Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (6 page)

It seems more likely that it was their common interest in art that brought them together. By 1903, Julius, as a partner in a thriving company, was a wealthy man and could afford to indulge his growing passion for the visual arts. It is reported that he ‘spent his free hours on weekends roaming New York’s numerous art galleries’. If so, given the way that wealth and enthusiasm attract invitations and introductions, it is not difficult to imagine that someone in the New York art world – an artist, an agent, a gallery owner – brought Julius and Ella together.

The cultural refinement that Ella represented was by this time something Julius craved. Though he had left school as a teenager, and had arrived in America speaking little English, he was determined to develop into the ‘proper gentlemen’ that his employees later described him as being. He dressed impeccably, acquired the social graces of the upper middle class and read widely, particularly in American and European history. Discovering that a German accent was a barrier to acceptance as a gentleman in the New York of the early twentieth century, Julius took drastic steps to remove all traces of his mother tongue, taking English lessons from an Oxford tutor, from whom he acquired the gentlemanly tones of the British educated elite.

Ella and Julius were married on 23 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 New
Ideal’ 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:

Though he and his society were almost entirely dependent on the money thus received from wealthy businessmen, Adler urged his disciples to accord little respect to making money. Being wealthy might
seem
to be ‘supremely enviable’, he wrote, but ‘the business of wealth-getting, and of wealth-enjoyment, when viewed at close range, turns out to be a very different matter. Its effect is almost inevitably unfortunate, not only on society at large, but on the mind and character of the wealthy themselves.’ Indeed, he added: ‘I would urge the principle of self-limitation in regard to wealth’, and he made this ‘plea to the wealthy’:

By donating $5,000 to the Ethical Culture Society whenever Adler asked him to, Oppenheimer was not only helping the Society, but also enabling himself to live a more ethically cultured life by shedding some potentially harmful superfluous wealth. ‘The habit of luxurious living is eating into the vitals of society, is defiling the family, and corrupting the state,’ Adler preached. But, of course, opinions will vary as to what exactly the ‘essentials of a civilised life’ are, and therefore how much wealth is required in order to provide them. Where is one to draw the line between the things that are an essential part of being civilised and the things that are mere luxuries?

Julius and Ella Oppenheimer, though never ostentatious, certainly led what many would consider a luxurious life. Soon after they were married they moved into an apartment at 250 West 94th Street, just down the road from Ella’s mother. It was a fairly large apartment in a fairly smart neighbourhood, but nothing very out of the ordinary. Where, however, they went way beyond what most people would regard as being
essential
to a civilised life was in the furnishing and decorating of the apartment, particularly with regard to the paintings that adorned its walls. It was in those days customary among wealthy German Jewish New York families to have a private art collection. In this respect, as in so many others, the members of ‘Our Crowd’ tended to veer on the side of conservatism, caution and conformity. Abby, the central character in Emanie Sachs’s
Red Damask
, sneers that they ‘haven’t enough physical courage to go in for sports like the rich Gentiles, and a little too much brains. So they go in for art collection with an expert to help. They wouldn’t risk a penny on their own tastes.’

Left to his own devices, Julius might have fallen into the kind of conservatism mocked by Sachs, but in Ella he had his own expert, one who, having studied Impressionism in Paris, was certainly
not
afraid to risk money on her own taste. The result was an extraordinary private art collection that was to be the pride of the family for generations. It included a Rembrandt etching, paintings by Vuillard, Derain and Renoir, no fewer than three Van Goghs –
Enclosed Field with Rising Sun
,
First Steps (After Millet)
and
Portrait of Adeline Ravoux
– and a ‘blue period’ Picasso,
Mother and Child
.

The private contemplation of fine works of art might be seen as the very opposite of the way of life promoted by the Ethical Culture Society, a society that emphasised social responsibility and the importance of the
deed
, of doing something practical to help those less well off than oneself. This was a society that set up educational programmes for the working class; that put forward practical suggestions for improving the health, the working conditions and the housing of the people of New York; that involved itself in trade-union disputes; and that helped set up a number of nationally important campaigning groups – the National Child Labor Committee, the Civil Liberties Union, the Ladies Garment Workers’ Union, the Society for the Advancement of Colored People, and so on. Spending large sums of money (for even though Julius and Ella were ‘early buyers’ of Van Gogh and Picasso, the cost of these paintings was still considerable) on works that would be seen only by one’s immediate family and one’s closest friends scarcely looks consistent with the ethics that inspired the movement and its many social and political initiatives.

