The Guggenheims: A Family History
Meyer Guggenheim, a Swiss immigrant, founded a great American business dynasty. At their peak in the early twentieth century, the Guggenheims were reckoned among America's wealthiest, and the richest Jewish family in the world after the Rothschilds. They belonged to Our Crowd, that tight social circle of New York Jewish plutocrats, but unlike the others -- primarily merchants and financiers -- they made their money by extracting and refining copper, silver, lead, tin, and gold.
The secret of their success, the patriarch believed, was their unity, and in the early years Meyer's seven sons, under the leadership of Daniel, worked as one to expand their growing mining and smelting empire. Family solidarity eventually decayed (along with their Jewish faith), but even more damaging was the paucity of male heirs as Meyer and the original set of brothers passed from the scene.
In the third generation, Harry Guggenheim, Daniel's son, took over leadership and made the family a force in aviation, publishing, and horse-racing. He desperately sought a successor but tragically failed and was forced to watch as the great Guggenheim business enterprise crumbled.
Meanwhile, "Guggenheim" came to mean art more than industry. In the mid-twentieth century, led by Meyer's son Solomon and Solomon's niece Peggy, the Guggenheims became the agents of modernism in the visual arts. Peggy, in America during the war years, midwifed the school of abstract expressionism, which brought art leadership to New York City. Solomon's museum has been innovative in spreading the riches of Western art around the world. After the generation of Harry and Peggy, the family has continued to produce many accomplished members, such as publisher Roger Straus II and archaeologist Iris Love.
In The Guggenheims, through meticulous research and absorbing prose, Irwin Unger, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize in history, and his wife, Debi Unger, convey a unique and remarkable story -- epic in its scope -- of one family's amazing rise to prominence.
Review: The Guggenheims were a great American dynasty that grew to prominence in the early twentieth century by building a fortune off of extraction and refinement of copper, silver, lead, tin, and gold. Originally from Germany, the family arrived in America in 1848 and initially supported themselves by peddling wares and then scaling up to produce their own stove polish, which was the family's "first foray into industry - into production rather than commerce" (13). Later they grew profitable through establishing a lace firm that brought them the wealth needed to expand into mining and refining.
Meyer Guggenheim is considered the patriarch of the family and credited his family's success on the close ties between his seven sons, who all worked within the family businesses. Yet over time, family solidarity faded as the family grew larger and more widespread. In the mid-twentieth century, the family became well known for their investments in the arts more than industry. As fewer and fewer male descendants were born into the family, today there are only a handful left that hold the name Guggenheim and even fewer that closely know the story behind their ancestry.
The first half of this book was relatively dry and focused primarily on the business operations of the family with little personal detail to make it interesting. Of course this is likely because little personal detail survives but it still made for a dense read. However, as the book proceeded, it began to focus in on well known Guggenheim figures and provide detailed accounts of their individual lives. With such a vast family tree, there is no way for the authors to provide an overview of every Guggenheim but Unger and Unger did an excellent job of researching the family tree and selecting the most famous and significant of the family to focus on in this joint family biography. Yet there were some stories I wish had been further explored. For example, one Edwin Guggenheim was stranded on a reef in 1924 and only rescued after surviving for 9 months of isolation (227). This one sentence is all that is devoted to this remarkable story.
A Guggenheim died on the titanic, another commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a building to house his museum of modern art, and another published the writings of T.S. Eliot and Pablo Neruda. A complicated family with many different personalities, most weren't particularly devoted to their Jewish heritage and many married multiple times. Sadly, the last Guggenheim family reunion happened in the mid-1980s and since that time the family has continued to drift further apart. "Once the core businesses decayed and shared economic goals attenuated, the most powerful cement of the extended family ceased to bind. Ironically, some of the surviving family self-awareness derives from the efforts of historians and biographers to chronicle the Guggenheim past" (495). Overall an interesting family history that tells stories that seem to have largely faded from memory.
Stars: 4
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