The Jews in America Trilogy by Stephen; Birmingham Page A

prestige but also to place him close to the Vienna House of Rothschild where he could be of further usefulness. Things, of course, did not always go smoothly. When the state of Pennsylvania defaulted on $35 million worth of state bonds held by British investors, including the Rothschilds, Belmont, in Paris trying to place another U.S. Federal Government loan, was icily told by Baron de Rothschild, “Tell them you have seen the man who is at the head of the finances of Europe, and that he has told you that they cannot borrow a dollar. Not a dollar.” Still, the United States was too good a customer of Europe’s—buying such items as railroad ties, which lack of American know-how still made difficult to produce here, in return for American cotton and wheat—for the Rothschilds to remainangry for long. Also, Belmont was too canny a trader to let such upsets damage his friendships on both sides of the Atlantic.
    In New York he was very much a man about town. He had made himself, à la the Rothschilds, a connoisseur of horseflesh and had, with his friend Leonard Jerome, founded Jerome Park Racetrack. But he had never been invited to join the Union Club, considered the best men’s club in town. He also seems to have invented a social attitude which was soon being widely copied—the attitude of indifference. When invited for dinner at eight, August Belmont rarely appeared before ten or eleven. Punctuality, he seemed to be saying, was the courtesy of peasants. It seemed very chic and “very European” to arrive at dinner with the finger bowls, and this affectation—which is still to be encountered in New York, to the bafflement of Europeans—may be blamed on August Belmont.
    Belmont did not do particularly well when it came to cultivating such old patroon families as the Van Rensselaers, nor was he admired by the Astors, the fur-trading family which, in the 1840’s, was probably the richest family in New York. He did, on the other hand, get along nicely with such Old Guard families as the Costers and the Morrises, and he was also a friend of an ex-ferryboat captain, now a millionaire, named “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt. New York society was giving up picnics and skating parties and turning to large formal subscription balls—always given in hotels or restaurants since there were still no private homes big enough to contain them—and it irked August Belmont that he was not invited to every one. There was, for instance, the great City Ball of January, 1841, so called because it was held at the old City Hotel. Eight hundred guests danced in a ballroom lighted with two thousand tapers, but August Belmont was not among them. Soon a series of Assembly balls was organized to be held at Delmonico’s, and, to make certain that he was asked, Belmont took decisive action.
    In a story told by the Van Rensselaers, Belmont went to the invitation committee and said, “I have been investigating the accounts of you gentlemen on the Street. I can assure you that either I get an invitation to the Assembly this year or else the day after the Assembly each of you will be a ruined man.” It was one of the most telling examples of the kind of power that could be wielded by one man (“a Wall Street banker, not even a native American”) in nineteenth-century New York. Belmont got his invitation, but—according to a story that sounds much more like wishful thinking than the truth—arrived at the Assembly to find himself the only person there.
    Belmont, on the other hand, though there was still some uncertainty about where he actually lived (he seemed to inhabit a series of hotels) could and did give balls of his own. Fancy-dress balls were his favorites, and he loved to put on a powdered wig and ruffled collar and appear as Louis XV or, with a tricorn hat and sword, as Napoleon. (Once, when he learned that another guest was planning to come as Louis XV, Belmont