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25 2 Manhattan and Moral Reform New Partner at Guggenheimer and Untermyer In late 1893, Untermyer invited Marshall to join the Guggenheimer and Untermyer firm in New York City, and the Syracuse native moved to Manhattan in February 1894, staying for the first several weeks with the Untermyers.1 From the start, Untermyer treated Marshall as a junior, rather naïve, partner who was not suitably appreciative of the firm’s arduous early ascendance to prosperity.2 “When you consider our small beginnings and rapid rise, you will understand with what horror I contemplate any retrograde step or even a standstill,” Untermyer preached to Marshall. He also served as Marshall’s social mentor, coaxing the thirty-eight-year-old legal wizard from Upstate New York toward the Manhattan dating circle. “You couldn’t do anything that would please us better except to get married, provided always that all of us are thoroughly satisfied with the girl,” Untermyer told Marshall soon after the latter joined the Manhattan firm. Marshall was pushing forty, and in all respects it was time for him to settle into married life. Just a few months after his arrival in Manhattan, he met at the opera his future wife, Florence Lowenstein, who (it will be recalled) was related to Untermyer. Unlike Marshall, a conservative purist from Upstate New York, a region known for ideological zeal, Untermyer, a son of the social rough and tumble of the American South, never seemed overly judgmental or moralistic about New York City’s patchwork society of immigrant communities and machine politics. Untermyer embraced social realities in Manhattan that were derided as profanity by most members of Marshall’s Uptown group. From the moment Marshall embarked on a professional partnership with him, Untermyer insisted that Jews in New York City would best be served by cooperation with Tammany Hall. “Between the Irish leaders of Tammany and the high-toned Jew hating Presbyterians on the other side, I consider Tammany the lesser evil for those of our race,” he explained to Marshall.3 Untermyer evolved politically as a liberal Democrat; his views on key local and national issues were often unlike Marshall’s, and the 26 • From Upstate to Uptown political differences between the two men became especially pronounced in years before World War I, when Untermyer formally left the firm. When Marshall joined the firm, Untermyer lectured solemnly about the outfit ’s lawyerly integrity. “I would rather make nothing and feel that our prestige and reputation were on the increase than double our income and have the reverse feeling,” Untermyer told Marshall.4 In fact, there was little danger that the driven lawyers on the firm would be content to earn nothing. As months passed by, Untermyer, an aggressive business lawyer, made clear to Marshall that prestige and reputation were not exactly goals that could be separated from moneymaking. A year into their partnership, he seemed cognizant that Marshall no longer genuflected after each sermon and was carving out his own spheres of independence on the firm. “I have often wondered whether with your good practical business mind you appreciate the fact that people in our busy city judge others solely by results, and that risks which one can seriously take with litigation in smaller cities are dangerous to our reputation,” Untermyer lectured to Marshall in autumn 1895. His new partner did not appear to be listening in rapt deference. “I am afraid that you think me a ‘crank’ on this subject and that you are inclined to treat me good naturedly rather than seriously,” moaned Untermyer to Marshall.5 Marshall’s advancement in the Guggenheimer and Untermyer firm was delayed at the start by his participation in the 1894 New York Constitutional Convention,6 but he advanced quickly at work, and immersed himself deeply in it during his first five or six years in New York City. His public Jewish commitments during this period were not preempted by his commitment to business law, but they were sporadic and not intimately connected to the circumstances and sensitivities of the East Side’s burgeoning Jewish immigrant community. At the turn of the twentieth century, his most conspicuous Jewish advocacy work involved firing off appeals to high authorities, including the president of the United States, on behalf of young Jewish men of his own, or his Uptown associates’, acquaintance who desired entry as cadets at West Point. In the period of the Spanish-American War and Rough Rider Theodore Roosevelt, American culture admired and...

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