Morgenthau: Power, Privilege and the Rise of an American Dynasty, 2022

Morgenthau is a narrative history of the Morgenthau family, an extremely influential political dynasty within the United States. In this doorstopper book (over a thousand pages), Andrew Meier narrates how the Morgenthau family rose from its German Jewish origins, fell briefly into poverty, rose again within the United States and gained prominence within New York city and eventually the United States by the early 20th century. Meier, who had been the Moscow correspondent for Time magazine from 1996 to 2001, currently teaches journalism and nonfiction at the New School in New York City. He is no stranger to non-fiction, having previously written Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall (2003) which was on numerous book of the year lists for 2003, and The Lost Spy: An American in Stalin’s Secret Service (2008). Morgenthau showcases Meier’s very extensive research on the titular family and is written in a style that makes it useful to historians and accessible to general readers.

Meier’s narrative stretches across four generations and a hundred and fifty years of the Morgenthau family’s involvement in American politics, and is quite comprehensive. The book begins with Robert Morgenthau’s retirement as New York’s district attorney in 2009, covering his career and influence in New York in brief. Afterwards, the narrative structure is chronological, dividing the book into five sections, which in turn are subdivided into chapters. The overall emphasis is on the influence played by the Morgenthau family in politics across the 19th and 20th centuries – whether in New York or America as a whole – their close ties to Woodrow Wilson and their personal connections to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the Kennedys, and many others.

The first, and shortest section, covers Lazarus Morgenthau’s rapid ascent to riches and social status in the German state of Baden and the equally rapid descent that forced him and his family to emigrate to America. The second section focuses on Henry Morgenthau Sr., his ascent to prominence in New York, his work as a leading member of the American Jewish community and as one of the chief financial backers of Woodrow Wilson’s Democratic Party. The third section of the book shifts from Henry Sr. to his son Henry Morgenthau Jr. and his relationship with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the fourth section of the book covering both Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s wartime and postwar work and Robert Morgenthau’s beginnings. The fifth and largest section covers Robert Morgenthau’s career as the District Attorney of New York. The story of Robert Morgenthau serves as the bookends of the work, this choice possibly having been influenced by Meier’s extensive interviews with him in the years prior to his death. The book includes a hundred pages of notes and references, including an extensive list of sources, followed by a 46-page index.

Of special note are extensive sections focused on Henry Morgenthau Sr.’s selection by Woodrow Wilson to serve as the United States Ambassador to Turkey from 1913-1916. Henry Sr. would make public the Armenian Genocide (whose horrors Meier describes openly) and raise large amounts of money from the Rockefellers and others to support victims and refugees. Other sections of interest detail his son, Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s extensive personal and professional relationships with Franklin D. Roosevelt and service as Secretary of the Treasury. Robert Morgenthau’s similar relationships with the Kennedys are explored in great detail, making this book a valuable resource for scholars of the Roosevelt and Kennedy families as well.

This is not a purely chronological history. The individual chapters are not strictly chronological and cover different periods of time. This depends on the extent to which Meier intends to cover the actions of the particular member of the Morgenthau family he’s focusing on – understandably, the history of Lazarus Morgenthau is far shorter than that of his great-grandson Robert Morgenthau. While a general reader may not notice these gaps, academic historians will likely find them significant and raise questions about what material is excluded.

Morgenthau is meticulously researched and brimming with small details that convey a sense of time and space and change throughout the narrative, from details about individual’s clothes to small observations about each individual’s appearance, habits, and life. This enables the narrative to provide an image of life in whatever social strata the Morgenthau family belonged to at a given time, and helps humanize them. Everything from Robert Morgenthau’s use of old New York slang to the origins of the name Morgenthau – from the ancestor Moses Morgenthau looking at the morning dew on the way to being registered with a surname can be found in this book. Even minor characters in this sweeping narrative get humanized – for instance, on page 511, a pilot involved in a fatal airplane crash is named and described as an expectant father hurrying home to his young family. This form of dramatization is especially useful in remembering individuals and their personalities.

Strongly focusing on personalities and personal relationships allows this book to make an argument about a recent controversy: Roosevelt’s policies with respect to Jewish immigration and the admittance of Jewish refugees from the Nazi regime during the Second World War. New documents suggest that the President was strongly anti-Semitic and that his prejudice was a major reason why only 200,000 Jews were admitted to the United States, while six million were brutally murdered in the Holocaust. Meier’s book examines Roosevelt’s own personal position on the issue in detail, the presence of his many Jewish advisors and aides including, of course, Henry Morgenthau Jr. and the anti-Semitism prevalent in American society in the 1930s and 1940s during the Nazi era. He draws the connection between Henry Morgenthau Sr.’s experience of the Armenian genocide and Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s establishment of the War Refugee Board after receiving reports of the Holocaust. Meier explicitly places the blame for the low numbers of Jewish refugees saved on anti-Semites and exclusionists within the State Department, and largely absolves Roosevelt of blame. Defenders of Roosevelt will likely find much to bolster their arguments in his favor in this book, while detractors will likely find much to argue about.

While this book shines at depicting personal interactions and relationships, there are places where detail is lost. To give a minor example, the torpedoing of the destroyer USS Lansdale with the young Robert Morgenthau aboard focuses on Robert’s strong character and heroism, but the poor descriptions of the technical aspects of the sinking make for an unclear narrative. More seriously, the rise of Henry Morgenthau Sr. to the heights of the New York real estate market appears far too swift and focuses too heavily on Morgenthau Sr.’s character than providing us clear insight into what made him do better than his competitors. Similarly, Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s reorganization of Farm Credit in 1933 into a massive, successful agency that provided much-needed loans to American farmers at the height of the Great Depression is completely glossed over, as is his reorganization of the Treasury Department.

The narrative also tends to omit information that would allow the mistakes or flaws of the Morgenthaus to come into clear light. This is most clearly seen with two major instances involving Henry Jr. as Secretary of the Treasury. First, the Henry Jr.’s importance to the 1944 Bretton Woods conference is underemphasized given how important that conference was to the American postwar dominance of the international financial and monetary system. The book does not offer a truly clear picture of Henry Jr.’s importance to these key institutions and neither does it provide enough information to question his actions or those of his subordinates in the Treasury Department. The criticisms levied by British economist John Maynard Keynes are not explained, although we are exposed to the latter’s vile anti-Semitism. This makes it impossible for a reader to critically evaluate Keynes’s position outside of his anti-Semitism, or to critically question Morgenthau’s position. The same lack of critical treatment applies to Henry Jr.’s “Morgenthau Plan” to depopulate, deindustrialize and agrarianize Germany after the Second World War, a plan vitriolically criticized even by Churchill. Overall, Morgenthau brims with fascinating detail about generations of one of America’s most influential families. It is also a book whose flaws and omissions should be keenly noted.