felt the plan to punish Germany was way too harsh, and was merely retaliation. Germany would be so resentful that her people would find a way to make war again.
In October 1944, Henry, Jr.’s aggressive attitude was leaked to the press. He got slammed and FDR’s opponent in the presidential election said Henry, Jr. had put American lives at risk; revealing America’s future plans would incite the Germans to continue fighting instead of surrendering.
Robert Morgenthau was born in July 1919. He became the U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York in 1961. He worked closely with Robert F. Kennedy, U.S. Attorney General, who advised him to let J. Edgar Hoover (head of the FBI) take over an organized-crime case of his, so that the FBI would be forced to acknowledge that the Mafia existed, and it would start to investigate it.
Decades later, Morgenthau took over cases of violations of international banking laws, when at least $700 million was illegally wire-transferred from Iran to U.S. and British banks, with information omitted from the transactions. Morgenthau’s bigger concern that Iran was sucking up to Western banks in order to learn how to build nuclear weapons, more than the financial wrongdoing. In summer 2009, the Israelis and Americans cooperated to use malware (the details of which are still classified) to sabotage Iran’s nuclear program.
“Once again, to Morgenthau’s surprise, Washington stonewalled. The more he demanded that someone go to jail, the more the attorneys from Justice and Treasury spoke of a ‘deferred pros’ — legal shorthand for a deferred prosecution agreement.”
Read the book to learn much, much more about the Morgenthaus and their times.