And yet, when looked at in another way, it was not only consistent with Adler’s vision, but a fulfilment of it. Despite the practical nature of much of the work of the Ethical Culture Society, and despite its repudiation of
theology, Adler’s vision was first and foremost a
spiritual
one. His central motivation was to find a way of preserving the spiritual guidance that religions had provided, even after all faith in religious beliefs had been abandoned. He thought he had found what he was looking for in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with its emphasis on what Kant called the ‘Moral Law’, which Kant thought
all
of us would find in our hearts. In a famous passage that Adler quotes in his discourses,
Creed and Deed
, Kant writes: ‘Two things fill the soul with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence: the star-lit heavens above me, and the moral law within me.’ According to Kant, the moral law is the same for all people at all times and at all places, and according to Adler: ‘The moral law is the common ground upon which all religious and in fact all true men may meet. It is the one basis of union that remains to us amid the clashing antagonisms of the sects . . . all that is best and grandest in [religious] dogma is due to the inspiration of the moral law in man.’

What, then, is the moral law? In Kant’s formulation, it is this: ‘act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law’. This means something like: do as you will be done by; or: do to others what you would be happy to have done to you. Adler’s formulation, however, is rather different: ‘The rule reads, “Act so as to bring out the spiritual personality, the unique nature of the other.”’

One brings out the ‘spiritual personality’ by awakening in other people the sense of the sublime, of the infinite. Art is able to do this, Adler emphasises, since it is a ‘high endeavour’ and ‘Truly disinterestedness is the distinguishing mark of every high endeavour’. Thus: ‘The pursuit of the artist is unselfish, the beauty he creates is his reward.’ The goal of life is to pursue ‘the Ideal’, which ‘is void of form and its name unutterable’. We can find the Ideal within ourselves – in fact, we can
only
find it within ourselves – through the discovery and appreciation of the moral law; and the ‘high endeavours’, of art, science and public service, can help us find it. So the acquisition of fine works of art does not, after all, constitute ‘luxurious living’, but rather a means of fulfilling the ‘Moral Law’.

It was in an environment governed by this idiosyncratic version of the moral law that a concerted effort would be made to ‘bring out the spiritual personality’ of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

^fn1
Adler resigned as president of the New York Society in 1882, though of course he remained – as he is described on Julius and Ella’s marriage certificate – ‘Leader of the Society for Ethical Culture’.

IT WAS IN
the extraordinarily tasteful and expensively furnished apartment in West 94th Street that, on 22 April 1904, J. Robert Oppenheimer was born. To help look after the baby, the Oppenheimers employed a nursemaid and, later, a governess. They also employed a cook, a chauffeur and three live-in maids to help Ella look after the apartment. There was no hint of decadence or overindulgence, but it was a luxurious life and a very sheltered one, too. ‘My life as a child did not prepare me in any way for the fact that there are cruel and bitter things,’ Oppenheimer later recalled. His parents, particularly his mother, saw to it that everything and everyone with whom he came into contact was refined, tasteful and pleasant. From everything discordant, ugly or unpleasant he was shielded and protected. Above all, there was an atmosphere of moral rectitude. He was, he later considered, ‘an unctuous, repulsively good little boy’, his upbringing having offered him ‘no normal, healthy way to be a bastard’.

Oppenheimer grew up surrounded by people trying to be and, as far as it is possible to tell, succeeding in being
good
. ‘Not religion as a duty,’ ran one of Adler’s more austere maxims, ‘but duty as a religion.’ There was
some
levity. Julius is remembered by one of Robert’s friends as ‘a hearty and laughing kind of person’. But the general tone was one of earnestness and propriety, Julius’s attempts at joviality at the dinner table – sometimes he would even burst into song – being met with acute embarrassment by his wife and son. A friend later recalled that Robert Oppenheimer would often be very critical of his father, particularly of what he perceived to be his vulgarity. On the other hand, he was never known to utter a word of criticism of his mother. Ella Oppenheimer was, as far as her son was concerned, beyond any kind of reproach. She, for her part, seemed determined to ensure that her family lived in a world from which all coarseness, vulgarity and discord had been expunged. She was, a family friend recalled, ‘a woman who would never allow anything
unpleasant to be mentioned at the table’. She saw to it that Robert, and later his younger brother Frank, had as little as possible to do with the outside world. When their hair needed cutting, a barber came to the apartment; when they needed medical attention, a doctor was called for; when they needed to go anywhere, the chauffeur would take them in the family limousine. There was, Frank later said, ‘a general distrust of the pollution of the outside world’.