THE GUGGENHEIMS AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
By
Edwin P. Hoyt, Jr. (The Vanderbilts and Their Fortune, The House of Morgan) adds a third great family and its fortunes to his record of American business and industry. He follows the Guggenheims down the generations from immigrant Simon (b. 1792), the tailor of the Lengnau ghetto who opted for the American dream and lived to see his family wealthy in a new world. His son Meyer parlayed a superior stove polish into control of the mining industry and a multi-million fortune divided among seven sons and three daughters. By 1914, the Guggenheims controlled half the copper output of the world; by the 1920's they began to feel the weight of their wealth, and there was an upspringing of foundations in medicine, aeronautics, the arts. Today the Guggenheim name is giving way to others of equal note into which the Guggenheims married, such as Straus. No whitewash, a straight, unsparing cram Job.