a twelve-year-old boy.
At the end of Oppenheimer’s third year of school, when he was ten years old, the First World War broke out. It would be another three years before the United States entered the war, but its effects were felt in America, in New York and among the Oppenheimer family long before that. For Rothfeld, Stern & Co. the war presented an opportunity to make a fortune supplying cloak linings for military uniforms, and, as a result, the Oppenheimers were able to buy a holiday home on Long Island. This was not a small summer house, but a mansion of some twenty-five rooms located in Bay Shore (which Oppenheimer always wrote as ‘Bayshore’), then fashionable and upmarket. To explore the Great South Bay during their holiday in this house Julius bought a forty-foot sailing yacht, the
Lorelei
, and, a few years later, a twenty-seven-foot sloop for Robert.
Where the war had a less welcome impact on the Oppenheimers, as on the entire German Jewish community in New York, including the Ethical Culture Society, was in widening the publicly perceived gap between being German and being American – providing Julius and others with yet more reasons to lose all traces of their accents and all vestiges of their ethnic origins. For Felix Adler, the war was something of a disaster. His first response to it was to deliver, in October 1914, an address called ‘The World Crisis and its Meaning’, an expanded version of which was published the following year. ‘Many of our fellow-citizens of German birth,’ Adler declared, ‘aside from the profound anxiety descendants of all the nationalities now at war naturally feel for friends at the front, are troubled with a new misgiving as to their own place in the American nation.’ The reason for this anxiety was plain: ‘Public opinion in the United States is decisively on the side of the Allies and this practically means on the side of England.’ But, Adler insisted, America is
not
English; it represents, as he had been saying for thirty years, a New Ideal. ‘The German ideal,’ he wrote, ‘roughly speaking, is that of efficiency.’ ‘The national ideal of the English,’ on the other hand, ‘may be described as that of
noblesse oblige
.’ In contrast to both these was the American ideal, which ‘is that of the uncommon quality latent in the common man’. The task facing adherents of Ethical Culture, Adler told his audience, was to keep alive during the strife the
American
ideal, which, properly understood, was not allied to
either
side in the conflict.
As for the
cause
of the war, Adler offered a surprising analysis. Militarism – identified by many at the time as the cause – was, Adler said, ‘only a symptom’: ‘If we wish to put the blame rightly, or, setting aside the question of blame, if we wish to place the proximate cause rightly, let us place it on the shoulders of science.’ ‘The time will come,’ Adler announced, ‘when that scientist [that is, one who puts his work to use for war] will be considered and will consider himself a disgrace to the human race who prostitutes his knowledge of Nature’s forces for the destruction of his fellow men.’
Adler’s address was widely perceived to be a plea for neutrality, and, in the atmosphere of the time, being neutral was regarded as being almost as bad as – indeed, barely distinguishable from – being pro-German. The year after Adler’s speech, the
New York Times
hit out at Adler for his ‘high opinion of the morality of the German people’. In the increasingly fervent anti-German atmosphere that was spreading throughout the United States (‘Anything German, from symphony to sauerkraut, was suspect,’ as Howard B. Radest puts it), it took courage to express any opinion other than full-blooded support for the Allies. Certainly no one in the Ethical Culture movement, despite their German heritage, was prepared to be openly in support of the Germans during the war. Some prominent members,
At the end of Oppenheimer’s third year of school, when he was ten years old, the First World War broke out. It would be another three years before the United States entered the war, but its effects were felt in America, in New York and among the Oppenheimer family long before that. For Rothfeld, Stern & Co. the war presented an opportunity to make a fortune supplying cloak linings for military uniforms, and, as a result, the Oppenheimers were able to buy a holiday home on Long Island. This was not a small summer house, but a mansion of some twenty-five rooms located in Bay Shore (which Oppenheimer always wrote as ‘Bayshore’), then fashionable and upmarket. To explore the Great South Bay during their holiday in this house Julius bought a forty-foot sailing yacht, the
Lorelei
, and, a few years later, a twenty-seven-foot sloop for Robert.
Where the war had a less welcome impact on the Oppenheimers, as on the entire German Jewish community in New York, including the Ethical Culture Society, was in widening the publicly perceived gap between being German and being American – providing Julius and others with yet more reasons to lose all traces of their accents and all vestiges of their ethnic origins. For Felix Adler, the war was something of a disaster. His first response to it was to deliver, in October 1914, an address called ‘The World Crisis and its Meaning’, an expanded version of which was published the following year. ‘Many of our fellow-citizens of German birth,’ Adler declared, ‘aside from the profound anxiety descendants of all the nationalities now at war naturally feel for friends at the front, are troubled with a new misgiving as to their own place in the American nation.’ The reason for this anxiety was plain: ‘Public opinion in the United States is decisively on the side of the Allies and this practically means on the side of England.’ But, Adler insisted, America is
not
English; it represents, as he had been saying for thirty years, a New Ideal. ‘The German ideal,’ he wrote, ‘roughly speaking, is that of efficiency.’ ‘The national ideal of the English,’ on the other hand, ‘may be described as that of
noblesse oblige
.’ In contrast to both these was the American ideal, which ‘is that of the uncommon quality latent in the common man’. The task facing adherents of Ethical Culture, Adler told his audience, was to keep alive during the strife the
American
ideal, which, properly understood, was not allied to
either
side in the conflict.
As for the
cause
of the war, Adler offered a surprising analysis. Militarism – identified by many at the time as the cause – was, Adler said, ‘only a symptom’: ‘If we wish to put the blame rightly, or, setting aside the question of blame, if we wish to place the proximate cause rightly, let us place it on the shoulders of science.’ ‘The time will come,’ Adler announced, ‘when that scientist [that is, one who puts his work to use for war] will be considered and will consider himself a disgrace to the human race who prostitutes his knowledge of Nature’s forces for the destruction of his fellow men.’
Adler’s address was widely perceived to be a plea for neutrality, and, in the atmosphere of the time, being neutral was regarded as being almost as bad as – indeed, barely distinguishable from – being pro-German. The year after Adler’s speech, the
New York Times
hit out at Adler for his ‘high opinion of the morality of the German people’. In the increasingly fervent anti-German atmosphere that was spreading throughout the United States (‘Anything German, from symphony to sauerkraut, was suspect,’ as Howard B. Radest puts it), it took courage to express any opinion other than full-blooded support for the Allies. Certainly no one in the Ethical Culture movement, despite their German heritage, was prepared to be openly in support of the Germans during the war. Some prominent members,