Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Ray Monk Read Free Book Online

March 1903, their wedding being the occasion of a very public statement that they did not consider themselves Jewish. The service was performed not by a rabbi, but by Felix Adler himself, and not in accordance with any Jewish tradition, but rather as an illustration of the ‘New Ideal’ preached by the Ethical Culture Society. In his series of discourses,
Creed and Deed
, published in 1886, Adler had written, in connection with his notion of what the ‘Priests of the NewIdeal’ might be like: ‘there are special occasions in these passing years of ours, when the ideal bearings of life come home to us with peculiar force and when we require the priest to be their proper interpreter. Marriage is one of them.’ And so Ella and Julius were, in a way, married by a priest, but not in a way that implied commitment to any religious creed.
    That Felix Adler officiated at Julius’s wedding was extremely apt, since in the years that followed Julius was to become one of Adler’s leading and most devoted disciples, his rise to prominence in his uncles’ company running parallel with his rise within the Ethical Culture movement. At the time of his wedding, as the Rothfeld brothers were entering their sixties and approaching retirement age, Julius Oppenheimer was preparing to take over the running of the company. It was an opportune time to seize the reins. The advent of ready-to-wear suits, which cut overheads, lowered prices and increased demand dramatically, had given the entire tailoring industry an enormous boost, and business was extremely good. The Rothfeld brothers, however, did not live to see the best years of their company. Longevity was never a family trait and both brothers died before they reached seventy, Solomon in 1904 and Sigmund three years later. Upon Sigmund’s death, in December 1907, Julius became president of Rothfeld, Stern & Co., which now had offices in that most prestigious of all New York addresses: Fifth Avenue. At thirty-six years old, Julius Oppenheimer was a man of means and substance.
    In the same year that he became president of Rothfeld, Stern & Co., Julius was elected onto the Board of Trustees of the Society. The following year he was appointed a member of the Society’s Finance Committee. These appointments put him in a position where he was rubbing shoulders with members of some of the most prominent ‘Our Crowd’ families. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the nature of ‘Our Crowd’ was changing somewhat. It was no longer dominated by people like Joseph Seligman, who had come over from Germany and made huge fortunes in business, but rather by their offspring, who typically were not businessmen, but something more refined (if less lucrative). They were men who, having inherited wealth – in some cases vast amounts of it – cared less about commerce than about matters of the intellect, of culture, of the spirit and of politics and society. Among them were the men who succeeded Felix Adler as president of the New York Ethical Culture Society: fn1 Edwin Seligman, Joseph’s son, who was a professor of economics at Columbia University, then Robert D. Kohn, a famous architect, and Herbert Wolff, a leading civil-rights lawyer.
    In Howard B. Radest’s history of the Ethical Societies, Julius Oppenheimer’s role in the New York Ethical Culture Society is mentioned in passing by Herbert Wolff in an interesting and revealing anecdote:
    In the old days, if there was a deficit . . . Felix Adler would be advised of the amount . . . I remember one year . . . $25,000 was needed. Professor Adler phoned to people like Joseph Plaut, B. Edmund David, Mr Berolzheimer [the head of the Eagle Pencil Company, who bought St Simon Island in Georgia], Mr Oppenheimer, maybe one or two others. There was a command to appear at his office on a certain specified day at 5 o’clock in the afternoon. He then told these gentlemen that the deficit was $25,000 . . . Each one – there were