Capitalist with soul Rediscovering financier and philanthropist Otto Kahn Archived article from Dec 9, 2002 By Lori Chambers     Theresa Collins' interest in the history of international business led to her fascination with early 20th-century financier and art patron Otto Kahn. Photo by Alan Goldsmith   Cole Porter and Fanny Brice tweaked him in their lyrics; the Marx brothers teased him in the 1928 musical "Animal Crackers." He was spoofed in the New Yorker and caricatured in Vanity Fair. Hart Crane, Eugene O'Neill and Ezra Pound punned his name with Kublai Khan in their works. The railroad banker and arts patron Otto H. Kahn was perhaps the greatest cultural philanthropist the country has ever known, the tastemaker who bankrolled the Metropolitan Opera, the Provincetown Players and the Little Review, among dozens of other artists and endeavors. Why, then, had this prototypical cosmopolitan never been the subject of a full-scale biography? "I like to think it was because he was waiting for me," quips Theresa M. Collins, assistant research professor of history on the New Brunswick campus, associate editor of the Thomas A. Edison Papers and author of the new biography "Otto Kahn: Art, Money, and Modern Time" (University of North Carolina Press 2002). The dapper Kahn, indeed, seems to have been tapping at her shoulder with his trademark ebony cane for the better part of two decades. "Every-where I turned, I kept bumping into the name ‘Otto Kahn,'" says Collins, whose research and teaching focus on the history of international business. She encountered him in the course of her work as a research assistant to Morgan banking scholar Vincent Carosso (Kahn's banking house, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., was second only to the house of Morgan); as a research assistant to Paul Robeson biographer Martin Duberman (Kahn sponsored Robeson at the start of his career); and at the Edison Papers (Edison valued Kahn's economic writings and hung a picture of the financier in his West Orange home). When Collins first visited the Firestone Library at Princeton University, she found that "no scholar had ever sat down with Box 1 through Box 550 of the Otto H. Kahn papers and plowed through the quarter-million pages," she says. After a three-year cycle of weekly visits to Princeton, Collins became convinced that "no other life brought together this particular constellation of ideas: the emergence of international capitalism, global culture and trans-Atlantic cosmopolitanism — in short, the interdependence of nations and lives. Here was a life that needed to be told." Born in Germany, trained in England and polished in America, Otto Hermann Kahn (1867–1934) became wealthy as a partner in the New York investment firm Kuhn, Loeb & Co., the era's largest railway banker. A wizard of Wall Street, Kahn helped reorganize the U.S. railroad system, finance the Allied effort in World War I and encourage banking reform after the 1929 stock market crash. A Jew and a foreigner in the prewar era, Kahn nonetheless parlayed his prescient understanding of good public relations and his reputation as a principled businessman to save his German-Jewish firm when so many others succumbed to anti-German, anti-Jewish sentiment. He also served as a trustee of Rutgers - - likely at the behest of alumnus and railroad magnate Leonor F. Loree - from 1915 until his death in 1934. But with a fresh tea rose in his lapel and a satin-lined opera cape snapping at his heels, Kahn was also "the rare capitalist with a soul," as Collins puts it, an inveterate first-nighter of the theater and the concert hall. His support of the arts ranged from the grand - paying the Metropolitan Opera's debts to the tune of $500,000 - to the discreet - covering the tuition of a poor youngster with a promising voice. He brought the Ballets Russes to America, introduced Wall Street financing to Hollywood filmmaking and coaxed Europe into an appreciation for American arts. But his true contribution is hard to quantify, as he was known to write checks when, notes Collins, "a small donation made a large difference in sustaining the creativity" of struggling artists — among them, Crane, O'Neill, Pound, Herman Mankiewicz, Robeson, Isadora Duncan and Norman Bel Geddes. One of the most celebrated men of his day, Kahn was cast in contemporary mythology as the dichotomous "Man of Steel and Velvet," the cold, calculating financier who transformed himself after business hours into an urbane, uptown sophisticate. A different truth emerges on closer examination. Kahn could be "shrewd in artistic matters, accommodating in business," Collins writes, and a text on monetary theory could lie on his desk side by side with the score of a cello concerto. The roles of banker and arts patron are not as incongruous as they may seem, she notes, "because both are intermediaries who enable the work of others. The image of Kahn as a dilettante and eccentric is untrue; there was an interdependence in his commitment to the arts and to business that is crucial to his message and his meaning. "Writing a biography in which the leading man is a supporting character was a challenge," she continues. "But in some ways his was a greater life - and a modern life - because he did collaborate with others and create networks." Instead of writing his story as a catalog of deeds, Collins chose to mine it for insight into greater historical contexts. "His life mirrored and engaged the main transformations in world capitalism and the social architecture of western bourgeois culture," she writes. Most strikingly significant is "his distinctly trans-Atlantic life of cosmopolitanism, which foreshadows the history of globalization," she says. "Otto Kahn believed the arts was the truest League of Nations." For Collins, examining broad cultural themes was one reward of exploring Kahn's story; another was unearthing unknown historical nuggets. A long-held riddle among opera aficionados is why the Met chose to have Arturo Toscanini and Gustav Mahler share the podium during the 1908–09 season. Collins found a document indicating that Kahn had "called in his debts" to protect the Jewish Mahler from losing the conductorship in an anti-Semitic snub. She also linked language in the popular 1934 book "The Robber Barons" - a passage that described the building of an artificial bluff to improve the view of Long Island Sound from Kahn's 127-room country estate - to the sequence in the movie "Citizen Kane" in which Xanadu is first described. "There's a lot of Kahn in Kane," she concludes. As if taking a cue from her subject, Collins now finds herself acting as the intermediary, introducing a new generation to a much-needed role model. "There are a surprising number of young lawyers and executives who stumble across Otto Kahn and become fascinated," she says. The response she has received from readers convinces her that Kahn is being rediscovered by rising professionals disillusioned by the current excesses of their corporate elders. "Here is a man in the pantheon of Wall Street who used his power for public good," she says. "New York City would not be the cosmopolitan world capital that it is today without his efforts."

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